How to appear legitimate when asking authorities about sensitive data for research?

Academic fieldwork is often a political game and appearing legitimate is certainly a key issue. I think if you are legitimate and upfront about where you work and what you want to do that aspect can be covered quite easily. But if there are sensitive data that they are not allowed to share, it will not matter who you are.

I think the first thing to do is to disclose your affiliation and explain what your are working on and how this organization's data are relevant to your study.

There are other aspects to consider so I will go slightly off topic here. It's sometimes very difficult to explain academic imperatives even to highly educated staff who work in other types of environments. They might perceive your work as an audit of their practices and can interpret your analysis as a challenge to their expertise. They might also want oversight on your writing and ask you to present their work in a positive way. You will have to be very diplomatic in that regard.

I think it safer to discuss data policy in advance: what you want to gather, what you will be showing in your thesis. They might ask for control over how their data will be published. You need to know in advance, ideally in written, what is OK and what not. The last thing you need is them to give you trouble when you're finishing up your thesis or after a paper is published.


How do top graduate school in Mathematics view BS (Mathematics) from a top engineering school?

If you're doing proof-based real analysis and algebra by your sophomore year, you're doing superbly. Many well-regarded schools don't introduce such coursework until the third year, opting to spend four full semesters on calculus. Sometimes the ultimate or penultimate semester is replaced by an intro to proofs, discrete mathematics, or linear algebra course, but the effect is the same. One of the major draws for me going to my undergraduate institution was that the norm was for mathematics majors to do real analysis their second year, with exceptional students starting little Rudin on day 1.

The extra year of advanced mathematics courses will be a huge boost to your application. You can increase this effect by demonstrating breadth and depth that other students won't be able to match. If you spend your first three years accomplishing the theoretical coursework that most students do, and then spend your fourth year taking, e.g., the graduate sequence in algebra, graduate courses in discrete mathematics and algorithms, and advanced undergraduate courses in functional analysis and algebraic topology then you've effectively demonstrated your ability to succeed in graduate level coursework. You'll also have a far deeper understanding of algebra and it's applications to computer science than the vast majority of applicants, and taking more advanced courses in analysis and topology lets you show that your advanced status isn't shallow or restricted to one area. And just in terms of a numbers game, you'll have ~12 advanced mathematics courses to other people's six (please correct these numbers if they don't make sense; I've only attended quarter systems schools and am not 100% on what numbers are normal).

Breadth and depth of coursework is a commonly used proxy for future mathematics success, and if you're able to take these fourth year graduate courses with professors you had already, then in their letters of recommendation they'll be able to talk about how you excelled in their previous courses and that they're excited to have you doing graduate work and that they expect you to succeed. Comments like that can go a long ways.

I don't think that you should be too caught up about the reputation of your university. In my experience talking to people who have served on admissions committees (note: I have never done so personally) is that, if they explicitly think about the reputation of a university at all, it is in very broad strokes that encompass dozens if not more universities per tier.

If this is an issue that concerns you particularly, you might find better success asking people at your institution who are more familiar with where you go to school than I am. One thing you should definitely ask is about what graduate schools other students like you have attended recently. This last bit is very important as, especially at a larger school, your outcomes and those of the average student are likely to be far apart.

In addition to talking to members of the mathematics faculty, you should also consider talking to any CS Theory faculty that you have. If you suppositions are correct, they're probably as likely or more likely to have written letters of recommendation for students who went on to top mathematics PhD programs. A sizable chunk, if not most, CS Theory people have mathematics PhDs rather than CS PhDs.


What action to take when questions regarding a published paper are ignored by its author?

How do you know he ignored the email?

Maybe he never received it because it was filtered before he had a chance to see it. Maybe he hasn't read his email this month because he's on vacation. Maybe that email address was good when the paper is published but not good now, but it's also not bouncing.

If one channel of communication doesn't work, try a different one. Call his office phone or send a letter to him. Write to a different author saying you've been trying to reach the corresponding author without success and you want to check the email address. Don't assume anything when you have no information.


How important is it to cite the earliest report of something?

For your readers, not important. Very often, later reports or review articles are better than the first report in terms of clarity and completeness. If you did not even need to read that first report when doing your research, then probably your readers do not need it either.
For the academic career game, mildly important. Depending on the field of research, citations may play a role in careers, and citing that first report may provide a (small) boost to its authors.
A pragmatic approach is to not waste too much time chasing citations, and wait for others to recommend citations that you may have omitted. Not everyone has to know the whole literature. And many people are not shy about asking colleagues to cite them (or others). To some extent, you can count on the readers of your article in draft/preprint/submitted form for pointing omissions.


How can I find out how often my publications have been cited?

Google scholar works pretty well, though with all of these things there are edges cases that cause problems (non unique names, random poster presentations showing up counting as citations, etc.)

I find that ResearchGate tends to be pretty good. People can comment, annotate, and more generally fix up the metadata issues on this site in a social media style, and so it tends to be pretty accurate. However, since it's still quite new most papers are missing from its databases (though it still tends to count citations correctly?).


Is cover letter another name for the statement of purpose for a PhD position?

Short answer: Between academia and industry they differ in usage, but amount to the same thing between academic institutions.

  I've been told that cover letters should describe what you have done, what you are currently doing and your future plans. They should also be personalized to the university you are applying to.

This is basically true. A professional cover letter follows what amounts to a three-section format:

1) What is the position at company X, where did you see the listing, and why does the position interest you?

2) What qualifies you for the position? Without rehashing your resume/CV, give mention to what it is you've actively done at your previous positions in an effort to draw attention to your resume.

3) This is where things differ: In a professional cover letter, the last section is where you want set up a workflow that allows the hiring company to follow up with you should they wish to contact you. They aren't really interested in your future plans, and I've seen applications that, for example, want you to list faculty you want to work with and why in your academic SOP... there's no room for any of that in a professional cover letter.

So it's essentially the same, with some difference because of the difference in audience.

Between the terms being interchangeably used between academic institutions, however, they amount to the same thing.


Tips on finding experts on a specific topic

What you are looking for might better be identified using a bibliometric search rather than a typical literature review. Bibliometrics search and analyze metadata related to scholarly publications more than the actual contents of the studies. In your case, the metadata that you are interested in is identifying the leading authors in certain topics of interest.
A colleague of mine published an article that shows how to identify the most relevant literature using free bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer. That is, by beginning with a topic search on a citation database (e.g. Scopus or Web of Science), you can identify the most relevant body of literature, authors, schools of thought, etc. based on cocitations and other bibliometrics:

Walsh, I., & Renaud, A. (2017). Reviewing the literature in the IS field: Two bibliometric techniques to guide readings and help the interpretation of the literature. Systèmes d’Information et Management. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316560668_Reviewing_the_literature_in_the_IS_field_Two_bibliometric_techniques_to_guide_readings_and_help_the_interpretation_of_the_literature

You can get the article by following the link. It should set you on the right track.


Should I include a summary of related literature and comparison of results in Review of Related Literature?

You most definitely need to compare your results to other related results: otherwise, how is the reader to know the significance of your work?
Whether this should be done in a literature review section or in your results section depends on how quantitative a comparison can be made.

If your results cannot be quantitatively compared to the prior work, then the comparison should be in the literature review section and discuss the qualitative relationship between the two pieces of work.  For example, if the previous mechanism handles only fribbles but your system handles both fribbles and tribbles, then you can't quantitatively compare tribble-handling capability, but can state the difference much like I just did in your literature review section.

If you can make a direct, quantitative comparison between results, on the other hand, then it is best to do that right in the section where you are presenting your own quantitative results. For example, if you created an algorithm, you might compare it against other algorithms that do the same thing, running on the same tests as your algorithm, and show that yours is faster, smaller, more reliable, etc.  You should also mention the other algorithms in your literature review section, with a qualitative comparison that will then have the details filled later by your results comparison.


Writing papers: do I include citation into an unrelated parenthesis?

Which is the correct formulation?

I wouldn't call either one incorrect or less correct than the other. However, you two are probably not the only ones who could either find the first form not very readable (or not "stylish") or misinterpret the second one. I would thus avoid both forms,  and I would try to modify the sentence to improve readability and avoid possible misinterpretations.

For example, if the referenced paper was the first to propose that division, you can avoid the issue altogether by writing:

  Following/According to (Marler & Mitani, 1988), we can also divide calls into stereotyped (discrete) and graded (continuous)

Or you can avoid the parentheses by writing (I don't know the topic, I'm just interpreting):

  We can also divide calls into stereotyped or graded (Marler & Mitani, 1988): stereotyped calls are discrete in character, whereas graded ones are continuous"


What are the possible grants/stipends/scholarships that are available in the Republic of Austria?

Austria has an official agency for International students, called the OeAD, which, in turn, offers a database of possible funding sources for academic purposes at https://grants.at
Grants.at allows for a granular search. You can select your nationality, state that you are an incoming student, and choose the option of funding of a full study programme.
Here is an example screenshot if you are from Russia:

Good luck (and congratulations on getting accepted at the CEU)!


