Any place for people with fear of writing?

I do resonate with your experience because I was scared to write (English is not my mother tongue) and I am also an introvert. I have been reading much about writing and networking and here are some tried and working methods (by me) that I wish will also help you. In the case of real fear, I agree that talking to some professional will also be advisable.

Don't "write," instead, draft then edit

My biggest "A-ha--!" moment was learning that most writers don't really write a perfect sentence at the first go, instead, they draft and edit. And for me, my mind has eased up so much once I have learned this distinction and decided to split my writing tasks into drafting and editing. In drafting, I just freely interpret the data and plug in some discussion here and there, occasionally with some anecdotes, etc. I never edit them. Then, after a couple days, I return to edit the piece. On a good day, I got to keep about 40-60% of them; on a bad day, I may have to slash 80-90%, but also often have a good laugh at what I wrote.

This finding really liberated me. I'd suggest you give this a try as well.

Write to think instead of think to write

Instead of writing to tell people what you think, I found it easier to write it as if I am having a discussion with myself. I wrote the research question, and then gave some answers, and then went back to question the answers more. I was often surprised that many times I read the scribble and figured out "Oh, this is what it is!"

I would advise against crafting out a perfect sentence and then put it on paper. This is futile because mind works a lot faster and non-linear than typing/writing process. By the time a "perfect" sentence is written, a lot of useful thoughts might have been suppressed or forgotten.

Dedicate times to write

Silvia in How to Write a Lot introduces a method that involves making a time and a space to write. I adopted the method this way: I block out time a few weeks ahead as writing/analysis time, then I guard that time. I cleared up the wall and the desk I face when I work on the computer so that I can only see the computer (and other books/articles I use) when I write. There is no picture, stationery, picture frame, etc. 120 degrees in front of my eyes. I also close down e-mail, silent my phone, and close the door.

Boice in Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing even goes so far to suggest coupling important and crucial daily ritual (such as shower) with writing hour. No writing? No shower. I found this kind of stressful, but perhaps may work for people with a different personality.

Document time as well as words

Productivity aside, it's more fulfilling to document my writing effort in both time and output. High output is, of course, great. But I have also come to realize that reminding myself I have been dedicating a fixed time regularly to write, albeit slow and low, makes me feel more confident.

Free writing

Goodson in Becoming an Academic Writer explains some pretty nice workshops to foster a healthy writing habit. The starting one is to "free write." Free writing is not new, and some people use this to warm up or tune into the internal writer channel. It's really simple, just sit down, open an blank document, minimize the visible area so that you cannot see what you type, set a time limit, and pour out all sorts of thought that goes inside your mind. Anything, just type.

Usually, after the time limit (I started with 5, now 10,) you'll have a pretty clutter-free mind and clearer idea on what that day's writing is gonna be.

Use proxy of writing

There are many, many ways one can put down an idea without initially writing it out. Drawing a mind map, popularized by Buzan, can help forming a bird view of an article. Paper and colored pen are good enough, online tools such as VUE are abundant.

Doodling, such as Sketchnote recommended by Rohde, can also be a fun way to "play" with words and idea.

For scientific writing, a paper by O'Coonor and Holmquist in 2009 suggests a pretty interesting method: basing your writing on a key output, such as a graph of the results, or a table of an analysis, and then build from there. For most experienced researchers this may be nearly common sense, but for those who think a paper should be written from Abstract to Conclusion linearly, this paper would help re-orienting them. My former supervisor, knowing my hesitation for writing, actually used this very method when advising me.

Use a recorder to document your thoughts or use speech recognition software to dictate your spoken words into texts may also help you break away from the deep-rooted fear towards writing.

Harness creativity

When writing output falls, I feel tired. After some trials and errors, I figured out that I feel tried not because I lacked energy, but because of too much creative thoughts didn't get to be expressed. So, I play music, pick a challenging recipe and make a potentially horrible dish (and eat it, butter + pepper + red wine always save the day), play LEGO, knit and crochet, come to answer questions... etc. I actually picked up a lot of habits through my doctoral study.

Introvert vs. extrovert

Being an introvert is actually not bad! In most modern culture extroverts get a lot more praises and attentions, but if you cast a critical look at it, this world needs both types to run properly. Two books I read last year were quite inspiring: Zack's Networking for People Who Hate Networking provides advices on how to focus your energy and properly carry out quality networking; Laney's The Introvert Advantage provides a more holistic look at how extroverts and introverts work, and how to cope and thrive as an introvert.

Closing remark

Best of luck and, really, enjoy the ride even it's scary. After the PhD thesis, there will be more collaboration and you will not feel as lonely. When I am down and want some healing reading, I often flip through Lamott's Bird by Bird and Zinsser's On Writing Well. They are also a good choice before reading those more serious and pragmatic how-to guides on writing.

Whenever I feel cognitively/academically inferior/inappropriate, I would think about a remark of Florence Foster Jenkins, who slaughtered Mozart's Queen of the Night aria (Try listen to Edda Moser's version first, and then Jenkin's version): "People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing." Before worrying doing it well, do it first, and you will improve.

The fact is I have never met one person in my life who genuinely embraces writing as if they "love" to write. Most successful writers, when interviewed, often just say things like "What tips? I just write," or "I draft, and then I write, rewrite, and then I rewrite again." Betty's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has made a lot of people realize they can draw; I wish there will be a book called Writing on the Right Side of the Brain that will make people realize that we all can write, but we probably have to wait until the neuroscientists get over their fear of writing.


You should not expect to receive a useful answer if you "cold-call" (or "cold-email") a professor. They have too many time constraints, and if your email looks like a junk email or wild goose chase, the professor will probably treat it as such, even if it isn't!

That said, I suspect that coming from a field so far away from CS will have an impact on the admissions process, because it will be hard for faculty members in CS to adjudicate your performance as a bachelor's student in geology. You can overcome this through the usual methods (strong letter of recommendation, cogent explanations in the statement of purpose, and so on). Your primary challenge will be to coherently show that you are willing and able to undertake graduate level coursework and research in computer science.


How can I justify doing a second Master's in Mathematics?

(Note that my perspective is US.) I think your first priority should be applying directly for the doctorate. You can simultaneously apply for an MS, of course, but I suspect that you are underestimating your chances for doctoral admission.

Yes, candidates are expected to have a pretty broad education in math on entry. Yours seems pretty broad if a bit non standard and you are missing a few things, but you won't know until you apply.

Doctoral studies are almost always about specialization, however. If you intend to work in an area in which you are already prepared, and say so in your application, then the missing bits might be overlooked. Not necessarily so, but you won't know unless you get into the process.

A second master's will broaden your education a bit. It may make a difference. Or not. Many places (US, at least) will treat the Bachelor's degree as enough. UK and EU may be more strict.


Is it unethical to cite a paper or book that you have never looked at?

When you cite a source, you are not actually claiming that you have read it.  What you are actually doing is staking your professional reputation on that source containing the information that you claim that it contains.

In most circumstances, of course, this gets instantiated exactly how you would expect: at least one of the authors has personally read the source.  There are, however, certain circumstances in which citation of an unread source is actually appropriate.  Let me give two examples:

The source is cited as a secondary source, e.g., "Feng et al.[17] claim that the species presented in the Necronomicon[18] can be found in Antarctica."  Here is is appropriate to give the bibliographic "pointer" to the secondary source even if you cannot access it yourself.
The source material may be known by a different route than the original publication.  This frequently happens with software tools and standards: for example, you might cite a standard that you are using even if you haven't read the standards document.  Likewise, if I am using a software tool, the authors often point to a particular paper as the preferred appropriate citation for the tool, and I am happy to take their word for it without reading that paper.

There may be many more cases as well.  It all comes down to this: how certain are you that you really know that the document you cite serves the purpose for which you are citing it?


You need to check on the rules at Harvard, but in general, "special student" generally means that a student is allowed to take courses but not to get a degree from the university.  The phrase "non-degree seeking student" is also sometimes used for this status.

It can be easier to be admitted as a special student than as a regular student, but it's also typically hard (as hard as getting admitted as a regular student) to switch from "special" status to regular degree seeking status.


How do I overcome fear of rejection when writing academic papers?

There are two points in your question: writing a good paper and the fear of being rejected. For the first point, there is no miracle recipe, although there are some clear guidelines of what is expected to be in a paper. You can find many useful resources on the Internet on "how to write an academic paper", and you will have to select what suits you the best. In general, a good way is to understand what you like in your favorite papers, and reproduce the same scheme.

As for the fear of rejection, well, it's a bit cliché, but you just have to get over it. People get papers rejected all the time, even the top professors, sometimes it is fair, sometimes it is not. If you plan to pursue in the academic world, you should expect to get papers rejected until you retire. It's normal not to like it, but somehow, you have to deal with it.

Most of the time, when a piece of work reaches a good level of maturity, I build a quick "submission tree", that is, I look at which conferences I could submit the work, and the overlap between the notification dates and the submission dates. At the end, I have something like: I could submit to Conf1, and if it's rejected, I have one week to make it better and to submit to Conf2, and if it's rejected, ..., or I could submit to Conf3, and if it's rejected, I have two weeks to work more and submit to Conf4, etc. So, basically, the possibility of rejection is directly included in the submission strategy.


