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thread-13818 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13818 | How do you know when your independent findings are paper-worthy? | 2013-11-03T06:30:47.213 | # Question
Title: How do you know when your independent findings are paper-worthy?
I learn math on my own. And I sometimes end up generalizing theorems. I do not claim that these generalizations are ground-breaking. However, I feel these generalizations are not entirely obvious at first-sight.
Could I publish a paper on such a generalization?
Making this more relevant to the community at large, how do you know when your "new" ideas are paper-worthy? Should one pursue research directed only by external trends? As in, if I were to publish a paper, should I only look for current areas of research in order to conduct research that would be relevant to academia today?
# Answer
> 15 votes
Complementary to Suresh's and Peter's more comprehensive answers that you should *definitely* take into account: (+1 to both)
*Use ArXiv*; ie. publish it yourself. Go ahead and write your findings down and put them in public. This will be a good exercise as :
1. you will be covered for plagiarism etc. and you 'll be also able to refer other people's attention to it. It will be immensely easier to attract people attention to something tangible than just referring to "some idea you think it is great". As Torvalds said : "*Talk is cheap. Show me the code.*" (or Maths in your case).
2. people you do not know, can actually find you; or even cite you for that matter. I know a lot of people who regularly read ArXiv papers to keep up to speed with the bleeding edge of stuff. You might be lucky and really get some attention from people that actually care for your work.
3. you will see for yourself if what you wrote can be formulated in a research paper and it doesn't come across as some ''back of the envelope'' calculations. You might even identify where feedback from a collaborator would be helpful.
If you think you are up to something good, put it up there. Worse case scenario: nobody bothers and you never know if you were right or wrong.
# Answer
> 21 votes
This is a very hard question in general, and is defined by a combination of absolute standards and community opinions. It's very hard to answer your specific question ("can I publish these results") and I don't think this community is the right forum to even ask that question.
But your second question is a good one. There are some things to keep in mind:
* make sure your ideas are indeed new. It's easy when working independently to be aware of the published literature, but not be aware of the large cloud of "folklore" knowledge that floats in the air of a community. You'll get a paper rejected because something is "well known", even though you can't find a specific reference and no one provides one. To figure this out, it would help to approach an expert in the field, or at least someone you trust.
* What kind of research you pursue is a complex combination of external trends and your interests. If you go too much towards external trends you might not find much pleasure in it. If you go too much towards personal interests (unless you have impeccable taste) you might find yourself isolated. It's all about balance. Similarly, while looking at current areas of research will tell you what's likely to be publishable, that's not the same thing as what's interesting or useful. Again, having some contact with people in the community might help a bit.
# Answer
> 13 votes
The only way to "know" if your material is publishable is to know the literature on the subject. I used "know" because all publications go through per review and that is the final hurdle your paper must pass before the answer is given. So the question really becomes what must be done to pass peer review?
So you need to know your subject by finding and reading all relevant literature. An interesting personal observation is that it is easy to think you know more than you really do if you are not familiar with a specific field. Getting yourself up to date is hard work. Apart from the research literature, there is of course need to master the basics. As editor and reviewer I see many manuscripts presenting measurements that in themselves might be good but where interpretations are shallow and sometimes trivial because they have missed relevant research. Remember that journal rejection rates, although they vary, can be from below 50% to up to 90% for the more prestigious journals.
# Answer
> 6 votes
Even professional scientists cannot know if their last idea is original and new (and so, if it is worth publishing).
Today science is too big, too complex and too separated in different specialties to allow one person to have a general overview (this is the "Big Science" issue).
However, there are people who are specialist of evaluating scientific contributions. There are *referee* of Journals.
So my answer would be to try to be published. Even if the paper is not accepted, it is the opportunity to have feedbacks, references and to see what your idea deserves.
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Tags: research-process, publications, independent-researcher
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thread-13842 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13842 | How many grants it is possible to have simultaneously? | 2013-11-04T07:57:49.077 | # Question
Title: How many grants it is possible to have simultaneously?
It is feasible to assume that you cannot have more than one grant, since getting a grant means that you are paid for a research project and you cannot work on too many projects at once. So answer should be one. Nevertheless there should be some researchers that have more than one grant. How common is that? Is this field related?
# Answer
> 14 votes
At my institution, most researchers have more than one grant. It is extremely common over a wide range of disciplines, at least in the USA.
Often, one is required to include the "level of effort" in each grant proposal; i.e., the percentage of one's time that will be spent on that project. That number is never 100%; more often, it may be 10-50%.
In many fields, the "principal investigator" on the grant may do only a small part of the actual research, with the bulk being done by students and post-docs. This part is very field-dependent. In some fields, full professors at top universities are expected to have very many grants simultaneously, or at least some very large grants that involve a lot more than the full time of a single person.
# Answer
> 6 votes
Here's one example: the National Science Foundation in the US funds academic researchers. Usually the researchers draws some amount of summer salary from the grant (the rest - most of the grant money - goes to student support and travel). But you can be supported by different grants for different fractions of your summer. It's not impossible to have four active grants, each paying 0.5 months of your summer salary.
# Answer
> 4 votes
You would have to check the conditions of the grants to be sure. This answer is based on my experience with some European grants. Especially for "personal" grants that pay your full salary, it is often not allowed to have multiple of such grants simultaneously. In addition it there are often conditions to ensure you are not being paid twice (from different grants) for the same thing.
The situation in Europe is different from the US in the sense that university employees are paid all year round, not only during the teaching semester. So they don't have to source additional income in summer.
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Tags: funding
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thread-13798 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13798 | How do you know if a PhD is for you? | 2013-11-01T19:57:09.513 | # Question
Title: How do you know if a PhD is for you?
After starting my PhD a few months ago I'm now not sure if research is the thing for me. I'm uncertain on whether I should continue in the PhD program and try to make myself like research more, or if I should just stop and drop out of the program.
How can I know if research is for me or not?
# Answer
I think this question is vague, but I think vague questions are the ones that provide the most general answers and thus the most useful. Thus, I'll try to answer.
Why is it vague?
Research is not "one thing", there is nothing like the "one true research". There are many different aspects of research that can influence this decision and the experience of doing research. Among others I can think off the top of my head about: The area, whether it is applied or theoretical, formal or empirical, the people in the lab, if you work alone or in a team, the supervisor(s), the project(s) or grants that provide the funding.
And then you have to consider that all that collides with your personality, assets and skills, or the lack of. Some people have natural skills for writing and communicating, some other people for rigor and analytic thinking, etc. So even if two people are doing the same "amount" of writing and analytic thinking, for the former writing may take 80% of the time and for the latter it may be the other way around.
If you think you like *some* research but you don't like *your* research it may simply be that you don't like *that* research.
This is why the answer cannot really be answered. But as I said, those are the best answers, what we should do in these cases is lifting up the level of abstraction and providing some guidelines so that anyone can find their own answers. I'll do my best.
First thing to do is find out what do you want. Do you want to do some research or not, even if it is some Utopian idea of research that does not really exist anywhere. Then try to find some place where this research is being done. Then try to see if you can access this place. Then you will have to find a compromise solution between what you want, what is available and what is available and accessible for you. If this compromise solution seems to be satisfying for you, then go for it, if it is not then leave it for some other life.
The hardest part is trying to know if a place that seems to fit your interests is really that way or that's only a delusion, the best approach is try to speak with the PhD students there, find out how do they feel about that, if they are similar or different from you, etc. You can also check the statistics like how long does it take for them to finish, number of publications, etc. that will give you expected values.
Remember the difference between expectations and reality, wishful thinking is a hazard. There are quite a few pictures with a skeptic/pessimistic meme about expectations and reality to help you.
Back to some specific details of your question, you should compare this Utopian place with your current place, and possible alternative PhD programs you could start. That way you have an additional option:
1. Not doing a PhD.
2. Doing a PhD in a place that suits you, even if it is a compromise solution (life's hard)
3. Doing a PhD where you are, it's again a compromise solution maybe less optimal than #2, but you save a year with this option, this may pay off or not, that's something for you to consider.
In the end nobody knows, life is about choices with partial information, choose wisely and work hard, no matter the path you choose, this train doesn't move without your effort. If you choose rationally, considering all the information that you have, you may make mistakes, but since they will be caused by information that you don't have, you should not regret them, that's life. Basically, if you do your best, you should not regret the consequences.
Good luck.
> 5 votes
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Tags: phd
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thread-13845 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13845 | Letter of Recommendation from an unofficial college email ID | 2013-11-04T10:01:18.203 | # Question
Title: Letter of Recommendation from an unofficial college email ID
I will be applying for MS (computer science) in US schools. I am from a rural part of India where lecturers (who will be writing letter of recommendations) in my college still don't have official email id (e.g. `name@mycollege.edu`) and they use commercial services (e.g. gmail or yahoo mail).
What shall I do? Will it harm my application? I think so, because I doubt how it can be evaluated as not-fake.
My other option would be not to consider this LOR at all. I am currently working under a professor in one of the top institutes of India and I can get a recommendation letter from the professor. But I am working under him from past 6 months. How does this weigh against the LOR of my bachelor school lecturer who knows me for 4 years ?
To add more details, I completed my bachelors 3 years ago, so will this LOR be any of help since the lecturer only knows how I was 3 years ago, but not now ?
# Answer
> 15 votes
*“Will it harm my application?*” — Maybe, maybe not… it depends on the mindset of the persons who will review the application. The likelihood that it impacts negatively your application is probably not very high (there are more people than you think, even in non-rural non-Indian areas, who use commercial email accounts rather than institutional ones).
However, you are right there is some slight risk: there have been recent cases of people using faking email accounts for other researchers, e.g. in order to increase their chances in peer review. Because these cases have been publicized recently, people may be more wary of non-institutional addresses.
But more to the point: *what can you do?* — Not much. **If the format of the letter is free, ask your letter writers to use official letterhead from their institution…** Otherwise, try and see if your letter writers are **listed on their institution's public pages, at least, with their email address**: that way, the person receiving the application will be able (if he wants to) to check their identity.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, recommendation-letter, email
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thread-13858 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13858 | Can we mention our own idea of a project in the letter to a professor during grad applications? | 2013-11-04T16:27:35.510 | # Question
Title: Can we mention our own idea of a project in the letter to a professor during grad applications?
I am applying to 6 universities for MS and I have short-listed 2 professors from each university whose field of interest is nearly the same to that of mine.
Along with mentioning my interest in their work, can I also mention about a topic/project that I have been working on or 'am planning to work in future?
Please suggest!
PS: The topic/project will be similar to the research interests of the professor.
# Answer
Sure, that shows proactiveness, interest, creativity and many good things.
I'd suggest to publish it somewhere before, even if it's just a blog, arxiv.org, safecreative.org or your favorite option.
Otherwise it will be *their* idea, at least for some professors. Some of those may actually have had that idea (years) before you suggested it, so it may really be *their* idea. By publishing it you are able to prove that at least you got to the same idea/conclusion on your own, even if it was years after them. In case that matters to you.
Make sure to emphasize the research aspects of that project.
> 4 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions, application
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thread-1772 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1772 | Time spent marking essays | 2012-05-28T09:02:22.850 | # Question
Title: Time spent marking essays
A stack of psychology exam essays has just landed on my desk for marking. It was a 3 hour exam with 3 essay questions. This is a final year essay so I do not have to provide written feedback. How long should I be spending marking an essay?
# Answer
I don't work in a field with essay exams, but I do ask my students to write proofs, so maybe my advice is still useful.
TAs at my university are contractually limited to at most 20 hours of work per week. You have 60 exams to grade in one week; that suggests an absolute limit of 20 minutes per exam. Since each exam has three essays, I would aim to spend **at most 5 minutes per essay**. It'll probably take longer at first, especially if you also have to develop a rubric, but you'll get faster as you work through the pile. Aiming for 5 minutes leaves you lots of slack.
Also, I strongly recommend grading vertically—grading all of essay #1 before reading anyone's essay #2—instead of horizontally—finishing each student before starting the next.
> 7 votes
# Answer
The only hard and fast advice I have been given in general is to not spend more time grading than the person did writing the essay. Note in most instances you shouldn't spend anywhere near that amount of time, but in general you should be cognisant that grading essays is an arduous task, and for a size like 60 it certainly shouldn't be done in one day (I don't know anyone who grades that many by themselves to be frank, all classes of that size I am familiar with have TA(s)).
Other elements will impact how long the grading takes. Such as are you grading all of the exams by yourself or are there other professors/teaching assistants grading exams. If there are multiple people sometimes it is necessary to have a collaborative meeting, and even co-grade several essays to make sure you are being consistent.
For essays people typically make rubrics with which to grade, and this focuses the content for your review (as well as makes expectations explicit to students). The more focused the rubric the easier your task of grading becomes. The only other advice I would give is I typically read all of the essays once, making small comments, marks and notes for myself, and then go back through a second time and grade the papers. This obviously adds more time to grading though.
Not being able to give students feedback is awful for learning, so I would suggest (if possible) you at least keep notes for yourself and/or keep copies of the essays for a short period. Thus if a student requests feedback it will be possible to give them some.
> 5 votes
# Answer
In the humanities 4000-5000wd an hour for commented responses on essays. Two to three times as fast for commentless grading of essays.
This is a "work norm" ala Taylorism, but it hasn't been subject to speed up as far as I've seen (unlike the head count in tutorials work norm, for example).
Source: Australian system, multiple essay based departments' work cultures amongst permanent members of staff; and multiple rounds of multiple sites of collective contract negotiations with casual employees; as a Trade Unionist and department level administrator with previous pay responsibility.