From what you have written, it sounds like this is one of the many computer science conferences that is in the process of shifting to include an opportunity for author rebuttal.

Conferences already often struggle to hit their intended deadlines for response, due to the challenges of wrangling reviewers---most do send responses either on their deadline or within a couple of days, but that often involves frantic activity behind the scenes on the part of the program chairs.

Rebuttal rounds are amplifying this problem, as they are still new for many conferences and haven't yet been properly figured into their planning and scheduling heuristics.

Most likely, then, this is a case of conference organizers struggling with a new process and you happening to be the ones being affected by slow reviewers.

Finally, it is worth noting that they didn't miss the deadline that was promised on the website (March 31st), but only the unannounced "bonus" rebuttal deadline.

Bottom line: the particular situation you are describing is not normal, but also not an unusual failure mode, and an appropriate response is to ping the organizers after the deadline has passed by a few days.


My thesis advisor is absent in my final stage of completing my Ph.D. programme

You are about to finish a PhD thesis. Somebody who obtained a PhD title is supposed to be able to organize and conduct reasonable projects independently. I think that your adviser is not being unreasonable in his demands.

Part of organization is also arranging to get more time, if your current time frame cannot be kept, or leads to serious degradation in quality and rigorousness. In some cases that might lead to working on your thesis without being funded. Personally, I would still advise to value doing a good job higher than meeting a deadline, but of course I cannot oversee all the consequences.


What should I do, as a reviewer, if I see another reviewer suggesting the authors to cite papers not relevant to the manuscript?

I would recommend raising your concern to the editor. If the editor is honest, they will not ask the authors to follow the citations en masse.

Given that the citations are all in the same journal, however, it is possible that the editor is part of the same citation cartel and may blow off your concern. In this case, it may be worth raising the concern to the publisher and/or one of the major indices. Citation cartels have been gaining attention in recent years, and if this is part of a systematic pattern of coercive citation, then those larger organizations may be motivated to investigate and sanction.


Can a professor teach mathematics and computer science?

I don't know how common this is now, but about 15 years ago I was a visiting assistant professor in mathematics at a small liberal arts college in the U.S., a position that became available because, in trying to fill a tenure-track computer science position, no suitable candidates were found by late March or early April, and so the search was ended and a new search was started for a visiting math position, with one of the math faculty members helping out by teaching a couple of beginning computer science courses and one or two of the computer science professors teaching an extra class. In fact, I had consecutive visiting positions at TWO different colleges/universities back then for this same reason (no suitable computer science candidates were found for a tenure track position), and in each case the reason the visiting position was for math and not for computer science was due to the overwhelming greater number of experienced (in teaching) candidates that a math search would generate this late in the hiring season.

The same department tried again the next year, with the same result (I believe the other place I had a visiting position at was successful the second time), and the same math faculty member pitched in again, this time I believe teaching only computer science. Over a period of several years this faculty member transitioned to computer science, and has since written two textbooks in computer science. For what it's worth, I do not think this faculty member originally had much of a background in computer science (maybe a couple of courses as an undergraduate), but I believe this person had started being interested in computer science at least a couple of years before I was there.


Importance of GRE for computer science PhD applicant

Admissions committee in strong CS PhD programs are primarily looking for concrete evidence of research potential.  Neither GRE scores nor the ability to take lots of undergraduate classes provide that compelling evidence.  Fortunately for you, a first-author CVPR paper and strong recommendation letters would!
Given your research record and the likely strength of your recommendation letters, no admissions committee is going to care about your GRE scores (even if the ongoing pandemic allows you to take the GRE in the first place).  At least in the top 10-20 CS PhD programs, GRE scores only matter if they are really bad, or if your case is otherwise truly borderline.  My department hasn't required GRE scores for graduate applicants for over a decade.
Similarly, I don't think finishing early will have much effect on your chances.  A few people will be impressed, a few people will be concerned about possible burnout, but most people won't care, especially given your research record and the likely strength of your recommendation letters.  Unless you have financial reasons to finish early, you might be better off in the long run staying where you are and expanding your research portfolio.  (If you eventually apply for academic jobs, hiring committees won't care how quickly you finish your PhD; they'll care primarily about the strength of your research record.)
This is a great issue to discuss with your letter-writers.  See also Mor Harchol-Balter's detailed advice for CS PhD applicants, based on her experience at Berkeley, MIT, and CMU.  (Her description also matches my experience at Illinois, and other departments like Washington explicitly recommend her advice.)


Converting Web of Science ID to pubmed or DOI

You can manually put parts of the citation into https://search.crossref.org/ and it will give you back the doi.

Alternatively, you could migrate your WOS bibliography into Mendeley using the steps in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqtAPRZaz2U . I just started using Mendeley (by Elsevier) and have imported my EndNote references pretty easily. I was able to then find the missing PMIDs for a paper I was writing.

Good luck!


Awards that are open all-year-round (no deadline for call)

Very often foundations and private organizations have rules that are difficult to understand.  You should always go to them with your questions.  They will not be offended or tie the question to your application.  You are likely not the only one with these questions.  Application guides, FAQs, and even webinars are very common for foundations and should always be sought out before contacting a sponsor.

Even federal programs have rolling deadlines.  Typically this is tied to how their budgets function.  If they receive an incredible proposal, they want to fund it as early as possible into their budget period in order to make sure they expend the funds.  If they wait too long into their budget year and no proposal feels worth funding, they may not be able to use the money.  If the foundation receives this budget from another entity, they may have to send the money back to the main institution--it doesn't roll over to the next budget period.

You can ask them general questions, such as how many proposals they typically receive in a calendar year and if they convene review panels on a regular basis or as needed.  My hunch is that they are prioritizing funding any proposal that scores high enough, not necessarily the best project within a given year (perhaps you should ask if "year" = calendar year or if they have a different fiscal year).  In the event that they get multiple entries though, they would surely fund the best project.  Focus your questions such that you can learn about the intent of the program.  Rather than asking bluntly "why are you doing it this way", the questions should focus on how the competition for this award is framed, because that is what you are trying to consider--what your competition looks like and who the reviewers are.

Depending on the foundation, scientists may not even be the primary reviewers of the work--board members may make the first call based on what they are interested in.  Some foundations do not restrict topics, and so a proposal on robotics may be up against a proposal on climate change.  If the board is more interested in climate change, they may opt for this proposal and ask for a scientific review to ensure the project is sound.  These types of structures are more common when the proposal/research summary is very short (1-2 pages).  Some faculty refer to them as "beauty prizes" because the academic rigor is not as intense, and sometimes the goal of the program is just to give money to science and attach the foundation to prominent scientists.


Why did my advisor criticize my work for the first time at my Master's Thesis defense?

You cannot go after him for asking questions, that's his prerogative. You can choose to work on your PhD with him, or without him. That's what the conversation ought to be about.

Check out Crucial Confrontations:
http://www.frumi.com/images/uploads/CrucialConfrontations.pdf

With a crucial discussions like that, it is always good to give yourself a pep talk and imagine why would a rational being do something like that. Was is really that bad? Were you his first student, and was he nervous? Could he have had some personal issues to deal with? Perhaps he feels embarrassed for his behavior?

That will help you develop compassion and temper your anger (regardless how justifiable it might be). The goal is really to channel your emotions.

Then you are ready to develop a focus for your discussion. You can pose it as the discussion about your concerns about doing PhD with that advisor. Let's face it, you were not going to do PhD with him, there wouldn't be need for the conversation. Ask questions, at this point.

For example, I was surprised with the level of question received during the defense. I was left doubting the quality of my work, and now I am concerned about proceeding with PhD because my work is not as good as I thought it would be. What is your take? That should be enough to start the conversation without accusations.

Keep in mind, they are supposed to ask you hard questions at the defense, it is an exam. It might even be a compliment - he wouldn't have asked you these questions, if he didn't think you can handle them.  My advsor holds practice defenses. The labmates and the adviser ask hard questions then. For my defense practice, I was answering questions for an hour! If it wasn't for the practice, these questions would have come at the defense time.


Why are there so many papers written in bad English?

I like V. Rossetto's answer (+1), but I think the level of cynicism it contains is more appropriate as an answer for why bad papers are published (to which I would add that there is now a glut of mediocre venues looking for content ... everyone wants to be editor or co-organiser of something; and I would also add that, unfortunately, authoring and peer-review is still done by humans).

But as for badly written ... I feel a little balance is needed. In particular, I feel it's important to caution against a common hyper-sensitivity to language problems in publications.

The phrase "badly-written" is subjective. Sure, the readability of the paper is an important aspect of the quality of the paper, and there is some minimum level of language quality that is a prerequisite, but that level can be artificially high for some academics.

The majority of research is published in English by non-native speakers. Many papers are primarily authored by students in their 20's/30's who might be quite new to English and to writing scientific works. Even certain native English speakers will struggle to structure a paper in such a way that it reads well (sometimes because they are still of the belief that things have to be complicated and difficult before they can be published, so they write in a complicated and difficult way).