I am an English Grad presenting at a NASA conference; what's the best way to prepare?

Different fields have different standards of what to expect in a presentation, from how it is organized, to how the 'powerpoint' is used (or not used). Even what constitutes notions of powerpoint agony for the audience will have some minor/major differences. (Science audience will want you to be simple, please). Presentations in an english department and a physics department will be a different in style and standard organization.

I would strongly suggest going to someone in one of the science or engineering departments in your university (perhaps someone who is charge of senior project courses who regularly has to work with training the undergraduates in how to give 15 minute presentation in the normal style of the field) and ask them for advice and copies of the usual documents they pass out to their students on how to give a scientific technical presentation. (Maybe have that faculty member in the audience for your practice talks)

And, assuming that the school year will start before you need to give your presentation, go to a few of the colloquium  (or student presentations) in that department just to get a sense of the style expected.

My experience (I am in physics/applied physics/materials) in attending seminars occasionally in the humanities either for fun or because I was serving as the university representative on a PhD defense, is that it is mostly stylistic expectations that are different. Good scholarship is good scholarship, and once I figured out my shortcomings in what different cues I needed to watch for in the humanties presentations, I could follow their work and be impressed or not.


Is it good to summarize your study cases in a thesis?

The very point of a survey work / literature review chapter / background section/related work section is to summarize the existing work that in other articles.

These sections are compulsory in my sub-field (NLP/ML). With all papers having a related work section, and all thesises having a literature review chapter.
More generally It is my understanding that even in fields that don't include a related work section in papers; they do include a literature review in thesises

The notion of one page max per summary, is I feel a bit constraining though.
For example in a book I recently wrote that summaries the state of my subfield, sometimes it took me 2-3 pages to summarize a particular complex or particularly important algorithm.
Conversely, other times I was able to summarize 5 algorithms in just 2 pages;
and I could highlight that infact they were all variants on the same overall principle (and highlighting these common features in works that are not obviously from the same source is a good thing to be doing.)


Is it fair and ok to add the new affiliation now, at the proof stage?

Yes. You could insert a footnote saying that the research feeding into the paper was carried out and completed while you were affiliated with university -1 in their lab 'so and so'.

This way, everybody is happy, and you're transparent about your whereabouts.


I would like to point out that life as a graduate student is tough, especially if you indeed want to achieve something. 40h/week working time is much less than one should normally invest in. (At least from my personal experience and my personal observation)
Things are just bumpy in the beginning. It's normal. Just keep moving.
You are not superman. Everyone has limited energy and time, you just can't do everything in the same time. You may want to give up one of the lectures that you are attending if it's not closely related to your topic.
Plan your own research, set milestones and keep progressing.
Try to do one thing in a day. If you work on your own research during the weekends, do not think about your TA duties or lectures at all in the same time. Make a bigger chunk of time to work on one thing instead of fragmented pieces of time is a good idea for improving productivity


I think the main hurdle will not be the knowledge about statistics you'll bring. (As a trained mathematician you should be able to pick up new math quick enough.) The main hurdle could be to embrace a new kind of doing science and research.

In more applied math people sometimes think differently about problems than in pure math. Roughly speaking, one is much more open to adapt assumptions and requirements for some problems such that they become more simple theoretically, more suited computationally or otherwise more convenient. Since one usually works with things that are related to the real world and hence, somehow uncertain and noisy, it is often not useful to stick to every assumption but use some freedom in modeling. I heard the saying "All models are wrong." Well, true but this should not make you hesitate to work with models.

I've seen people changing from pure math to applied math who never could adopt to these principles (but also cases where there were no problems). If you think that you won't have problems with issues like I described, then things will turn out fine, I think.


Is it appropriate for a TA to say "My Students"?

Yes, it is perfectly appropriate to refer to students in a class you are TAing as "my students."

You are teaching them; hence, they are your students. It doesn't really matter whether or not you are the primary instructor.


Most PhD students in Germany receive a regular salary, not a scholarship, and are officially employed as research/teaching assistent (this is what full-time/part-time refers to). It depends on various things like the source of funding if these positions are full-time or part-time.

The time you dedicate to writing your PhD thesis is technically your own free time. So there is usually no difference between these positions in terms of workload, value of the degree, etc, except for the salary. It's stupid, I know...

There are calculators on the internet that can tell you the exact salary, but lots of public charges depend on your personal situation (whether you have children etc) and things like where in Germany this is: http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv-l-2016i

For a 65% position it's currently ~2200 EUR/month (after taxes a bit less than 1500 EUR).


NSF mathematics postdoctoral fellowship: how to indicate U.S. citizenship status

This may be too late, but I ran into the same issue when applying for an NSF PRFB biology postdoc fellowship. They sent an email saying to provide your country of citizenship on like K (usually reserved for foreign nationals). I sent an email to follow up that all's good, and they said I did it correctly. Hope this helps someone!

Here's a screenshot of the NSF application:


How to get reviewed (undergraduate student's work/research)

The title suggests you want new individuals to review your work, while the last sentence seems now like you need advice reviewing your own work. I'll focus primarily on the title question.

I think you should ask why is nobody commenting on my work?, rather than who can I get to comment on my work? and I'll share my thoughts on that question.

I don't know how you're presenting your work, but if it's anything like this question, that might play a significant role.

What I mean to say is this. You did not explain your situation very well. Sure, I got the idea, but this is a relatively mundane situation, "Nobody will pay attention to me." It's just not communicated clearly (or professionally, do you really need to abbreviate department?), as I've pointed out that it's not even clear what question you're asking.

But when it comes to actual scientific research, we leave the world of the mundane. You are potentially discovering something nobody has seen before, or at least working on very technical material. Anyone reading your work or listening to you cannot simply fill in the gaps or correct any imprecision. If they could, it is overwhelmingly likely not 'research' in the academic sense of discovering or clarifying things that are new to the world, not just you.

My point is supported by your posts on MSE about Brocard's Conjecture (see, for example, here). You used very unusual notation, lots of handwaving, and were generally unable to explain yourself sufficiently, by mathematical standards, in the body of the post or in the comments.

If you are asking faculty members to comment on work that's presented similarly, dismissal seems like a likely outcome. The flaws above are so serious that I can only assume (in that example) you hadn't made any real progress on Brocard's Conjecture, and thus it wasn't really worth my time to continue attempting to make sense of what you had presented.

You need to sit down and ask yourself some serious questions about what you have produced and how it's presented. Questions like "Is this true? How can I tell? Is my argument correct beyond a shadow of a doubt, and has it been tested on several examples? Have I made any conclusions that simply don't follow, or used leaps of logical faith to justify anything? Have I explained things so that, with minimal effort, this can be read and understood by a professional?"


When should one include the proof of known results in a mathematical PhD thesis?

As a general rule, you can cite other people's theorems without explaining their proofs, and omitting a proof is a good idea if it would be a lengthy distraction.  However, there are several reasons why including such a proof could be helpful:

Including it may be convenient for the reader if the proof is short.  It's annoying to look up another paper and discover that you only needed a short argument that could easily have been explained in the original paper.  Extracting information from a reference can be cumbersome (you have to locate exactly what you're looking for, figure out what it depends on, sort out the notation, etc.), while giving your own explanation can help readers avoid some of these difficulties.
Even if the proof is not particularly short, it may serve as a warm-up for new applications of the same techniques.  Reminding the reader how they work may make your paper much easier to read than if you just dive into the newest and most complicated case.

Ph.D. dissertations are something of a special case, because your advisor may encourage you to include extra details in the background sections (beyond what you might include in a published paper).  This is partly a matter of demonstrating your mastery of the area and partly a matter of writing a useful survey for others.  Advisors differ in how they approach this: some think it's a waste of time and it's best just to focus on writing a published paper, while others think writing a more extensive dissertation is a valuable learning exercise.  This is an issue you should discuss with your advisor.


Is it okay to consider publishing in my first year of PhD?

Whatever you do, you will want to cultivate a good working relationship with your supervisor, so I'd advise against doing something she dissuaded you from just because strangers on the internet told you to. Talk it out with her.

That said, not a single PhD student I've known wrote/writes a relevant portion of their thesis in their first year, and the advice I have constantly been getting from faculty is that early in the PhD is the time to think about publishing other things. There will most likely be a time when your thesis takes all your attention, and by then it's certainly too late to worry about publishing elsewhere.


Outcome of LaTeX template differs from published papers – should I worry about this?

If you are following the template that the journal has provided, then don't worry about minor differences of this sort.

Journals often have a different post-acceptance "polishing" process for final production, which might involve changing the LaTeX templates or (more likely) converting to an entirely different graphic-design-centric pipeline.  The reason for this is that the review and production are often handled by different staff with different software serving different needs.

Moreover, even if you did do something mildly wrong in your application of formatting, no sane editor will ever say

  "Muahahaha! You have failed the test of the enlarged first character! YOUR MANUSCRIPT IS UNWORTHY OF REVIEW!

