How do I balance interests within a specialized PhD? Do I simply read a lot outside my field?

You say, "The problem is that I want to know too much." You don't want to know too
much, but maybe you want to know too much all at once.

If you are going to pursue a PhD in molecular biology, you owe it to
yourself, your department, your research adviser, and whomever is
providing financial support to focus you energy on learning that
material and writing a fine thesis roughly within the usual time
expected by your department. Most serious PhD students don't have
much time for 'hobbies' outside of their coursework and research,
but if you do, you could consider AI as your hobby for now.

There seem to be unexploited connections between molecular biology and AI,
so it is worthwhile to look forward to exploring those connections
at an appropriate time.

If you can't bear to let a major connection to AI wait until you
finish a PhD in molecular biology, then maybe you should re-think the
order of your concentrations. Both fields are developing rapidly.
Will it be easier to catch up on recent developments in AI after
your PhD in molecular biology? Or would it be easier to learn about
recent developments in molecular biology after getting a PhD in AI?

I have some idea how much biology an AI a person would have to know in order to
make worthwhile applications to molecular biology. But personally, I
have no idea how much you would have to know about AI
to exploit opportunities in molecular biology. So I have no advice about the best
order of concentration.

As a starting place for you to make the best decision on your own, do you see how study "of a single new enzyme ..." would make successful exploitation of AI techniques more likely? Or maybe you can find a molecular biology department
that is already deeply committed to using AI.

I have done a lot of work in applications of statistics and probability modeling
to biology with only self-taught biology (not even a high school biology class).
My impression is that it is easier for me to catch the essence of the necessary
biology ad hoc than it is for biologists to catch the the essence of the
required statistics or probability. (Some of my collaborators may disagree
on that.)


Will taking a gap year after my Master's degree improve or degrade my potential of doing a PhD?

If you're using the gap year to get real-life work experience, it will improve your potential to do a PhD. The reason is simply that you'll have a clearer idea of why you're going to grad school.

I've seen many students who weren't ready to be adults even at the end of their undergraduate degree. They were heavily sheltered by their parents, and never had to worry about things like money. When money isn't an issue, university becomes something to be attempted because it's there. The post-undergraduate job search becomes heavily intimidating, and going to grad school the easy way out. So they end up in grad school with no real idea why they're there.

Real-life work experience goes a very long way to broadening one's world view. You'll learn what's needed to succeed, what's needed to be able to afford a house/car/spouse/children. You'll learn that you only have so much time to spare and that grad school might not be worth it. And if you do choose to go to grad school after all, you'll have a much clearer idea what exactly you want out of it. Since motivation is a key factor in any endeavor, this improves your ability to complete the PhD.

Only drawback is, it's my impression that grad schools like to admit starry-eyed students who're doing PhDs because they want to become professors. Having different career goals isn't fatal to your application, but you might have to modify your statement of purpose somewhat.


Where to get ACM references for MS Word?

Managing references can be a tedious task, especially at the proof-reading step of a paper and the usage of software that keeps track of your paper/references library (e.g. EndNote or BiBDesk) can be strongly recommended.

With such software you can have all your references in your paper formated accordingly and automatically to the style that either you choose or the conference/journal wants.

In MS Word there is an option where you can integrate EndNote, insert references and have an automated formating and arrangement/re-arrangement. Integration is done automatically for EndNote and MS Word, just when you install both of software.

ACM style quide can be found here.


Applying for assistant professor position with limited teaching experience

We can't tell if the lack of teaching experience will hurt you or not; too many variables. But I can share with you how to prepare yourself on this front.

Make a clear inventory of all your guest lectures, reflect on them

Do know that most job market candidates have not taught a full course themselves and nearly none of them had developed a course for real by themselves. Your profile is definitely not in the dismal category so you shouldn't beat yourself up too much. In the teaching experience section, list all of the relevant guest lectures you have done, and make sure to highlight the 2-month one, as it's already 2/3 of a semester. If you can survive 8 weeks, you can likely survive 13 weeks.

Do also recall the title of your talk, class size, undergrad or graduate students, any in-class activities you have used, any evaluations you have applied (assignment, quiz), and if you can get a hold on your colleagues whom you helped, check if their course evaluations had any entries that are pertinent to your performance and ask if they would allow you to quote them.

Also, since it's a research institute, it'd be important to document your 1-on-1 mentoring experience as well. Any entries on supervising students or postdocs should also be captured.

With this inventory listed in front of you, try to dive deeper to remember how and why you explained the concept a certain way, why you decided the sequence of slides/notes were better this way. New teachers often worked on hunches, but most hunches have some reasons behind them. And most of them are a direct manifestation from their experience as a student. So, in fact I think it's totally fine that you based some of your teaching philosophy on your student identity.

Develop a clear set of vocabularies in learning and education

There are a few titles I enjoyed and found useful when learning how to teach:

How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Ambrose et. al.
Tools for Teaching by Davis
Student Engagement Techniques by Barkley
Teaching What You Don't Know by Huston
What the Best College Teachers Do by Bain
The Teaching Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions by Seldin et. al.

If you have access to these titles, definitely check them out. You should be able to garner a healthy amount of concepts and vocabularies about teaching, and apply them appropriately in your teaching statement. By the end you should be able to sensibly talk about things like Bloom's taxonomy, backward engineering of syllabi, action words in learning objectives, summative and formative assessments, etc.

Some schools (perhaps your current one as well) periodically conduct teacher development workshops. While you're there you can also try to enroll in some of them, or at least contact them for online or published references on learning theories and teaching methodology. They will also be an excellent source for sample teaching philosophy.

(I think) there is no recipe for teaching philosophy

I have come to a conclusion myself that there really isn't a golden formula for how to write a good teaching philosophy. It is really an authentic statement about your current teacher's state of mind. (I looked at my teaching philosophy written 4 years ago and I found that silly as well.) A little bit of naivete is not going to hurt you.

What I found, however, is that it's easier to develop this document if you sit down and ponder about 3-5 statements starting with: "I believe learning should be..." and then elaborate from there. If you have done your inventory and literature review meticulously, you should be able to come up with a few that resonate with you.

It is also common to mention what kind of courses you're ready to teach. Most committee members would find that easier to imagine how to incorporate you into the teaching roster.

Seek help from peers

And since you mentioned you have helped some other faculty pals, definitely consider getting their feedback on your teaching philosophy. The people working at the faculty development will also be a good resource if you don't wish to publicize your job hunting.


How to automatically import APA references into reference manager?

There is a list of tools that attempt to convert formatted bibliographies to bibliography software formats here. I haven't used any of them for a while so I can not recommend any of the tools in particular.


Mental calmness during timed test taking

I would suggest getting used to self-proctoring practice exams within a certain time limit. Keep at it until you figure out how to determine when it is fruitful to skip a question. Come back to it later when you have an ah-ha moment or finish the exam. As for worrying about spending too much time or self-depreciating yourself, try to minimize it. Remember your successes. Take time to build up your confidence both inside and outside academia and strive to do the best you can do.

Think of every difficulty as a chance to be humbled, and use that outlook to find wisdom in the experience. In grad school, I'm sure you'll encounter this same feeling just by speaking with people whom are your senior.


There's an MSc specialising in Networks and Distributed Systems at St Andrews. There's also quite a large group that does cloud computing research and a cloud lab, so you would almost certainly be able to do an MSc project on that topic.


Advantages and disadvantages of doing a PostDoc

I have a situation somewhat related to yours: I did a PhD in engineering with an industrial partner, and I'm now a post-doc researcher in a reputable university. It sounds, when you say 'doing a postdoc', that you have the impression that it is the logical 'next level' in the sequence: bachelors - masters - PhD - … but it is not.

There are no 'advantages' or 'disadvantages' in being a postdoc researcher for a while. It's just that, with some rare exceptions, you will not get a faculty position right after you graduate from your PhD.

The time spent as a postdoc is usually the time where you gain experience, hopefully make your peers aware of your existence, publish (or finish publishing) the chapters of your PhD thesis and maybe that study that you feel will make you stand out, etc. in other words: giving yourself the pedigree that will make you interesting for an academic hiring committee.

Since you have no intentions of becoming a professor, there are no real reason to 'do a postdoc', unless there aren't any other options (which I assume is not the case for you, as an engineer with experience in translational research/industry).


What is the usual dress code for academic workshops?

Academia casual, as you put it, is perfectly fine.

Basically, imagine yourself doing a TA in front of students. I would say, a similar kind of attire would suffice.

I've seen people doing an academic presentation in a T-shirt and slippers, and that was a damn fine presentation, too! Even if you'd rather want to wear some more formal footware than slippers and some jeans and not shorts, I think that my point is clear:

No beachware.
No three-piece suit.

I've worn a shirt and formal trousers to multiple conferences without feeling overdressed, but that's probably the most formal thing you'd wear if you are not the conference chair.


How can the summaries and statements linked to particular references be identified?