As an example of hypersensitivity, I am a native English speaker and for a journal paper I was primary author of, I once had a reviewer complain that the paper was poorly written. His/her main complaint was that we were confusing the semantics of "that" vs. "which" in the paper, saying that mixing the two up is not up to the formal standard of English required for journals. Eventually I did actually manage to stop laughing, but as I picked myself up from the floor, I realised I'd have to "correct" it for the revision. Three hours of Ctrl+F'ing "that/which" in a 40 page journal paper (and even worse, fixing the resulting bad boxes and widows again) wiped the smile off my face.

I also find that students new to reviewing, particularly non-native speakers, tend to expect a very high standard of writing. For example, I assigned a workshop review to a student once that wanted to reject the paper, primarily due to having "several typos". These would take 5 minutes to fix and didn't affect the paper at all. I asked the student if he had had any problem reading the paper? He said he hadn't. Did he learn something from the paper? Well yes, X, Y and Z. Why is he rejecting the paper? Necessary has two 's's.

Yes, the quality of writing often sucks in published works, but I don't believe that a paper should be automatically rejected just because it could be labelled as "badly written".

The goal is to communicate ideas with good science/maths, not to give an exposition of English grammar and phrasing. The original versions of many important publications were almost indecipherable in their writing. Even if an idea is written in such a way that you have to spend a few more hours to understand it, the idea itself might influence you and many other people in a positive way for many years.

Yes such influential papers are rare, but there are many shades of grey in between black and white.

And think of all the raw brain-power we will be missing out on if we perpetuate a culture that implicitly discourages non-English speakers from publishing!

In any case, for journals, I would tend to blame poor copy-editing and typesetting from the publishers. Most journals employ professional technical writers whose job is to avoid this situation. (I don't envy them their job, but still.)


What is the importance of postdoctoral teaching experience for US tenure-track jobs?

Two semesters of teaching in four years sounds almost ideal for a postdoc, so I would not be worried about that -- if you are aspiring to be a mathemagician rather than teaching-focused mathematician.


How to politely respond to generic emails requesting a PhD/job in my lab? Without wasting too much time

What I currently do is save the following text on my computer, and simply paste it in an email response every time I receive this type of email.

  I'm sorry to say that this email is too generic for me to consider you as a future PhD student working with me. Unfortunately, it doesn't demonstrate that you know what topics I work on. I'd recommend in the future sending only a few emails. Focus on max 10 or so potential supervisors that really fit your specific research interest. Explain what specifically drew you to them as a supervisor. Explain what you want to work on with them. You should have read one of their papers or at minimum read a description of their research from their webpage. The type of email you wrote will get very few responses because we receive several such emails. I hope this doesn't come off too harsh. I hope you might take this advice and improve next time if you send more emails in the future - because I really do want you to succeed.

  Here is an example of what I sent to my prospective PhD advisor 10 years ago. I only emailed 6 professors, because I really wanted to spend a lot of time tailoring my email to their interests and convincing them I wanted to work on the things they worked on.

    "My name is ____________ and I am a senior majoring in Applied
    Mathematics at UC Davis. I am interested in working in your lab during
    graduate studies because of my broad interests in theoretical ecology.

    Your website especially stood out because you state that you encourage
    independent research and teamwork. Currently, I am collaborating with
    six other students modelling plant population dynamics in fragmented
    landscapes. We defined our own research question, and although it was the toughest  part of the project it was the most rewarding.

    During this project, I first came across your early work on
    the population dynamics of plants with a dormant life stage - and
    further reading some of your newer papers in epidemiology, predator
    prey dynamics and evolution, I really like the diversity of the
    problems in your lab.

    Specifically, I am interested in doing research in spatial ecology and
    understanding how populations spread. This is because spread is not
    only a fundamental process in ecology but also because it is at the
    heart of controlling environmental pests and diseases. I think your
    work on integral projection models will be especially relevant to the
    spread models I want to study (integro-difference equations). I am in
    the beginning phase of drafting an NSF graduate research fellowship
    application on how to best choose the locations of pest control when a
    pest species spreads according to such equations, and think you’d be
    an ideal supervisor for the project.

    I was wondering if you will have any openings for new graduate
    students in your lab this coming year? Any comments or feedback would
    be greatly appreciated."

  Note the parts about teamwork and independent research are specifically on this professors website that talks about qualities he looks for in graduate students. I didn't put this sentence in any of my emails to other professors (in fact all the sentences except for the first one are very different for each prospective professor). For most professors, I wrote shorter emails that focussed on how their work related to mine. For example, sentences like the bolded one in this email.

  cheers,

  -Dr X

The goal is to provide them with useful advice that they might take and become more successful in the future. Often these students come from disadvantaged backgrounds or from developing countries and I think it is really important to try to help them and not just ignore their emails. Of course, as one becomes more well known, even this strategy might prove to be cumbersome.

Over this past graduate student application season, nearly all of the students I sent this email response to were gushing with gratitude for the advice.


Can it be unfair when the same referee reviews a manuscript again at a different journal?

If you have concerns that the reviewer isn't being fair or just, you can always contact the editor and ask for a new reviewer. It is not entirely uncommon, I know of researchers that have a "blacklist" of people that they do not allow to review their works.

But consider that the reviewer might have a point. I know it is not your case, but I get really disappointed when I get the same paper twice and it is exactly the same text. Regardless if is the same process or not, a proper review would most likely improve the paper, so to see that not even the typos got fixed (in my case) is hard.

More to the point, how did you change your paper to make sure nobody else reading it would reach the same conclusions as this reviewer?


Can I submit a paper rejected from a tier-1 conference to a tier-1 conference again?

It is exceedingly common to get rejected at a top venue, improve the paper, submit to the same or a different top venue again, and get accepted. No conference or community that I am aware of has rules in place that would disallow this, or even any mechanisms to track it. To be frank, PC members don't know nor care if you already submitted your paper before to a similar conference and were rejected. They will look at your paper as it is now, and decide.

There is, however, one small caveat: if you keep submitting the same paper without changes to conferences with similar PC, people may get miffed that you are ignoring their comments. I have seen in PC discussions come up that reviewers were complaining that they received the same paper two or three times, without fixing even the typos in the manuscript. While it is still true that even in that case the paper should strictly speaking be reviewed "as-is", without taking the history into account, it is only natural that this kind of behavior leads to PC members not looking overly kindly on your manuscript.


Masters in math, bland PhD in CS, want to go back to math

The main thing you will have to show for the three years is your thesis, so the first objective should be to finish it on time. If you feel the project is at a dead end, maybe you can target making your thesis the capstone that closes it out. Turn your papers into sections each of which resolves a loose end. That way, it does not matter if they don't relate to each other.

Meanwhile, can you audit courses in the mathematics department? Get to know some of the mathematics professors, and get their advice on how to transition.

Don't feel too old - I was 60 when I finished my PhD, and I'm still learning new stuff. You have decades of research in front of you.


Does a professor have the academic discretion to design the curriculum for his class?

Answering for the R1 schools with which I am familiar:

Of course a professor has this discretion. There is no universal standards board that decides what must be taught in what course -- nor would we want such a thing. Otherwise we might end up teaching intelligent design alongside evolutionary biology and the great flood alongside plate tectonics.

The professor might be better off choosing a different course title, but there are a host of bureaucratic reasons why this doesn't always happen. So long as the syllabus accurately reflects the course material, I see no problem whatsoever. (And even if it doesn't, the professor still has the ultimate right to determine the course curriculum).

In addition to the question of what a professor is permitted to do, there is a second question about what is a reasonable standard of conduct for the professor. This too offers quite a lot of latitude, particularly in higher level classes.

Caveats: For certain large introductory classes or multi-selection courses, the academic department or a committee within the department may select a set of topics to be covered in order to standardize what the students learn -- but in this case the professor would not be tasked with developing the curriculum himself or herself. As we move from introductory classes toward advanced classes. Similarly there could potentially be a problem if a professor taught oceanography in an English literature class, or vice versa -- but decisions about where to fall on the philosophy / calculation spectrum within a given topic area are entirely up to the professor.

Addendum This whole thing may not seem like a big deal to those of us in STEM fields (with the possible exception of those fields that sometimes contradict big oil, big tobacco, or a narrow reading of the Book of Genesis). But faculty discretion over the contents of the curriculum is extremely important the humanities and social sciences where political agendas are more immediate and where the choice of a text may itself be an overtly political act.


Is Master Program Rank Important for PhD Application

I don't think it's so important for terminal masters degree, although it should not be completely disregarded. What is much more important, in my opinion, is the exact field you are intending to work in and the person you will work with and the references that you will get in the end (and, again, who they come from).

So if Edinburgh would give you the chance to work with a leading scholar in a subfield you are interested in, and UCL is ranked 10 ranks higher generally, but not as compelling for your more specific interest, I would go with Edinburgh.

Also, 10 is really not much of a difference.