Instead, either the editor will say something like "Your revised manuscript must adhere to XXX format, including the following points" (paraphrasing from one of my published recent manuscripts), or more likely not even say anything because they didn't even notice and only the post-acceptance production staff really care.


Should I use a personal github account or a new one to publish academic code?

You should use your real name.

My lab has a private GitHub group for internal stuff, as well as a few open public-facing projects.

Everyone in our group uses their real names or some transparent abbreviation (like jsmith) or one that matches their university email/login ID.

I feel it should be immediately obvious who each person is. It would be mildly annoying if I had to remember who allo was every time, when everyone else has easy-to-read IDs.

If I was your mentor, I would probably ask you to change it.

It's fine if you do non-job-related development on that same GitHub account, for the reasons you mentioned.


Does rejecting an undergraduate admission offer have any effect on my chances of postgraduate admission?

I have worked on admissions councils and I'm 99.9% certain the answer is no.  I doubt they'll even consider whether or not you had previously applied.  I'd be surprised if they even have a way of looking up that information.  The pile of applicants who reject is tossed away pretty quickly, time to move on.


Can I make a case for authorship if I spend two weeks running a series of repetitive experiments for my PI?

The short answer:
It does not hurt to ask, and a good mentor or PI will explain the criteria for authorship and their reasoning for why you have/have not earned authorship.  It is a teachable moment.

The longer answer:
Different journals give different criteria for authorship, and this is usually explicitly stated in the guidelines for authors.  In your question you mention that the experiments need to be performed to satisfy peer review.  If the article has already been reviewed for a particular journal (and perhaps now it is in a revision stage) then you and your advisor know which guidelines to check for their description of authorship criteria.  That said, it is a common criteria to require intellectual contribution (rather than simply data). If that is the case, and if you are very interested in this work, you could offer to help edit the paper.  However, if the paper has already been submitted, it can be challenging to add an author (for some journals this requires all other co-authors to sign off on the new addition).  If the paper has not yet been submitted, and the target journal is undecided, you really should discuss this with your advisor (which you should do in any case).  Personally I have worked for months on projects where I was not a co-author on the write-up when I was paid to primarily collect data.


What to do when a PhD supervisor is not collaborating on publications after the PhD from it?

If the advisor made a substantial intellectual contribution (or, in fields where it's relevant, procured the grant supporting the work), there's not much the author can do to publish the paper without the advisor's permission. The advisor would have claim to authorship rights if:

the paper grew out of work proposed by the advisor, or was supported by funds accrued by the advisor;
the student discussed the work with the advisor and gained useful feedback or guidance about the direction or results of the project;
the advisor contributed to the writing of the paper.

The last point is definitely true; it's not clear if the first two points hold, but they very well could, given the situation described.

Basically, if the advisor has authorship rights, the student is more or less screwed if they try to publish. If they publish the paper, with an author who has not given permission for submission or without an author who has authorship rights, then that is sufficient grounds for retraction of a paper.


I would differ a bit from both of the previous two responses.

The SOP and the CV serve different purposes. The SOP is the high-level summary (some would say sales pitch) for why your work is interesting and why you should be hired. This needs to be tightly written and compelling, and part of being compelling is highlighting particularly unique, interesting, or high-profile publications. Importantly, I've been told by several hiring committee members that more people will read your SOP than your CV - so if something's important, don't bury it only in the CV. The CV is more of a "data dump" in which you list everything that you've done that may be of interest. You don't necessarily want all of this detail clouding up your SOP, although you want the hiring committee to have access to it if necessary. Think of your SOP like a glossy brochure and the CV like a dictionary - the former is intended to be read while the latter is intended to be referenced.

So, that said, I think it's both a mistake to leave your publication out of your SOP entirely and also to list all of your publications there (if you have many). Reference only the key ones that support the rest of your story and include a hyperlink in a footnote if you think that a reader might actually follow it. I would suspect that this will be a rare event, though, and I would encourage you to put enough detail from this publication in the SOP itself that a reader won't have to follow the link to get the gist of what you did.


Is it ethically problematic for an internal candidate to attend the job talk of a candidate for the same job?

First, as I inquired about in the comments, most job interviews have both public and private aspects.  Public means that they are open to the entire department (or maybe, and probably in some formal sense are, open to the entire university community): e.g.  there should be at least one job talk, and most often this talk will be advertised on the calendar like any other talk, sometimes called a "special colloquium talk" or something like that.  That makes it a departmental event.  As a department member you certainly have the right to go.  There are also usually some private "interview" portions: this is several faculty members asking questions of the candidate, either one-on-one or in groups (or at meals; even lunches and dinners are part interview, really).  These are usually not public events; rather they are activities on the part of the faculty search committee, though in some contexts, e.g. at a small liberal arts college (SLAC) students and other non-faculty members may play an auxiliary role.  Certainly as a candidate for a job you can't be part of the search committee to hire into that job: that is the Cadillac of conflicts of interest!  So you should try to distinguish in your mind between "search committee activities" and "public events" and be sure not to attend the former.  (As usual, if you are in doubt, ask.)

Now I want to make a few comments on StrongBad's (good, I upvoted it) answer.

  One of the jobs of internal candidates, like all member of a department, is to help recruit the individuals being interviewed such that whoever is given the offer, hopefully you, is more likely to accept the offer.

At least at a large research university, it probably not the case that all department members are involved in recruiting for faculty jobs (either temporary or tenure-track).  For instance students are usually not involved at all other than maybe wandering into the job talk (though at a SLAC they might be), and temporary faculty are not on search committees for permanent faculty.  So I don't necessarily agree with the above sentence.  Moreover being involved in "recruiting" for a position one has applied for again sounds like a whopper of a conflict of interest.

  When you are interviewing after an external candidate, the thing to remember is that in most cases watching what someone else does is not going to help you. One case where there could be a definite advantage is if the search committee has some fixed interview questions and you attend an event that gives you access to these prior to your interview.

Yes, I completely agree with that, and it answers one of the OP's main questions.  Most academic interviews I know are not sufficiently formalized that watching someone else's in advance would help you with yours.  Most questions asked in academic interviews are not content questions or "gotcha" interview questions: they are questions about you.  I also think that a job talk is a strange place for asking pointed interview questions.

So here is my answer: being an internal candidate for a job is potentially awkward enough so that you should seek some guidance about what to do.  If the job talk and the interview aspects are not separated sufficiently clearly in your department, then I think the ethically correct thing to do is just stay away from the whole thing (but tell the faculty in advance that you are planning to do this, in the unlikely event that they have other plans).  If the question really is attending another job candidate's talk: I see no ethical problem with it, and if you're in a department where it really is expected that faculty in your position attend all such departmental events (again I'm thinking of a small department) then maybe you should go.  It is an academic talk after all and you might learn something.  However I think that you should really (forgive my colorful language) shut the hell up as an audience member in this situation.  Interacting with another candidate in any active way is also a huge conflict of interest.  If you have a sincere academic question, of course you can find a way to communicate your question to the candidate later on.

I don't see how multiple internal candidates makes much difference.  I guess that if I knew the other candidate very well and was very friendly with her, I would be more inclined to come to her talk rather than skip it...and especially I would be more inclined to ask what her preference is.  I would not do that for an external candidate because it's a potentially loaded question that they shouldn't have to deal with.


How many supervisors for a post-doc position?

There are oh-so-many things to govern this decision.

First, a post-doc should be about you establishing your own vein of research and experience in handling a grant. With too many "superiors" involved, you may end up doing little more than answering to them, as a graduate student does. This is not a dissertation committee, it should be a working group of peers that launch your career. From your comment it sounds like there is heavy redundancy in your 'team.' If you are doing an ecological experiment with X population for A behavior and B technique -- which thing is your expertise? It sounds like your working group could 'work' entirely without you. That's not good.

There are two ways you can approach this.

Only have supervisors who are more senior experts in your exact area of interest, thus ensuring you get the pedigree of an area expert through this project.
Only have supervisors who are not in your area of interest so that you are the area expert. For example, if you are the behaviorist and are trying to establish yourself in your field as such, don't answer to other behaviorists, only methodologists. Be your own boss.

Choose between strategies 1 and 2 based on your long-term career goals.

There are other, minor considerations: you need to carry at least one person who has a solid track record of competently handling scientific funding to be co-investigator. Also, if you do not have a few publications in the area, you better include someone who does on your grant proposal. It would be ideal if the funded/published is the same person.

Finally, don't burn bridges. You can always publish with someone later.


The use of phrase "per se" in academic writing

I guess my advice would be to write in the way that seems most natural to you and gets your ideas across efficiently rather than worrying about the "word police."

If a reviewer objects then you can make a change, or not, as you see fit.

Clearly objectionable terms would be an exception, of course, but reviewers will point those out pretty regularly.

I think it is a fair statement to say that language rules evolved from language usage and not the other way around.


PhD without previous academic degree: truth or myth?