> 4 votes
# Answer
The answer by Andy W discusses the role of Rubrics, which I think is key to simplify grading. They provide better understanding for both expectations and evaluation from the student's perspective.
To add to that, one method that I find works in many situations to reduce grading is to gather students after the exam and discuss the answers in session. This way I can express the points I consider important for a good answer. I realize this cannot always be accommodated in the schedule of courses and exams. But, students appreciate the opportunity to ask questions etc. The grading can then be done quicker since I can refer to what was mentioned in session rather than making many detailed comments. The comments necessary will then be more of a summary connecting to the rubrics and how the answer fills (or not) these criteria.
To say how much time is needed for the grading is difficult in detail but I believe significant reductions can be made, including post-grading discussions with students.
> 0 votes
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Tags: grades, time-management
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thread-13865 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13865 | Time short on thesis defense preperation | 2013-11-04T18:50:18.140 | # Question
Title: Time short on thesis defense preperation
I was supposed to defend my thesis in another week. But, due to the time schedule of one of the committee members I have to give the defense it tomorrow.
My status:
* Developed a rough defense presentation (probably need revision)
* Have less than a day to prepare
Can anyone advise me a plan as to defend this successfully?
EDIT :
**RESULT : FOLLOWED ALL ADVISES POSTED HERE AND DEFENDED SUCCESSFULLY ! THANK YOU ALL !**
# Answer
1. Call together your graduate school friends, and set aside a two hour block of time.
2. Give them the presentation in its current form.
3. Receive (possibly scathing) feedback and take good notes.
4. Go fix the presentation.
5. If your friends are up for it, repeat the process, but not more than once.
6. Practice at least two more times before tomorrow.
7. Give the defense tomorrow, and pass.
Good luck!
(8. Buy lots of beer for your buddies who gave you help to pull this thing together.)
> 24 votes
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Tags: defense
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thread-13868 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13868 | When would be a good time to ask a professor if he will consider being my PhD advisor? | 2013-11-04T23:26:31.053 | # Question
Title: When would be a good time to ask a professor if he will consider being my PhD advisor?
I just started working with this professor, I am beginning to really like the work they are doing in his lab. When do you think I should ask him if I can do a PhD under his tutelage?
# Answer
I would tell the professor that you're interested right away, but don't necessarily expect him/her to say yes or no immediately. Rather than saying "would you advise my Ph.D. research?", just say, "I'm planning to do a Ph.D. and I'm interested in working under your supervision."
You'll probably get a "let's see how this first project turns out", but it will be easier to discuss in the future and the professor will know you are interested.
> 11 votes
# Answer
This depends on how far out you are from starting your PhD (are you a first year undergrad, halfway through a masters or somewhere in between?).
Ideally you should ask as early as possible so that if you are rejected you have time to find someone else. Although the earlier you ask the less likely you are to be accepted, since you may not have shown ability or determination yet. I feel that the best time to ask is probably after the professor has indicated that they like your work.
> 9 votes
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Tags: phd, advisor
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thread-13833 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13833 | Job sites for applied/interdisciplinary jobs in Mathematics? | 2013-11-03T15:42:00.560 | # Question
Title: Job sites for applied/interdisciplinary jobs in Mathematics?
I was wondering whether there're job sites that post jobs in applied/interdisciplinary mathematics, more specially, say postdocs or higher positions in mathematics and medical imaging, mathematics and computer vision. I'm aware of mostly all the popular job sites, mathjobs, euro math jobs, jobs.ac.uk, nordic math jobs etc etc, but most of the jobs there are of 'pure' nature, with very few for applied/interdisciplinary. I find it a little strange, since it seems (I might be mistaken) that they've more funding in the interdisciplinary areas, which should mean they'd have more available jobs too, but I don't see any!
For my particular case, I'm trying to find postdoctoral position in mathematical imaging problems, which would use significant amount of conformal/quasiconformal mappings, Riemann surfaces, differential geometry etc. I guess looking into individual group's webpage is an option, but that's just too much work, since you've to google them first, then see what groups actually work in your areas, then look at their sites etc. But if there's an webpage containing all the information, that'll be much better!
So, if you know any such website for the above (for Europe and the US), I'd appreciate if you could pass them onto me. Thanks! And sorry for having sounded so shameless about the funding comparison.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I know of:
* The SIAM Job board
* The NA-Digest list, ostensibly restricted to numerical analysis but in practice lists jobs in a wide range of math-related subjects
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Tags: job, job-search, mathematics
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thread-13172 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13172 | Discussing work in progress | 2013-10-03T21:07:06.743 | # Question
Title: Discussing work in progress
I am about to begin my hunt for post-doc positions. As such, I will be discussing my dissertation work in some detail with potential post-doc advisers.
I am currently in the data collection phase, and none of this research has been published. I am somewhat worried because, as a requirement for my PhD, I have to contribute novel research to the field. I hope to submit a part of my dissertation to a conference; however most relevant conferences are not until next summer, and submissions are typically due early next year. In other words, this research will not be published for a while.
Is it appropriate to ask for some discretion when discussing my dissertation with professors who do similar research?
# Answer
> 1 votes
I think the following won't apply to you, but may be useful for people in other fields with the same question.
If you work in a field where putting preprints online is an accepted practice, then write up your work and upload a preprint. In this way you clearly establish priority without needing to wait for the article to be refereed.
For instance, in Physics, CS, and Math, most researchers put preprints on arXiv.org.
# Answer
> 0 votes
You are right to be cautious. better safe than sorry. But as Nate said there is an ethical responsibility on the side of the recruiter to keep things you said during the interview confidential. And since you are considering working for him, you surely do not have reason to doubt his honesty, or else you would have ran away!
So: you should speak about your unpublished work and results. Be careful to mention that it is unpublished, though, to be sure they get it and do not mention it inadvertently to someone else.
# Answer
> 0 votes
> Is it appropriate to ask for some discretion when discussing my dissertation with professors who do similar research?
Sure, why not. The correct answer is "certainly". If it doesn't come, run away.
On the other hand, to me it sounds extremely early to look for a postdoc job when you do not yet have any publications about dissertation project (and while you are still collecting data).
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Tags: postdocs, interview
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thread-13875 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13875 | Etiquette or useful guidelines while making video lectures | 2013-11-05T07:18:03.277 | # Question
Title: Etiquette or useful guidelines while making video lectures
I'm in the midst of creating a series of videos to teach statistics online. Do any of you have a list of common do's and don'ts that can make a big difference?
Also, how does one assess how much to explain a topic, since you do not get instant feedback by looking at facial reactions to a given concept?
In real classroom scenario, it's quite easy to course correct if someone didn't understand the original thought, but in video, you have just one shot. The student either gets it or he doesn't.
Any way to minimize this?
# Answer
Do's:
1. Do your best to pretend there are students in the classroom. Obviously, don't ask questions to the void, but scan the room, move about as you might in a real classroom (but don't go off camera), and take "normal" pauses if you're writing on a board. This is an example from a short video I made for some of my pre-algebra students, and there weren't any students in the classroom at the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=est2X6-BVkw
2. Write big enough and clearly enough so the video picks it up. In the video I linked to, I realized that the pen I was using was pretty crappy, so I switched to a better pen (although I probably should have redone the entire clip). Even better is the way Khan Academy does it, with a digital board that he writes on during the lecture.
3. Make sure you have a good microphone, preferably one that is wireless that you put on your shirt/lapel. There is nothing worse than trying to watch/listen to a video that has poor sound.
Don'ts:
1. Don't block the board!
2. Don't be afraid to make a few mistakes that remain on tape. You can spend too much time re-doing videos for simple mistakes. If you make a mistake and recognize it immediately, fix it as you would in a real classroom. If you find a mistake in post-processing, feel free to overlay the video with a text box that fixes the error -- no one will care. Obviously, you can re-record if you wish, but keep in mind what your time is worth.
> How does one assess how much to explain a topic?
This is one of those times you have to do the best you can and try to elicit feedback from the students after they watch the video. The reason I posted the video I linked above is because I realized that a number of students didn't get it when I first taught the topic.
> In real classroom scenario, it's quite easy to course correct if someone didn't understand the original thought, but in video, you have just one shot. The student either gets it or he doesn't.
Well, that's one difference between face-to-face instruction and online video instruction. This is what email correspondence with the professor is for. You can also consider posting response videos to frequent questions you've been asked via email.
> 6 votes
# Answer
Wow, I am on the same boat! Way to go!! Anyway, I'm slowly experimenting as well and am happy to share what I know.
**Synchronous or asynchronous, or both?**
Foremost, you'll need to decide if your online module is going to be synchronous or asynchronous.
*Synchronous* module involves real-time interaction. For example, online conference where students can type in comments into a twitter-like platform or directly ask you through microphone. The pros about this format are that you can clarify any problem instantly and the format mimics class-room interaction; the cons are that one technical error can throw the whole class into chaos, and multi-tasking in talking, reading, typing, and clicking through slides require some skill. It'd be better to have a teaching assistant to comb through the incoming messages and give you a synopsis of students' question.
The number of enrollment matters very much as well. If there are a few students only, you can afford to tune up the interactivity (e.g. more discussion, Q&A, etc.) If the enrollment is high (from my experience, more than 20 or so,) then the format may have to be less spontaneously interactive: perhaps a relatively longer lecture, coupled with break-out group discussion, and a big wrap up as a whole group.
*Asynchronous* module is a bit more like learning anything online. For example, online presentations/workshops through which students can learn the materials at their own pace. Comments and evaluation are usually done through blog post, e-mail, or forums. The pros of this formats are that students have a lot of flexibility, and the lecturer usually has to devote one large fixed chunk of time to set up the workshop, and it can run itself (more or less.) The cons are that the preparation is extremely intensive and assessments have to be carefully chosen and planted here and there to make sure the course is working.
**Hybrid or fully online?**
Some online course would mix in-class lecture and online together. For example, students may meet at a classroom for the first two weeks to learn about the requirement and format of the class plus some fundamental background lectures. And then they'll go back home and switch to online. Some other hybrid model may involve coming to class every alternate week, etc. The pros are quite apparent as the lecturer can establish a real presence, and it also provides some opportunities for networking between students, which is a crucial component especially in graduate schools.
Another sub-genre of hybrid online teaching is called "flipped classroom," through which students will watch the lecture in advance, complete the assignments, and come to class for more challenging group exercises, case studies, or journal critique. I am actually planning two classes using this format and hopefully I can get a real sense of what a difference it may make.
You may also conduct your course fully online... that way no one have to travel, leading this format to have probably the lowest carbon footprints, if limiting such is part of your aspirations.
**Microlectures**
For video lectures, length matters. I'd suggest breaking up your lecture into one-idea, one-bite chunks. Formats like microlecture will be a good place to start. For me, I usually try to explain an idea within 10 slides in 20 minutes, which is usually the attentions span for someone sitting in front of a computer. Never make hourly videos; they are a pain to download and very tedious to sit through. Pausing and coming back later is possible, but it's better to capitalize on the online features and make learning (esp. technical subjects like statistics) more modular.
One good way is to incorporate some **Interspersed exercises**. For instance, after the microlecture on normal distribution, build in some exercises asking the students to check the *z*-score table, or answer some online quizzes about application. What exercises to put in there depends on your class objectives and competencies to be taught.
You also mention that:
> In real classroom scenario, it's quite easy to course correct if someone didn't understand the original thought, but in video, you have just one shot. The student either gets it or he doesn't.
which is not totally true. As long as your script is clear and correct, students can always replay the video to listen again. They can also try the exercises to evaluate themselves. From the exercises you can detect problems and misunderstanding to some extend, and provide feedback accordingly. I would like to emphasize that this is a pretty different generation we are looking at, *gen Y and after are actually much better as a communicator online than in person*. In the tool paragraph I'll talk about some ways to let student provide feedback or ask question about the video.
**Combine self evaluation + formal evaluation**
As mentioned above, build in plenty of self evaluations within and between students: online quiz, blog post, comments for others' post, exercises, etc. Let the students know in advance that how they will be formally evaluated for grades.
**Be present and don't be always present**
One "curse" of being an online teacher is that students think you're as convenient as the materials you put online. This can be bad cause you may get an e-mail at 3:30 am and you happened to have forgotten to mute the phone that night. Be very upfront about your availability and honor the promised office hour. You can use online communication such as Skype, Google Chat, etc. to communicate with students. Also, make sure to give them an expected time for your response (I have been using one office day, which seems doable.)
**Use the right tools**
Looking for the right tools has been the biggest deal for me by far. I broke my class into three major components:
1. Lecture: I use a few ways and they all have their own advantages. MS Powerpoint with voice recording is amazingly easy. Users can also correct and re-record on each single slide if you're not happy about it. Adobe Presentation has been wonderful, you may even edit the soundtrack and record over with the corrected script. Both are quite friendly to multimedia such as embedding videos. **Invest in a good microphone**, for recording lecture on screen, a headphone with built-in microphone (around $30) and a quiet room will work fine. For recording real lecture, have some school IT unit hook you up to a wireless microphone. Video lecture + speech submerged in echo + difficult subject = withdrawal.
2. Software demonstration: I use a software called Snagit to take screenshot video of all software demonstration. The software allows users to export it as movie files, which can be linked to the lectures.
3. Other materials: I use a wiki platform to host all materials. I also authorized all student as editor so that they can maintain a project page in the wiki and collaborate.