It's quite a broad title for a module but I expect it'll give you skills you might need to conduct research.  For example, how to conduct reliable surveys, interview people, they'll probably teach some statistics and how to analyse results and show you some tools to do so.  It could also teach you about writing articles and publishing in academia.


Should I talk to my professor about my grade?

To expand Bob Brown's answer, yes, you should talk to your professor politely with the objective how to improve your study in the future.

In my opinion, your grade is probably on the borderline between A and B. You need to ask her what grade you got for the final paper (worth 25% of the grade). [E]veryone said that it was a really good paper, and that it deserves an A is not enough for you to say you did get an A on it. You need ask her how well was your final paper.

Generally speaking, it's not easy to change a grade after it's out of the professor's office unless there was an obvious calculation error.So, don't expect she will change your grade from B to A unless your final paper was extremely well written.

I won't be surprised if she tells you that your final paper was okay but not good enough for an A. In that case, you should ask her what you can do to improve your writing skills so that you can get better grades for the future essay writing assignments in other courses. Good luck!


Is there an internet Git-like repository for collaboration on a paper?

Aditya's comment should be the accepted answer:

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repos for academic users.


By giving you a word range (1000-1500 words) they are telling you how much detail they want the letter to go into. Your 350 word letter is likely too superficial.

Give them what they are asking for. "Does not follow instructions" is generally not a good look.


Can a professor alter the syllabus when calculating a final course grade?

I would argue that an instructor has the right to deviate from the syllabus's method if it does not unfairly penalize any student.

I had this happen recently when I told a class that the weighting of the final exam was different from how it was calculated on the syllabus. Because the change benefited everyone in the class, except for one student who was right in the middle of a grade range (and was only disadvantaged by about 1 point out of 1000), and therefore was not hurt by the change, I kept the more beneficial weighting.


When citing a paper with a lot of authors; is it OK to shorten the author list in the references section?

Every citation style has some threshold at which it is OK to change a long list into an "et al." citation ("et al." is an abbreviation of the Latin "et alia" meaning "and others").  The particular threshold depends on the citation style, but if you've got half a page of authors it's certainly over any reasonable threshold.

You then simply convert your citation of, e.g.:

  A, B, C, E, ... , Z, "Massive Joint Study," Journal of Big Science, 1(4), 2012.

into:

  A, et al., "Massive Joint Study," Journal of Big Science, 1(4), 2012.


A professor who I used to work with once gave me an explanation that I found quite useful for understanding the purpose and philosophy of grading.  Universities, he said, must always struggle with a tension between two educational goals, illumination and certification.

Illumination means the intellectual development of the student, bringing them a deeper understanding of a subject, its relation to the world, and the deeper issues it may touch on.  From the perspective of illumination, marks are intended to be feedback to students that helps them realize weaknesses in their understanding so that they can fix them.
Certification means evaluating a set of skills acquired by the students against an objective standard, to attempt to measure their fitness for certain tasks or professions.  From the perspective of certification, marks are intended to be objective judgement of the fitness of the student for carrying out tasks requiring the skills taught in a class.

These two are often in tension with one another because certification pushes teaching toward rote practice and standardized testing and grading, while illumination pushes toward more open-ended exploration and interactive formats which can deliver much more benefit for apt students but are often very subjective.  Most classes try to deliver both, to varying degrees of success, though some classes may almost entirely hew to a single side of the balance.

You need to decide what you're after from the classes that you take.  From your "pay for service" tone, it sounds like you want the career value that comes from certification.  But certification isn't valuable if the standard can be easily negotiated, and so professors have to set a standard and stick by it.  Sometimes they are even forced to by regulations.  From the perspective of certification, trying to negotiate for a better grade is trying to cheat the system and reduce the value of everybody's grades.

Moreover, one of the "meta-skills" that is always being certified is the ability to figure out what somebody wants from you.  If you're out in industry and you deliver the wrong thing because you misinterpreted your client's needs and didn't ask for clarification, it will be difficult to argue that you should be given more partial credit.

If, on the other hand, you're after illumination, then grades are less important to begin with.  In that case, it's more important to understand why you got the grade that you got, so that you can improve your understanding of the material.  If you want illumination and you aren't getting it, you need to switch courses, majors, or institutions.


How well does "Applied Mathematics" cover "pure math?"

For undergraduate math, programs tend to be really similar. You do calculus, then multivariable calculus, then linear algebra and differential equations, and you move on to an elementary analysis course and abstract algebra. These are usually what a student does through their freshman year for any math degree (and many for sophomore year depending on how prepared you were).

After you go through these, there will be upper division courses in PDEs, dynamical systems, manifolds/geometry, complex analysis, numerical analysis, etc. I assume that the main difference would be that an undergraduate program with only applied math would have less algebra courses (more courses in ring theory, Galois theory, etc.), one or maybe no upper division number theory course (except maybe a cryptography course in a CS department), and more courses based in modeling, numerics, and differential equations (numerical linear algebra, finite element methods, etc.).

But there's really one way to know for sure: look at the courses they offer. It's always online. Don't look at just one year since the upper division courses tend to be every other year, so look at maybe the last 3 or 4 years. Look at what they offer and ask "are there 3-4 courses a quarter here that interest me?". Look at some syllabuses, crack open some books, look through Wikipedia. Then do the same for places you are wishing to transfer to.


Are Honorary Degrees Awarded to Those Lacking PhDs?

all the time. Honorary degrees have been awarded to popstars, athletes, etc.
See for example wikipedia


Can University revoke my degree if I change some results, and how can I correct it?

This is very serious academic misconduct, of the type that reduces the confidence that the public and other scientists are able to have about scientific results. It doesn't matter if you did not change the raw data - you can't expect any readers to actually go through and do this analysis. Therefore, it is the results of the statistical tests, p-values, etc, that truly matter.

You should correct the problem as soon as possible, and beg for forgiveness. If this was done at the instruction of your advisor, that could be grounds for their dismissal from their position regardless of tenure. If you have submitted this work to any peer reviewed publication with these errors, you should inform the editors immediately and submit corrections that include the impacts on interpretation or withdraw the paper entirely.

Your program and your advisor have failed you in their duties if they have made completion of your graduate degree dependent on significant results. You should always design experiments that teach you something regardless of the outcome. Your institution should grant your degree as long as you have done sufficient work; this may be a lengthy, difficult process for you, particularly if you lose support of your advisor for this, but you may not want the support of your advisor if this turns out to be a pattern in their work. Most institutions have staff dedicated to academic misconduct that can assist you in this process.


If you're in the "squeezing blood from a stone" stage of paper compression, trying to fit 10 pages of text into a 6 page limit or the like, then sure.

If you want readers to be able to understand what you're talking about, however, you typically want to give your variables a bit more space to breathe.  Definitions sections are typically very dense and hard going, cognitively speaking, and the more that you can present in a reader-friendly manner, the better the rest of the paper is going to be.  If each symbol is important and distinct, then it's worth devoting the space to explain each naturally. If you really do have a large number of not-very-interesting variables best explained by brief phrases rather than prose, consider using a table instead, which at least provides a clear and separate visual organization of the symbols.


How true is the stereotype that PhD graduates are overqualified?

First things first - this question is very region- and field-specific, as cultural norms and views of academia differ a lot in different places. Further, this will naturally also be highly employer-specific, as not every recruiter or employer has the same sort of requirements, views and prejudices. Everybody who tells you that there is a hard and fast rule is lying.

That being said, there are a few observations that I think are pretty general w.r.t. the PhD job market:

Nobody hires you or pays you more just because you have a degree. It's a pretty common misconception that having an advanced degree somehow magically entitles you to higher pay even if you do the same job in the same quality than somebody without a degree. This is particularly pronounced in computer science, where there are a bunch of excellent programmers / software devs out there without degree. Don't expect to make more than them just because you got your training in an university rather than through participation in open source projects.
At least in central Europe, no smart person does not hire you just because you have an advanced degree. I am confident to say that in Switzerland, the sentiment expressed in your quote is entirely wrong. A PhD certainly does not close any doors. There are a lot of jobs where it will be useless, but I have not yet seen cases where it was actively bad for the applicant to hold a PhD.
There are a bunch of jobs out there where holding a PhD is in fact very good for you, even outside academia and research. Here in Switzerland and IT, consulting is one of those fields. Consultants with PhD look smarter on paper, and hence their time is easier to "sell" for horrendous amounts of money to customers. It is pretty well-established that in this case just holding a PhD will in fact give you better starting salary and better career opportunities in many companies.
Generally speaking, as a PhD holder, you will have less experience than somebody who worked in the industry for 5 years. Contrary, you should (at least hopefully) have a higher level of formal knowledge and understanding of underlying principles. What you need is either (a) a job that requires the latter rather than the former (various "evangelist" or innovation jobs come to mind), or (b) and employer that has a time horizon large enough to allow you to get experience and who has problems complex enough that they need somebody with deep fundamental knowledge. This is the reason that big tech companies such as Google, IBM, or MS, often also pretty aggressively recruit IT and math PhDs, rather than going for cheaper and more experienced professional software devs.