My (former) thesis advisor, Barry Mazur, has only a PhD.  In fact, according to Stephen Krantz's Mathematical Apocrypha Redux, he does not have a high school diploma either, having left Bronx High School of Science after his junior year to attend MIT.

The story is that he had not completed an ROTC requirement at MIT but had already been accepted for graduate school at Princeton.  Princeton was not insistent that this requirement be completed, so Barry did not take it seriously.  (I have heard more colorful stories about this, but not from him, so I won't repeat them here.)

You might say that this is a technicality.  I would agree with that but still claim it to be an interesting (even slightly inspirational, in some weird way) case.  Moreover, Barry was 22 when he attained his PhD, so some actual schooling must have been skipped (or highly abridged).


In recent academic history, why has research funding increasingly focused upon large interdisciplinary teams?

Personal experience, and a lot of inspiration from nature (I'm a biologist) suggests that interdisciplinary teams can view a single problem from different perspectives.
This enables teams with varying knowledge to attack a problem from the easiest angle.

For example,

When Canadians faced the problem of snow accumulating and freezing on power lines, men were sent up power-poles armed with poles of their own with a hook on the end to shake off the snow. When they were complaining about how tough the job was to each other (and coming up with pole & climbing related ideas to make the work easier), the secretary to the manager overseeing their work chimed in to say that when she was a nurse in the army, she'd seen the downdraft from helicopters knock objects around with ease.

Her fresh perspective introduced a new line of thought that would not have otherwise been introduced into the problem solving atmosphere.

When you're a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. When you're a toolbox full of different tools, however......


How can I find an old paper when the usual methods fail?

In the future, your university librarians are MADE for this!  Don't feel ashamed to ask -- there are librarians more into archiving and cataloging, and some more into education and service.

Give as much information as you currently have, and they'll find it for you AND/OR show you how to find it yourself in the future (if it's accessible via a resource like some of those mentioned above.)


Officially and in general, no.

The teacher of a class should in general not share grades with his colleagues. Informally, however, there might be some communication of individual students' performance in ways that don't violate confidentiality: "she did very well on my class"; "he struggled on the exams, but did a very good job on the final project." Typically, this would be in the context of a colleague inquiring about hiring a student as a student worker or as a graduate student. Aggregate information could also be shared without harm to enable better matching of teaching to student needs and abilities.

That said, there are exceptions to this rule. For instance, your academic or research advisor will typically have access to all of your grades. Similarly, an evaluation panel—such as one that convenes for a graduate student's qualifying exams—will probably have access to all of the student's academic record.

But a random professor generally will not see a student's grades in all courses. This is by design and a logical move.


Does repeating a second course to bring my GPA up 0.05 points help or hurt for graduate admissions?

As an admissions-committee person for an R1 math dept, this would look to me like an obsessive-compulsive waste of time.

For most people the years they're in undergrad school are an enormous transition, and things that happen freshman year are (hopefully, and, mercifully) not strongly related to what happens later. People understand this, and often look with some interest on the very contrast between "freshman year" (and maybe sophomore) and what happens junior and senior year.

While it might seem virtuous to "go back and repair" a bad performance early on, this is a vastly sub-optimal investment of one's finite time and energy. Look forward, not back. Learn new things, don't worry about perfecting things that really don't need perfecting.

And, indeed, grad admissions people exactly try to appraise candidates' sense of "forward" rather than "back"...


whether my phd interview might have gone well or not

1) Does mentioning the means of funding in a PhD interview imply that the applicant did well enough in the interview?

No, it could mean many things. E.g., they might be trying to establish whether you could be hired without using their own funds.

  2) ...what can “nice to meet
  you”...imply? Is it a commonly used
  expression by interviewers or does it mean that the interviewer is
  pleased to admit the applicant?

It is a generic expression, it carries no hidden
meaning.


Should the introduction of a thesis have figures/pictures?

I can't think of any reason in general that you should not do this if it makes sense in the context of the paper. If you can express the underlying concept better with a figure then it is better than to use words.
But an advisor might disagree, in the context of this paper. And an editor or reviewer of the paper might disagree. In that case, change it.
But the paper is yours. Do what you thing makes the most sense and makes the paper accessible to your audience.


How can I strengthen my submitted graduate application?

For the sake of efficiency and fairness, candidate selection is a purely administrative process, based on submitted paperwork only, and handled by academic staff that adhere to strict rules and work ethics. You should not disturb them, nor should you hope for any good effect of doing so.
If you want to enhance your chances, then apply in parallel to other universities or/and other master courses. Submit paperwork that excels in contents and layout.


My previous PI used my data in an article that was published in a high profile journal. My name is nowhere to be found in authors list

Creating the graphs and tables for a paper does not necessarily entitle you to authorship (https://publicationethics.org/files/Authorship_DiscussionDocument.pdf).  But creating those graphs and tables nearly always requires some other activity that does entitle you to authorship.  Your work should be acknowledged at a minimum.
If you are entitled to authorship based on the standards of your field, you may:

Request that the professor ask the journal for a correction of the author list.
If that fails, request that the journal retract the paper for plagiarism.


Is the development of an original/novel method a contribution to knowledge worthy of a PhD?

While developing a method has merit within science, that method needs to be useful to answer a question which is not currently answerable. I too have worked primarily on methods development in graduate school, and got stung by this in some of my early work. So, while it's good to focus on the method, always have the question in front of you: "what do we want to know, that we can't know yet, that my method will be able to tell us?"


Do authors have to be politically correct in article-writing?

In the absence of a compelling reason to not use politically correct language, authors should make reasonable attempts to minimize offending readers. Given the information you provided, there does not seem to be any reason not to use master/slave. The words, and even the context, do not seem inherently offensive and have an established usage in many fields. I suggest including in your response letter a statement that you do not see the established use of master/slave to describe communication systems as being offensive, but if the editor requires a change, you will be happy to comply (assuming you are).


What does an employer want to see from recommendation letters

I think all 5 points are valid. I would add two more:

Due diligence: Institutions want the insurance in case something goes wrong with the faculty in the future, e.g. the person commits scientific fraud or sexual harassment. Of course, there can be nothing in a recommendation letter that would guarantee that the faculty will behave, but in an inquiry, the institution must be able to say they did their due diligence. So, they just need a certain number (typically three) letters on file, not necessarily for their content.
Intangibles: They want to see enthusiasm in the recommendation letter. I have heard many times that a merely good recommendation letter is a terrible recommendation letter. If someone's adviser/colleague cannot be bothered to write superlatives for the candidate, it might be a "red flag" that there might be a something intangibly wrong with the candidate.


There is plenty of "research on research" (or "science of science").

There are dividid into different fields, e.g.:

Scientometrics - measuring citations, networks of collaborators, relations between topics and other quantities characterizing the scientific output.
Sociology of science - treating science as a activity of groups of people, with its history etc.
For example there is a great book Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Research on collective intelligence, innovation (when, where and how does it happen), etc.
General fields related to education, didactics, teamwork and management.

As you asking about engineering (i.e. how things work in practice), I don't even mention things like philosophy of science. Also, as you see, the answer depends on scale - from an individual, through a group or an institution to a country, the world nowadays or our civilization.

Typically it is done under umbrella of complex systems, complexity, network science, econophysics or data-mining and modeling in sociology. There are institutes doing it, see e.g. the front page of the Santa Fe Institute. Also, there are some projects on it, e.g. QLectives.

ADDED:

As you are interested in the optimization (not only the observation) and on the micro scale: some findings may implicitly give hints, e.g.:

R. Kenna, B. Berche, Critical mass and the dependency of research quality on group size (2010) says that you need a critical number of researchers to make it working smoothly,
B. Jamtveita, E. Jettestuena, J. Mathiesena, Scaling properties of European research units (2009) says that the larger an institute, the higher percentage of administrative workers it has.

Other things may be harder to find, as in science it works a lot in apprentice-master mode, with approaches differing from a group to a group. So it may be not as easy to be serialized (as in different fields, countries, etc. one may need to have different approach); and when you don't a large enough sample, you cannot use quantitive methods in a meaningful way.

Moreover, now we are in the phase preceding formalized studies, as only recently people started to share with the world their soft and subjective findings on that matter, e.g.:

Materials for Nurturing Scientists (a collection) on Uri Alon Lab website (BTW: he is the right person to talk about it, as he promotes such exchange of information on research)
G. Whitesides, Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper (2004)
J. Gallian, Advice on giving a good powerpoint presentation (2006)

and on things like academia.SE, for a bit of self-reference.


Benefits of doing Part III at Cambridge (Pure Math) for US PhD applications

I think Part III is quite common amongst US students nowadays, and is thus well-known to graduate admissions committees.  Probably the effect on your application will be good, since if nothing else it shows you are serious about studying mathematics; a school can also reasonably expect you to be considerably better prepared coming after a year at Part III than when you finished your BA.  So if one of your issues was a weak curriculum as a BA student (as opposed to poor grades or weak letters), then Part III could help quite a bit.  On the other hand, I wouldn't count on a dramatic change in your graduate school admissions, in part because as you note, you won't have your grades or a strong recommendation from Part III in hand when you apply for graduate schools the next time around. I wouldn't worry about the fact that Part III is not research based; obviously doing research before starting graduate school is great, but most graduate schools in the US are not really expecting you to have done much in the way of it beforehand, or to be even close to ready to start when you enter.