I pretty sure this does not exist.  It would require a level of sophisticated text parsing that has not been developed by computers.  After all, not all statements that the earth is round are going to phrased the same way, and for such a tool to be useful, it would be necessary to identify statements with the same semantic meanings.  This is not possible with the current language processing techniques; it would be huge advance if a computer could reliably parse and identify logically equivalent statements.  So you are not going to find what you are looking for.


What additional revisions can I make in a journal paper after review, beyond those suggested by reviewers?

Short answer: ask the journal editor.

Longer answer.
I've had two different types of experiences that are contradictory. I've had what I took to be the "standard experience" where one should not make edits to the copy after submission unless specifically advised to do so. In this case, don't make edits other than those that meet the questions of the reviewers. The rationale is that you don't want to introduce new problems during the editing process.

My sense is that in this sort of case copyediting is usually done by devoted staff at the journal or publisher. Often there are ominous warnings no to go around editing things.

Alternately, I've had a couple of submissions (outside of my field of philosophy) where the editor had both told me the paper was accepted and then made me substantially rewrite the paper, commenting at one point that I should get someone to read the paper and critique it -- which I thought was kind of odd and non-standard since if the paper needs that much revision, you shouldn't say you've accepted it for publication but rather that it needs to be revised and resubmitted...

In this case, copyediting is done by the original author together with the editor in a back and forth manner.

Anyway all of that text to say, these practices are less standardized than you might think and you need to know that journal's practices.


Does it look bad if I put a variety of interests in my research statement?

It depends what they are looking for. Some employers will place a premium on flexibility, in which case your variety of interests will be a positive. It will help you to build connections with other departments, potentially increasing opportunities for service teaching, and hence increasing funding to the department. It will enable you to go with the flow, to seek research funding in whatever area has the best prospects at the moment, and collaborate on a variety of projects inside and outside your department. It will also help you to teach from several different angles.

Other employers are looking to build on an existing strength (for instance, a strong research stream in a particular area or good relationships with a particular external stakeholder) or fill a particular gap in their existing strengths. In this case, a variety of interests will be a negative, because you might shift focus away from the research interest for which they are really hiring you. Usually, job ads will mention whether there is a particular specialty that they are really after, but it also doesn't hurt to ask around to find out if you are not sure.


Shall I apply again after all my PhD applications are rejected?

Age is not a discrimination in your age range, there will be opportunities when you complete your PhD but you should ask yourself what kind of opportunities are you seeking by completing a PhD.

If you stay at the same job your LOR will likely be the same in one year, so you have to change something else. I would suggest you reach out to 1-2 professors whose work is closely related to your job and see if you can be involved in one of their projects, and see if this can also benefit your company. I am afraid if you don't build a more direct connection with academia/research your chances will stay low. Otherwise you have to aim lower, less prestigious schools, but then we go back at WHY you want to do a PhD.


Student supervision when student loses motivation to work

Yes, I think you're doing the right thing.

One of my service assignments is undergraduate advising in computer science at a selective school.  I think my experience with undergrads may inform on what could be happening with your grad student.

All the students I encounter are smart and they're all capable of getting an A in anything if they only took one course, had someone else cooking their meals, doing their laundry and cleaning their bathroom and they actually cared about the subject.

When students don't do well, it's almost always one of two reasons.  The most common is that they don't have the time, usually because they're taking too heavy a load, but sometimes due to medical, family, relationship, work or other reasons.

The second reason is they don't like what they're doing.  Sometimes it was a terrible course delivered by an instructor who did a terrible job.  Sometimes it's on us, but those are rare; academia doesn't run completely open loop.  Those student evals actually do matter.

More often, they've been pushed into CS, often by parents, or they've pushed themselves into it.  And they hate it.  They feel cornered and they want out, but see no way out except to plug ahead somehow and get it over with.  An example might be a student who desperately wants to be an actor but is facing threats from his father that any financial support will end if he switches to a drama major.  Another may have realized the work is different than she expected and not what she wants to do with her life but believes she's sunk too much into the degree to give up now no matter how much she hates it.

A social worker friend of mine once remarked, "People don't make changes in their lives until the pain of staying where they are is greater than the pain of changing."  And in the meantime, they struggle and they don't do well.

I'm suspicious from your description that your student has come to a realization that this just isn't what he wants to do with his life.

When I encounter students that seem to be struggling in this way (which is pretty often with UGs), it's often because they had a plan but it's not working and they don't have a new one.  Asking what their plan is when they don't have one isn't as helpful as encouraging them to think about what makes them happy and what they want from life.  What I've found is helpful is to ask them to watch Steve Jobs's 2005 commencement address at Stanford and discuss with them some advice he gives:  To do great work, you must love what you do.  Don't settle.  Keep looking until you find what you love.  You cannot live someone else's life.


Switching from Economics to Computer Science?

This should be a comment but I need a little more space.  Also, the question should be closed as duplicate of who knows what.  I know I've written this before but I still need to find some system for keeping track of the common answers I've written.

Step one is to look around and pick one or more subfields that appeal to you.  Then, pick a couple of specific programs (a program means a department in a particular university) that make your mouth water.  Do this by reading some of the professors' bios and research program descriptions.  You can also look at grad student bios and perhaps also some of the professors' publications.

Once you've got your eye on a particular program, look at their program of studies (requirements for the degree) and the course descriptions in the catalog.  Make sure you understand what's a prerequisite for what.  You may need to go backwards a bit in your reading, to trace through the undergraduate prerequisites as well.  (Check the schedule of classes too, because some departments list phantom courses in their catalog which are never actually offered, and you should ignore those in your analysis.)

Compare what you see with what you already learned in coursework, on the job, in internships, and in self-study.  Now you have a list of what it would be good to cover prior to stepping into the classroom in your new field as an incoming grad student.

If you discover some question during this analysis, do not hesitate to contact the department.

Once you know what you are missing, you can of course do some self-study, but I would actually recommend that you take at least one course formally, if only online.  You can enroll as a non-matriculated student.

When you are applying you can present as many transcripts as you have.


Is it unprofessional to include a humorous quote in a PG thesis?

Unless your advisor and committee are strictly against it, there should be no problem with including a quote like this somewhere.  Formats for theses vary, and sometimes a preface or the introductory material can be presented in a fairly conversational way.  That would be a perfectly appropriate place for such a quote, as would the acknowledgements.  However, I have also seen humorous or literary quotes inserted at topical points into the body of a thesis, sometimes with several of them sprinkled through the body text.  In what can often be a very dry read, they may help to liven up the document.

However, as I noted in my first sentence, while this is generally fine, you don't want to do it if it will run afoul of the people responsible for grading and accepting your thesis.  Sometimes readers can be unnecessarily stodgy about these sorts of things, so it would always be a good idea to check how your readers feel first.


Why would a student go to a lecture at all if everything was in the book already?

I think something mentioned in a comment is far more important than usually acknowledged: the lecture, standing at a definite time and place, plays the role of a ritual: at that time and place, the students (should) only focus on learning. This gives a rhythm, a time frame to help pace one's study.

In my experience, having very lenient rules such as long delays to turn in homework leads most student to postpone until the very end, and thus to work less than expected (to be honest scholars often do the same with e.g. grant applications). Similarly, leaving students to work with books would probably not end up well unless there are periodic incentives to have finished some chapter by some time. In fact, it seems even MOOCs tend to have a schedule, with material released periodically and only available for a given period, to force students to work it in a given time frame.

Another point is that a lecturer in fact makes small adjustments to the lecture in response to low-level signals from the students. Very concretely, it happens even in large amphitheaters that I feel that students all got a bit lost, which leads me to repeat a point or slow down.
A comparison made by Krantz in his book on mathematical lecturing struck me: when one drives a car on a mostly straight road, one still steers the wheel, even if very softly. This almost imperceptible steering makes the difference between getting to the end of the road and getting off-road pretty quickly. Letting student only study on books would be like launching a car without a driver (nor a computer driver).

Last, any given course has a precise context (background of students, future study, other parallel courses, goal of the lecture, etc.) which is always even slightly at odds with any given book. The lecturer adapts the lecture to her or his precise goals and to the context. In particular, indications of the most important points to remind of every lecture can be very useful.

All that said, lectures in front of a large number of students are not a very adequate way of teaching - it is often the best we decide to afford.


How to deal with an incompetent collaborator

Not all attempted mathematical research succeeds.  Sometimes you work on something for hours, days, weeks...and realize at the end you have too little to show for it, or that you made a crucial error that ruins everything.  This applies in particular to collaborations: just because you get together with someone (or someones) and propose to work on X, it doesn't mean that you will end up writing a paper on X or even making any progress on X.  (This has certainly happened to me.)