Is having my essays proofread inappropriate?

The only correct answer is to ask your instructor.

As a general rule though, proofreading is encouraged. In the professional world, proofreading (or copy editing) is a normal part of scholarship because the goal is to make the final paper as neat and polished as possible.

Sometimes it is appropriate to cite help you have had with a paper. If there is legitimate contribution and collaboration, this is often done with giving co-authorship. If a specific idea is used, this is often in the form of a footnote. For proofreading, this is sometimes in the form of an acknowledgement; sometimes proofreaders are not recognized at all.

Unless your instructor specifically prohibited proofreading, this is not cheating/plagiarism.


Why would a top department hire a less experienced researcher for a tenure-track position?

Candidate A might have a research agenda (either based on her dissertation, or on her formulated research plan) that fits better with the research agendas of other people in the hiring department, or with strategic priorities of the department or even other departments at the university.
Candidate A might already have collaborated with members of the hiring department, maybe in writing grant proposals.
Candidate A might be cheaper, in terms of salary, lab space, funding or anything else the hiring department may need to cough up.
The hiring department may be afraid that the "superstar" candidate B has so many more attractive offers that she would not accept an offer at this department at all, so they would rather not expend the time to go through the entire process with her.
Candidate A might just have better contacts, because her Ph.D. advisor is big friends with the dean of the hiring department, or (less sinister) the dean has met candidate A at a conference and been very impressed with her presentation.

My advice: do a little research on the people and the priorities at your target department, and emphasize unobtrusively in your cover letter and research plan how you could collaborate and find synergies. And tap your network. Good luck!


Bad undergraduate grades, decent research experience, what are the chances of PhD admits?

I am writing as a American about American universities in case you want to apply here.

A Master's Degree is basically a "halfway" step toward a PhD. That is, it requires two years instead of four (or more) after an undergraduate degree.

As such, a Master's degree represents a lower risk for a university. In your case, they're dealing with a student that has a weak academic record and a strong work record. They are also, potentially, dealing with a "late bloomer."

So the feeling at a Master's Program might be, "let's see if this strong worker can fix his academic record. If he can, that's great, and he can go on to a PhD. If he has the same problems in his Master's work as in his undergraduate work, that's two years, not four that were wasted. (One year, if you are asked to leave the Master's program.)


There is no such site because it is unnecessary.  In Europe, a Ph.D. student is like an employee and is admitted to work on a specific project.  In the USA, a Ph.D. student is admitted in a manner similar to an undergraduate (based on general considerations) and is not necessarily attached to a particular project or even a particular advisor.

Hence, you could say that every US department has a number of studentships available each year, always at the same time (start of fall semester) and you apply for all of them simply by submitting an admission application to the program.

Thus the answers to your numbered questions are

No.
No.

Disclaimer: there are probably exceptions, but what I've written applies 99% of the time.

One additional note: I disagree with the comment below that claims that individual faculty do not decide which students are admitted.  In every program I know, a small committee of program faculty makes all the decisions.  If some faculty member (whether on the committee or not) really wants a particular applicant, that applicant will be admitted.  My own admission came on the same day that I contacted a faculty member (and as a direct result).  Of course, you should always follow this good advice when contacting faculty you'd like to work with.


What should new faculty focus on when meeting with the university public relations representative?

What you should focus on: think through what of your work might be of broader interest to the public.  Is your research interesting and on timely topics that the public cares about?  If so, be ready talk about that.  Are you innovating in teaching in a way that might be of interest to the public (maybe, teaching an unusually large class; teaching a MOOC; teaching a topic of broad interest; trying some innovative new experiment)?  If so, be ready to talk about that.

Do not plan on giving a talk.  Don't rattle on.  The PR rep will ask questions and ask for more details.  But be prepared to give a few highlights (a few sentences) on one or more areas like this, if they might be of broader interest.

If you don't have anything that might be of broad public interest, that's fine, too.  Go in to the meeting preparing to learn something from the PR rep, rather than the other way around.  Ask them to give you a brief tutorial on how to interact with the press.  If you're interested in it, ask whether they have a media relations training program.  Meet the person, and treat it as a networking opportunity to build a relationship you might use someday.

But overall: Don't overprepare.  It's not worth spending a lot of time preparing in advance for this one.  Go into the meeting, see how the PR rep can help you and how you can help your university, and move on to something else in your busy life as a professor.


No, that's not a big issue for you. I'd be very surprised if anyone sees that the letters are similar (who would compare letters of recommendations between two different years?). And if they do notice and are interested in you, they can always contact your thesis advisor (it does reflect a bit strange on her tbh).


Acquaintance is paying friend to do his coding for an Ivy League master's degree. What should I do?

What would I do? I would report them both, anonymously.

What is my rationale for this? Mainly because it is not a "victimless crime":

There are plenty of employers who weight the reputation of a university very highly (perhaps too highly) in hiring processes. A more-deserving and capable candidate might not be given an interview or an offer as a result of this person having cheated.
To the extent that any university's reputation is well-deserved, this is founded upon other people's judgements of its integrity. i.e. that the degree means something. If that impression of integrity is eroded by unqualified people receiving degrees, that hurts the employment chances of everyone with a degree from the same school.

I feel these two points are basically just statistical. Given enough incidents of cheating either or both seems to be a likely consequence.

Somewhat more subjective reasons:

Bad outcomes are possible when an unqualified person is granted responsibility. Crashed airplanes? Deadly medical devices? Losing money for their stakeholders? Maybe the odds of great harm are small. And perhaps such a person has no actual interest in taking a job like that. But I don't think this can be totally ignored.
More broadly, what other harm are these people likely to cause in life? Chances are that this is not at all their first case of untrustworthy behavior and won't be their last -- as long as they perceive it to be in their interest to act this way. On the other hand they may be early enough in life that a "shock to the system" from being caught could actually be helpful. Or at least a deterrent.

Why an anonymous report? I think this is pretty obvious, but I would not want to take any personal risk (in any sense) from this. People can be petty, angry, etc., and I see no reason to expose myself as any kind of 'target' of those emotions.

On the other hand you might have to trust the institution to protect your identity, it depends on how you can make a report.


Journals that only publish online. How reliable are they?

Any reputable online-only journal will have a plan for data retention that goes beyond what's visible to the user. There will be backups somewhere.

Print journals may have the advantage of having a physical repository copy existing, but even those are not necessarily of "archival quality" (that is, printed on acid-free paper and using techniques that promote their long-term preservation).


Two conflicting reports on a Combinatorics paper

I'm not sure you can get a definitive answer here, but my suggestion would be to let the paper stand on its own and just submit it to a different journal without further comment.
I don't see anything wrong with making a suggestion to an editor, but suspect that it is likely to be rejected. If you give them full context then I think it is even more likely to be rejected.
Of course, a new journal might happen to use the same referees as the pool of experts in a small domain may be limited.
But, in general, let the paper speak for itself. It may be that the negative reviewer is the one with a more complete context in which to judge whether your paper is interesting (enough) or not.
And, yes, this is just an opinion and a personal view.


If you have institutional access to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library you can find the definitions given by various standards.

Both framework and library are present in several standards. For example, from IEEE Std 610.12-1990, IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology:

  software library
  A controlled collection of software and related documentation designed to aid in software development, use, or maintenance. Types include master library, production library, software development library, software repository, system library. Syn: program library.


Applying for scholarships for PhD before I know where (and which country) I'll be accepted

since the US has a reputation here in Europe to have very high tuition fees. Do I understand correctly from this statement that Harvard Economics PhD students don't have to pay any kind of fee to the university for the full 5 years, or am I missing something?

I am a graduate student of economics in continental Europe, so I do not have a first-hand experience about the US or the UK. However, my general impression about the field is that those very high tuition fees are more relevant in undergraduate degrees and professional non-PhD degrees (such as MBA, terminal applied MSc, etc.) and not much about the PhD path.

I do not know for sure about the Harvard PhD funding policy, but your interpretation is certainly plausible. The general expectation among the PhD students is to receive some funding, and actually having to pay tuition to the school (in addition to not getting any living subsidies) seems unusual (and inadvisable).

The passage below from the econphd.net guide supports my impression that actually paying tuition  should be more of the exception than the norm for PhD students.

  Economics departments give considerably lower fellowships than business schools or science departments. Worse yet, some people will be admitted without fellowships and a few end up paying tuition. But it is commonly understood (although the department may not be willing to explicitly guarantee it) that all students who stay on beyond the first one or two years are funded in some manner. Often teaching assistantships are part of it, but many programs also reward academic success with scholarship money.

  Generally, the best and most competitive programs offer the most generous funding – MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale admits can expect to get a package of, perhaps, between $ 16,000 and $ 20,000 per year (with tuition waiver).

That said, I believe there are also externally funded PhD students (who receive funding from governments, other research institutes, grants, etc.) Having your own funding may help in the admission, but I do not know the process or how normal it is.