I think if money is no object, then Part III is probably as good as anything else you might do for having a strong graduate application in the coming cycle.  EDIT: I should probably also say that a matter of substance (as opposed to application strategy), Part III is probably on average better than spending a year as a grad student at a random respectable grad program in the US, since it will bring you into contact with a wide variety of other students and ideas.

However, I think you should weigh that next to the possibility of starting graduate school at one of your lower preferences, and then trying to transfer after a year, or when you get a master's degree.  There's no guarantee this will work, but the same can be said of Part III.  If you've been offered funded admission at a respectable school in the US, and would have to pay your own way at Part III, I would look hard at whether you think it's worth the money.

EDIT: I wouldn't count on the "glamour" of Cambridge itself to have a strong effect.  I honestly don't know how selective Part III is (maybe someone who knows can comment.), so I wouldn't rely on assuming that admissions committees will consider it as such.  There's some psychological "band-wagon" effect where getting one prestigious position reinforces getting others, but it won't work if the substance isn't there. Getting a BA from Harvard or MIT is helpful for getting into graduate school (if you have a strong record) because an admissions committee is more confident that getting an A in math class at Harvard really means something, and that a professor at Harvard has a lot of experience with talented undergraduates and thus can speak with some certainty about what it takes to succeed in graduate school.  So, if you went to Part III, got good scores on your exams and got a strong recommendation from a professor there, that could strengthen your application a lot as a "second opinion" reinforcing the recommendations and grades you have from your BA.  However, as discussed, those would only be available for the fall 2016 admission cycle, not 2015.  One possibility is to see about accepting one of your safety schools with a deferment to go to Cambridge, going to Part II in 2014-5, going to the safety school in 2015 and applying for transfer in 2016 or 2017 if you're unhappy there.

One piece of information we're lacking is what your "lower preferences" are (don't put too much stock in USNW rankings, but they help to be concrete in a discussion like this).  It makes a big difference whether we're talking about a school in the rank ~25 (like UCSD), ~50 (like UVA) or ~100 (for example, South Carolina).  In the former case, I'd say it's a waste of time to try to try to move up unless you go and are miserable, whereas in the latter it makes a certain kind of sense.

LATER EDIT: Incidentally, yes, given that your undergraduate grades are already "baked in," the main things you can still hope to change are your letters, and also your GRE scores if those were bad.


The following answer applies to all public-service salary schemes (TVöD, TV-L, TV-H, etc.) that apply to PhD students. The information that is most likely missing is:

Your class (Entgeltgruppe): PhD students typically paid according to class 13, which is the lowest class for people with a master’s degree or equivalent. As even postdoc positions with class 14 are extremely rare, it’s safe to assume that this is your class if no further information is given.
Your level (Stufe): Unless you worked in German public service on this level before, you will have the following progression of levels:

first year: Level 1
second and third year: Level 2
fourth to sixth year: Level 3
after that, you hopefully finished your PhD

Now, the offer will have to state how much you are officially working. It’s usually somewhere between 50 % and 75 %, but may also be 100 % – this mostly depends on your field.
This should give you all you need to obtain your gross salary (brutto) from the tables or calculators.

Keep in mind that taxes and insurance will be deduced from this, which depends on several aspects such as whether you are married, have children, whether you will use the German retirement provision (VBL) etc. However, a considerable portion of the taxes will actually be to your direct benefit (health insurance, retirement provision, etc.) and things that you would pay with your salary in many other countries.


When I submitted my MSc thesis, I thought my thesis was perfect (English/vocab/grammar). Now, every time I go back and read a section or chapter, I find some mistakes/things I will never use if I'm to write it now! I'm sure this will always be the case since your writing style/opinion will evolve and change. The point is to try to be better in your current work (thesis, papers etc). I wouldn't bother going back to FIX stuff but rather to see how much I have become better!


Is it a minor or major revision, if only one of the reviewers asks for major?

It's up to the editor to make the decision. Their job is to read the reviews and decide if the criticism is substantial enough to justify a major revision.
If the editor is lazy, they might resort to shortcuts, such as: follow the least favorable recommendation, or take the average of all recommendations. But that is a poor practice.


Priority of application materials for admission decision

As aeismail says, what we are looking for is concrete evidence of research potential.  So, in decreasing order of importance:

Decent grades and (if required) test scores; otherwise, no one will read your application at all.  Here, "decent grades" means three-point-something from a good undergraduate program.
Research publications, if you have any.
Recommendation letters.  You must have at least one (and preferably three) strong recommendation letter from a faculty member who praises your research potential in specific and credible detail.  Letters that draw specific comparisons to other successful PhD students are best.  Letters from junior faculty are perfectly fine; they can draw comparisons to their recent graduate school peers.  Letters that say only "He got an A+ in my class" are useless; we can read your transcript.
Research statement.  Your statement must discuss your research experience and interests in specific and credible detail.  A statement that only describes your sources of inspiration ("Ever since man walked on the moon...") and/or brags about coursework is useless.
Other concrete evidence of independent research/scholarship/creativity.
No red flags.  Potential red flags include low grades in classes central to your proposed research area, missing key classes entirely, abysmal test scores, negative (or overly delicate) recommendation letters, recommendation letters obviously written by the applicant, spelling and grammar mistakes in the research statement, any evidence of immaturity or personality issues, and any evidence that the applicant is not prepared/informed/serious about research.

Notice what's not listed.


How do I get into a masters course in pure mathematics?

There are no standardized international exams for mathematics. Strategies for applying for a masters in Maths is no different from any other program. The best, and possibly easiest, way to enhance your chances for acceptance is to find a means to self fund. Specifics on how to tailor an application are very country and program dependent.


How to complete PhD when your advisor knows very little about your subject area

Ten years sounds like plenty of time for your supervisor to become an experienced researcher. If they are young, don't discredit their abilities as a supervisor. If they are busy — well, all professors are busy. It's unlikely a replacement supervisor would help, there.

Most PhD projects stray sooner or later from the comfort zone of their supervisor — the very nature of a PhD research project implies that there will be novel work completed. It's also not the role of the supervisor to solve technical problems on behalf of the student (in my institution I receive less than 2 hours per week ‘workload allocation’ for my PhD students).

Trust that your PhD supervisor can guide you through the process of completing and writing up the project, and bring additional people into the project that can assist from a technical perspective. One of the best ways to do this is to contact active researchers in your field and invite them to be co-authors on your papers in exchange for technical input. They might not be able to put in any more time than your actual supervisor, but their different perspective might be enough to see you through.


The two abbreviations you mention yield respectively 2 and 0 results in a Google search. Do not abbreviate that name.


How to search google scholar for singular and plural words?

If the alternative terms are part of a phrase, then you could use parentheses () and a vertical bar |, like "the (woman|women)".
The same applies to, for instance: "the (entrepreneur|entrepreneurs) told". I tested it and it works.

(EDIT: I originally wrote that the wildcard entrepreneur* should work, but my test was not so convincing. Thanks to lighthouse keeper's comment.)


Including Award Values on Academic CV When Applying For Graduate School

I doubt that if I were reading the CV that I'd care one way or the other. If the award has a name or title, you should list that: Award/grant from IBM to support research in "glub-bending at the cusp". But adding the amount is also fine. My response to seeing the amount would be "interesting", but not "yay" or "nay".

But the important thing, to me would be the fact of the award, not its amount. Not a big deal, though. Others might have different opinions, of course.


How to react when a team of colleagues obviously made up some results?

my position at the university involves the management of the animals they used in the study

If your immediate supervisor is to be trusted, go to him or her.  If not, pick someone higher up in the university hierarchy.  You are looking for someone who will

protect your identity as a whistleblower

investigate discreetly

have enough influence within the university to be able to trigger effective action

Edit (in response to some comments): I should really have suggested that you look up your university's policy and procedures.  Let's look at what MIT has to say about "Research Misconduct" as an example.

Unethical behavior in research and scholarship strikes at the heart of the scholarly and educational enterprise. [...] Supervisors must enforce the highest standards for conducting research and creating and maintaining records of the research [...] specifically, laboratory and center directors....
Definitions: [...] Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them.
Duty To Report: Each member of the MIT community has a responsibility to report any conduct that he or she believes in good faith to be Research Misconduct at MIT. Ordinarily it is appropriate in the first instance for a Complainant to report his or her concerns to the supervisor of the prospective Respondent. [...] Consultation and guidance is always available from the Office of the Vice President for Research or from senior academic officers (deans, department heads, laboratory directors)....
A supervisor who becomes aware of possible Research Misconduct, either from his or her own observations or because of reports, has a responsibility to bring allegations of Research Misconduct directly to the Vice President for Research in order to ensure that proper procedures are followed.


Is it reasonable for an institution to ask for families total income in application form?

I don't have any direct experience with educational systems in India, so this is a very general answer.

In response to a question, you said that you view the practice as being potentially unreasonable

  Because income is a private matter and not related to admission.