Some teachers start going online by videotaping the lecture and upload that online. I feel slightly negative about this approach because it does not exploit the pluses of going online. However, if someone so wants to do that, I'd suggest investing some time to identify a software that allows picture-in-picture. One camera can focus on the lecture, one zoom onto the board or show the slides. Having said that, I have to admit that in most of the "online" lectures I have watched, the board writing is mostly illegible. I haven't incorporate writing into my work, but if I have to, I'll consider to:
1. Use a 3-D project to show my writing onto the board. There you can use thicker pen or play with the zooming to make sure all space on the white screen is used. An added benefit is that projecting on screen does not cause glaring on the video, while a white board may show glaring that obstructs the text.
2. Use a drawing pad and a very simple drawing software (even MS Paint) as your writing tool.
For students' feedback, I have been having some luck with online forum and tweeter-like bill such as Todaysmeet. Todaysmeet allows your to open a chat thread in which student can post questions or comments. You may even archive them if you wish to. Most online meeting software (such as Adobe Connect) also builds in some "raise hand" button; users can click that to initiate a question.
As for video, look for some video markup tools so that student can bookmark a certain section of your video, generate a link and send it to your with related questions. They can, of course, mention the video link and time stamp as well. E.g. "I have a question about a point at 12:45 of the video on \[link to the mp4, etc.\]."
*Provide ONE and ONLY ONE official announcement site* where students can get the most up to date announcement. Because online teaching involves a lot of software and different forms of communication, it's easy to fall through the schedule not knowing some is due or a new lecture has been released. Make sure all announcement can reach the students' official e-mail address.
Lastly, I cannot stress enough **i) pilot run, pilot run, pilot run!!** Try all modules and make sure they work on at least Mac and PC. You may want to check the course shows up correctly on iPad and Android pad as well. For a very similar reason, don't use any Adobe Flash to make animation. **ii) have a plan B, plan C... plan K**: Isolate your critical control points and prepare a second plan if the control point falls through. For example, if you decide to use Skype for an online talk, but Skype's server goes down, think 1) how to contact the students? 2) Where to re-establish the meeting? etc.
**Study guide**
Because you're not there to guide them in person. It's crucial to have a very protocol-based syllabus. I adopted the idea from Smith's Conquering the Content. For every single session, list:
1. **Learning goals and outcomes:** After the session, what will the student know and learn to do?
2. **Learning resources:** List all resources including the required and optional reading, supplementary websites, journal articles etc.
3. **Learning activities:** Describe the flow of learning, provide due date or schedule.
4. **Self assessment:** Lay out how the students can assess their learning.
5. **Formal evaluation:** Lay out how you'd assess their learning.
I like this approach very much. Smith particularly emphasizes not to put time-sensitive information in your video, instead, put them on this learning guide. For instance, in the video you can say "refer to the suggested journal article" instead of saying the exact title. That way, you can just update your learning guide without the need of re-recording your video, saving some time to renew your lecture every year.
**Closing remark**
Sorry for this really long post. I still have a lot to say but I guess I have long passed the socially acceptable length of SE responses. Teaching online is a fun challenge, and all I have described here are just a fraction of this domain. There are online interaction, engagement, etc. which are other cans of worm. If I were to do it again, I'd start simple by switching 2-3 classes to online as an experiment, and build from there. It's dangerous to go online in a semester, I'll invest a good 6-month period to be familiar with all the tools. I'd also suggest planning the whole course before putting anything online, because that helped me eliminate a lot of irregulars, and make the format a lot more uniform.
Hope these comments would help, and have fun!
> 3 votes
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Tags: teaching, etiquette, online-resource, audio-video-recording
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thread-13860 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13860 | What are some good ways to showcase one's research capabilities while applying for graduate programmes | 2013-11-04T16:45:56.850 | # Question
Title: What are some good ways to showcase one's research capabilities while applying for graduate programmes
I would like know to what are some good/effective ways to showcase one's research capabilities, other than paper publications, when the person is out of academia and applying for schools in USA for MS(preferably MS by Thesis)
Specific to my case, I graduated 3 years ago and now I am out of academia. I do not have any paper publications. So I am looking for other good ways to show the admissions committee that I am capable of doing research. But how?
For eg., a personal website where I can list my technical essays (which are not worthy as to be published as a paper) mentioning methods I tried to improve an idea, or where I failed etc. List of research projects I did independently.
Basically I want to know how can I make myself a potential candidate for the MS by thesis programme(other than paper publications) being outside an academia and working independently.
# Answer
> 4 votes
If you are applying for graduate school, you need to show that you can do good research. More than the actual *field* of research, it's more important to show the *ability* to do good research. That being said, of course, doing research in the area in which you're applying shows that you are motivated and equipped to solve research problems in your field.
Here are some things you could try :
1. Reach out to a professor in your alma mater (someone you've worked with during your undergraduate studies) - offer to be a voluntary research student. Work with the prof part time, if you have a full time job, otherwise volunteer to be a full time *unpaid* researcher. This doesn't mean you get a freebie research position, the prof still wants to know you can do quality work. Remember, the prof is also investing his/her time to coach you, and answer questions you (probably will) have during your voluntary research term. This, by far, is the best way I know of that you can do research outside of university.
2. Get an IEEE membership, or use google scholar. Go through research papers in your field, and see if there are any interesting problems you can solve (there are millions of awesome problems yet to be solved :) You may think you're way in over your head, but that's how you learn. Once you have an interesting problem to solve, reach out to peers (senior students, or current graduate students you know) and professors (including potential professors you want to work with during your Masters) with your work. Remember, researchers are looking for talented and passionate people more than anything else - test scores and grades are just an indicator of that, but not the *only* indicators. So if a professor is *genuinely* interested in your work and convinced that you have potential, they *will* be interested.
3. It's about passion, intensity and potential - less about content. At the risk of being repetitive, the work you do *demonstrates* how much potential and passion you have. Your work is not a *means to an end* \- don't "do research" with the aim of getting into graduate school. Graduate school should be a natural continuation of what you are already passionate about doing.
Good luck with your future and applications.
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Tags: research-process, graduate-school, graduate-admissions, independent-researcher
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thread-13894 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13894 | Authorship of class notes | 2013-11-06T04:28:56.243 | # Question
Title: Authorship of class notes
I am taking a graduate class which is based on "notes" written by former students of the course years earlier.
This notes are a bad translation of a published book by a renowned author, and the class consists entirely on expositions from the students based on this notes and the book.
At the beginning of the course, the lecturer suggested that his idea was to collaboratively write some notes of the material covered in class, but so far, he has not given a single lecture, nor any help, insight or even references for the gaps found in the notes, everything has been done by the students. Now he is asking us to write all the expositions of the material we have found to fill the gaps in the notes.
I don't want to contribute to the notes because there is no guarantee that they will be published as a collaborative project instead of as something of the lecturer's authorship, but it might hurt my grades if I refuse to write something.
I am thinking in writing something to be included in the notes but posting it with me as an author in my blog first. Do you have any suggestions?
# Answer
I guess my suggestion is to think carefully about what you want to achieve in this situation. It doesn't feel especially righteous to suggest that you do a competent job of working on the notes, try to learn something and don't worry too much about precisely how much credit you will get out of the collective endeavor; however that sure seems to me like the right course of action. For an original refereed publication, it's worth throwing a few elbows to make sure you get your fair share of credit (and even there it pays to be careful), but it doesn't sound like that's what we're discussing here.
While I don't like saying that, I just can't think of what course of action is likely to actually improve your situation. if you refuse to participate, you'll get a bad grade and make a poor impression (and such impressions do spread from one faculty member to another); I doubt he will really believe its due to high-minded concerns about authorship credit, as opposed to laziness. If you make a fuss about getting credit before you've even written the notes, I don't think that will make an especially good impression either. It wouldn't be right for the lecturer to publish the notes without appropriately crediting the class, but that wouldn't make suing him (or more realistically, making threats about suing) any less stupid. If it makes you feel better to separately post your contribution on a blog as well, knock yourself out. Hopefully some people will read it and learn something.
I think the productive thing to do is to try to meet the expectations of the class, and if later it seems that the faculty member is doing something shady with the results, you can go to your graduate director or another professor and express concerns about credit. But complaining preemptively is not likely to achieve much.
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, ethics, authorship
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thread-13903 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13903 | Can I publish a sum up paper? | 2013-11-06T20:14:28.023 | # Question
Title: Can I publish a sum up paper?
Are there papers that sum up ideas and results from other papers? What are their characteristics/form? Do they provide insights on the field or try to predict the future?
I have read some papers for a class homework and I would like to know whether I should try to summarize and publish it somewhere.
# Answer
The sum up papers you are referring to are called *review articles*. In order to write one, you should know the research area in question **very well**.
Note that there are also systematic reviews and reviews of reviews (tertiary reviews).
> 7 votes
# Answer
I second blabla's answer, short and too the point, with adequate amount of emphasis on **very well** :)
I'll expand it a bit by saying that journals are not typically interested in review papers that merely *summarize* other papers in the field. It is not simply a report on the papers you read: this has some value for your studies, but it is not a valuable publication in academic research.
The value of a review paper is to provide **perspective**, giving the author's deep insight into each of the papers and the way they articulate together, his ideas of the directions in that particular subfield, a critical overview of the recent advances and deadlocks still to overcome.
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However, while your *summary paper* (or *bibliography report*) is probably not publishable in respectable peer-reviewed journals, it doesn't mean you cannot publish it (in the sense of “making it public”). If you are careful about how you title it (not “review paper”), you could upload it to your webpage or to arXiv.org, so that it is useful for other students discovering this field…
> 5 votes
# Answer
This is one of those questions that depend on the area.
In some cases you can do a summary or a review, e.g. a **survey paper** or a **review paper**. These papers are very useful because they provide an overview of the state of the art in some area, (if they are well written) they are good for citing and for anyone who is not yet an expert and is interested in the area (new grad students, interdisciplinary people that can benefit from an overview, etc.)
Sometimes you may prefer to do some **evaluation, benchmarking or comparison**, this is usual in computer science and I guess it's normal in engineering and other sciences (robustness tests, stress tests, statistical significance and that kind of things). So this takes more than listing papers, it takes executing/testing things, maybe on new settings, obtaining new results and publishing these results. The difference with research papers is that you don't develop a new system/theory, you only test them on a new (better) setting.
Finally, some people (but probably not you) can write a **position paper**, where they make educated guesses about how the future will or should be, the directions of research, etc. This is usually done when you are an expert and your opinion matters. Usually nobody cares about the opinion of grad students. Personally I don't care about opinions in general, but these papers are interesting because they influence decision makers and investment in research, they are self-fulfilled prophecies to some extent.
There may be other possibilities that I cannot think of now.
> 1 votes
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Tags: publications
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thread-8184 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8184 | Need help and advice concerning how to apply and look for grad schools | 2013-02-25T02:39:18.443 | # Question
Title: Need help and advice concerning how to apply and look for grad schools
I am very new to this grad school process and currently overwhelmed to the point of tears.
I graduated from Stony Brook with a degree in Sociology in 2010. I was also admitted to Alpha Kappa Delta that year. I was a teaching assistant for 2 classes and had a 3.28 gpa overall but a higher gpa in just sociology.
I took time off to earn money and just give myself a break. I work as a babysitter, make pretty decent money, and I enjoy what I do but I want to go back to grad school now. I have no research experience, I am currently studying for the GRE, reading up on some information and I honestly don't know where to start or if I have a snowball's chance in a furnace of getting in anywhere.
I would like to go back Fall 2014 (giving myself time) and I am looking at programs like Cornell, Rutgers, and Syracuse (probably more as time goes on) and thinking the only way I am getting into any of those is if the faculty has pity on me. I feel I am intelligent and could do grad work, I just don't know how I can prove to admissions I can so they will let me in. I'd really like a Ph.D but if I have to start off with a masters to get into the school, I will. Although my fear of asking this question is currently taking over since I fear someone will squish my dream of grad school like a slow moving spider, if I don't ask, I won't be able to go forward since I don't know where to begin...
Honest advice or information would be much appreciated. I want to go to grad school and I am willing to find ways to make that happen, just no idea where to begin.
Thank you so very much ahead of time...^^
# Answer
The first advice I have to give you is perhaps the most important: in the immortal words of *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,* **DON'T PANIC**.
First, identify the schools to which you'd be interested in applying. You should find a reasonable number (6 plus or minus 2 is typical), and plan on some "long shots," some "typical" schools for you, and one or two schools which you would have as a "fall back" option—in case none of the "long shots" and "typicals" work out for you.
You should also find people who can write letters of support for you. This is perhaps the hardest part for you. Luckily, you've finished relatively recently, so you should be able to find people in academia who can write some letters of support for you. If you have a few people such as employers who can vouch for your work ethic, that could also work.
Doing well on the GRE will also help, but it isn't likely to make a huge difference except in "borderline" cases.
One thing that might help your case is to get directly into contact with people at the various schools you'd be interested in attending. If you can organize a meeting with some of the faculty there and present your case in person, that can leave a more positive impression than just submitting an application "cold."
The other thing you can do to help your case is to have a *clear and compelling explanation* for what you want to do, and why you feel a master's or a PhD is the right way to accomplish those goals. I see far too many applications from candidates who otherwise might be viable who can't elucidate a single reason to go to graduate school beyond. Having a compelling plan can go some ways toward convincing skeptical faculty members that you are serious about graduate studies.
In addition, you can consider all of the advice about getting a bad transcript past admissions as additional suggestions for how to proceed.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Let me recommend to you Phil Agre's Advice for Undergraduates Considering Graduate School. This essay is about 12 pages, with sections such as "What is Graduate School?", "Do I want to go to Graduate School?", "Research", "Applying to Graduate School", "Letters of Recommendation", and "Getting Accepted to Graduate School".