Worldwide Dissertation Database? or French, German, Italian ones?

I am not aware of an international database, but basically all german dissertations have to be submitted to the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek), so if they exist in physical form they can be accessed at the libraries in Frankfurt and/or Leipzig. If they only exist in electronical form, they are still registered at the library. The following link is going to give you a list of all german dissertations that are freely available online:
DNB search

The DNB also has a manual about searching for dissertations, however I could only find a german version that is available here


What are cautions to take with second hand data in an interview?

...what are some cautions to take in interpretation? Can you use the data at all?

The most obvious caution to take here is simply to be upfront in your research about the fact that certain data is unconfirmed 'hearsay' data, consisting of a recounting of another person's experience, without confirmation from the primary person.  Whether it can be used legitimately depends on the purpose.  There is no particular reason that data could not be used at all, but that really depends on whether hearsay evidence constitutes valuable evidence on your research question.  Regardless, in your description of your data, and subsequent interpretation, you should be clear about the fact that this data is hearsay, and your interpretation should take account of this (e.g., one possible hypothesis would be that the hearsay account is incorrect).

As in courts of law, hearsay should be considered to be weak evidence, due to the possibility that the account of another person's experience may not accord with that person's own description.  Hearsay evidence has an additional degree of removal from reality relative to direct evidence from a person about their own experience and actions.  As such, it has a higher chance of error, and this should be conceded clearly in your analysis and interpretation of your data.

  ...wouldn't there be potential ethics issues considering the other person has not signed a consent form?

As with any academic research project, if you are using data that identifies the characteristics or experiences of individuals, it is generally the case that you will need to present your results in a way that anonymises the data, and does not allow the reader to identify the characteristics of any specific individual.  The same should apply whether the information comes directly from that individual, or as hearsay from another person.

There may be cases where it is legitimate to report hearsay information about individuals as part of research.  For example, a research project might ask respondents to give feedback and opinions on the actions of local politicians, in which case it would be legitimate to report this data without the consent of those politicians.  (In this case the respondents would be anonymised, but the politicians probably would not be.)  In other cases, when you are dealing with people that are not public figures, it might not be legitimate to report outcomes that allow identifiability of those people.

If you are unsure about the ethical requirements for your study, you should contact the relevant ethics boards or ethics officers at your university.  Academic studies involving people generally require ethics clearance anyway, but if this matter has arisen as an additional issue, you should contact the ethics board and seek further guidance from them.


Is it common to have a mentor in academia?

I won't try to guess how common it is, suspecting that it is quite common. But it is very useful in any case.

But there are two (at least) scenarios.

The first is that your "mentor" doesn't even know that s/he is your mentor, but you just take cues from them about how to behave in any academic and personal situations that you observe. How do they lecture? How do they respond to questions? How do they interact with colleagues. I've had many mentors of this kind. I was lucky enough to meet up with one of the most important ones later and thanked him for providing the role-model I needed as an academic. He was in the same field, but his research area was very different from mine.

The second is more personal. This is someone that you specifically interact with, though not necessarily in a research sense. But someone that you are comfortable asking questions of. Even somewhat uncomfortable questions. Someone who you trust will give you good feedback and not be shocked it you ask a strange question that you might not ask a stranger. These relationships are harder to arrange and must, IMO, develop over time.

The second sort of "formal" mentor can be more instrumental in promoting your career, of course, since they know you well and, having taken on the role, are likely to be supportive when asked.

If you are a grad student, I strongly suggest that you seek out one or more professionals as mentors of either kind. Even better, is to seek out a circle of people who are mutually supportive - but for the right reasons. People who respect one another and help when they can.


Visa requirement query for Indian postdoc applying in UK

tl;dr: Read the job description.

Details: The job you're applying to is advertised publicly, and as a part of a job description it is normally explicitly stated whether or not the particular University is willing to sponsor the visa application for the non-EU candidates. If unsure, ask the contact person or/and their HR department.

If the university invites only those having a right to work in the UK to apply, there is nothing you can do about it — find another position to apply.

If the university is willing to sponsor the work visa for a candidate, there is nothing you (and your PI) need to worry about — the process will be handled by their HR department. Just make sure you meet Tier2 visa requirements.

Note that there are certain conditions for the University to apply for a Tier2 visa. Normally, the position should be advertised for at least 1 month. Also, the University should be a Tier2 sponsor (check the list).


What is the proper etiquette for requesting speakers from industry for an academic seminar?

I don't think using or even adapting a sample form letter would be very helpful, just as a canned letter wouldn't be very successful in a job application.

A couple of thoughts:

In cases like these, a good network definitely helps. If you know someone, even only slightly, that gives you a better starting position that just cold calling someone. Think through your network, and even if you don't know anyone you could meaningfully invite, maybe someone from your network knows someone she or he could introduce you to.
Can you at least offer reimbursement of travel costs? If not, look for people working close to you. Budgets are tight, and your speaker may have a hard time getting reimbursed for such a talk from his company.
Just as for a job application: when you do contact someone, be brief and to the point. Introduce yourself (if necessary), briefly describe your class and ask whether your candidate would in principle be interested. Offer to follow up with details - don't include them in the first email. People in industry are busy (just as everyone else).
However, you should definitely include a tidbit that (a) makes speaking interesting for your candidate and (b) helps him/her get permission/budget from the employer. Are your classmates close to graduation? Then the company can present itself as an interesting employer. Do you have any interesting projects? Are you working in a field that is related to your candidate's employer or even better to you candidate's own work? Are you perhaps potential customers? Any kind of motivation is good.
Above all, don't worry overmuch. Everyone's ego is tickled at being invited to speak, even if they don't accept the invitation. And established people, whether in industry or in academia, often are happy to accept such invitations and help students out. The worst that could happen is a polite refusal (or no answer at all). The best would be a nice talk and an interesting contact for later on.

I kind of wonder whether this question wouldn't be better at workplace.SE.com. You'll get more answers from industry there than at academia.SE.com. Perhaps you want to consider flagging it for migration.


Possible to defend myself from plagiarism in draft thesis?

According to my own understanding of what a "draft" means, it sounds like you're getting a raw deal here.  A "draft" is an informal document that is in the process of being changed and improved.  Unless "submitting a thesis draft" is something formal in your program, to me this sounds like accusing someone of cheating for looking up the answers to a practice test.  I also view the fact that you included the citations as a key one in your defense: that makes it quite clear that you are not in the middle of a larger plan to steal others' work; you just turned in a shoddy draft.

You do however sound very naive about what plagiarism means and how academic writing works.  You don't write an academic document by taking others' words, modifying them slightly, and then planning later to modify them enough to make it not plagiarism.  At no point in this are you actually doing the independent thinking and writing that's asked of you.  If you want to indicate in a draft that you intend to include standard background material, you could include a section that is almost blank with "[Standard background to be filled in here as from SourceX]".  The less generous way to look at your situation is "How did Mr. Ske manage to make it all the way to a master's thesis without understanding basic academic norms?  If he hasn't understood these things by now, it's too late."

The other issue is that, sorry to say, the rest of your description of your academic experience sounds extremely (virtually entirely) negative.  You have a bad relationship with your advisor -- very bad; he raises his voice at you when you ask questions, and he directly mocked you; both of these are really unacceptable -- you have a coadvisor who didn't read any of your previous drafts and gave you papers that you found "irrelevant" (which they might be, or you might be mistaken about it; either way is bad).  Finally, someone who should be helping you out instead reported you to the Dean's office.  This is really not good!

To answer your question: accepting everything you've said as an accurate account of the events, I personally find it unlikely that you will be expelled for this.  However I am much less optimistic that you can move forward from this to successfully defend your thesis and complete your degree.  The behavior exhibited by your advisor and coadvisor could well be gearing up not to accept your thesis.  Someone who accuses you of plagiarism is surely pretty close to being done with you whether the accusation is affirmed or not.  I'm sorry to say it, but I think you should be looking for exit strategies and considering other options.  It is certainly worth a shot to go to your advisor and say "Look, this has been a bumpy road and I acknowledge that.  I've been working on my degree for XX years, have spent YY months working on my thesis, and I would really like to finish it if at all possible, even if it is not perfect or what we originally hoped for.  I would really appreciate your help in showing me what I can do to make that happen.  I know that the primary responsibility is mine, and I'm willing to put in lots of hard work between now and ZZ, but so far I haven't met expectations, so getting more specific direction will really help me through this."  Almost all advisors want their students to finish rather than not, so that is a good shot at salvaging a bad situation.

Good luck.