But if they are using this information to figure out whether you deserve a scholarship it does seem to be related to admissions.  According to their website, all students are considered for fellowships, so this could be it.  Admittedly there are less reasonable, um, reasons they might want to have this information: e.g. they may want to give preferential treatment towards or against students with high family incomes.

  [I]n that case the question could have been asked in a different way.

I think you're probably right about this.  And the online representative does not seem to have been at all helpful (we can all sympathize with that!).  It seems you have the following options:

Make a more concerted effort to speak to someone in the admissions department -- either by email, phone or in person -- to find out the reasons behind this request.  If appropriate, you could also make clear that you are not seeking any sort of financial aid and see if that changes the situation.
You can feel that the practice is a bit unreasonable and invasive but decide that it is in your best interest to comply with it anyway.
You can decide not to apply because of this, in which case I think it would be a good idea to contact someone (higher up than an online representative) in the admissions department.

  What if I fill in a random amount or enter zero?

That is a bad idea.  Many institutions (academic and otherwise) view lying during the application process as grounds for termination of your position into the indefinite future.  Saying that you have zero family income in particular is liable to get you in trouble: they may wonder how you are going to pay for the program, or they may come back with a financial aid / fellowship offer that it would be very unethical for you to accept.


Faculty member brought sick (feverish) child to class - is this unethical?

Is it unethical?  Yes.

Is it worse than the alternative (usually canceling class)?  Probably only slightly.

Is it worth reporting?  Only if it happens repeatedly.


Finding papers that acknowledge a specific author

Resorting to advanced search tool that most famous publishers offer would simplify your task (at least to an extent).

E.g., search for papers with name in full-text and not in authors and not in references.

Currently existing journal libraries do not support such a feature yet. The solution to your question is a topic of research by itself. The following articles, [1] and [2], might provide some insights.


How to engage students in oral presentations?

I would like to add to earthling's answer. If you have teaching assistants, please do make good use of them in this aspect.

As a TA, I have had excellent experiences in mentoring undergraduates to prepare research presentations, final papers, projects and proposals for these papers and project. Of course, we were generally in a class of 120-160 students so that speaks to a classroom scale higher than what you are suggesting. There were 3 graduate TA's, usually and we each had about 50 students to mentor. We found that we could devote significant amounts of time to each student when we met them on a one-on-one basis. Of course, the professor also met them one-on-one and there were a couple of rounds of iteration of their final presentations - which was very, very useful for the professors, the TA's and the students. As mentioned previously, it was a time sink, but very well worth it.


How to formalise the "extra-mile" work done by an academic?

At my university, we have this system for PhD students.

I am a PhD student. In my contract, I have "up to 20% department duties". When I get assigned tasks not related to my research — teaching, administrative tasks, presenting our institute to visitors, etc. — I write down the hours. At the end of the semester, I report to my boss how many hours I have worked on such duties. Then, a corresponding fraction of my salary is funded from a different pot of money. At the end of my PhD, this means I will have an equivalent amount of time extra to finish my research before my contract finishes.

I think the system is quite fair, although some tasks — most notably teaching — don't get the actual time assigned, but according to a certain formula. So in practice, I do lose research time by doing teaching, because teaching takes more time than the formula accounts for, certainly if it's a first time. However, it's still much better than a system with no accounting at all, such as I have understood to be common elsewhere in the world.


Can I serve as a reference for someone applying to fill my position?

There's no conflict in my mind, and given how hard hiring can be, I would value your input if I were on the hiring committee.


How to broadly assess the state of research for a topic?

You can use any academic search engines such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, or LENS (these three are freely available) or scientific databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, or Dimensions (these three require an [institutional] access for full use) and limit the time range of publications to the past years.
You could also add the word 'review' or 'survey' to your query, or, better yet, limit the search results to the document type 'Review' in order to specifically fetch articles that serve as reviews of a given research field.


Examples of when to use "Accessed" in citation and references

Technically, APA uses "retrieved from" for websites rather than "accessed from":

  Retrieved [date] from [URL].

It should be noted that dates are only required for frequently changing content; more or less "static" web pages do not need to have a date included, although there is certainly nothing wrong with doing so.


Should I be truthful about graduate school rejections?

As someone involved in graduate admissions decisions, I can say unequivocally that knowing a student has been denied admission at another program does not negatively influence my admissions decisions.  I have all of the application materials from the student, and (assuming the applicant is strong) the decision is sufficiently important that I will certainly look at and evaluate all those materials.  The decision of another school is not a useful indicator of whether I should admit you.

Indeed, if you tell me you have an offer from another top program, I might even be more cautious about offering you admission.  Why?  If I make all my initial offers to students who end up going to other schools, then I have to go back and dig through the applications and find the ones that didn't already accept an offer, which by that time will be lower quality applicants.  I know of one program where this happened last year and they resolved to make more strong offers to the second tier of (still quite strong) applicants this year.


Is there a maximum duration for an MS in Germany, and are there allowances for medical leave?

It is almost always possible to take a vacation semester, which is either free of charge, or at a fraction of the standard fee you would normally pay. (But you also lose some student perks, such as the public transportation ticket and student discounts.)

But you have to check with your Studienordnung or Prüfungsamt. You will certainly have a maximum number of semesters for your studies as well as a maximum time between finishing your last lectures and beginning your thesis.

In case of illness, as long as you have an official waiver from a doctor saying you can't study/work, most of these limits don't apply.

tl;dr: Check with your "Prüfungsamt"


Where can I find the IEEE list of research topics?

The IEEE makes their 'Taxonomy' available on line (linked to in their Author FAQ under the Publications page), but this is only a hierarchical list without the designations you have given to identify something as the C.2.1.h topic. Surprisingly (to me), neither the author kit nor the editorial manual discuss this hierarchy.

In contrast, for the American Institute of Physics, the PACS codes are available on-line at PACS 2010.


Working at a Liberal Arts College in Mathematics

In general, I tend to think of the difference between a college and a university is the presence of graduate programs and multiple "schools" at universities, while the focus of a liberal arts college is the teaching and development of undergraduates.

Research experiences for undergraduates are considered to be important parts of the modern experience, so having experience in those areas are considered useful, but is by no means the dominant concern.


Tracking updates for an individual paper in arXiv

This is a pretty silly solution, but you can use a page tracking service to see when the page changes; this should detect both changes in the paper as well as in the journal its submitted to.

Edited as per Jaap Eldering's suggestions in the comments: you can use arXiv's OAI-PMH protocol to programmatically access version history! For example, if you want to look up arXiv #1206.0094, you can look up http://export.arxiv.org/oai2?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:1206.0094&metadataPrefix=arXivRaw for its version history.

Furthermore, arXiv does have an Atom feed for individual articles: you can access it at http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?id_list=1206.0094 -- the link it includes is to the latest version of the article, so I presume it will change if the article is updated.


Doing a math PhD with a great deal of student debt

A few things to address. First, note that a Ph.D is not a good financial choice. There are plenty of articles you can Google for, I'll link one but there's plenty more. Another thing to note is that the academic job market isn't that great, there is a problem with many people getting stuck in postdoc and adjunct positions, though there is data to show it's not as bad for mathematicians. If you are choosing to do a Ph.D, make sure you understand that it will not help you increase your wealth, but you're choosing this because it's a career path you wish to pursue.

Keeping this in mind, you choose to do a Ph.D and it's hard to find money. Financial advice helps, but when your income is low, the best help is to find more income and spend less money. What can you do? One thing to note is that in many ways you have your hands tied. Many times fellowships and departmental funding will have a requirement that you cannot have other sources of income, so having a night job is usually not an option (speaking in terms of the US). Thus you have to make do finding small amounts of help every way possible (always check with the administration that it's okay!). Small savings add up. Here are some things I found:

Find free food. Find the seminars which have food, and go. You can also use this to network at the same time, and/or use this as your downtime.
Find extra teaching / tutoring jobs. If your funding is a fellowship, they may let you TA as well for a bit extra cash. If you are already a TA, you can tutor local K-12 students in math for quite good pay. Another good place to look is at on-campus workshops that could use your talent. You can tutor / help out with programming workshops and other on-campus initiatives. These normally will pay minimum wage, but it also adds to your CV and again, everything adds up.
At my university, there are some paid positions in the graduate student council. It's an interesting experience where you will have to take some time lobbying state governments and other outreach activities. Again, builds the resume and brings in some cash.
Live on-campus and don't have a car. Use the fact that you need rides as time to catch-up with people. You'll be doing math so often that it will be nice.
Try to get a living wage by doing something applied. This depends on your interests, but one thing that most mathematicians don't know is that salaries in different departments can be vastly different. At my university, students in the School of Biological Sciences get almost double the pay of math students. This is due to differences in salaries set by NIH vs NSF. Could you do the same kind of research in a Mathematical/Computational Biology program? Or find an adviser that could pay for you at a salary closer to bio students? This can make a huge difference. Even if you want to do something "pure", take a good look into this. There are applications for any math if you look hard enough, and so it's a balance between choosing to do what you want to do and what the general public thinks is more valuable (whether they are right or wrong...). It's at least something to think about.
Find award money. Many times there are monetary awards for best posters, best presentations, etc. Most of these are more "outreach" types of presentations, i.e. not for mathematicians, but some university-wide project partnered with industry. Look out for these and have a cool "my math for the general public" presentation ready.
Eat cheap. Get a big rice cooker and have that be the big part of each meal. It'll help cut down on costs.
Don't do it alone. Live with friends / family / significant other. Eat together. Buy in bulk from Costco with others and share the savings.
Plan ahead for summers. Plan to do extra teaching, or look into things like GRIPS which can give a supplemental summer income if you have a summer fellowship. You'd have to check with your adviser and the administrators that this is okay with the terms of your fellowship.
Understand your health benefits. Many universities give you health care as part of the funding. In addition to the standard health benefits, my university has extra goodies like an on-campus dental care where you can get a free dental cleaning every 6 months. Using these kinds of services will help you stay healthy without spending much.