Hows is this relevant to your present situation?  Well, on the one hand you seem worried about disappointing your friend, which I certainly understand, but actually you delivered on the deal: he wanted to collaborate with you, and so you have.  Surely you didn't agree to collaborate until you achieved some specific goal, no matter what, right?  So I don't think you should feel too bad about breaking off the collaboration: all collaborations are parted sooner or later, and most by mathematicians who remain active on other projects.  On the other hand, you use the word incompetent, which seems harsh to me.  Most mathematicians lack the competence to solve (or even to superficially understand!) most mathematical problems, of course.  Just because your friend can't make correct arguments on this topic doesn't mean they are not competent in something else.  Also collaboration gives you a chance to see someone at their worst as well as their best: some mathematicians make a lot of mistakes that no one ever hears about, but people hear about their remarkable successes.  (We generally respect and admire these mathematicians.)

If you are describing your friend as "incompetent," it sure sounds to me like you want to be out of the collaboration, so I would suggest that you do so, by which I mean ending the research sessions with your friend.  In my opinion the "classy move" would then be to write up what you have so far and ask your friend how they wish to proceed.  They may well decline to be an author on the paper.  Or maybe they will accept to be an author, either because they think they brought more to the table than you do or because professional exigencies make them feel that they cannot turn down an authorship on something they spent this much time working on.  This kind of thing used to bother me.  It doesn't really anymore.  I don't think your friend is going to get tenure "unfairly" because of this one project with you.

Of course once you have decided what to do about your joint work and that you will not collaborate anymore, you are completely free to do further work as you see fit.


How to negotiate for clinical vs protected research time in academic job offer?

It really depends on your professional goals.
if a purely clinical position is not an option for you, and if your research credentials (publications, etc) back up your ambition, then you should make that clear to the department and work with them on adapting the offer.

It is not just about salary, but would likely involve a start up package for your research, reserved physical space for research (lab space), possibly a joint appointment in a research department. etc.
if none of these can be part of the offer, this would mean your research activity is not supported.


Crediting sources one has found citations from

The quoted you wrote is actually a pretty good way to include that citation.

It all comes down to the fundamental reason you are citing the paper. Citations are used to refer the reader to papers that contain useful information pertaining to your discussion. As such, “because it includes a good citation” is not a good reason for citing paper A in itself: there are plenty of other ways you could have found paper B (other citations, web or database search, bumping into its author at a meeting, etc.). Unless paper A adds relevant information to paper B, it should simply not be cited. One way it can add information is by performing a review of the literature, or by commenting on the results in paper B… In the first case, your quote is a good way to acknowledge that fact; in the second case, you could simply write that:

  Qwerty discussed in [21] the original results of Doe [22], showing how the data wasn't corrected to account for the phase of the moon at the time of measurement.

In conclusion, I'd say: determine whether paper A brings additional information, then either cite it or do not cite it. It is not common practice (and I don't think it should be) to acknowledge a paper without citing it.


Why do national laboratory presentations contain so much info per slide?

Let me try to answer for the tendency in my own discipline (particle physics) where we have this problem across the board (i.e. universities too).

Much like questions and answers on a Stack Exchange site, those slides are expected to form a resource for future investigators. We know there is too much there for anyone to absorb in the meeting, but we also know that more people will dig these slides out of the archive over the next year and study them then actually attended the meeting in the first place.

Yes, in an ideal world there would be a technical report and a deck of slides, but in fact there are only the slides.

Personally I try pretty hard not to do this, and the result is a lot of backup slides and a lot of little URLs hanging around the bottom of the slides.

As an aside, I think that PowerPoint and similar polished slideware makes stuffing them (over-)full way too easy. I use a LaTeX base for mine (just the old slides class with my own library of macros for a long time, but I've started using Beamer) and these tools encourage a better style.

Alas, I know all the tricks to squeeze on just one more thing.


How valuable/impressive is a review article written by an undergraduate?

There are several factors to consider here when evaluating the "significance" of a review article:

The length and scope of the review article: a six-page review of recent literature with 50 references is not as impressive as a 50-page review with hundreds of references.
The publication in which the article appears: is the journal a high-level, review-only journal, such as Reviews of Modern Physics or  Chemical Reviews, or is it a review article in a traditional journal?
Was the review invited or contributed?
Is it part of a special issue? (If so, the standards for acceptance are often a bit laxer than in a "regular" issue.)
Since it's written as an undergraduate, you might try to compare its citation count to similar review articles written around the same time as a proxy for its significance to ongoing research in the field.


Should I talk about my PhD acceptance in follow up email to potential advisor in different school

No.  You will appear to be threatening to go elsewhere if they do not act on your application soon.  People may react to such (perceived) threats by saying, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

If the other institution has a deadline by which you must accept their offer, tell your chosen school, "I really want to come to [chosen school] but other factors require me to make a decision by [week before deadline date.]  Is it possible you could help with that?"


What to do if there is no book about a certain topic?

In reading the following, keep in mind that anything you can do personally will have at best a minuscule effect on whether such a book gets written, and you shouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon.  For all practical purposes, you should plan on having to proceed with your research without the aid of this hypothetical book.

My impression is that these books usually get written on the author's own initiative, perhaps prompted by having them see a need for such a book.  So
I think the best thing you can do is to identify someone who you think could write such a book: someone who is a recognized expert on the topic and who writes particularly well and clearly.  Contact them and say something like: "I've really appreciated reading your papers on topic X, but it strikes me that there are no books that could give a comprehensive introduction.  Have you ever considered writing one?"

Unfortunately, your message alone probably won't do much, particularly because you are a grad student - these suggestions would have more weight coming from someone who would be recognized as a fellow expert.  Someone who is more deeply acquainted with the existing literature and its gaps.  But if the potential author starts getting a number of such suggestions, it might plant the seed that such a project could be worthwhile.

Of course, writing a book is a huge task (thousands of hours, I'd say) which is poorly compensated.  Academic structures are such that researchers tend to have stronger incentives to write papers than books.  If the book is to be published commercially, there is the additional question of whether it will be profitable - even if the book is fantastic, if the topic is too "niche", there may not be enough potential buyers to interest a publisher.

I don't think that contacting a publisher will have any effect.  Again, the incentives are such that a publisher can't do much to encourage anyone to write a book, unless they already really want to do so.


Explaining academic probation as an undergrad on PhD application, after doing well in masters

I think you know the answer to this: it's what you just told us. If I read that on an application, I'd nod and keep going, my concerns fully assuaged. (I've read similar, and still recommended admission of the applicants in question.)

If, however, I saw a bunch of lousy grades and a probation notation on an undergraduate transcript with no explanation of what happened and what's different now, that would be a huge red flag for me even considering the better graduate-school record. I would wonder whether the applicant would crash and burn again, and what else the applicant might be hiding from us.

Face it head-on, the way you just did here. I can't guarantee it'll be fine, but I think it's by far the best of your available alternatives. People aren't perfect and they grow over time; we know that, and a lot of us are not averse to second chances. If you learned from what went wrong and put it behind you, that's what we need to know.


Administrative recognition of frequently-cited unpublished manuscripts

how do you convince administrators that ...

You don't and you can't, and I endorse Alexandros's suggestion.

The department to which you have applied, if they want to hire you, will try to convince the administrators of exactly this. The admins don't know you and don't trust you, but they might listen to such complaints coming from someone they trust.

In the meantime, in addition to any other benefits, submitting your paper to a peer-reviewed journal will signal to the hiring committee that you are doing your best to make their lives easy.


What does a managing editor do in scientific journal editorial board?

Yes, the managing editor is more administrative.  For example, when a review is overdue, he may send a reminder to the reviewer.  After a paper is accepted, he may send to the author the paperwork to complete.

I would say: do not communicate with him directly, except in response to something he sent to you.


How to write a "Related Work" section in Computer Science?

The problem here is likely deeper than just how to write a related work section.  In order to publish a (good) scientific paper, you need to be able to compare your results to prior results---often directly and quantitatively in your experimental section.

If you already have prior methods that you are comparing to in your experimental section, then that's a good seed for your related work.  Look at the papers describing those methods; look at papers that they cite and papers that cite them.  By spending a few days wandering around in this web of literature, you are likely to be able to get a good sense of what else is out there and which of those pieces of work are most significant overall or most closely related to your own.

If you don't have prior methods that you are comparing to, then you need to sit down with your professor and get some help.  If you aren't comparing in some way, how can you establish that your work is a significant improvement worth publication?


Journal submission refered to Editor-in-Chief

First of all, your situation is not at all uncommon.  On the contrary, most academics who submit sufficiently many papers find themselves in it from time to time.

The fact that your rebuttal email resulted in an editor's writing back that he saw value in your paper is already worth something: it gives corroboration that your paper has value.  In general it is doubtful that an editor would write that only to be polite, because in doing so he is opening himself and the journal up to further rebuttal from you.  The fact that he is passing your complaint on to the editor-in-chief is further evidence that he takes it seriously.

  Now, what are my chances of publishing this article of mine with this journal?