> 6 votes
# Answer
Check this site, which is supported by the Andrew Ng (of Coursera and machine learning class fame) : http://graddecision.org/ this will walk you through entire process and has lot of good information and advice.
Basically figure out where you want study and why that school, prepare a kickass Statement of Purpose(SOP) and contact your professors for letter of recommendations(LOR). And yes, give GRE soon as deadlines mostly in December.
All the best :D
> 0 votes
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Tags: phd, graduate-school, application, masters
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thread-13912 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13912 | Can a PI take someone's idea | 2013-11-07T05:53:53.917 | # Question
Title: Can a PI take someone's idea
Lets say a member of a lab has an entirely theoretical idea like "wouldn't it be nice if we wrote software that does X?" The member did give a talk showing how such code would work if implemented. Due to general skepticism about the idea, nothing ever comes of it.
The member never actually writes any of the software while in the lab.
After leaving the lab, the member uses publicly available data and implements the software, as well as developing the mathematical theory.
Is the member required to acknowledge his former lab in authorship? Is this a breach of ethics?
What if the former lab member had previously agreed to letting the PI use his idea in a grant proposal, but the PI then forced him out of the lab and thus out of the grant proposal.
**1. Can the former lab member write up his work for publication? 2. Does he have to make the PI a co-author if he does?**
Extra Information:
The idea was documented as a presentation to the lab. A small simulation with fake data was used to argue this could work. There was some discussion of how it would work when the grant was written, completely the member just saying to others how this idea worked and so the idea was written up in the grant. The PI does not have any training in this area. However, there are plenty of emails where the PI refers to this as the former lab members idea etc. I feel certain everybody in the lab would acknowledge this was the former lab member's idea.
The former lab member didn't actually write any of the grant as the PI claimed to want to collaborate with someone with greater mathematical expertise. So the collaborator wrote the grant, with occasional emails to ask the former lab member questions.
# Answer
As far as I can see "member" has developed everything from idea to finished product. There is very little sign of anyone else being involved other than possibly as a discussion partner at the lab. To allow someone to use the idea still does not take away the intellectual property held by the member unless there has been important feedback from someone. So I would not hesitate to try to move forward towards publication with the idea. I simply cannot see any ethical issues based on the details you have given.
Having given the green light, there will always be the issue of personalities. You allude to some level of conflict in terms of the move by the member. It is not inconceivable that the PI may have a different view and this view may not even be anchored in reality. So even if you do everything by the book and have all rights, that does not preclude the PI from doing all the things you express, it really depends on the PI's personality.
In the end member should think through if anyone has contributed to the work to the degree that merits co-authorship. Member can, for example, use the the post What are the minimum contributions required for co-authorship to set the authorship in perspective.
> 4 votes
# Answer
There are actually at least three(3) persons involved: the member, the collaborator and the PI.
There are two parts in the work: the software and the mathematical theory.
Based on the information described in the question, the member definitely owns the software because the original idea was his and he implemented it.
The real question is, who is responsible for developing the mathematical theory? Based on the info, *So the collaborator wrote the grant, with occasional emails to ask the former lab member questions.*, I think the collaborator plays a role. But, how much is his contribution? Anyone else contributes to the development of the theory?
There is another question, did the lab ever receive the grant? Grant proposal and the grant itself are completely two different things. Did the lab ever start to work on the grant (not the proposal)?
In my opinion, the ideal solution is for the collaborator to write the paper if he is the one who develops the mathematical theory. The member will be the co-author. Whether or not the PI is another co-author depends on how much his contribution is.
If the member develops the whole thing including the theory without much help from the collaborator and/or the PI, then the member should be the main author. Who should be the co-authors depends on the invidual contribution.
The above is my opinion based on the limited information I know.
> 3 votes
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Tags: ethics, intellectual-property
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thread-13943 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13943 | Etiquette when unable to attend a conference | 2013-11-08T08:33:13.697 | # Question
Title: Etiquette when unable to attend a conference
I'm supposed to give a presentation at an academic conference in the coming days but have fallen ill. What is the best way to send my regrets? Should I also send a doctor's note? It doesn't provide details of my condition but does have other personal information such as date of birth and home address. I just wonder if any of this is the conference organiser's business. At the same time, sending an email without proof that I am truly incapacitated doesn't seem like it's enough either. I'm still not sure what to do about the presentation I'd prepared - whether or not to send it anyway etc. I'm trying to focus on getting better, but I am worried that this medical issue will ruin my good name. Any advice would be appreciated.
# Answer
Just tell the convener that you will be unable to present due to unforeseen circumstances. That is enough and will be understood — there can be many reasons and it won't be a first time. He/she will be glad that you inform him/her at all — it happens all to often that people simply don't turn up without giving any information at all. The convener shouldn't need a doctor's note.
That being said, is any co-author travelling to the conference, or perhaps a colleague familiar with your work? If yes, you could ask one of them if they are willing to take over your presentation. I've done this for colleagues and although I wasn't able to answer detailed questions from the audience, it's still beneficial both for me (visibility to experts in the field) and to the first author.
> 36 votes
# Answer
Just inform the organisers as soon as possible, they might want to rearrange the programme accordingly, and therefore might to contact other authors to see if they agree to change their scheduled slot. You don't have to provide proof, as gerrit says, things like that happens quite often.
In addition to gerrit's suggestion to see if a colleague could present your talk, you could also check with the organisers if you can present your work remotely (if your illness allows for it). I attended a conference recently where one author presented his slides through a Skype conversation, and another talk was presented as a video, while the author was available in the end for any question. Although it's not ideal, it's still better than not presenting your work at all.
> 20 votes
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Tags: conference, etiquette
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thread-13946 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13946 | Paper contributions and first authorship | 2013-11-08T09:47:59.287 | # Question
Title: Paper contributions and first authorship
Twelve months ago I started working on a project (which began at that time) with my advisor. Six months ago another student (refered to as A in the following) joined the project.
We are now publishing a paper on our results. My advisor asked me if I would find it reasonable that A’s name was put **before** mine in the article. Our advisor’s reason is that she believes A has contributed a lot more to the publishable results and making figures for the article.
I agree with this latter part: student A has definitely been the working horse behind these results and made the graphics for the article. However, my contributions were in the first 6 months of the project, laying the foundations for the setup, etc.
I’m not sure how to feel about my advisor’s question. Is my contribution worth less because they are further back in time? And does making article-figures count as “ammunition” to be put first in an article?
# Answer
Authorship questions are among the most difficult aspects of academia and where feelings may run high. First, it seems you have a reasonably good working relationship with your advisor, it is good that she asked you. Some would tell you, some would just do it. So from this perspective, your advisor does what she (in this case) should.
The question of ordering of names is tricky and there are no simple rules, or actually there are simple rules, but they may be difficult to apply in the individual case due to a variety of reasons, including anything from personality clashes to just simple difficulties to asses who has done most. There are examples of point systems where authors are given points depending on what they have done and how much. In one case, the study design and writing (discussion) had much higher weight than aspects of experimentation and data analysis. the problem is that one should agree on such matters before starting on the writing.
So, to assess your and your co-author's contributions, you need to split the project down in at least four parts:
1. Who came up with the original idea and designed the study (high credit)
2. Who did the experimental work (equivalent) that generated the data
3. Who did the analysis (equivalent) of the data
4. Who contributed to interpretation and discussion towards the conclusions
Each of these have some weight with 1 and 4 most often larger than 2 and 3. Then when several persons split a chore you need to figure out roughly how much of each point each person has contributed. This would then give you a profile of who has done the most (important) work etc. I completely agree with anyone who would say this is easier said then done but you probably see the principle.
So to the question(s). If you have work earlier or later on this is of less significance, it is what type of work you have done and of course how much. figures can be extremely important. Good graphics convey the message in condensed form. plotting data is, however, in most cases not much more than a technical issue. Creating conceptualizations of processes, events etc. can be key to the paper so making figures *can* be a considerable input to be counted.
You can also check the text on this link for a text on authorship. An example of how authorship can be determined is given on AuthorOrder
> 5 votes
# Answer
Peter gave a good summary of the types of issues encountered in determining authorship, maybe I can answer some of your more specific questions:
***“Is my contribution worth less, because they are further back in time?”*** — It’s neither less nor more. There is no unique scale to weigh the different *important* requirements of authorship, and except in clear-cut cases, it is somewhere between a judgment call and a negotiation.
***“Does making article-figures count as “ammunition” to be put first in an article?”*** — The typical standard to judge authorship issues is the **intellectual (or scientific) contribution** of each co-author. Having the ideas, setting the foundations for the work is very important. But obtaining the results, analyzing them, presenting them in a convincing manner (which includes making figures, writing the paper, etc.) are also crucial: without it, there would be no paper!
***“I’m not sure how to feel about my advisor’s question.”*** — We can’t answer that for your, as it also depends on your relationship to your advisor. She has more experience than you in makings such decisions: do you trust her to do the right thing? (at least according to her) Or do you suspect her of trying to screw you over?
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Finally, a solution may be to used footnotes to indicate **equal-coauthorship**, if that is something the journal accepts. This is typically indicated by a sentence like
> *“The first two authors contributed equally to this work”*
or
> *“The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors”*.
> 5 votes
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Tags: authorship, paper-submission
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thread-13949 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13949 | Are spelling issues part of the reviewer's job? | 2013-11-08T10:36:23.703 | # Question
Title: Are spelling issues part of the reviewer's job?
During peer-review, is it part of the job of the reviewer to check the spelling, typos, grammar, and suggest improvement? It will help the paper and seems part of the job, but seeing some manuscripts it could take ages to write down every tiny correction in the review.
So, is it the job of the reviewer to judge quality of the writing?
# Answer
> 15 votes
No, the major goal is to examine the validity, integrity and contribution of the work. Since these can be challenged, causing the work to be rejected or subjected to a major revision, editing at this stage would just be like staining the wood before the carpentry work.
Also, at least for me, my mind runs on two different gears when engaged in editing and reviewing. If I have to edit, I can only edit; if I have to think about the concept, I can't edit... perhaps in my mind editing only happens when the concept is already there.
Having said that, there are three areas I always do a full body pat down, once for concept, once for edit:
1. **Table**: I suggest always comb through the table title, column and row titles, numeric agreement, footnotes, superscripts, etc.
2. **Illustration**: Check labels, title, and footnotes.
3. **Abstract**: Look for typos and point out if a particular sentence appears to be terse or even misleading.
The reason for putting the abstract under all lenses is apparent. The reasons for checking the illustration and table are that these are usually the most neglected places in copy editing and revision. And yet, these are the most viewed sections in a paper. Nine out of 10 errors I've spotted in journal articles are in these two hot spots.
In the main text, if there is any sentence that is very grammatically challenged, I cite the page and line in the review, and comment on the need of a rewritten version.
If there are typos, I collectively write one separate comment requesting a through spell-checking, and give 2-5 occasions in the article as examples.
# Answer
> 17 votes
The simple answer is no. Unless the review instructions ask for such comments, it is not mandatory. When I do a review, I usually do some corrections if there are not too many of them. If the paper is littered with such errors I might make corrections for one or two manuscript pages and then state to both authors and editors that the papers needs substantial checking and correction beyond my capacity. I also sometimes just leave that comment without making example corrections.
One of the more problematic issues is the difference between native English speakers and this who have English as a second or third language. Clearly authors who are not native speakers, should receive more help than others. There are also services that do language corrections and each publisher typically can suggest such services. If there are native English speakers as co-authors, some responsibility should fall on them to correct the language, after all, they are credited, or perhaps discredited, by the paper as well. So my point is that some leniency has to be considered depending on the severity of the problem but the bottom line is no-one is forced to correct spelling and grammar.
# Answer
> 7 votes
It is not the job of a reviewer to proofread an article.
However, it is the responsibility of a reviewer to comment on issues that would improve the state of a manuscript. Therefore, one should not completely turn a blind eye to issues of formatting, spelling, and grammar. Moreover, there are some papers where the grammar, spelling, and usage of English is so poor that it actually hinders appropriate evaluation of the manuscript.
Thus, it is appropriate to include some comments on the general level of usage in a review, although one would not want to list tons of typographical errors as part of the review; a comment that corrections are necessary should suffice.
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Tags: publications, peer-review
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thread-13963 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13963 | Moving a detailed literature survey in Appendix to reduce size of chapter? | 2013-11-08T19:16:35.740 | # Question
Title: Moving a detailed literature survey in Appendix to reduce size of chapter?
In my dissertation, I am solving a problem by using techniques used to solve another problem. As a result, I have to do two literature surveys for both problems. I ended up with a huge chapter! - most of it is basically a literature survey.
I do not want my examiners to hate me when they find a long thesis, but I don't want to get comments such as: "Why have you not considered the work of X in your survey?"
Is it a good practice to move part of this huge chapter's survey to an Appendix chapter, while keeping a section that speaks about the general approaches followed in the literature?
# Answer
> 6 votes
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.
# Answer
> 5 votes
**Disclaimer:** I am a current graduate student starting to write my own doctoral dissertation.
The advice which I have got from several faculty members with whom I have been working for the last 3-4 years is that there is no *true* length to a literature review.
A literature survey should encapsulate your research problem, identify the current gap in the literature and then, factor in methods using which you attempt to answer your research question.
If that makes it long, its long. My literature review is probably around ~30-40 pages. Given that I work in a rather interdisciplinary area, its inevitable.