Finance paper with different decimal places

This is an issue of significant figures. You say the value of 1.00 is not informative, but trailing zeros after a decimal point do, in fact, carry meaning. Showing a number that's been rounded to 1.00 indicates that the true value is somewhere between 0.995 and 1.004 - we know that the hundredths place rounds to 0. If you show the number as just 1, I can only infer that the true value is somewhere between 0.5 and 1.4. You're losing information, since we know that the tenths place is indeed zero, and that the hundredths place rounds to zero. Keeping the trailing zeros after the decimal point shows the level of precision with which you have measured your values.

You are free to round the numbers to whatever precision is meaningful for your domain, but keep in mind that your representation can reflect the precision of the underlying data - there is indeed a difference between a value of 1 and a value of 1.00.


At what point should I stop caring about writing papers after leaving academia?

You shouldn't feel any obligation to write papers if you don't want to and you aren't required to for your job.  At this point, you've written 35 papers, which more than repays any investment the research community put into training and mentoring you.  (This shouldn't be a concern in any case, but with so many papers you're extra safe on this count.)

It will be a loss for the community if you decide not to continue, but you shouldn't decide on that basis unless you anticipate world-changing outcomes from your future papers.  Think of it from the perspective of someone reading one of those papers.  How would they feel if they knew you had forced yourself to write it at the cost of personal unhappiness?  If the paper leads to a cure for cancer, then they'd think you made the right decision, but for most papers they would probably feel sorry and wish you had chosen otherwise.  If the potential audience for your papers would feel sympathetic, then you shouldn't hold yourself to a stricter standard of community service than they would.  (I wouldn't assert the converse: you can legitimately quit even if the potential audience wouldn't feel sympathetic.  However, they probably would, and that may make your decision feel easier.)

Of course, quitting research may close off future opportunities.  If you'd like to move to a research university someday, or a more publication-focused industrial lab, then you'll need to maintain an active research program.  (Having done compelling research in the past doesn't count for much if you haven't published recently, since potential employers will assume that your knowledge and skills are rusty and that your not publishing recently reflects a lack of ideas or enthusiasm.)  Maybe research would be more fun in a supportive environment with coworkers who are also actively engaged in research.  If that's the path you'd like to take, then you should keep doing research while you figure out what sorts of jobs might be feasible.

However, if you don't want to write papers now and you don't anticipate wanting to do so in the future, then it's perfectly fine to stop.  You can quit with a clear conscience and be proud of the work you've done, without feeling any need to continue.


Obtaining Letter of Support from Colleagues External to University for P&T

You can request the letter but I would recommend that the request be directly sent by and returned to the chair of the department or the chair of the departmental P&T tenure committee. They can then decide if it should be attached to the P&T file.

As far as sharing it via Google Drive or equivalent services, I would suggest that you investigate if your institution has a designated file transfer service and use that instead. Your P&T file is probably not something you would want to have "leaked."


Reference letter request for options the letter writer is unsupportive of

I think this dilemma can be approached from first principles: a letter of recommendation is an explicit choice to support a person on the path that they have chosen.

In most cases, the main question is not the path but whether this particular person is a good match for that path.  If one didn't like the path, however, I think it would be vital to come back to the question of how much you support the person.

Sometimes, we support somebody enough to want to help them even when they are on a course that we have grave doubts about: many a parent has faced such dilemmas, and a teacher's role can sometimes be quite similar.
Other times, we might find the path itself so problematic that we refuse to support, even if it means doing damage to a person's hopes and dreams.

In short: I don't think there's a cut and dried answer, but that one must judge the individual situation with the question: "Can I, in good faith, support this person's decision to take this path?"


Should an applicant to an university mention that her spouse is currently a student in the same University, as part of her SOP?

This really can be a two-edged sword.

Pros: You are likely to really come and stay since your spouse is there. You can argue that you know much (positive) about the place through your spouse which has made you select the place.

Cons: You may be seen as applying because your spouse is there and not because you think the place is exactly where you want to go and be. In other words, you make a choice out of practical and not academic reasons. (largely what you already stated)

So, first of all, it is no-ones business why you apply to go to a certain place. Of course the people who read your application will evaluate your interest and so anything that strengthens the application is good anything that doesn't can be left out. Although the location of one's spouse should not be grounds for admitting (or not) a person, it is possible people read things into the fact that you did not originally anticipate. If you want to state that you already know the place is good, you may do so by demoting your spouse to a friend. I have to confess I am not at all happy about writing this which seems so negative towards mentioning your relationship but it stems from knowing that you cannot predict how people interpret things and it is therefore better to be neutral and focus on the academic rather than putting up personal reasons for a choice.


Saying no to miscellaneous administrative tasks as a Grad student

Will there be any negative repercussions if I do that (reject majority of the tasks)?

Of course there is no way to say for sure whether there will be any negative repercussions if you keep rejecting those requests. However, frankly, it seems likely to me that:

You will come across as kind of an ass to the administrative staff, and that's not great at all. If your university is at all like mine, there will be a number of times when you need their support in, well, administrative matters, and you will be very low on their priorities list if you make it a point to never or rarely help them out.
You will come across as kind of an ass to the other students, who will surely notice that you never help out and they need to take on more of those duties as a consequence. You will invariably need their help at some point during your studies, and it's not unlikely that they will not be thrilled to help you out then either.
You may come across as kind of an ass to the faculty, which tends to notice if certain students are never volunteering for anything. The extent to which they care is another question, but it seems unlikely that they will consider this a positive attitude. In the worst case, somebody may remember this when the time for letters of recommendation comes up after graduation.

  Also are there any tips on how to say no, with respect to Academia? I may try a new strategy of ignoring such emails, the emails do "require" us to respond whether we can make it or not, not sure if ignoring such emails may be a better policy since I think that is what some students do.

If you really think you should keep on saying "no" to those things, it seems fair to tell the administrators directly that you are not available for volunteer work. They will likely be annoyed, but they will also be annoyed if you keep turning them down. I don't think there is a way to turn them down without annoying them in any way.

(and please don't start stringing together increasingly less plausible excuses - that's just childish)


Asking an exam question that requires a specific technique

You say, "Solve for Y.  You must use X technique to demonstrate that you know how to use it, even though there may be simpler other ways to solve this particular problem."

Edit: One should cover in class why the students need to know X.  The point in the exam question is to make it clear that using X is a requirement of the question, not a hint.

Example: "Use a Karnaugh map to simplify the following Boolean expression."  Here, the question asks, "use a Karnaugh map," not "simplify the expression."  The latter is the mechanism to demonstrate the former.


How common are PhD interviews in the U.S.?

In my experience, it's typical for a US university to invite PhD applicants for a visit only after they have been accepted for admission. The purpose of this visit is primarily for the school to make a good impression on the student and try to convince the student to accept their offer of admission. An interview is not normally a required part of the application process.

However, one of the best things you can do to increase your chances of admission to a particular graduate school is having a professor there who wants you to work with them, and who will lobby the admissions committee on your behalf. In order to get this kind of connection with a professor, you will need to meet them and establish a rapport well in advance of applying to the university, and it's possible that the professor will want to meet you in person as part of that process.


Leaving academia - what to do with the personal website?

Put your website on some other hosting than your university.
Write up-to-date status and contact, perhaps with a few words of explanation (e.g. to make it clear that is not only for archival purposes).
When it comes to rest of stuff, they can be the same. (Minding academic data and contact; when it comes to branding - it is a question for Workplace SE and answers will depend on your profession.)


What if you can't publish in very high impact journal or top conference during your PhD?

The goal of a Ph.D. is to learn to be an effective scientific researcher.  If you accomplish that during your Ph.D., then you will have been successful.

Moreover, early in one's career, high-rank publications don't actually correlate strongly with being an effective researcher.  They're much more about happening to be in the right research group at the right time with the right guidance.

Now, if things line up for you and it happens that your Ph.D. also generates some high-rank publications during that time, it will make your next stage easier, but it is by no means necessary.