If you're asking for a straight-up prediction: that's hard to say.  In general the chance that a paper that gets multiple negative referee reports is eventually published is very small.  However, it is also relatively unusual for an editor to directly communicate disagreement with the referee reports to an author.  The chances depend on how egregiously off-base the referee reports were.  If the editors truly agree that the referees "missed the point on...the actual aims and scope of that journal" then they are going to feel like wronged parties along with you and the chance that they will at least solicit another referee report seems pretty solid.  (On the other hand, if that is the case one wonders why they didn't notice it before you brought it to their attention.)  If a third referee report disagrees wildly with the first two, then perhaps the editors will be inclined to accept the paper (or seek yet further reports).

Nevertheless, unfortunately my guess at the most likely outcome is that the editors will convey their sympathies to you and wish you the best of luck elsewhere.  In my experience editors just do not have enough incentive to overrule referees in this situation.  From a hard-nosed perspective they may be right: if your paper truly is valuable and the referees are wrong, then you can resubmit to another journal of similar quality.  That outcome is in the long run almost as good for you and only detrimental to them if your paper is not just publishable in the journal but outstandingly strong beyond the sort of papers they usually accept.  On the other hand if your paper is flawed and they publish it anyway then they are throwing away all the advantages of peer review.

In general, it is a rare referee report that doesn't tell you something that could improve your paper.  If a referee wildly misses the point (which again, is not at all uncommon) it is not necessarily your fault...but nevertheless maybe you could rewrite the paper to make it easier to get the point.  Sometimes authors work for months or years on very subtle things and then expect readers to appreciate these subtleties upon a much more casual reading.  The fact that two different referees missed the point still does not imply that their comments have any legitimacy, but it does make it more probable.  If two people miss the point of your work in the same way, then I would certainly take a crack at rewriting the paper to avoid that particular misunderstanding.

All in all, it would be safe to at least start thinking about how you could (perhaps relatively quickly and easily) modify your paper for resubmission.  I would expect the editorial deliberations on this to be rather quick: if you don't hear back from the editors within, say, two weeks, then it would be appropriate to inquire politely on the status of your paper.  I would not advise you to resubmit to the same journal unless you know you'll get new referees: people who have missed the point once are not your best bet for appreciating the new version.


Should I invite my idle team mates to participate in our project discussion with our professor?

In an ideal world you would have worked this out with the professor long ago. But you can't turn back the clock.

Depending on the project and the professor's expectations, declaring yourself the sole worker can be a terrible solution. Especially if the prof was expecting you to learn about teamwork.

I suspect your best course is just to turn it in and not discuss process more than necessary.

Whether you discuss it with them or not is another matter. I don't know what your goals would be in that. I don't actually see much positive that could come out of it. Since they are nominally on the project they need to see the result, I think, before it is submitted.

But, your professor is partly to blame here for not monitoring your work more closely.

Unfortunately, out in the real world, this is often the outcome on joint projects. Sometimes for good reasons, though not always.

With the comments, I'm not sure, now, about your real concern. If you are worried that you will be downgraded because you didn't actually work as a team, then it is what it is and there is a record of it in the logs. But if the prof is happy that somehow the work got done, even if all by one person, then you don't seem to have any risk here.

The prof has established a process for evaluating your work. If it calls for a meeting of the team with evaluators then you will just have to do that, but be honest. Dishonesty often leads to the worst outcome. But if it doesn't require such a meeting, don't offer one. If you are happy with the work your grade will properly reflect your work.

But, it might also be a mistake to claim, in a meeting, that all the work is yours. It would be better if the team mates first give an honest appraisal of their own contributions. If it is honest, then it is clear that the work is primarily or wholly yours. But that is better coming from them if they are willing to be honest. If you meet with them, I'd suggest you let them know that you will be honest with the evaluators and not try to cover for them.

Your team mates may have to offer explanations about why they didn't participate, but that is "on" them, not you.

If you were my student, I'd be unhappy with you, but I'd also realize that this is a learning situation. My unhappiness would be, primarily, that you didn't let me know earlier so that I could help you formulate a team more effectively.

The tone of your question, however, doesn't raise another issue that sometimes occurs. Sometimes a "team" member will just cut out the rest of the team and do the work him/herself, ignoring the others. I don't see that here, of course, but it is something that professors need to watch for and halt when it occurs. Team work is an important skill in computing, but it isn't the most natural thing in and educational environment where students are often forbidden to work together before they reach this stage. But it needs to be taught, and that is the responsibility of the professor.

The actual project code here isn't the most important thing. Learning is. Learning about systems, certainly, but also learning about process.

Again, in the real world, a manager would probably be happy that the work was done, no matter how. But in the real world the product itself has a much higher value than the process. But a professor should be much more concerned with the learning, compared to the product.


Is it reasonable to say I'm not happy at my current position at interviews?

A traditional interview technique is to reframe such questions.  Don't focus on the fact that your current job is bad - view it as an opportunity to discuss how the new job will be better and how you're a good fit for it.

Bad: "In my current job, I have to teach too much, and good research is not appreciated."

Good: "I'm looking for a job with more opportunities to pursue research, in areas where I can make the best contribution.  I have successful experience in doing X, Y, and Z, and University A is known for its excellence in this area."


How to protect the copyright of the thesis draft?

If you live in the US or any other country that observes the rules of the Berne Convention, your work is automatically protected by copyright as soon as it is saved to a fixed medium (which may be your hard drive, a printout, or scribbles in a notebook).

So if your work is written down, it's already protected with respect to copyright.

There may be other things about the draft that you wish to protect - for example, you may wish to ask the proofreader not to speak about your ideas with anyone else - but that is not a copyright issue.


Can a conference paper with all weak reject get accepted at the end?

If nobody wants to accept the paper, it shouldn't get accepted.  This holds even for workshops and symposia with very loose standards, as the reviewers should be making their judgements based on those standards (e.g., "this paper is pretty half-baked and poorly written, but we're just looking for interesting ideas to discuss, so it's a weak accept").

Thus, the answer ought to be no, it cannot be accepted (except in certain unusual cases, such as the organizers deciding there is a hidden nugget with value enough for shepherding to improve the paper).

A struggling, eccentric, or fraudulent organization, however might just not care, and accept it anyway. If you have this happen to a paper of yours, you may wish to reconsider whether you really want to publish it in that venue.


PhD Student reapplying to other PhD program, what to indicate in CV?

Since every country/state/university has its own regulations on Ph.D. programs, my answer might carry little value to your concrete situation.

I dropped my first Ph.D. program last year due to some financial difficulties. It was the 4th year of my Ph.D. life. I am currently enrolled into another PhD program after a prolonged period of struggling. I think I can totally understand your situation.

Put your current PhD program into your CV, mark yourself as "Ph.D. student" because you are. And this actually helps since you already know (more or less) how academia works and how to proceed with your research. You are not a Masters student, don't put "Master" there.
Like in any CV or application letter, honesty is always appreciated. Explaining your situation would help them to understand you and your goal (which I assume is to continue with your research).
It's really subjective. Recommendation letters don't matter THAT much for Ph.D. students compared to Master or Bachelor students. What you really need is a quality list of publications and/or projects in which you have participated.


Conference/workshop does not provide for 'poster logistics' - is that normal?

I'm answering from an HCI-related subfield of CS:

What you describe - attendees print and bring their posters themselves - is completely normal.

While I do not rule out it exists even in my specific field, I have never encountered a conference that would print posters for you. Any time I have participated in, or just looked at the CfP for a poster session, attendees were merely told the available board size (and thus, the maximum allowable size for the poster) and asked to prepare their poster in time for the poster session.

Typically, attendees then have the poster printed at their home institution (and get compensated by the institution as a part of the conference attendance cost). This has the nice side-effect that, at least in smaller places, you might already get in touch with a few conference attendees at the airport, because you notice the people walking around with poster tubes. At some point before the poster session (depending on the conference, already at the beginning of the conference), attendees will take a few minutes to affix their posters at the boards they have been assigned (or just at any boards, if the poster space works in a first-come first-serve manner).

The poster belongs to the attendee/their employer and they are free to do with it after the poster session what they like. A possible procedure that has been followed by many people I have been in touch with is to take the poster back to one's home institution and place it on some wall in or near one's office.

A word on your impression:

  The opposite case seems strage, ridiculous even: For 10 or 20 people, coming in from different countries, to each have to arrange for the printing of a poster and either bring it from overseas in a special container or to have to coordinate with print shops in a city they don't know.

In a way, that's true. But then, note that poster printing (well, any graphics printing) comes with a certain deal of variety and "risks". Colours might be messed up, the size/margins might be unfitting ... add to that that different regions of the world are used to (and thus base their poster templates on) different paper formats. Thus, it is desirable to see the poster when there is still some time to make some corrections.

As for the special container - any university institute I have encountered owns several of these, for exactly this purpose. Note that if you want to bring back the poster (as described in my text above), you need such a container anyway for the way back, so there would be no point in carrying the container there without anything in it.


Publication Strategy for book manuscript

With book proposals most authors submit proposals to several publishers at once and then negotiate with those that are interested in the book project.  There's generally no clause that says "You cannot have submitted this for publication elsewhere."  Although you can submit a completed manuscript along with your proposal, many publishers will just want to see an outline and perhaps a sample chapter or two.  They won't typically review the entire manuscript in the way that a research paper would be reviewed.