I advise you to include all the literature that is relevant.
The appendix is usually reserved for additional figures, tables, links, code, supplementary analysis etc.
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Tags: thesis
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thread-13968 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13968 | How do I write a good abstract? | 2013-11-08T21:15:27.403 | # Question
Title: How do I write a good abstract?
So, I'm sitting here, rewriting the abstract of a paper I hope to submit shortly. The abstract I had was old and not very good.
I have on good authority that an abstract is an important part of a paper, because it is often what makes a reader take a closer look at the paper.
So, how does one write a good abstract that will make people take a closer look? What are things to include and things not to include? What are common mistakes, if any, to watch out for?
By way of example, here the abstract I am rewriting, in its current form. This is for an applied statistics paper. Feel free to critique.
> We describe and implement a method to select a Bayesian model for a collection of DNA sequences. This method assumes the DNA sequences are generated from one of a particular class of distribution models. These models capture long range correlation structure among the sites of the DNA sequences. We choose a model from the class by using a simulated annealing search algorithm with a scoring function based on the prior predictive distribution corresponding to the model. We apply this method to model human and mouse Recombination Signal Sequences (RSS). We use the posterior predictive distribution corresponding to the model to predict which of a larger group of sequences are RSS in the context of a cross-validation setup.
ADDENDUM: Please comment on whether there is a standard abstract length limit in your field, unless it is journal specific.
EDIT: Here is a second attempt at an abstract. This is based partly on the discussion at How to Write an Abstract, which is a nice discussion of the main points to think about. The results teaser at the end is a little unorthodox, but it is intended as an inducement for people to look further at the paper. @F'x, do you have any feedback?
> Given a specialised set of DNA sequences, it is a biologically
> interesting problem to predict which members of a larger set of DNA
> sequences belongs to that set. In this paper we consider the
> particular example sets of Recombination Signal Sequences (RSS).
>
> Problems of this kind are commonly addressed in the biological
> literature. However, we approach this problem by selecting a
> Bayesian model for this specialised set. This is an approach that is
> rarely used in this context, but as we show, can give good results.
>
> We select our model from particular class of distribution models. These models capture long range correlation structure among the sites of the sequences. We choose a model from the class by using a simulated annealing search algorithm with a scoring function based on the prior predictive distribution of the model. We apply this method to model human and mouse Recombination Signal Sequences
> (RSS). We use the posterior predictive distribution of the model to
> predict which of a larger group of sequences are RSS in the context
> of a cross-validation setup. We summarize the results of the
> prediction in figure and tabular form, showing good results. Example
> statistic: out of 700,000 candidate sequences, 30 to 50 are actually
> RSS. The algorithm ranks these, in descending order, by how likely
> they are to be RSS. It ranks almost all the RSS (90\\%+) in the top 100.
# Answer
One of the things that is too much overlooked is that an abstract is read by a more diverse crowd of people than the rest of your paper. So, you have three different goals:
1. Give a take-home message to people who aren't interested enough to read the full paper.
2. Convince the undecided to read it.
3. Make it easier for experts to find it.
Nowadays, #3 is not so much of a constraint: Google and other search engines allow for full-text searching. So, focus on #1 and #2: **be concise, crystal-clear, attractive**.
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*Enough with the generalities. I love to critique, so I'll give it a try: I'm not in your field, which I think makes me a good test reader for your abstract, but also makes it harder for me to actually suggest actual changes to it. Anyway…*
I think it's decent: no catastrophe, but far from enthusiastic. My main comment would be that it lacks a clear statement of the broader issue you are trying to address. You could start with it, something like:
> The past few years have seen large advances in the statistical modeling of DNA sequences, mostly based on genetic algorithms. In this work, we explore the efficiency of an alternative and simpler route, and show how to efficiently choose within a class of distribution models.
I have filled in with semi-random keywords/buzzwords, just to give you a sense of how to achieve it. The idea is to put your findings in perspective:
* Roughly, what subfield are you working in?
* What is the main trend in this field?
* How do you position your work with respect to this recent research?
Then trim down the rest of the text:
> We showcase a method to select a Bayesian model for a collection of DNA sequences, generated from a specifically chosen distribution model capture long range correlation structure. We choose the model based its prior predictive distribution. Applying this method to model human and mouse Recombination Signal Sequences (RSS), we predict which of a larger group of sequences are RSS in the context of a cross-validation setup.
(I hope I did not lose or betray some of the meaning, it's hard when you don't get the finer points of the text… but you get the idea anyway!)
> 14 votes
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Tags: publications, writing, presentation, abstract
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thread-13952 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13952 | Is it okay to put up a submitted paper and a paper which is about to be submitted on Academia.edu? | 2013-11-08T13:31:16.263 | # Question
Title: Is it okay to put up a submitted paper and a paper which is about to be submitted on Academia.edu?
I'm applying to graduate school (CS MS/PhD) this year and I wanted to put up a copy of my papers online so that admission committees would be able to see them. The problem is one of the papers is currently under submission at a conference and notification for the same is only on Jan 22nd. Another one is still in preparation and I will be submitting it soon to a journal/conference. So I was just wondering if it is okay if I put up these papers in my Academia.edu page? Actually one of my friends' told me that since Academia.edu submissions are searchable on Google, the conference I have submitted to and the journal or conference I would be submitting the other paper will have a problem. Is he right? How else can I provide a way for others to view these papers?
# Answer
> 6 votes
For your submitted paper: Check the copyright and "prior publication" policies of the conference you've submitted to. It's very likely that they allow you to post a "preprint" of your paper on your web page. This is a very common practice in Computer Science, since it allows researchers to share their work without being delayed by the peer review process. You might also consider posting on a preprint server such as arXiv.org as this will further increase your audience (this is also usually allowed). And it would also be a good idea to include a copy of the paper with your applications, or at least a link; don't expect the admissions committee to find it by themselves.
For your not-yet-submitted paper: Again, there shouldn't be a problem with the journal/conference, but it's probably best to wait to make it public until it is completely finished and ready to submit. However, you could certainly include a copy with your applications.
# Answer
> 6 votes
This may not be relevant to OP's situation but it's relevant to the general question: There is one additional issue not addressed so far: Are you sure that you want everyone in the world seeing your paper now? Are you sure, even, that you want admissions committees seeing it? If a paper is accepted for a conference, that means that someone has decided it's at least good enough for that conference. You have a little bit of confirmation that you're not embarrassing yourself by posting your paper publicly. But conference papers don't necessarily have to be good in a self-contained way. It might be enough, from the point of view of the conference organizers and reviewers, if the paper is intriguing and could lead to interesting discussion and feedback.
The *safest* thing to do is to restrict circulation of your papers to people you know until the paper has been published. I'm putting aside issues about copyright, prior publication, etc. My point is that having had a paper reviewed, having gotten feedback, and having revised to the extent that reviewers think the paper is worth publishing provides good reason to think that you are *not* embarrassing yourself by making the paper publicly available. (Alternatively, just get lots of feedback from people who are qualified to give it.)
That's the safest thing to do. I'm not saying it's the best thing to do. There are tradeoffs. By putting the paper out on the web early, you promote your ideas, advertise what you're about, and promote discussion.
I'm not sure that any of this applies to CS, and I'm not sure that any of it applies to your situation. It's more relevant to people who are going on the academic job market after graduate school. I think that what people are probably looking for in graduate applicants is that applicants have a lot of promise. If there is good raw material, but also rough edges, that's OK: Helping you grow past the rough edges is the job of the graduate program.
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Tags: conference, computer-science, paper-submission, preprint
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thread-12838 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/12838 | How to look for a master's program? | 2013-09-19T10:55:05.987 | # Question
Title: How to look for a master's program?
I am looking to join a masters program for next year. Unfortunately, I've found that comparing masters programs is difficult since the information is not displayed the same way in every university page. My question is: what is the best method to search masters, gather their information and analyze so as to make the best choice?
Other questions about searching masters is the following one, which is directly relates to the previous one: does exist any webpage, document or reference sorting masters and giving unified information about them?
# Answer
You can also find search tools specific to regions, such as MastersPortal.eu. If you just need the same sort of general information that you will find on a program's Web site, all in one place, this will be useful.
If you know of a specific major that you want to study, many professional associations or organizations will put a long list of programs on their Web sites, see for example this list of linguistics programs at the LINGUIST list or this database of schools from the TESOL International Association. Sometimes these lists include detailed overviews of the programs, courses offered, and estimated costs, but usually not enough information to know about the quality of instruction.
For thorough student reviews and comparisons of schools, see StudentsReview. This Web site has various tools for searching for and comparing the various details of schools, based on your personal requirements, such as the University Comparison and the UltraSearch.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Actually, I've gathered quite a bit of information on the website phds.org. It is specifically suited for researching Ph.D.-granting institutions, but there is also an option for ranking Masters-granting institutions.
> 3 votes
# Answer
When searching for programs I found that I overlooked a lot of good programs when looking at "database" type sites. They are useful for getting basic data and narrowing the programs you look at, but also consider getting advice from people in (or near) your field and (if applicable) looking at publications in your interest area to see where the research is coming from. I also found organizing the information that was the most relevant to me in a spreadsheet useful, even if it is time intensive.
> 2 votes
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Tags: masters
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thread-13939 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13939 | How many faculty positions should one apply to? | 2013-11-08T04:05:49.537 | # Question
Title: How many faculty positions should one apply to?
Since the start of the hiring season, I've seen around 20-30 job openings that looked interesting for assistant professor positions in my area of computer science.
However, it's somewhat awkward to ask my recommendation letter writers to send letters to 20 different places. (Is it not?) How many places do people usually target simultaneously?
# Answer
Your chance of getting any particular job you apply for is small. To make your probability of success significant, you need to multiply that by many applications. Your recommenders know this is the situation. Try to make things as easy for them as possible. E.g., they would probably prefer to send out 20 letters at once rather than being contacted by you 20 times in the space of a month.
> 16 votes
# Answer
Don't hesitate to apply to a job because of the burden on letter writers. Applying to 20 or 30 schools is quite normal (and I know people who've done as many as 100).
* Firstly, letter writers know it comes with the territory.
* Secondly, the thing you should focus on is making each individual letter less of a burden. It's normal for them to send their letters to an administrator in your department (or sometimes the one where you got your Ph.D.) and to have the administrator send out the letters. You can also use a service like Interfolio, where they only have to submit once.
> 13 votes
# Answer
If you're coming out of a graduate program, your department or an office in your university may be used to handling the process of sending out letters. Another alternative is to use a service like Interfolio that allows your letter writers to upload a single letter. You can't see the letter (that's what you want), but you can cause it to be sent to whomever you want.
> 2 votes
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Tags: job-search
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thread-13977 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13977 | How to reduce the load of professors writing recommendation letters for graduate school application? | 2013-11-09T19:04:10.020 | # Question
Title: How to reduce the load of professors writing recommendation letters for graduate school application?
If a student can't decide which school to apply at one time, and different schools have different' deadlines, how could the student do to reduce the load of professors writing recommendation letters for graduate school application?
One possible solution. I heard of interfolio (http://www.interfolio.com/). Does anyone know if it might help? My concerns are that each school has its own only application system, and it might not be good for recommendation letter to not have specific school name in it. What do you think?
# Answer
> 13 votes
You can reduce the amount of work the professor needs to do by following this excellent advice from Prof. David E. Keyes. Here are some of the most relevant bits:
> To ensure that such a writer is well primed to execute your reference efficiently, you should create a self-contained packet containing all the information the author will need to dispatch the reference in one sitting: (1) contact information for the recipient of the letter, (2) a description of the position and application closing date, (3) your own application essays and cover letter, (4) a resume, (5) relevant transcripts and scores, and (6) an explanation of the niche of the writer! It is very useful, as a reference writer, to receive a reminder along the following lines: "Professor Keyes, your letter will be the one that comments most authoritatively about my analytical ability, my promptness in completing projects, and my reasons for wanting to pursue X next fall. Remember that you gave me an A– in partial differential equations two years ago and it was your suggestion that led to my summer at Los Alamos with Y." You should provide this packet in both hard and soft copy. Writers of lots of references maintain files that may be hard or soft, or both, and you should make it easy for those writers to locate your files quickly for subsequent updating and future requests.
>
> Some faculty write many dozens of letters of reference during peak months, and they may even ask candidates for sample text to be incorporated into letters, to ensure that they capture their niches. You should not be flustered at such a request, and should not be modest in complying. You should be aware, though, that your words will not pass directly into the delivered product; they will be used simply to get the author's juices flowing following the formulaic paragraphs of the letter.
>
> To help maximize the time a writer has available for each candidate, you should complete the reference process as far as legally possible yourself. For hardcopy applications, this means printing out and filling in as many fields as possible, both about you and about the writer (title, affiliation, contact data). For reference letters collected online (the vast majority for positions filled by junior candidates), you can usually fill in each writer's basic contact information. Such streamlining is always appreciated and leads to fewer errors and faster completion.
I don't think something like Interfolio would help, because the last thing you should do is force the professor to learn to use a new tool just so he/she can write a letter for you.
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Tags: recommendation-letter
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thread-7231 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/7231 | What is a "TV-L 13" position? | 2013-01-15T10:41:00.470 | # Question
Title: What is a "TV-L 13" position?
I just received a PhD invitation letter from a German University which mentions that my remuneration will be 2/3 of full TV-L 13 position. I do not know what a TV-L 13 position is (Google is of no help here), and didn't want to be rude, so I am asking here first. Is this a common position or specific to Germany? If anyone knows, currently how much remuneration corresponds to a TV-L position?