Remember:

Most post-Ph.D. careers do not require high-rank publications.  Highly focused fields, industry, teaching-centric colleges, and many other areas will care about the solidity of your work much more than its glamour.
Interesting work often takes a long time to mature, and important work often shows up in high-rank venues only after it has been incubating in multiple publications in "bread and butter" venues over the course of years.
If you do want a career that will be boosted by high-rank publications, one or more postdocs are an excellent period to obtain such. They also let you demonstrate that you are the important factor, and that it's not just that you happened to get lucky in your Ph.D. subject and advisor.

In short: stop worrying and instead just focus on doing something interesting and worthwhile with the work you're doing now.


Effective way to organize a course so that it can be followed from abroad

First, I suggest you consider what are the absolute requirements of this lecture. You say the attendance is not that important. Are there mandatory weekly homework assignments, or a final project which has to be handed out in the end?

It is good that the professor seems to be in goodwill to help you in the process.

I assume this course requires a lot of interaction because it is related to programming, but honestly I have not learned much from the lectures when I have ever had programming classes. Exercises, and actually sitting down and writing the code has helped the most. Of course, the presence of an expert in the field can make things easier for understanding. But, I don't think it is absolutely necessary.

I also believe that the gain that you will have by following the lecture via skype or via Realtime Board, won't be as big as you doing the exercises alone. You might be loosing more time than gaining knowledge from attending the lecture.

The time from October to December does not seem like a long one. Even if it is (assuming that the course might be fast-paced) you still will be able to catch up for the two months when you will be back. Because the introductory parts are easier and you can grasp them faster. If we add other factors to the equation, for example, if you have previous programming experience, this will be even easier.

I don't know what programming language you will be learning there, but if it is one of the programming languages which is covered in one of the online programming teaching platforms (Codecademy), then you don't need to worry at all.

One thing you can do, is to reach out to the professor or any other fellow student and ask them to record the lectures for you; You can listen to the lectures while studying from the textbook. But the main point will be doing the exercises. My experience so far has told that programming is something which you learn by doing, rather than learn by being taught, although some help is welcomed.

Hope this helps!

Note: It would be useful if you could provide the programming language, and your previous experience with programming in the question.


This is a waste of your time, and, more importantly, a waste of the time of people who already selflessly gave away their time working to give you feedback that helps you improve your paper, and to help the peer-review system function.

The best thing you can do is not ask the editor and referees to spend any more time on your paper, unless you are contesting the rejection decision in good faith. And use their feedback to improve your paper so that other referees and readers don’t reach the same erroneous conclusion that this referee did.


When should the grading scheme for quizzes and exams be finalized?

This seems perfectly reasonable to me. In this type of freshman physics course, there are some very common difficulties that students have:

Physics is counterintuitive, e.g., students often intuitively believe in some kind of half-baked aristotelianism, and this belief can be resistant to instruction.
Students try to solve problems by shopping for a formula that has the right letters in it, and then plugging numbers into the formula. They don't think about what the formula means, when it's true and when it's false, etc.

This is all very well documented in the pedagogical literature. The best summary I know of, although it's out of date, is in Mazur's book Peer Instruction. Mazur shows a lot of evidence that physics instructors are in denial about what their students are really learning and about the (in)effectiveness of traditional teaching methods. There is a huge gap between how physicists think about their subject and how their students think about it.

A lot of these issues are qualitatively different than in other fields, such as mathematics. E.g., I don't think students have deeply held intuitive preconceptions about derivatives and integrals before they walk into a freshman calc course. In a course like freshman calc, a lot of what the students are learning to do really is just algorithmic -- there's a reason it's called calculus.

For these reasons, it can be extremely difficult for an instructor in a freshman physics course to write appropriate exam questions. Results can be really horrible if you write questions that require conceptual understanding, multistep problem-solving, symbolic rather than numerical calculation, or interpretation of symbolic results. You can write problems that just require plug-and-chug, but then you're dumbing down your educational standards.

Because of the gap between how instructors think about physics and how most students think about physics, there is a real danger when setting an exam that you will be taken by surprise by how horrible the results are. This is particularly likely to happen with inexperienced instructors. Fiddling with standards after taking a look at the answers is IMO not an unreasonable way to prevent this kind of meltdown. Especially for a non-tenured instructor who can't afford bad teaching evaluations, I think it's pretty understandable to do this. As time goes on, people usually get a better feel for what kinds of questions will be hard. If I were evaluating someone for tenure, I would rather see them doing the kinds of things described in the question than see them writing plug-and-chug exams.

There is one thing that does seem a little odd to me about the specific situation described in the question. If I'm understanding the question correctly, the instructor in charge of the course seems to have delegated the writing of some of the lower-stakes quizzes to TAs, but the instructor will still be the one writing the final. However, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism for making sure that the standards and style are consistent throughout the course. Ideally students would be doing homework that is similar in style and difficulty to the quizzes, prelims, and final. The instructor should be setting the tone as to what should be the mix of easy and hard, concepts and mathematics, numerical and symbolic. If that isn't happening, then something is wrong.

Daniel R. Collins wrote in a comment:

  In future semesters adjust the tests so that's not needed. Personally, I don't find it hard to dial in an appropriate difficulty level after the first semester.

If these questions are being written entirely by TAs, with almost no supervision by the instructor, then it seems unlikely that there is any institutional memory that would allow this type of adjustment to occur over time. If that is the case, then the serious problem is lack of supervision, guidance, and institutional memory -- not a particular practice in grading quizzes.


How much mathematics are electrical graduate students expected to know?

I think it really depends. I've seen EE majors do much of the math someone majoring in math. At the junior-senior level, some EE students will take a semester of advanced calculus, matrix theory, and numerical analysis. It really depends on the university and their degree requirements.

For students outside of the US, admissions committees do try to review the student's background as carefully as possible, comparing it to their requirements. Certainly it will help to have as much math as possible if you want to stand out. In particular, try taking some "applied" courses - partial differential equations, numerical analysis, optimization, stuff like that. Some "pure" topics like real analysis (perhaps up to introductory measure theory, this is really not a big thing in my opinion) and complex analysis will help too.

If you plan to apply to a US university, I suggest talking to someone in graduate admissions in the department that you are interested in.


Are course evaluation forms REALLY confidential?

Whether evaluations are anonymous (see StrongBad's answer for the difference with confidential, which evaluations are rarely) depends on your institution. On my university, they are. However, especially in small classes you can often get a pretty good idea of who wrote something depending on writing style and typical spelling mistakes.

But as Elizabeth Henning says in the comments, it's unlikely that this is the case here. It takes time before the evaluation is sent to the teacher. On my university, this happens only after all grades have been sent to the administration, after which it is possible to change them, but all those changes are logged - it may even be disallowed to mark someone down in that phase. In any case, the instructor won't care enough about the grade to change it and risk all kinds of trouble.


How to politely inform potential PhD supervisor that I must wait before responding to an offer? (Two-body problem)

In my opinion, since you are already accepted, there is no harm in telling about the two-body problem; if you end up going to University B, Prof@A.edu would likely feel better about that reason than some negative impression of them personally or of University A.

You are well within your rights to take the full 30 days to decide. Certainly not all professors are equally versed or sympathetic towards the two-body problem, but most have experienced it, if not personally, through their colleagues, friends, etc.

Ultimately I think it is your choice whether or not to explain your reasoning, but I would personally lose a bit of respect towards your Prof@A.edu if they were unable to accept you stating simply "My offer gives me 30 days to respond, and I would like to take that entire time to ensure I make the right decision for me. I will inform you immediately of my decision once it is made."


I find the easiest way to cite scientific software is to search it on Google Scholar and see if anyone else has cited it. In this case, searching for "DIEHARD: a battery of tests of randomness" yields one result that's been cited in 614 papers. Clicking the cite button and picking BibTex gives the following:

@article{marsaglia1997diehard,
  title={The Diehard random number testsuite},
  author={Marsaglia, George},
  journal={http://stat.fsu.edu/pub/diehard},
  year={1997}
}

You may want to throw a \url{} around the address, but otherwise that should work for you. Just mention the specific test in your paper when you cite it.


Moving a detailed literature survey in Appendix to reduce size of chapter?

For a thesis, you may as well include the full review. You've done the work, and a thesis typically has no particular length limit. Realistically, your examiners will probably just skim it anyway. I see no reason to move it to an appendix, though I also don't think it matters very much. If your advisor or university policies feel strongly, of course, do what they say.

When you publish papers based on your thesis, then you'll want to condense the review to focus on  the most important and relevant prior work.


I'm looking for faculty positions. How important is it to have your PhD advisor's letter after 3 year post-doc?

Unless your former advisor can speak to your present and future research potential (especially funding potential), his letter won't add anything that your post doc references won't already say. At a certain point, prospective employers want to see that you have become an independent researcher, and a letter from a doctoral advisor might give the wrong impression.


tips for mathematics student giving interview for physics (quantum information)

It may be too late for this, but I'd suggest giving a talk for physicists in a lower stakes setting (eg a seminar at a school that isn't interviewing you). Physicists often have different names for things and ways of talking about them, and it can be really nice to have some exposure to the kinds of questions you might get asked.