Advisor doesn't let me graduate and prevents me from working

Let me suggest a couple of things. You may not be happy with the suggestions, I realize, but it is a "safety first" recommendation.
I suggest that you agree to 4th project and that you commit to it. But I suggest that you don't leave it open to a follow on 5th, 6th, etc. Try to come to a firm agreement that this next big thing will be the last he asks and that you will then be able to move on with good recommendations. Hard to get a guarantee on the last part, but it is what you seek.
There are two major reasons I suggest this.
First is that it is now a terrible time to be graduating. Higher education is in flux because of the pandemic and it will take another year for it to settle out. Hopefully it will by then, but a "novel virus" presents an unknown future.
Second is that fighting with your advisor is not a recipe for academic success. Going to the chair with a complaint might poison the relationship and leave you without a future path. I don't know if the advisor is abusing you or just thinks that with a final push you can open more doors in the future. Doing more than the average is actually expected, though not always achieved.
If your funding is in place to continue and you want to maximize your future, consider following his advice.
And if you are actually depressed, go see a professional. The university probably has a counseling office for such things. What you are feeling is pretty natural, actually, but you may need advice about how to get through it.


How important are extracurricular activities as a Mathematics Major?

In the US, and I suspect elsewhere, such things have little bearing on admissions to graduate school. People will look at your academic achievements, mostly, but not entirely, in your major subject. They are looking for evidence of academic success and want to be able to make an easy prediction about your fit into their program. It is a much more important thing for admission to an undergraduate program in the US, but not a graduate program.

However, evidence of hard work and dedication to a goal can also be evidence of academic success. But the more important thing is the courses you took, your grades, and any writing you have done.


Is it better to use reference letters that show variety, or two letters from the same job that better fit the program I'm applying to?

The content of the letter is more important than whether the author is a theorist or experimentalist.  I suggest you ask your letter writers what they think.  They will know if they will write you a good letter better than I will.


Do "News and Views" articles count as publications?

Articles like this are essentially a form of review article (review articles, likewise, are sometimes peer-reviewed and sometimes not, depending on venue).

Just like other reviews, when they appear in a significant publication venue they can be extremely high-impact. They are part of the scientific dialogue and they get cited, just like other articles. Moreover, even if not peer-reviewed, they are typically by invitation and still with editorial oversight.

As such, I do often see these types of articles listed under publications, on people's publication profiles, and being of value to a person's career.


ADA requires you to accommodate the students you have.  If you have a student who cannot read the hand written documents because they have a disability, you must distribute them in a way the student can access them.  Your disability services office should be able to advise you.

Providing searchable, typed documents would help some students with disabilities and also some students without disabilities, so it would be nice to do.  I recommend the universal instruction design approach.

A UID book


Two potential advisors are interested in me as a master’s student – should I meet with both?

Mostly everyone contacts multiple potential advisors before starting any project (or multiple schools/departments when exploring program options, such as PhDs), and advisors/departments are fully aware of it. You want to be honest, if you are worried, and tell them, when you meet or talk to them, about the ongoing conversation with the other potential advisor. Assure them that you are interested in what they are offering to you, but you want to make sure that, whatever you work on and whoever you work with, it will be a good fit. And, once you decide for one of the projects, contact this advisor to confirm it, and the other advisor (over the phone if this is how you've talked until then, not email) and tell them that you finally decided to work on the other project because it was closer to your interests or any other reason. Don't have anyone on the hook, be clear to everyone as soon as you make a decision so they can take another student.

Overall, be polite and honest, and they will be fine with it.


The utility of graduate math study for theoretical physics

You need to distinguish between a few different styles of theoretical physics, which differ dramatically in their math requirements.

Particle phenomenology and theoretical cosmology. These are the people who use math to make predictions about our universe. They study things like dark matter, inflation, (low-energy) supersymmetry, baryogenesis, grand unification, etc., and often talk directly with experimentalists. (hep-ph/astro-ph on ArXiv)
"Formal" theory. These are the people who play around with neat theoretical toys like supergravity, AdS/CFT, strings, twistors, etc. without worrying much about whether they have anything to do with our particular universe. (hep-th/gr-qc on ArXiv)
Mathematical physics. These are the people who try to put physics on a firm mathematical foundation. The Navier-Stokes and Yang-Mills Millenium prize problems fall under this category. Many professors who work on this have stuff have joint appointments in the math department. This camp is much smaller than either (1) or (2). (math-ph on ArXiv)

Lumping them all into "very foundational physics [...] such as QFT" and "formal/pure theory stuff" makes it sounds like you haven't learned enough physics to know what you want yet. All of these groups will use QFT, in very different ways. You should talk with professors and grad students who do each of these things and look at papers on the ArXiv to see what catches your interest.

If you want to do (1), you'll probably need to pick up differential geometry, group/representation theory, complex analysis, Lie groups and Lie algebras, and the very basics of algebraic topology (i.e. what a homotopy group is). The most efficient way to do this is to read math books written by physicists for physicists, which are listed here. If you take pure math courses on these things, as I have, you'll find that what the mathematicians care about is very far from what physicists care about! About 80% of the material in any given course will be irrelevant.

If you want to do (2) it will depend on exactly what you're doing, but it wouldn't hurt to get full year-long courses on differential geometry, algebraic topology, and algebra under your belt, in addition to the material in (1). Most PhD students have done this or done the equivalent by self study. While you'll rarely see math-style proofs in such papers, they will use the language of pure math, and the benefit of the courses will be acclimating yourself to this language. If you want to do (1) this background can still be useful because it makes papers from (2) much more accessible.

If you want to do (3) you'll basically be a mathematician, so you should take everything you mentioned and ideally enjoy it very much. You'll need more advanced graduate courses too, though which ones will depend on exactly what you're doing.

If you have more questions, feel free to drop by the Physics.SE chat room where we have people in all three camps!


Is there a database of every scientist with their scientific interests?

I don't think this database exists, but you might try searching the literature archives. Databases like Web of Science might help you.


How to become an Editorial board member?

That's generally not a job you can apply for, but a job you're asked to take on. At least in reputable journals, the members of the editorial board are largely scientists well known in their field. They have that role because the editor-in-chief trusts their opinions and perspectives on submitted papers, and also because they have the stature in the field to write to potential reviewers and ask them to review a paper. Well established researchers also have fewer potential conflicts of interest: They no longer have promotions coming up, and so feel less conflicted about rejecting papers by people who might otherwise be asked to write letters of evaluation about their promotion.

I don't know what your career status is, but suspect that because you are asking the question that you are still young. As an editor-in-chief, I usually try to avoid using younger researchers as members of the editorial board. That's not necessarily because I don't trust their judgment, but because they have conflicts of interest and because they will have a harder time receiving the necessary reviews within a reasonable time frame.


What can a grad student do when their assistantship requires more hours than specified in their contract?

It is fairly common for graduate students to have TA assignments that are expected to take up about half of their time, as you have stated is the case for you. In this case, you should not really think of yourself as a full-time student, but as a half-time student, half-time employee of the department, since your teaching work is what you are being paid to do. Moreover, a healthy department will typically have its expectations of students adjusted accordingly.

There is, of course, a huge amount of variance in the actual time required for a given class, based on the particular students, professor, assignments, etc.
It sounds like this is what's being the problem for you: since you only got assigned one class, you were expecting to have a light load, but the department is trying to "get its money's worth" from you, and is doing so in a manner that you find difficult to plan for.

I would think it is entirely reasonable to ask for notification farther in advance, so that you can plan better.  It's also entirely possible that you will not get it, since the person making the assignments is likely an overloaded professor who is dealing with requests that are being given to them at the last minute as well.

Ultimately, my recommendation would be discussion with your advisor so that you can:

make them aware of the impact last-minute requests are having on you,
enlist them to help in either improving the situation or alleviating its impact on you, and
prevent it from happening to you again in the future.


ORCID identifiers do not mean much when you write them on the first page of a paper. Humans usually prefer to see affiliations or email addresses, because they carry more meaning.

However, ORCID iDs are very useful when they are included in the metadata associated with the article. This helps search engines and research information systems identify the authors the paper. As this metadata is rarely shown directly to users, it is not so easy to observe ORCID iDs in the wild. Here are a few examples:

Some papers registered on CrossRef or DataCite have ORCID iDs associated with their authors. For instance, you can search for the papers associated with 0000-0001-5556-6616.
Some repositories also store ORCID iDs, such as Zenodo: for instance, this paper has an id in its metadata.
Some research information systems such as Dissemin display ORCID identified authors with the ORCID logo, as in this example.


Can I submit my paper without author list (double-blind) to a conference with a single-blind review process?

In a single blind review process, the author names are not hidden for the reviewers, but the reviewer names are hidden for the authors.

In a double blind review process, the author names are hidden for the reviewers, and the reviewer names are hidden for the authors.