Added: Here is another site on the internet containing some discussion on the issue of plagiarism on a thesis draft.  Note that the case in question concerns missing references, which is not exactly the same as yours and to me seems more serious.  The overall consensus is that initiating formal plagiarism proceedings for this is so far over the top that there must be something else going on beneath it, which is my thought as well.  However they point out that a ruling will depend on the precise plagiarism rules at your university, which (i) of course we can't know and (ii) of course it is your responsibility to know.  But again, reading between the lines here, there is something profoundly wrong with your relationship with your coadvisor, so trying to fix that directly has got to be a good idea.  The fact that it will not nullify the formal plagiarism inquiry is just an (unsurprising) formality: that's just saying that once something has been started, you can't unstart it, you can only end it.  The only person who is accusing you of anything is your coadvisor, so if you can work things out with him, the inquiry will almost certainly work out in your favor.  Hinting that you did this because of his bad advising seems like the worst possible strategy to me.

Finally, my talk of "exit strategies" does not mean that you should simply give up: in fact, as I immediately followed, you should have a frank discussion with both of these faculty to see whether the thesis and degree can be salvaged and if so how.  But to be realistic, you sound like you are in an unusually bad situation: if you are at a university where master's students repeatedly get turned in by their advisors for what they write in their thesis drafts: yes, consider the prospect of going elsewhere if you can.  Starting over is not the end of the world, and sometimes it is the best way to move forward.


What is the best way to publicise an on-line survey for research?

If you're using forums, don't just make a thread and then write:

  Class project, please fill out this survey. Link: www.xxxxxx984asdfac. Thx!!

Most of the time these annoying threads can trigger shutting down or be simply ignored as spam.

I'd recommend picking a few major forums and actually start a communication with the administrators. In no more than a few hundred words explain who you are, what questions you're trying to answer, and how your results may help both parties. If the outcome is positive, here are a bunch of wishes you can usually ask for:

Pin your thread at the top for a fixed amount of time to enhance visibility.
Tap into their membership e-mail or online messaging network for an announcement and about 2 waves of weekly reminders.
Provide you with important statistics including open rate, click rate, bounce rate, initiation rate, and completion rate. These are all necessary if you are to publish your results in an academic journal.

Try to enhance your credibility by, in the mail to the administrator and the message to the users:

Detailing the motive of your survey, what kind of questions respondents should anticipate, and how long would it take.
Getting an institutional review board approval, and report so in the announcement.
Explicitly mentioning the measures to ensure respondents' confidentiality and/or anonymity.
Explaining how the results will be used, and even be fed back to the communities that have helped you filling in the survey.
Being real and present by providing your official contact information (names and school e-mail are sufficient). Invite respondents to contact you if they have questions about the study. Check with your supervisor and department for policy of using the school's name.
Clearly stating the opening period of the survey.

You can also try contacting companies that hire freelancers, or talk to websites that organize freelance jobs.

I'd also suggest to make duplicates of your survey so that each forum will have their own referral link. You can pool the data later and compare the differences between forum. If you just make one survey you may not be able to figure that out at the end. Putting a "where do you learn about this survey?" question may also help, though probably not as objective.

Now, if you don't care about knowing all those rates, and just want a quick turn around of data, you may use your network to contact some high profile people in the field and see if they are willing to broadcast that for you. Most of the time, a tweet from them would be quite effective.

I also agree with the comments asking you to pay a visit to some social science faculty. At the very least, make sure your questions are examined by some professional for validity. Most researchers also do not mind share with you some templates of the survey introduction.

Some other technical strayed thoughts:

Do make a copy of online survey for each major source. Aka forum A will have its own link, and forum B will have its own link, etc. That way later you can stratify them in the analysis.
Invest in a good online survey service. Make sure not to enroll in those with limited responses. It'd be very annoying for the 501st respondent to get a "quota full" warning if your free service account only allows 500 responses.
Write good questions and include only relevant questions. Again, talking to some researchers will help a lot.
The Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys (CHERRIES) provides a good list of components you should include in manuscript. Read them before you start data collection and make sure you have thought about all these factors.

Lastly, check if someone has already invented the wheel for you. Secondary data sets may have already covered information you wish to collect. For example National Longitudinal Surveys maintained by the US Department of Labor (I just went ahead and assume that you're interested in the US market) does ask question about freelancing. They even once released a report about this.


MS in Mathematics, having trouble finding work outside teaching algebra

First of all, jobhunting s u c k s. It sucks even more when you're trying to get into a field and it sucks further if you're not in a major metro area. It's a massive timesink with terrible ROI, but it needs to be done in order to get a job at all. The truth is that whether you get hired isn't going to just depend on your skills and experience, but also on whether the person reading your résumé thinks your skills and experience line up with what they think they want, and you don't have a lot of control over that. So honestly it's impossible to predict how long it will take before you find something.

That being said, your situation really doesn't sound so horrible to me. You're interested in and studying things that (1) you want to do and (2) employers are looking for. You have a master's degree in a marketable field. As for whether you feel you learned much during your degree, it sounds to me like you're just in a bad place with a killer case of impostor syndrome. Some employers might want to see your transcript, but they're a lot more interested in what you can do for them. So maybe try putting together a portfolio of the kind of work you want to do, which might include models or software that you developed or small projects that you did for free or for cheap for someone. (These are pretty standard suggestions.)

Finally, you can't be everything to everyone. It might feel like you need to cast as wide a net as possible, but it sounds to me like you might be spreading yourself thin and that's contributing to your frustration. Narrow it down some by considering where your best bets are in your geographic area and what you really want to do. For example, if coding is the right path, then back-burner the modeling, or vice versa. Good luck.


Advisor asking me to use my grant to cover his orders

This is delicate issue, and I would advise you to proceed with utmost care. There are a number of ethical, legal, and practical issues to take into account.

First, the legal side - as Bill Barth already mentioned, it is not a given that you even can (easily and legally) move money from your grant to somebody else in your lab. In a nutshell, only the funding agency or the respective support department from your university can help you with this.

Second, in terms of ethical issues, the question arises whether you do in fact "share budget in this lab". In other terms, did the lab head also share his budget with you when you did not yet have a grant? Do think about this critically. In my experience, young independent researchers (myself included) tend to take the support we get from senior researchers for granted sometimes, while being rather protective about our own funding. From your description, it does sound like you yourself are being funded from money acquired by the lab head. In that sense, asking you to give back a small part of your grant to support his research is not necessarily unethical. Further, has he helped you with your grant application? If he has, sharing a bit of your grant with him may be the right thing to do (if even possible, see above).

Thirdly, in practical terms, the question arises whether it is worth for you to fight over this issue. This largely depends on how bad it can end for you if the lab head is really mad at you (in Japan I would assume the answer to this is "very", unfortunately) and how much funding money is concerned. This is another issue that you can really only decide for yourself, but (again), do proceed with caution. You should consider that you not only need to work with this guy day to day, but you may also need his support for your next career step. I have unfortunately seen a few young researchers taking a stand with their mentors "on principle" over relatively minor issues. This kind of thing tends to not go as well as people hope.

All things considered, you would do well to not let your successful grant application go to your head. It is certainly a very important milestone in you career, but don't get into a lone wolf mentality ("I'm so good, I don't need anybody to succeed!").


I don't see any problem with reusing your own data from a previously published article, as long as it is cited properly. This would look like:

  We evaluated algorithm B using previously published data generated by
  algorithm A (Myself et al, 2010).

If the dataset is deposited somewhere along with the article describing algorithm A, it might have a DOI that you can also cite. If it isn't deposited, or hasn't been assigned a DOI, well now would be a good time to do that.

If the article describing algorithm A is more than a couple years old, nobody will think it is salami-slicing. And you only need to cite this article properly to rule out "self-plagiarism". Self-citation is an easy way to increase one's citation count, but it is definitely not unethical: you have to cite previous work relevant to your current article, even if it happens to be also from you.


Whether to take a holiday or get research experience when transitioning from masters to PhD?

Wanna relax, then do so. Don't be somewhere you don't want to be. You have to be mentally ready to do a research. I have seen many cases of young intelligent individuals who started doing PhD, and then for various reasons gave up, because some serious work needed to be done and they want to have well... some fun (rightfully so)!

I would recommend do not burn the bridge with your supervisor as you might start doing PhD in upcoming years. Tell him/her in a meeting that you would like to finish your studies and enjoy life a little bit; before committing yourself to doing research.


Is it possible for someone to get into a PhD without a thesis in Masters-level?

I assume that you have a Master's degree but not a Master's Thesis. The answer to your question depends on the location.

In the UK and the US, a Master's degree is not a requirement to start PhD studies, and therefore a Master's Thesis is also not a requirement. The admissions committee will compare your achievements with those of other students who only have a Bachelor's degree, and the expectations in terms of research output and thesis writing will correspond to that level.

In other locations, such as Germany, starting doctoral studies without a Master's degree is possible but very rare (unfortunately, the link is in German, but it says that only 1300 out of 108000 doctoral students that started on the winter semester 2011/2012 had no Master's degree).

The traditional way of starting doctoral studies in Germany is to contact a professor directly, and be selected by the professor, without the participation of any admissions committee. Professors will generally expect a Master's degree, and will want to have access to some of your research output to see how good your research is. They will by default look at your Master's Thesis for this, but you might be able to also get selected without a Master's Thesis if you have enough research output (publications or written reports of research projects).