# Answer
TV-L is the German public servant remuneration grade table (*Tarifvertrag für den Öffentlichen Dienst der Länder* (TV-L)). It is how civil servants Germany are graded for their salaries and similar conditions for their work.
Depending on where your position is, you'll be under TV-L West, or East, or Berlin, or Hessen. Something in your letter might specify this. Either way, there is information on the details at the Öffentlicher Dienst website.
Assuming you'd be in West Germany, taxed as a single (i.e., not married or living with a life partner or children), this boils down to a basic salary of €2103/month with a net salary after all taxes and health insurance payments of €1383/month.
This will increase as you remain hired, you'll go up the staircase of salaries, going from 1 to 2 after 1 year, from 2 to 3 after an additional 2 years, etc. Each step is a monthly salary increase of about €150/month net.
> 65 votes
# Answer
Found this link after Googling for "Tarifvertrag für den Öffentlichen Dienst der Lände" (Thanks to Mike for explaining first )
**Tarifvertrag für den öffentlichen Dienst der Länder (Collective agreement for the public sector in the countries)**
According to this, 13 is the pay group for Ph.D. students and postdoctoral associates. And the gross pay is from 3200 Euros upwards. (Basically it would be about 2000 Euros for 2/3 of that).
BTW, in one of the invitations, it says "E13". I'm not sure what this refers to but, I guess it's same as TV-L 13.
Hope this helps, and if you took this position, please explain further about TV-L 13.
Cheers....
> 8 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, terminology, salary, germany
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thread-13980 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13980 | How to effectively manage a new collaborator? | 2013-11-10T09:53:12.980 | # Question
Title: How to effectively manage a new collaborator?
As a 3rd year PhD student in a Canadian university, I've been given the opportunity to work directly with my supervisor's long-term collaborator, who is a young faculty member in an Australian university. I shall be visiting him for a month to initiate a (STEM-theory) project and am looking for advice on how to make the collaboration fruitful.
More specifically, it took time for me to understand my own supervisor's priorities, strengths-weaknesses and way of working. With that understanding, I have been able to work effectively with him. How can I quickly learn the best way of working with my new collaborator?
# Answer
> 4 votes
I just wanted to comment that your choice of words in the question is somewhat inappropriate: you do not "manage" a new collaborator when your collaborator is more senior than you are. As a graduate student, you cannot have any reasonable expectation of asking for and receiving commitments from a professor—if anything, it's the other way around, even if you will be the one doing the majority of the work!
However, this also tells you something about how to handle the process. Remember that the professor is quite likely to have many more time commitments than you will. Therefore, you will need to be cognizant of that when making plans. What takes you a few days of effort may take your collaborator substantially longer, if he has to do it himself. So it may be very useful to find out if there is another point of contact you will be working with in the other professor's laboratory group, and ask if you can coordinate things directly what that individual.
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Tags: phd, collaboration
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thread-5585 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5585 | How does one keep oneself updated with new research without forgetting older results? | 2012-12-03T17:12:04.900 | # Question
Title: How does one keep oneself updated with new research without forgetting older results?
The title is fairly generic in nature, so I'm trying to elaborate in the body. I'm interested in answers pertaining to Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), but I'm certain the question would be equally relevant in fields which have been around for more than a couple of decades, and hence I hope to get responses from researchers in other disciplines as well!
What I'm trying to understand is how researchers (who have been working for quite sometime) in any specialized field (like TCS) keep track of results that have already been published - not just seminal results, but also results which have a lesser (but not insignificant) impact on the field but were published years or decades before. At the same time, one has to keep track of results being published in (at least) the notable conferences in the current year as well, in order to absorb the new ideas presented there and incorporate/extend them in one's own work.
I find it kind of incredible to believe that all of the above is possible without any kind of disciplined approach to reading and subsequent assimilation of the ideas on a regular basis - which is why I'm asking members of academia about their experiences/practices on this. In particular:
1. How frequently (if at all) do you revisit "classic" results?
2. Do you keep written/electronic notes on a regular basis to keep track of continuing progress in a field (say, for instance, inapproximability results for geometric problems) - or do you prefer to keep it all in your mind?
3. To keep track of current state of art, do you only attend/read Tier-I conferences, or do you get useful ideas from results published in Tier-II/III conferences as well?
4. What kind of time/resources would you typically set aside for reading, as opposed to working on a problem?
In short, I'm trying to find what kind of things would you expect a top researcher to "know" off the top of his head, and at what level of depth - and how would you go trying to maintain that level of perception over the years?
(I understand that the question **IS** subjective, but I'm hoping that it satisfies the guidelines for a "good subjective" question!)
# Answer
Here are a few additions to Suresh's list (converted from a comment at TCSgrad's suggestion):
* **Don't even try to remember details.** Just remember that somebody published something related, and use Google (or Mendeley or Papers) to find the paper again when you need it.
* **Chase references.** Interesting papers tend to cite other interesting papers. When you read any paper, also look at the papers in its bibliography.
* **Chase citations.** Interesting papers tend to be cited by other interesting papers. When you read the paper, find other papers that cite it (via Google Scholar, for example) and look at them, too.
* **Follow whims.** If you see a paper with an interesting word in the title, or an interesting figure on the first page, at least read the abstract.
* **Don't try to read everything.** That's impossible. Just try to read a little more.
* **Stop reading.** Eventually you have to do your own research. Don't worry about reinventing the wheel; sometimes the best (and even fastest) way to understand what someone else did is to ignore them, figure it out yourself, and *then* read their paper.
> 26 votes
# Answer
I'm very bad at keeping track of things, so maybe all I can share is what NOT to do :), but I find it easiest to keep track of ongoing work in the community (and I'm in TCS too) in three ways:
* By working on problems and being willing to indulge in flights of fancy (which allows me to read beyond the narrow scope of the problem I'm dealing with)
* By perusing the list of accepted papers at a conference when it's announced.
* (more recently) subscribing to relevant arXiv feeds and saving papers to read on my IPad - this works only partially, but I always have things ready to read when I feel like it.
This system is not perfect - I still miss lots of interesting papers - but I've slowly come to accept that it will be impossible to keep track of all interesting results in the field (let alone the flashy ones). For breadth beyond the above I rely a lot on surveys and slides that I can quickly browse.
> 12 votes
# Answer
**Read review articles** in your field. That's where someone else already did the hard work of reading and summarizing the literature. Tenured-track professors have a strong incentive to write invited review articles because it's prestigious and gets them a lot of citations.
**Maintain a library database of papers you've read** along with the dates you read them. Add your own keywords to them so you can find them later and cite them. Keep this database separate from the new databases you'll make when you start writing a new paper (don't make the mistake of trying to keep it all in the same file -- you'll never find anything when it gets too big). I do this in Endnote, though obviously you could do it in bibtex or some other program.
Put a repeating monthly reminder on your calendar to **send you an email when the new issue of each journal comes out**. You can do this easily on Google Calendar or MS Outlook. Delete the email after you've looked through the new articles. (Remember to put the important ones you read in your library database!)
Also put semi-annual reminders on your calendar with **abstract submission due dates** for the relevant conferences for your field. I'd suggest putting two email reminders about a month and also a week before the actual due dates.
Carry a notebook (not a laptop or other device) with you at the conference and **write down titles of the important events and what was important about them**. Yes, handwritten notes! You won't have time to type up pretty documents. Managing battery life and surfing the internet is a waste of time when you could be networking with the best researchers in your field. You'll have time after the conference to go back through your notes and then add those presentations to your library database.
> 6 votes
# Answer
I am not *experienced researcher* but I will say what I usually do:
* **Subscribe for Google scholar alert.**
I found this very helpful specially for new topics and to keep you updated. Once google scholar indexed a paper contains your word, it will send you alert. *It is simply an awesome feature to know almost every new paper in your subfield.*
* **Subscribe in ArXiv**
My goal here is to see the general field papers. (I am subscribing to Artificial Intelligence and Game Theory). You will get the abstracts along with the paper title. If you found this paper is interesting then google it.
* **Follow up with Top-conferences and journals**
*(in Computer Science)* Sometimes visiting the new DBLP page for the conference/journal might be useful. Same goes to visiting the pioneers DBLP pages.
I do maintain a plain text file contains some (crazy) ideas/strong statements/question related to the papers I read. When it is the time to look for new project/idea, I usually consult this file.
> 4 votes
# Answer
At some point in your academic career you have to be pragmatic. By this I mean you will *read* a paper when you need to, and you often read the papers only in parts. Still you will read plenty of papers: research, teaching, refereeing there are many occasions.
On the other hand you have to keep your eyes open. You should have a rough idea what is going on in your field. But you don't have to know the details, since you don't have the time for this. Many ideas how to do this were already posted. Here is what I do (I also work in TCS and Discrete Math).
* Subscribe to the arxiv's rss feed you are interested in.
* Read the important blogs, they will also list paper accepted at main conferences.
* If you are interested in a journal, subscribe to the newsletter.
* Talk to your peers.
Often I just scan the titles, and the list of authors. If I find something interesting I have a look at the abstract and try to understand the statement of the main result. If you don't already use a rss reader I strongly recommend to use one to keep track of everything in one single place.
> 3 votes
# Answer
Research Lei was an interesting attempt at visualizing groups of people working together, clustering documents with similar subjects of work, using a simple python interface. I am not sure if it still works but making such graphs and reviewing your community gives you a global view of work being done in the field.
> 2 votes
# Answer
You don't need to know everything. Older results only matter as much as they're relevant to what you're researching and writing about now. Also, since research is about discovering NEW things, older results can pretty much just sit there and gather dust until they become relevant for current research.
> 0 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, research-process, career-path, productivity
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thread-14005 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14005 | Following literature - What is a good configurable publication notifier? | 2013-11-11T10:57:35.040 | # Question
Title: Following literature - What is a good configurable publication notifier?
I would like to keep up to date with public literature in my research field. All relevant publications are of too big a volume to follow and so the problem invites some automatic mechanism of filtering and notification.
Do you know of any good mechanism (desktop\online application etc.) that could be configured to alert on new publications according to specific criteria?
Three criteria that I would think would be very useful in such a mechanism are :
* Follow by ***researcher name*** \- I would like to know of any new publication Prof. X was involved with.
* Configurable ***citation*** filter - I would like to know of any new publication which cites any of Prof. X papers or a specific one.
* And\Or\Not ***keywords*** \- I would like to know of any new publication that has both keywords A and (B or C).
Do you know of such existing app? Any recommendation to such (or similar) applied functionality would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
# Answer
Your institution (for example its Harman Science Library) and many others have the database product Web of Knowledge. Precisely the alert criteria that you described, and more, are available through that product.
The selection of journals covered in its flagship collection, Web of Science, is curated with the goal to cover all of, and more than, the core literature of all scholarly fields, naturally without attempting to cover all journals in existence. Alerts in Web of Knowledge can also simultaneously search up to a dozen other collections including Medline, depending on your institution's subscription. You can see the collections in the subscription that is available to you by choosing the "Select a Database" tab. You can browse and search the journal lists for the various collections.
> 3 votes
# Answer
If you are in life sciences, I suggest two methods.
1. PubMed updates: PubMed is the database that contains the abstracts of all life sciences publications. If you register (free), you can have query updates sent to your mail regularly. The way this works is that you run a database query once (these queries can be quite advanced), and then all new results to this query are compiled and sent to you. *This is a good method if you want to keep up with every publication in a relatively field*.
2. F1000: The Faculty of 1000 is a group of ~5000 scientists that regularly read papers and rank papers of special interest along with a short explanation. If you register (not free unless your institute has this service), you can also receive weekly updates according to specified sub-fields of interest. *This is a good method for keeping up with interesting publications in a wide field* (where the PubMed search would just give too many results).
> 2 votes
# Answer
Google Scholar alerts are certainly one (slightly crude) solution. But there are other databases out there that allow much better controlled searching and which do email alerts. My university gives me access to a university-branded version of EBSCO Discovery, but others do exist - some generalist and some especially suited to particular fields.
Assuming that you are affiliated with a university or similar, I recommend asking your university library what they recommend.
Alternatively, sites such as ScienceDirect allow you to set up similar alerts, but they only apply to journals that are published on those sites (so with the example of ScienceDirect, you would only be told about articles in Elsevier journals). Depending on the publications that are relevant to you it might be possible to set up similar alerts on a few different publishers' sites to get good coverage.
> 2 votes
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Tags: research-process, reading, literature, literature-search
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thread-13996 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13996 | What precisely does "ISI-indexed publications" mean? | 2013-11-11T03:40:57.840 | # Question
Title: What precisely does "ISI-indexed publications" mean?
I'm currently looking at the requirements of a (Comp. Sci.) job that seems to only take into account "ISI-indexed publications". I'm vaguely aware of what ISI is and so forth, but I'm struggling to find a definitive list of ISI-indexed venues, or what "ISI-indexed publications" means.
Or at least I hope it doesn't mean what I think it does ...
I found the following list on the Thomson Reuters' page as a journal list for science. However, the list doesn't contain any conferences (even the "big ones" like WWW, (P)VLDB, SIGMOD, etc.) and a few journals I would expect to be on there aren't.
Would I be correct to say that any Comp. Sci. venue not on that list is not "ISI-indexed"?
Is this "ISI-indexed-only" restriction common?
(If so, seems quite antiquated really. Not being able to mention good, highly-cited, highly-selective conference papers sucks.)