In both cases you will have to submit the author names during the submission process (e.g., in a web form), and the organizing committee will be able to see your names. Typically, for a conference or journal with a double blind review process, you are asked to provide a manuscript without any author names and affiliations.

You cannot submit an anonymous manuscript to a conference/journal with a single blind review process, as it probably will be rejected straight away.


Depends on your purpose.

If your aim is to track the publications of a given academic then I would recommend these in the following order of preference. Some of these may surprise you:

Google Scholar;

Google Scholar seems to capture more publication outputs any other source. This is partly due to the scope they have for including different publication types, such as  reports and discussion papers that many other platforms exclude. They also have greater capacity to show citations to those publications. This will often lead to a higher H Index on Google Scholar than on other platforms;

Microsoft Academic (Microsoft's weird equivalent to Google Scholar);

Microsoft Academic is the almost unheard-of equivalent to Google Scholar. It has a different look and feel but does more or less the same thing, but less well. It does not seem to capture as many publications as Google Scholar and seems to require more intervention on the part of the academic to keep their record up to date, and is therefore less reliable;

Twitter;

Whaaat? Twitter? Yes. Twitter. Many younger academics send a tweet whenever a new publication of theirs becomes available. It's as close to a real-time notification of new publications as you can get with those that do this consistently. Not very good for reviewing previous publications but great if you are following the latest from a particular academic;

Academia.edu;

Academia.edu is hanging in there as a platform despite being behind a paywall for many of their features. Many academics still maintain a record of their publications on this platform because it offers reasonably good analytics. But they have to keep it up to date themselves, which can often mean an inconsistent record of publications and often a significant time lag in publications being added;

ResearchGate;

As with Academia.edu above, only their analytics aren't as good, so there is less incentive for academics to keep this up to date.

Linked In;

Many academics use Linked In for their professional networks. They typically want people in their network to see what they are up to so they often keep a selective record of their publications there as well;

Their own departmental web page;

Updating their own department's web page is normally the last thing on the list for most academics. It's often a pain for them to update because they typically don't have access to this record themselves and are therefore reliant on the lazy-ass staff at their own institution to (reluctantly) update it for them - or worse - rely on the deeply flawed system their institution uses to track and report their research outputs. These often deliberately exclude publications which do not count for 'points' in whatever research incentive scheme they use. Don't get me started!

Finally, there are a host of platforms claiming to offer a definitive list of publications attributed to each author (including Orcid, Publons, etc). Orcid really exists as a means of attributing a unique identifier to each author so that publications might more reliably be attributed to the correct author. These have a role to play but they are not really designed as a means for making an author's publication catalogue accessible (and these platforms are simply awful to use, so many academics don't bother with them at all once they have their author ID number).

The main differences between these pertain to how much information is included and how they are updated.

Platforms like Google Scholar are more reliable as they do not rely on the academics themselves to keep their records up to date. Academia.edu and ResearchGate can still be useful, particularly where academics make the full text of their publications available through those platforms. Twitter and the others are useful for keeping up with the latest and getting a sense of what they think is important.

Try them out and see :-)


Is it appropriate to bring coffee and cookies to a PhD defense?

How I have seen it handle in France: usually, no food and drinks is given out during the defense, except for a bottle of water and a glass who are set on table of each member of the defense committee. However, as you say, it may be cold outside and committee members may be glad for a hot drink and/or maybe something to eat (depending what time it is). So, it is quite customary for the thesis advisor(s) to actually invite the committee members to join him some time before the defense starts, where they can make small talk and drink coffee. If the defense starts early afternoon, they committee can even go to lunch together, giving them an opportunity to discuss practical stuff (who will chair the committee? what order will people talk in? etc.).

Then, after the defense is concluded, there is a celebratory “cocktail” (buffet and drinks) to which the defense committee is invited, and to which they usually attend at least for half an hour.


How to be properly cited with a two-word last name

Make it easy for people to cite you correctly.

People are lazy. When I cite a paper, I usually copy-paste the citation from some website. This can be the publisher's website, the author's website, or some index like Google Scholar or DBLP (for computer science). I suspect most people do this too. So you should make sure the correct citation appears in these places.

Make sure that the publisher of your papers has the correct citation on their website. Put the correct citation on your website (e.g. create an "export citation" link). Create a google scholar profile and make sure it has the correct information. In some places it may be appropriate to even include the suggested citation in your paper itself. These actions won't ensure 100% correct citation of your name, but they will make a difference.

Another note: You get to choose what name to put on your paper. It doesn't have to be your legal name. (For instance, someone who changes their legal name upon marriage may choose to keep publishing under their maiden name.) So you do have the option to choosing a professional name that avoids these issue -- e.g., by hyphenating. Just be consistent.


Proper way of refering to yourself, according to graduate level

According to proper etiquette you may use Master as a title (as in “Master Segovia”) if and only if you are:

the heir apparent of a Scottish viscount or baron
a boy not old enough to be called “Mr.”

The New Oxford American Dictionary (which gives the above information) also lists the archaic use as a  “title for a man of high rank or learning”, but (a) that is archaic, (b) it was not linked to a specific degree, just a courtesy title.

There is no formal title in British English or American English to designate someone who holds a Master's degree. Get over it, and earn a PhD! :)


What does 'open position for bachelor project' actually mean?

In most cases professors will not be offended if an eager, and knowledgeable, undergraduate approaches them about working on a project. This doesn't mean they will have a position for you, but it does mean it is always worth asking. Reading their website and seeing what they are interested in is a great start.


Who pays travel & per diem costs for invited lecturers?

The short answer is that it depends (no surprise there).  If it's to give a talk in a department colloquium or seminar, travel cost are usually covered (at least, that's been my experience in mathematics), though that can vary a bit, especially since smaller departments may have very limited budgets for that kind of thing.

Food expenses vary even more wildly, and they depend heavily on the source of funding.  I've been at places that had a standard per diem for visitors, places that did nothing, and places where the faculty would take the speaker to dinner and split the cost among them.


Checking whether you have cited some other researcher

If you are fine with looking at only Web of Science indexed articles then yes, this is easily possible using Web of Science.

Do a "Cited Reference Search" and search for the name of the researcher you are interested in
Select the publication of that researcher and hit "Finish Search", you now end up with a list of every paper citing the previously selected papers of that researcher
Do a basic author search of your own name, you end up with a list of your own papers.
Go to "Search History" and select these two searches and combine the two sets with the "AND" operator.

There's another way to do this using Web of Science. It will take some time and work to set up (depending on how many publications you have) but the process of checking can be automated afterwards. You have to create a list of all papers you cited which includes the author names of the cited papers.

Search for your publications on Web of science
For each publication open the details, on the right it shows the number of "Cited references", click on that number you end up with a list of papers you cited
Export this list to endnote (you have to do this for every page)
Eliminate duplicates in Endnote.

You now have an Endnote database with all the publications you cited which can easily be searched for authors.


Should universities give extra time or related accommodations for students with mental illnesses?

In answering this question, I think that it is important to consider the distinction between mental illness and learning disabilities.  While there is a spectrum of different and complex effects, for the purposes of making policies it may be useful to consider these two "prototypical" classes of challenge:

Many specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia or speech impairment, have a rather focused affect on perception and action, rather than more generally impairing cognition.  In many cases, relatively simple interventions (such as giving a dyslexic student more time) can have a big impact on educational success by mitigating the impact of the disability.  I think of this as little different than the intervention of glasses in mitigating the impact of my poor eyesight.
Mental illness such as depression or bipolar disorder, on the other hand, is much more subtle and difficult to deal with, since it strikes at "core" aspects of an individual such as motivation, interpretation of the world, and outlook on life.  Even when an intervention is plausible, the ethical boundaries are much less clear, particularly given the difficulty in balancing the need for consent against the likely harms from a possibly distorted mental state.

For an educational institution, then, the approaches to supporting students with mental illness and specific learning disabilities are likely to want to be very different, and the type of support that is needed is likely to be different for different types of challenges.  Giving a dyslexic student more time on an exam makes a lot of sense; it's like letting a student who is hard of hearing sit up in the front of the lecture hall.  Giving a highly depressed individual extra time on an exam is not likely to be a meaningful intervention; letting them take time off without penalty and return in another semester with a clean slate is more likely to be effective.

A good institution should then try to figure out the needs of each student, and how far they can reasonably go to satisfy them given the institution's resource constraints.


How much course preparation, grading, and student question handling can be reasonably expected of a graduate TA?

The professor has created no content for this course at all, and I put in at least 40 hours a week. Is the professor allowed to have me doing this much work?

It depends on the individual university, but in practice almost certainly not. I a math professor in the United States, and by that standard this sounds absurd. From what I can tell, the professor's behavior is completely out of line.
When I was a TA, I was responsible for: running discussion sections, holding three office hours a week, grading, and answering emails. And, if I felt nice (which I generally did), running review sessions before exams. That's it. I was not responsible for creating any of the content for the course.
I would recommend making an immediate appointment with the graduate director, and asking what the expectations of your TA role are. Remember that, as a graduate TA, the graduate director is your boss, not the professor for whom you teach. If your graduate director tells you that writing exams or preparing lecture notes is not within the scope of your duties, then you can and should ignore any requests from the professor to do it anyway.
Good luck to you!