There are also structured doctoral programs in Germany. These function in a similar way to PhD programs in the US/UK (with admissions committee and more course work), and are more likely to accept students without a Master's degree or thesis. These programs are, however, much less common than "traditional" doctoral studies as per the previous paragraph, so you might have a hard time finding one that interests you.


Is it normal that an advisor does not read the final version of the PhD proposal of his student before submission?

Well, if I would pingpong a proposal between me and a PhD student four times, and I feel like my last remarks were mainly fine tuning, then I would not mind accepting whatever the PhD student makes out of it.

This is a very personal answer, but since we can not read the mind of your supervisor, this still might help.


How to effectively use blogging as a tool to gain visibility in academia

I think it is well accepted that an online presence for early career researchers is a good thing, even though a minority actually have one. As an example, blogs on my website have been reposted a few times on various news sites, and they also appear high up the search engine list for keywords relating to my field of research. I also managed to get invited to speak on the back of my website, so in my experience a website really does improve your visibility.

The first challenge with blogs is deciding who they are aimed at. Remembering back to my early PhD, understanding papers was hard, and so I decided that I would focus on researchers in my field (magnetism) but try and avoid all unnecessary jargon, which should also make it accessible to undergraduates in the discipline. If you are blogging about your publications, then it means you can simplify the result for a broader audience, without compromising on the detail (those who are interested can look up the paper on your site - don't make them hunt for it or have it stuck behind a pay wall).

My main tips for an academic blog are:

Talk about all your publications - what is the main result in laymans terms and specify why it is important.
Don't worry too much about length limits. Academics are used to reading long documents and a blog a couple of pages long doesn't take long to skim. However, research is generally technical and so it is difficult to write a superficial post such as 'I had omelette for tea' or some such.
A blog is as much about you as the subject, so write in the first person and include your wider activities. For example, I always write up conference visits and talks I have attended/done.
Pictures and figures are a lot more effective than words, so use these extensively if you can.


Is it okay to start a collaboration with a research group of which you're reviewing a paper?

Finish the review and wait until the paper you are reviewing is published to contact them.

Reviews are supposed to be anonymous and by doing this you waive your anonymity away.


Same data, new method, same outcome – can I publish it?

I'd say it is difficult to answer this question in general. You should ask yourself if you are contributing something significantly novel to the academic discussion. For example, if you reanalyse the dataset and get completely different or new results, then it is probably worth publishing. On the other hand, if you only slightly modify the statistical method and arrive at the same results, it is probably not worth it. Before beginning the analysis, you could ask yourself if this dataset is particularly big or of good quality or if there are other, better datasets out there (in which case a reanalysis of this particular one might be unproductive).

To give an example, in the UK there have been many papers on the effectiveness of breast cancer screening that essentially analysed the same dataset using different methods. These methods were fairly complex and the various approaches have significantly advances our understanding of the advantages and possible detriments of breast cancer screening. In this case, publishing multiple papers was justified.


Do grad schools google their students before acceptance?

I have no doubt that some grad schools google applicants.  I'm pretty sure that defamatory things others say about you will have close to no effect on your admission.  It's the things you say yourself that might give you trouble.  If you're openly pro-nazi on your facebook page, that'll be a problem.

And, unfortunately, if you take a bold public stand on one side of some issue (say the Palestinian state) and someone one the committee feels strongly the other way, it could still be a problem.  But don't worry about others' comments.  Everyone knows about trolls.


Minor typos found directly after submission of a revised manuscript to a geochemistry-focused journal

These errors should not lead to rejection. Even if the paper will be accepted now (i.e. no additional round of revision) there will be a chance to correct those errors during proof-reading. The missing reference will probably be detected by the journal and corrected automatically.

Take notes of the errors, so you can be quick once you get to proof-reading stage, since often, publishers give you as little as 24 hours to check and correct a manuscript.

I just remember that there are fields where the authors take care of formatting and editing of the final version - there things might be a bit different. My  answer is based on journals that do the editing for you, after acceptance of the manuscript.

The fact that your supervisor (or any corresponding author) submitted a (revised) manuscript without asking co-authors and making sure, they approve the manuscript, is a different matter and should not have been done. Look for posts regarding "submitted without consent/approval" to find out more (basically, the corresponding author has to make sure that all co-authors have seen and approved a manuscript before submission, at every stage).


Refworks Bibliography Output Style Choice, for Springer?

The "Springer" document that you linked contains specific instructions for how to contribute to Springer Computer Science Proceedings. It also says:

  You will find here Springer’s guidelines for the preparation of
  proceedings papers to be published in one of the following series, in
  printed and electronic form

That means that those instructions are valid for all the journals and publications listed below.

So try to look for one of those style (i.e.: Lecture Notes in Computer Science) and it should work.


What do grad schools want to hear about why I'm changing PhD programs?

I'd suggest that, as a guess, 95-99% of your application should be just as it was the first time, focused on your skills and likelihood of success in any new program. I think it would be a mistake to spend valuable words giving a bedsheet of reasons that you are unhappy. Even ignoring the issue altogether might be fine, if a bit risky, especially if you are crossing borders as part of your switch. You are "looking for opportunities not available locally". If it comes up in an interview you might want to raise it.
The one thing you say, however, that might resonate, is that COVID limited your choices last time around and that you picked a less than ideal situation because of it. Also, if you are interested in pure, rather than applied, math, then a quick/short statement that your current institution supports that poorly might be fine.
But keep the focus on the skills and success part, just as you would if this is your first application. People won't choose you because they feel sorry for you but because you seem to be a good fit for their programs and a good bet for success.


The general rule is "if you don't want someone to ask you about it, don't put in on your CV." Including such memberships is still standard practice for many as they signify both your involvement and willingness to continue to participate in your field. So, don't think of these memberships as padding, think of them as opportunities to highlight your accomplishments - unless you really can't find a positive way to discuss these memberships, in which case they should not be included.


It is plagiarism if my work is very similiar to something previously published?

Your situation is not in any way plagiarism, but rather a common and ordinary case of independent reinvention.

There is no need to have the other person as a co-author or anything like that: just cite their model as related prior work, explain how yours is similar and different, and learn from it so that you can do the best you can with your own work.


There is a link at the bottom that provides a citation in bibtex or amsrefs format;

Clicking on this particular link the bibtex citation generated is;

  @MISC {58756,
      TITLE = {Unique ways to keep N balls into K Boxes?},
      AUTHOR = {Gjergji Zaimi (https://math.stackexchange.com/users/14274/gjergji-zaimi)},
      HOWPUBLISHED = {Mathematics Stack Exchange},
      NOTE = {URL:https://math.stackexchange.com/q/58756 (version: 2011-08-21)},
      EPRINT = {https://math.stackexchange.com/q/58756},
      URL = {https://math.stackexchange.com/q/58756}
  }

You could put that in your .bib file. From that point, it really depends how the rest of your citations are being formated. You might get something like;

That seems like a pretty standardised way to do it.


Statement of purpose: How to state PI backup

Let's just clear the situation within the scope of two cases:

The Pl-based universities: In this case, acquisition of a positive response from a Pl would pave your way, considerably. Within this scenario, you are supposed to mention your propensity toward the target Pl within SoP. Then, your SoP will be analyzed and sent to that fellow, has which been named within that SoP. Here is the very step, within which the Pl could admit you.

You better to pay close attention to two important points:
interpretation of the Pl's tone within the response is, merely, up to yourself... For example, he/she might say that: "You look a qualified applicant, I will encourage you to apply"..., but the other one's reply might be: "Your CV sounds considerably overlapping with my current projects. Would you please take some explanation into account regarding your programming skills, as most the current projects are highly-simulated-based ones...". One could claim that the second answer might be more promising than the first one, but the others may take both energizing and apply into both... So, you need to apply for the replies, are which stemmed from serious propensity of the corresponding Pls. Hence, you must cite the desired Pl's name within the application.
The admission-committee-based universities: In this case, the Pl's reply just could be effective to find your turning point. Actually, their positive opinion could be compiled as your gratifying situation in comparison with the typical admitted students to the program. In contrast, the deferring answers should warn you about the high risk of the taking application into account. Therefore, mentioning the Pl's names in this scenario is not useful, noticeably.


Average time to get a postdoc after finishing PhD?

Just changed from one post doc to another. It took me 3 months to send 100 applications, interview at few places. Ended up with 5 offers and chose 1. The kind of lab you join is extremely important. So don't shortchange yourself by picking a not-so-good lab to save yourself a few hundred dollars. A good lab will ensure a good job after the postdoc. Bad lab (which I chose too) will leave you in a shaky position and you might end up having to do another postdoc. 1 month's time has high potential of getting you in a not-so-good lab (that doesn't mean you won't get a good lab but chances are slim). Give yourself at least 3 months AFTER defense. In that time, apply to lots of places, interview at some and then pick the one that is the best for you. 1 month's time is not enough for defense and postdoc search. Good luck!