# Answer
Right, the IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters (the business formerly known as ISI) curates the indexes Web of Science and Current Contents Connect. The journal coverage in those two is almost identical. Thomson Reuters then creates some data products from the Web of Science and Current Contents Connect data, such as the Journal Impact Factors.
Other indexes that are important in computer science include IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library. There are also more open indexes such as DBLP and CiteSeerX.
Thomson Reuters mentions "Bradford's Law" as a principle it uses to include or exclude journals. The general idea is to include some 12,000 journals that are well woven into the network of scholarly citations, viewed broadly.
I have read more than once that computer science is unusual in the value it places on conference papers. That fact may help to explain limitations in the collection of conferences in the Web of Science collection. I am not certain whether or not the collection strategy for Web of Science specifically takes into account that computer science is unusual in that way.
The Web of Knowledge product that provides access to the Web of Science collection happens to have a more subject-specific collection called Inspec available for subscription. That is a bibliographic collection curated by the Institution of Electronics and Technology that historically was the UK's counterpart to IEEE. Not every institution that subscribes to Web of Knowledge elects to include Inspec in its subscription. Conversely, Web of Knowledge is not the only way to access the Inspec collection - although I believe it is the only way that is cross-referenced with Web of Science.
> 3 votes
# Answer
> Would I be correct to say that any Comp. Sci. venue not on that list is not "ISI-indexed"?
I suspect the answer is Yes. Click here to search for your journal. Many CS top journals are not indexed by ISI. This says nothing whatsoever about the quality of the work. Limiting publications to only ISI-indexed is really really a bad decision. This may vary between fields, but in CS, I am certain most of the high quality venues of publishing are not ISI-indexed. Note that some scam journals would claim they have impact factor *x.xxx* where actually they are not even listed by ISI.
> Is this "ISI-indexed-only" restriction common?
I know some universities (like King Saud University; a list from one guy from KSU is also here ) where researchers are required to publish in ISI-indexed venues to get promoted (i.e. to associate or full). But these are exception cases and not common.
> 2 votes
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Tags: publications, cv, computer-science, publishers, reputation
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thread-13902 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13902 | Internship for PhD students | 2013-11-06T19:38:26.360 | # Question
Title: Internship for PhD students
I am a PhD student and I would like to do an internship at an American university or institute. How should I proceed?
# Answer
If your advisor has contacts at any of the universities you'd like to work at, I would ask him or her to reach out for you. If you are looking to work with a specific faculty member, that is probably the trickiest route, as faculty members often use the summer to travel themselves, and it is rarely worth the hassle to hire an unknown student for the summer, anyway.
If you don't have a networking contact through your advisor or other faculty members at your school, my next suggestion would be to start networking at a conference, or through a professional organization that you are affiliated with (e.g., IEEE, AMS, etc.). Start getting the word out that you are looking to spend a summer at a U.S. school, and see if anyone has suggestions.
If you are looking for a paid internship, you may be at a disadvantage as an international student, and you are probably more likely to find something if you can fund yourself. If that isn't an option, you might also consider looking at internships in industry, as they tend to have more money for summer interns.
> 4 votes
# Answer
If you are in a STEM field, there are lots of options available to you. There are about 20 national laboratories that take students from every level of education as summer students, including international students. Personally, I've interned at Los Alamos National Lab and at Pacific Northwest National Lab. It's generally very applied work, but it's a great atmosphere for students and is also extremely helpful for making connections with potential future employers. I would look up national lab websites and look at their respective research areas, and contact individuals you would be interested in working with.
The internet is your friend -- many companies and government agencies have programs listed on their website, and many of them don't require US citizenship.
> 2 votes
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Tags: phd, internship, united-states
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thread-14011 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14011 | Selecting the relevant papers for a survey paper I have to write? | 2013-11-11T15:11:05.257 | # Question
Title: Selecting the relevant papers for a survey paper I have to write?
I have to write a paper as an assignment for one of the courses that I take in University.
The main outcome of this lecture is having a good final paper in the end. As we are Masters students, the paper that I am going to write resembles more a survey paper in a given topic, rather than a research paper presented by the authors of a specific research.
I have my topic assigned already. I have done my literature search and organized all the papers that I want to use. Unfortunately, at this point I am not that deep into the topic. But, everything I read seems to me like relevant for the topic, and somehow useful.
I have had difficulties with a similar situation before. As I was trying to include as much as possible relevant material to the survey paper, to make is complete. But in the end I was blamed that the paper loses its coherence.
Now I am stuck. In fact I am reluctant, because reading multiple papers, multiple times, writing them and then getting bad remarks does not feel nice.
What criteria should I use to filter my papers all over again, and what approach should I use when writing a survey paper.
# Answer
The answer may differ from field to field.
First of all ask yourself "What is the central question" or the goal of you paper?
Do you want to give an overview on all aspects of the theory / concept? Or is it more about the central aspect of the theory / concept and extensions / applications are not that interesting? Or something else?
Then think about the story you want to tell. If its about the theory itself you might want to talk about the development of the theory, **central** aspects, proofs, and maybe some applications or extensions at the end.
If you want to give a general overview, try to create groups, are there some main movements, aspects, fields of application? Where are the links between these things?
Then select your paper according to this "central story".
While writing think about the audience of you paper, which concepts are common knowledge? Which are important to explain? Which depth of information is appropriate?
And, of course, try to get more feedback: Read the feedback of your old paper, then read your paper and try to find the flaws. Ask the person who graded you to give you some advice. Read some paper of your fellow students which got good marks, find out what you like about them.
in short:
```
1. Identify the central question of your paper
2. Create a structure / central story
3. Think about the audience
4. Fill the structure, create links between your sections.
```
> 6 votes
# Answer
To add to Frederick's excellent answer, after you have settled on your central question/goal/thesis AND have created at least a rough draft of your paper, use the 'So what?' method. For every section, idea, and paragraph, ask yourself "So what?". Why does this need to be here? What purpose does this serve? would the narrative still flow without this piece? Don't automatically throw it out if you cannot answer the questions immediately, but use this as a way to assess what you have written, find the weak spots, and begin to understand how to improve them. This also helps weed out irrelevant material, so that you can avoid a bloated, incoherent paper.
> 2 votes
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Tags: research-process, publications, literature, literature-review, literature-search
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thread-14022 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14022 | Is it worth it to add substitute teacher work in a CV? | 2013-11-11T19:19:58.470 | # Question
Title: Is it worth it to add substitute teacher work in a CV?
As a graduate student, i've had to substitute teach a number of times for a variety of classes. I'm wondering if it is really worth while to add this information into my CV. Obviously, it won't hold as much weight as teaching a full class. But if it is worth mentioning on the CV, what category should I add it to? Teaching? Volunteer Service? Something else?
# Answer
I am going to disagree with Peter Jansson here.
If you mean you stepped in to cover a couple of classes here and there when the regular instructor was sick or out of town, I would say this by itself doesn't constitute a meaningful amount of teaching experience for professional purposes, and shouldn't be listed on a CV. It may have been valuable to you, but I think it would look kind of silly on a CV.
If you were assigned as a teaching assistant for the course, you probably have a line where you describe your responsibilities in that role (grading exams, holding office hours, etc), and you could add "occasional lectures" to that line.
If you filled in for an instructor for a longer period of time, then you could consider listing it ("taught 3 weeks of Calculus 4").
> 6 votes
# Answer
Definitely. Teaching experience is always worth adding to the cv because it reflects that you have gained experience in presentation techniques beyond the usual scientific presentations. The difference to research presentations lies in that the latter involves explaining matters and making material understandable at a more basic level. On its own, such experiences may not be enough so document your teaching experience such as levels of the courses, number of students and amount of teaching. you should also gather evaluations of your efforts. I could add links on teaching portfolios here but a simple search on "teaching portfolio" will give you quite a lot of examples and your own university might also have links worth loking at.
> 5 votes
# Answer
I agree with Peter Jasson. It's worth mentioning in your CV unless you already have quite a bit teaching experience. You should put it under "Teaching".
You're a graduate student. Anything meaningful should be listed in the CV. Many years later, you'll find the substitute teaching looks funny when you're a professor. For now, list it unless you already have more than 2 pages long CV.
Here is my personal experience. I put my number of years teaching experience in my resume while in industry. A lot people were interested in that. It's was one of the most frequently asked questions in my industry job interviews I had. One time, I did ask the hiring manager why he was interested to know. He said it shows that I do know how to communicate.
> 3 votes
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Tags: teaching, cv
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thread-14033 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14033 | Emphasizing in paper: italic or bold? | 2013-11-12T06:43:09.710 | # Question
Title: Emphasizing in paper: italic or bold?
I am preparing a paper for a conference in EECS field. *(Generic suggestions are also welcomed!)*
What should one do when they want to emphasize one particular word? Should that word to be emphasized be in italic or bold?
I myself rarely see text in bold, which makes me wonder whether bold should only be used in section or subsection headings?
# Answer
> 23 votes
**It's a matter of style**: both bold and italic are typographically acceptable ways to emphasize part of your text, as are small caps, use of a different typeface or point size. (And, if you wonder: *no, underlining is not considered good practice in modern printed text*).
However, **you are right that using bold is usually reserved for headings or very strong emphasis** (think things like “Danger of electrocution — do not use under water” is an appliance user’s manual). The reason it is not commonly used inside running text is that it disrupts the overall level of gray of the page, drawing the eye from too far away: you want emphasis to make certain words stand out in the sentence, but you do not want the reader to skip directly to these words as soon as they set their eyes on the page.
There are, of course, always exceptions… like when you use bold (or color, or any other device that disrupt the grayness of the text), to emphasize a few stand-alone “take home messages” from a longer text, as I've done above!
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Tags: publications, writing
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thread-14038 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14038 | What is the significance of the Master thesis (topic and quality) when you apply for a job in the industry/academia? | 2013-11-12T13:31:01.520 | # Question
Title: What is the significance of the Master thesis (topic and quality) when you apply for a job in the industry/academia?
Today this question came to my mind.
Currently I am a Master student enrolled in University. All my previous studies I have passed thinking that I am a fan of Telecommunication/Computer Networks and related topics.
However, recently due to the overload on these topics I feel like I have lost my interest in them. Honestly, I have not lost my interest, but I have come to a point where I feel disgusted. These topics are too technically oriented. There is not much to do with the human factor (in terms of interaction). I am aware that all the studies related to computer science, electrical engineering etc. are closer to the machines rather than the humans. In daily bases the communication with machines is more often than with humans.
I was contemplating the possibility of switching from such an area, and work my thesis on Human Machine Interaction, where the human factor is considered a little bit more.
What is your opinion on this issue. Does the topic that you work on as a master thesis affect your future job if you apply to a position that is not that much related?
What about the academia?
# Answer
> 3 votes
> Does the topic that you work on as a master thesis affect your future job if you apply to a position that is not that much related?
By applying to a position you are not that familiar with, you will compete against people who know more about the job than you do, starting with a disadvantage. However, as AJed said, companies are sometimes looking for potential rather than technical skills and showing *other skills* during a job interview can prove really useful.
> What about the academia?
To answer this question, I will assume that you mean "looking for a PhD position". I think it will be even more difficult to find a PhD position if you change field (please correct me if I am wrong). Indeed the ultimate goal of a PhD program is to make the student an expert in his domain and the commitee might prefer choosing someone with little experience than no experience at all in the topic.
Finally, there are plenty of applied research fields related to Human-Computer Interactions so before you switch topic I advise you to check some of them in-depth.
# Answer
> 2 votes
Does the topic that you work on as a master thesis affect your future job if you apply to a position that is not that much related?
In my opinion, No. Companies usually want their employee to have specific knowledge before hiring them. (so if your thesis is close to what they work, you may be very interesting to them).
(still if your thesis is not related to what the company does), then you may be interesting to them company. Why? A master thesis gives the company an indication about your skills, including marketing skills, creativity, and theoretical skills. These skills may be useful for the company. (this is just my opinion)
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Tags: masters, job, job-search, thesis
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thread-13711 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13711 | Creating an central multi-purpose dictionary / database | 2013-10-29T12:34:24.140 | # Question
Title: Creating an central multi-purpose dictionary / database
I am trying to organize my workflow and make it more effective.
As non-native English-speaker studying in a foreign country I often need to look-up domain-specific translations (in 3 languages). As there are no specific dictionaries I am using textfiles containing translations I have collected over the time. This is quite uncomfortable.
Often these words are related to some kind of mathematical definition which has to be stated as a theorem for proofs. Right now I usually copy these from my old publications.
It would be great to have some kind of central dictionary or knowledge-base where I could organize all this (Translations and Definitions).
* Anyone who can recommend a program for this?
* How do you organize definitions and domain-specific translations?
# Answer
> 2 votes
I would try http://termbases.eu/ a site that was mentioned under Software: Lexicons in Linguist List.
Broadly, what you have described is a lightweight variety of a dictionary writing system, software for developing a lexicon.
If you were translating digital documents, I would recommend translation memory software. Collecting and managing your multilingual context-specific translations is part of what translation memory software does.
Another possibility, if you happen to be comfortable setting up a wiki, is to create a wiki in the manner of Wiktionary.
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Tags: software, workflow
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thread-11500 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11500 | Teaching uninterested/under-engaged students in science courses | 2013-07-29T17:54:15.047 | # Question
Title: Teaching uninterested/under-engaged students in science courses
How should one engage uninterested students in a fast-paced, densely fact-packed science course such as chemistry or microbiology? I find that the only students who truly understand and engage with the material are those who already have a strong background in the material being covered, while the rest of the class is usually ranging from bored to panicking, depending on how much they care about grades. (For most of the students in these classes, the science courses are required for their major, so they are taking them because they have to, not because they are intrinsically interested in the sciences.)