I think you should definitely mention the research assistant in your acknowledgements, but not as an author. For such questions, I generally refer to the Vancouver Protocol, a widely used standard to determine appropriate authorship (search "Vancouver authorship" on the Web and you'll see that it is fairly well known):

  The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

  Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  Final approval of the version to be published; AND
  Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Furthermore,

  Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged.

So, according to these principles, the research assistant is not a coauthor, but ought to be acknowledged.

Also, please note that coauthorship is often considered an ethical issue (that is, it is considered unethical to include someone who does not merit authorship, or to exclude someone who does), whereas it is more of a professional courtesy to acknowledge someone's contributions (that is, it is nice and collegial to acknowledge someone, but it is not considered unethical not to do so).


How to avoid the repetition of "I" while writing a cover letter for an academic job?

Because it's a cover letter, I think it's quite natural that you say a lot about you in it. That's actually not to be avoided, because you want to give the addressee a good idea of your background, your motivations, your interests, etc. In short, you want to show them who you are, so they want to work with you. This is a totally different exercise than usual academic writing.

Now, regarding the redundancy of I, it is a matter of writing style. It probably wouldn't bother me much, but if you want to diminish it for some reasons, here are worthy alternatives:

Instead of starting your sentence with I, just push it somewhere down in some sentences. That way, you avoid the pattern of I as the first word of every sentence.

  Looking at your group's wide range of research, I must confess a certain attraction for your recent groundbreaking work on the correlation between beer-drinking and publication rate.

Use constructions that, while retaining the first person, shift from the subject pronoun to other cases:

  It has been my intention for a few years now to shift my research interests from pure psychology to experimental psychohistory, and I have thus taken in 2009 a post-doc position at the University of Trentor (group of prof. Seldon)

instead of “I decided a few years ago to move to the field of psychohistory…”. Similarly, you could say

The standard techniques of academic writing… introduce the pronoun once, then shift the discuss to avoid being the actor, e.g. using passive voice.

  During my thesis, I introduced a new data reduction technique called XXZ. This algorithm, when applied to large datasets, was used to univocally establish whether data was being manipulated. In particular, results obtained on the 2000 election showed systematic bias against a specific candidate, highlighting its power as a diagnostic tool for real-life applications.

Be aware that there are downsides, though: most of these alternatives are longer than a direct sentence starting with I, which means overusing them could make you sound windy.


Unclear answer from my prospective PhD Supervisor

I would guess that you received the professor's standard (if poorly worded) reply to prospective Ph.D. students. Of course, it is also possible that the professor looked at your CV or resume and doubts you fulfill the admissions requirement, but I would not read that far into the reply.

Regardless, be sure  to cover the following points in your reply:

Reiterate your interest in the program.
Indicate how you fulfill each criterion for admission to the Ph.D. program (attaching a resume or CV if you did not do so in your initial email).
Identify potential research threads that you would be interested in working on with the potential adviser.

The goal is to convert this cryptic email exchange into a productive correspondence that makes a potential supervisor excited to work with you. Addressing the three points above would likely achieve that goal.


Is it possible to change email on published paper?

You could do the following things in this situation. But, it depends on (1) whether it is a journal paper or a conference paper?, (2) whether it is already published as offprint?

Politely ask the publisher about it (as it is a mistake done on your part). (credit: @Dirk)
E-mail the editor of the journal (if journal paper) and request to publish an Erratum on your behalf. (credit: @PsySp)
Publish an erratum on your personal web page or blog.


How to get the letter of commitment of the host institution for ERC Calls?

If you want another institution to provide you with space, office, computer access, mentoring, etc, then they will need to know and approve of your proposal. Every university has a sponsored research office (or other name) that is in charge of these things. Contact the department head or the university you want to host you to provide you with the necessary contacts.


What makes papers publishable in top-tier journals?

To be accepted and published it has to be submitted. Some papers that might be accepted just aren't ever submitted.

Some of it is just luck. The editor was looking for something. Even something as simple or stupid as s/he needed to fill an 8 page gap in an issue and yours was the best available candidate at the moment.

Some of it is just the writing itself. Good journals want, and try to get, well written, understandable, papers. If the reviewers have trouble understanding you, it will be hard to get accepted.

But most of it is that a paper answers a question (or two) that seems important at the time the paper arrives. It is the science/mathematics/whatever behind the paper that really matters. The members of a scientific community are fairly often on the lookout for an answer to a perplexing problem. If you can provide that, and submit a well written paper, you are more likely to get published.


How to find out paper from phrases like "Chun and Seymour (1989)"?

Format Chun and Seymour (1989) means that there should be a full reference in the bibliography (at the and of the article, chapter or book; or sometimes in the footnote).

In case if it is missing, you can use Google Scholar with

author:Chun author:Seymour

then in the options set date range to 1988 -- 1990.


Short answer: No, not at all.

Long answer:

  What I understood from the official GRE manual:

GRE, just like any other multiple choice exam, requires fairly specific preparation. You need to understand how to go about analyzing their standardized types of problems, methods of elimination of the answer choices, and even sometimes think like the person who's writing the question. Getting a good score means that you've acquired these skills and can use them rather efficiently in the 3 hours you took the exam. This is what I understood by reading their official manual.

  My personal opinion:

Doing well on GRE does probably also mean that you can, in fact, learn how to do other things, given that they are presented to you in "standard packaging". But so does an undergraduate degree where you get to take classes and prove by taking exams that you can efficiently use what you learned in those classes.

However, none of these (and no other single thing) actually "guarantees" that you will do well in graduate school, regardless of what program you go into. It's just a metric that you should be able to do well, if you are passionate enough to do well in graduate school.


Is it ethical to award points for hilariously bad answers?

Is it ethical to award a few points for this answer?

No.
It does not demonstrate understanding. If I wrote a good-intentioned, but poor answer and got the same amount of points, I'd be peeved.


How to prevent Google Scholar from merging two different papers?

[Update: Multiple users have reported that this doesn't work.]

Go to your Google Scholar profile and bring up the add article dropdown, click on "Configure article updates":
Select the radio button for "Don't automatically update my profile" and click the "Update settings" button:
When Scholar wants to merge your papers, instead of going ahead it will send an email to ask if that is the correct course of action.


How to handle capitalized abbreviations in Book, Anthology, Journal, etc. titles in APA?

First of all, do not trust Bibtex/Biblatex on capitalization issues. Every Bibtex/Biblatex style file I've looked at handles capitalization using quite simple rules - either it's "Title Case" (capitalizing every "major" word) or "Sentence case" (capitalizing first letter). There's no extensive hidden database used to tell if a given word is a name, proper noun, abbreviation, chemical element, etc. That is, Bibtex/Biblatex would happily output "On gustafson–barsis's law", for example.

Now, APA generally recommends abbreviations to be capitalized (there are some exceptions like 'laser' where an acronym has become overly familiar), which presumably also applies in the reference list. The clearest statement to this effect I've found is from this library guide:

  Capitalize proper nouns, initials, and acronyms in a title.


Does it matter that your dissertation has been submitted when you apply to a postdoc position?

This answer is specific to the USA.

Your dissertation advisor needs to write in their letter something along the lines that you've written X chapters of your dissertation (or the equivalent in the hard sciences) and that they fully expect you will be able to defend and submit by such-and-such date.

On the receiving side, we know that some students will decide at the last minute to not submit their dissertation and defer graduation. This is usually critically important for international students who will lose their immigration status once they graduate, but it also applies to domestic students as well who might need university health care, housing, or just the extra time to perfect their dissertation.

We all know how this game is played. On the receiving side, all we need is assurance that you WILL be able to submit IF you are given the post-doc. Many post-docs have been burned by recipients who did not finish the dissertation receive the PhD before arriving at the post-doc and turned the post-doc into a pre-doc. Many now have formal language that if you do not submit by the start of the post-doc, your hiring letter will be vacated.


In many departments, when it comes to accepting students, it's good to have a professor put their hand up and say that they would want to work with you and put you on their funding. By the time it gets to accepting students, because there are so many good applicants, the pool has become mostly indistinguishable. Having someone advocating for you at these meetings can make all the difference in the world.


Should I be citing wrong papers and preprints whose correctness I am unable to judge?

To answer your general question, I would argue that it is only your responsibility to:

ensure the correctness of your own work and claims;
honestly report your methodology, experiments, and findings;
do a thorough literature review and acknowledge all relevant prior work; and
where appropriate, provide your critical assessment of those works.

Thus, my answer is: no, you are not responsible for whether the cited work is correct.
That being said, you are responsible for making sure that everything that you claim to be true is true.

Regarding your first example

If there is work that has been shown to be inaccurate, as in your first example, you should state as much, and ideally give a citation to the correction.
Depending on how relevant the inaccuracy is to your work, you might explicitly address it in the text, or just acknowledge it in a footnote.
For example:

  Previous work has shown that this issue is important [paper].\footnote{Note that this paper was found to contain errors [correction], but those errors are not relevant to the present discussion.}

Regarding your second example

In the scenario you presented, you are actually stating that the preprint has not been peer-reviewed simply by citing it as such.
In your list of references, it will become clear to the reader that the work you are citing is just a preprint, and therefore has not been peer-reviewed.

However, as mentioned above, it is your responsibility to make sure that anything that you say is accurate.
For example, rather than saying

  Pi is exactly equal to 22/7, as was found previously [preprint citation].

you should say

  A previous study found that pi is exactly equal to 22/7 [preprint citation].

Similarly, in the example you gave, your claim is actually true:

  A related model was discussed in [preprint citation].

(Assuming the preprint does in fact discuss a related model.)
If you instead want to make a claim regarding whether that model is accurate, then you should state what you know to be true, and acknowledge any genuine concerns/skepticism you might have.
For example:

  A previous study showed a similar model to achieve 99.93% accuracy [preprint citation], although that model was only tested against simulated data, so we expect the performance of that model to suffer in the real world.

However, since you note that you are "unable to judge their correctness", I assume you do not have any specific concerns about the cited preprint.
In that case, my advice is to just ensure that your claims are accurate.


How should an undergrad pick a journal to submit to?

Assuming your professor is not new at advising, he would have the best opinion on the matter since it is surely something he has dealt with before. If you are really unsure about this, express your concern and ask him why he would suggest one over the other, and then make your decision from there.

Additionally, can you get input from the PhD student you are working with?

If all else fails, you may be able to talk to another professor in the same field to get a second opinion on this.


How to get notified when a specific paper is cited

If you asking this for your paper(s), then this is procedure:
Go to your Google Scholar profile, and click on some paper/article title. Now you will have one new window open, in which you have to click on the "Cited by" link at the bottom left of that window. Finally, you want to click on the envelope icon in the left sidebar to create alert... The similar procedure will work on papers from other authors!


How to accept admission to graduate school

Reply in the same form that was used in the acceptance. In this case, by email reply. You don't need a document beyond the email, but it would be polite to thank them.

And be sure you are clear that you accept the offer.

If it had been done by postal mail, the reply should be also by postal mail.


What should I consider when making a complaint centrally to the university regarding the quality of a subject?

Finish the course, and let it go. It sounds as though you are being properly taught a lesson in taking a course you knew you shouldn't take. This is actually a lesson worth experiencing. Real life will require you to face unwanted tasks, in unpleasant situations, while being judged by a person that you know is not qualified to judge your performance.  So i suggest you simply get the best grade you can, and move on with your academic career.

Good luck.


Telling supervisor we need to wait before publishing

Most research is never finished - it can always be further improved. At some point you have to say "this is enough to write about".
If it's not to do with your PhD then the chances are that you aren't going to go back and work on it more, so the choice isn't whether to do some more work on it, it's "is this good enough to publish as is?"
Of course we can't comment on whether your masters thesis is "finished enough" - but your supervisor is likely to have a better idea than you do.
I would recommend expressing your concerns to your supervisor and seeing what they say.


Pros and Cons of including less interesting results

You could omit the uninteresting 95% in the peer-review journal version, but include them as an appendix in the arxiv.org version of the paper. That way they're available but you're not forcing anyone to read them...


What effects (if any) do audited undergraduate courses have on graduate admissions?

My question is: will this have any positive benefits while I'm applying to graduate school?

I think you are asking whether it will make your application more competitive.  Answer: not much.  At many/most universities, anyone can audit any course at any time, and it doesn't certify anything more than that they showed up for class -- in some cases not even that.  I had an auditor in a course this semester who showed up
for the first half of the lectures and not for the second half.  My response: ok.  It shows up in my records -- so presumably also hers -- that she audited the course.  I am not asked to assign a grade of any kind.

  Or would the admissions committee assume that I didn't learn as much as someone who actually took the course, and take it with a grain of salt that I know the material?

They would probably not assume anything at all.  They would certainly not regard this as being evidence that you learned the material: getting a poor grade in a course certainly does not demonstrate learning of the material, and auditing shows less than that.

Of course you can learn things by auditing a course.  But you can also learn by outside reading and in other ways.  However most students at this level learn more by actually taking a course, and of course if you do well in the course then that knowledge gets certified (to an extent) and can be used advantageously in your graduate application.

Story check: you say that you have two years left of undergraduate study and can't find time to officially take one course that you think will be beneficial to your intended graduate study.  This professor who read graduate applications for several years finds that hard to believe.  In two years you should be able to work in the time to take one extra course, e.g. by (i) taking courses over the summer or (ii) getting excused from one course in a sequence, say by taking an exam which shows your competence.  This is something to talk to your undergraduate advisor about.


Note: I am not Canadian, so this may be a bit off. However, I do hire post-docs fairly regularly into a research group at a US National Lab.

First - for an official post-doc interview your proposed attire seems appropriate. Dress slacks rather than jeans would be an upgrade, but probably not necessary. (Note that standards in the US can vary regionally, I'd assume similar in Canada. What is needed in Toronto might be different than Vancouver or Saskatchewan. An interview in New York City is different than Denver.)

As an added comment, you should treat this as a job interview because it definitely is one. While it may not be the formal interview, they have asked you are going out to give a talk. Any impressions from this visit will apply to a more formal interview. If it goes well, there may not even be a separate formal interview. Good luck.


Is it okay to break a contract for a teaching position to get a job outside of academia?

Just to clarify, the standard terminology for the action you are considering taking is “resigning”, “quitting”, “handing in your resignation” etc., NOT “breaking a contract”. I’m not just being pedantic here: “breaking a contract” suggests that your contract (together with the applicable labor laws that govern your employment and may override anything the contract you signed says) does not allow any permissible way for you to stop your employment prior to the end date of the contract. Well, I haven’t read your contract and don’t know where in the world you are, but I am extremely skeptical that a normal academia job for a visiting assistant professor would have such draconian restrictions that forbid the normal act of resignation over a multi-year period.

With that said, let’s rephrase your question to say what I think you actually meant, which is: is it okay to resign your visiting assistant professor position to take an industry job? The answer to that is simply: yes. That is what people all over the world in all industries do when they find a professional opportunity that better suits their skills, ambitions and needs. You don’t need to make up excuses about moving or otherwise explain yourself. There is nothing to explain: you simply wish to change jobs, that’s all there is to it.

Hand in your notice, finish the semester or academic year, and go be happy in your new industry career.

One final thought: if your current job includes long-term responsibilities such as advising students, it would be courteous of you to help your current employer by offering to keep some of those responsibilities on an informal basis after leaving. Especially where students are considered, it will likely be frowned upon if you simply abandon them. Or if you are in charge of a lab, you could offer to help train your replacement even if that requires coming in a few times after you’ve already switched jobs, etc. But those are the only caveats I can think of to the general principle I discussed above.

Good luck!


What external funding opportunities are there for American or British students undertaking a PhD in Sweden?

Higher education in Sweden is free at the PhD level, and free for EU citizens at any level. It is possible that an American who wants to take a Bachelor/Master level course as part of his PhD studies might need to pay a ~100$ application fee, but that should be it.

PhD here is a full time job, so your living expenses will be well covered by the salary. It also means that you would start the application by finding an open position through university websites, or approaching a potential supervisor to create a new position. Additional scholarships are aimed mostly to cover the tuition fees for students who do need to pay, or to finance brief research collaborations.


The candidate can get in somewhere (a friend of mine with a third from a less prestigious UK university got into a PhD programme in Melbourne) but the candidate should decide carefully whether it is constructive in his future plans to obtain a position "anywhere".

I don't think the application will be competitive. "Cambridge" on the CV is a big help on any application to any UK place (business or academic) but the candidate will have to be ranked objectively against those obtaining Upper Second Class and First Class honours at many other good institutions.

That said, all the CV and the qualifications can achieve is an interview. If the candidate can impress the interview team with his mathematical or scientific skills then the formalities of a third may be disregarded.

Since the candidate is self-funded the usual rule "2:1 or better" may be relaxed; because actually it is a rule from the funding bodies for the candidate to be eligible for funding. ["2:1" is a British expression referring to a degree awarded with "Upper Second Class honours", which is the "typical" degree a good student will receive.]

I would also strongly advise that the candidate speak to his former tutor at his college in Cambridge. If the tutor is not receptive then he should talk to the head tutor or even (in a small college) the Master of the college. Basically, it might be that some strings could be pulled (academia is a small place) or a particularly favourable reference be produced for the candidate, explaining some of the deficiency in his degree classification.


Yes, they will be flagged by Turnitin. However, why don't you just cite your own research? In that case, it's not plagiarism because you cite your own work correctly.