So how could I engage the interest of these students without dumbing down the course material or slowing down the pace of the class? Neither seems a viable option given department wide standards at this institution.
# Answer
> 8 votes
From a pedagogical standpoint, you always want to teach with a couple of things in mind:
1. You have to have a standard for the class.
2. The standard you set should be influenced by the level your students start at.
These two criteria frequently are at odds with each other, which is a shame: you want to teach the most engrossing, intellectual class so that each student can obtain a mastery of the important details of the subject, yet sometimes your students don't have the background and are not prepared to learn at that level, or are unmotivated for other reasons.
A third issue, and the one that you brought up, is the question of what to do when you have a heterogeneous set of students where some are unprepared (or unmotivated) and others are well prepared. If you are at an institution where the standard is very high, one option (and probably the right one) is to teach the material with the expectation that everyone will try their best and that it will be challenging for everyone, and let the cards fall as they may. Do your best to point the struggling students who want to learn the material to avenues for help -- office hours, tutoring, key reading material, etc. Don't worry particularly much about the ones who don't care -- if you're teaching an engaging class and they are bored because they don't really want to be there, that isn't your problem. If you find that you do have too many panicked students, you probably need to re-evaluate your teaching style or assessment plan, and slow things down. This is just the reality of the situation: too many of your students aren't prepared for the class as you envision it.
From your comment:
> This is a community college so many of the students are working parents who juggle multiple demands on their time.
I believe in this case you may end up in the situation I just mentioned more than you'd like. I would venture a guess that many of your students have academic priorities that are less about getting every bit of learning out of your course, and more about doing well enough to graduate and be prepared for whatever the next step in their career is. I urge you to try to put yourself in their shoes (this is always a good idea) and try to see from their perspective what the course means to them. I have taught a college physical science course to non-science majors at the community college level where I was happy to give them the *exposure* to the material -- most of them had never taken a physics or chemistry class in their life (high school or otherwise), and I knew that it would not have been a good idea to try to force a lot of math-heavy science down their throats.
So I haven't really answered your specific question about how to "engage the interest of these students without dumbing down the course material or slowing the pace of the class." My suggestions are (1) to re-evaluate why you think you're already engaging (and tweak it to meet your students' level), and (2) to make sure you are providing concrete assessments for them to study for (or work on in lab). If your students know what they have to do to get a "B" versus an "A", this might lower the level of panic if they see that shooting for that "B" will be obtainable while still giving them time to keep the other priorities in their life straight.
# Answer
> 6 votes
If I may contribute something more from Chris Gregg's excellent answer, from my experience as a high school science teacher for over a decade, in a range of environments. All having students with a mix of abilities and motivation.
Make the scientific concepts relevant, link the concepts to current discoveries - show them where the science is headed. Show them how the science affects their lives and how it would continue to affect them.
This is not always easy time-wise and logistically as it is not always easy to find how it links to their lives. But I found that the question:
"Have you seen/heard about \[everyday life concept related to the science taught\]?"
and go from there.
# Answer
> 5 votes
As a student, even if I was deeply enthusiastic about the course, I would be completely unengaged in any class session that consisted of powerpoint lectures. There are many alternatives, such as flipping, peer instruction (Mazur, Peer Instruction: A User's Manual), and various other forms of active engagement (Hake, "Interactive Engagement Versus Traditional Methods: a Six-Thousand Student Survey of Mechanics Test Data for Introductory Physics Courses, Am. J. of Phys, 66 (1997) 64).
> How should one engage uninterested students in a fast-paced, densely fact-packed science course such as chemistry or microbiology? \[...\] For most of the students in these classes, the science courses are required for their major, so they are taking them because they have to, not because they are intrinsically interested in the sciences.
Are these actual examples? Do you actually teach both chem and microbiology? (That would be unusual.) I would think that microbiology would be the easiest thing in the world to sell to students. E.g., if they're premed, they ought to easily be able to appreciate the relevance of learning about viruses and bacteria.
In any case, your subject has intrinsic worth, interest, and beauty. Presumably that's why you got a graduate degree in it. Approach it from this point of view and without apology, and you have every right to expect that at least some of your students will respond. You can't expect *every* community college student to respond. Look at the parking lot on the first day of the semester. Look at the same parking lot in the last week of instruction. Many, many community college students simply shouldn't be in college.
Re "densely fact-packed" -- you could ask yourself whether your subject could be presented with less emphasis on memorization and more emphasis on concepts. Do you give open-notes tests? If not, why not?
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Tags: teaching, productivity
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thread-14058 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14058 | Obtain a secondary school teaching certificate? | 2013-11-13T10:09:27.067 | # Question
Title: Obtain a secondary school teaching certificate?
I am currently taking a year off to reapply for PhDs. My ultimate aim is to work in academia. I am currently teaching secondary school biology as a way of filling this year. My government presents the opportunity of obtaining a teaching certificate by taking weekend classes in addition to the teaching. I was wondering whether a secondary school teaching certificate would be in any way valuable in obtaining a lecturing position after completing my PhD. I know that there are specific university teaching certificates which might mean that a secondary school teaching certificate is useless?
# Answer
In the big picture, having a secondary school teaching certificate probably won't make a difference in the hiring process for lecturer positions at the university level. Your teaching experience is what will count (to some extent--really, teaching at the collegiate level will be more important), and you will have that to put on your CV. I highlighted my high school teaching experience (and degree, certificate, etc.) on my CV when I applied to teaching positions, and in the interviews I had it was clear that it helped me land the interviews.
That said, if the certificate is something that will give you a fall-back plan if the PhD doesn't work out (i.e., you can transition directly back into the secondary teaching more easily), it might not be a bad idea to get it.
Either way, having the certificate won't hurt you when applying for future collegiate teaching jobs, and if you have the time now it might not be a bad idea to go ahead and knock it out.
> 5 votes
# Answer
Being someone who has a teaching certificate and have just completed my PhD, I can provide some insight to this. A caveat though, my experience is localised (Australia) and subject based, so not all may be relevant.
My PhD is in Atmospheric Physics, and I am a high school teacher of Maths and Physics, I have been applying to get into lecturing for a little while with no luck, even for STEM and Education lecturing positions. Having said that, I have only bee searching for a few months.
A colleague was in a similar situation for about 2 years (PhD, high school teaching and applying for academia) and he succeeded, but starting off with short term lecturing contracts (a term here, a term there, then a semester), now he is pretty much part of the furniture in the university faculty.
Talking with my academic supervisor (=advisor) where I asked whether the teaching degree and experience were useless, he suggests that the qualifications and experience are indeed valued, but an academic should build a published research profile and most of all, be patient.
Another thing to note - every degree is not useless, they all contribute to your skills and knowledge in some way at the very least.
As Chris Gregg said, having the teaching qualification can not hurt you, as not only is it a back up - teaching provides bountiful transferrable skills that can be applied in academia, as mentioned in the answer here.
> 3 votes
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Tags: teaching, application
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thread-14059 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14059 | How should I cite an invited paper? | 2013-11-13T11:39:36.783 | # Question
Title: How should I cite an invited paper?
My discipline is Telecommunication engineering and I am writing a paper for an IEEE journal. I want to cite an invited paper published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. My question do I need to mention in my citation that the paper is invited? If yes, how? As part of the original article name or the journal name or somehow else? Same with correspondence papers which are not full length articles, but short ones on some emerging area. What does IEEE say about it?
# Answer
No, **cite it as you would any other paper.** You do not mention the paper status (“invited paper”, in your case; “review paper”, “perspective”, “editorial”, etc.) in the citation, unless that is formally part of the title (which it typically is not), or unless the citation style explicitly calls for it (IEEE does not, and I know no citation style that does).
In IEEE's templates and LaTeX classes, the only place which mentions invited papers is a command to indicate when *your* paper is an invited paper (here for IEEEtran):
> Special paper notices, such as for invited papers, can be declared with:
>
> ```
> \specialpapernotice{(Invited Paper)}
>
> ```
> 12 votes
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Tags: citations, ieee
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thread-14063 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14063 | While contacting professors should we mention if we have contacted some other faculty in same department? | 2013-11-13T15:30:21.750 | # Question
Title: While contacting professors should we mention if we have contacted some other faculty in same department?
If a student is contacting faculty member and finds that there are two professors that are of his interest. So, he decides to contact both of them.
While contacting should the student mention that he has also contacted another professor in the same department?
# Answer
I'm assuming this is regarding admission to graduate school. I don't see any harm in mentioning this as a courtesy. The odds are high that if the two professors work in related areas they will discover this themselves. If you haven't mentioned this to them, it will seem as if you're flooding the department with applications.
It also helps personalize the letter, which is the number one thing you have to do if you expect to get any kind of response.
> 6 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions
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thread-14065 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14065 | What's the reasoning behind phrase "dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements"? | 2013-11-13T19:26:15.897 | # Question
Title: What's the reasoning behind phrase "dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements"?
Phrase "dissertation submitted in **partial** fulfillment of the requirements" seems strange. Can one submit dissertation in **full** fulfillment of the requirements?
# Answer
> 21 votes
Most doctoral programs have other requirements for completion of the degree, such as a certain number of course hours and the passing of qualifying exams. Hence, while the dissertation is the culmination of the doctoral program, on its own it does not satisfy all the requirements for graduation.
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Tags: thesis
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thread-14051 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14051 | Responsibilities of instructors to students when teaching controversial subjects | 2013-11-13T00:06:05.307 | # Question
Title: Responsibilities of instructors to students when teaching controversial subjects
When teaching a course on a topic that might be controversial, what are the responsibilities of instructors to facilitate an open learning environment? If the instructor has a strongly held opinion, is it appropriate for the instructor to structure the course and the readings around this opinion? Does the instructor have a responsibility to structure the course in a way that is agnostic about the topic? When selecting the readings and the lecture schedule, does the instructor have a responsibility to give equal time to opposing viewpoints, if those opposing viewpoints plausibly have equal intellectual merit?
I'm familiar with the notion of academic freedom for instructors, where instructors should be protected from external influence (from outside the academy: e.g., from politicians) in their ability to shape their courses and express their findings and opinions. Is there a corresponding responsibility to protect the academic freedom of *students*, by structuring courses so that they do not make students feel uncomfortable expressing views that disagree with the instructor's?
Are there any guiding principles or resources for how these issues should be navigated? What are the social norms within academia? Are there any lines that, if crossed, might lead to disapproval from a significant fraction of fellow academics? I'm mostly familiar with engineering/science/mathematics courses where this sort of issue rarely comes up, so this is new to me.
# Answer
If the students are being assessed by you, some (most?) will start to tell you what you want to hear in order to get the highest grade. This is rarely what we as educators want in our students. We want to build within them critical thinking skills.
Controversial issues are common in some fields. For example, one of the subjects I teach is Business Ethics and I have clear beliefs and values in this area. Is it OK for me to focus on the arguments in favor of my view and discount competing arguments? No, it is not.
Can I tell my students my opinion? Opinions differ on this but I believe it is OK, as long as it is done very carefully with LOTS of evidence that my opinion is wrong. Again, students must be taught to think for themselves, including how to critically evaluate what they consider right and wrong. If I just make my points then it is not education, it is indoctrination and that is not what higher ed is about.
As far as social norms, I would say that if you are trying to get your students to 'believe' anything, then you are doing it wrong. If you are trying to get them to think critically, then you are doing it right. If the students feel they must agree with what you say, you are doing something wrong. If they feel like they are getting balanced information and a class ends up with many different opinions, then you are doing something right. If everyone is thinking the same, then nobody is thinking...and that's not good for anyone.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Although I cannot say how the principles of, or basis for, university education are formulated everywhere, one guiding principle in the system I work is that courses/teaching should be founded on science. In the term science lies objectivity, that is to show both pros and cons for a specific idea. this does not preclude one from having personal opinions we all have. One example:
In my university a scientist, known for controversy, decided to run a course on divining rods under the pretext they were serious and work. Now, one can have an opinion about this but when trying to look for a scientific background, the best one can say is *absence of evidence is not evidence of absence*. The university clamped down very hard on this because it broke the founding principles of university education due to a lack of critical discussion.
So, a person's opinion should not taint the material so as to skew the picture based on unscientific principles. If one runs a course that uses sound scientific principles to criticize a view point, the exercise to evaluate the criticism may be sound in itself. The issue therefore lies in openness about any "one-sidedness" of the course. The role of a university teacher/teacher, is after all to provide objective critical view of materials.
One way to look at this is to compare with research. If we try to push a view uncritically, our peers are likely to suggest rejection of that article. To not approach teaching with the same serious rigour is, I would argue, unprofessional. The problem maybe lies in that there is no peer review of course materials.
> 3 votes
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Tags: professorship, teaching, academic-freedom
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thread-14074 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14074 | Applying to MSc vs PhD in CS with science background in US | 2013-11-14T06:38:36.487 | # Question
Title: Applying to MSc vs PhD in CS with science background in US
I hold a BSc and MSc in physics and want to do graduate studies in CS. I did computational and theoretical research and thesis on quantum memories which are useful in quantum communications (not sure if that sounds any interesting to CS admission committees). But I have not officially taken CS foundations courses (well, except some through Coursera and edX). I am willing to pay for a decent Masters program through loans and part-time work though. Here are my questions from you:
1. Can I improve my odds of getting into a decent department by applying to Masters programs instead of PhD programs?
2. Besides full score on GRE quantitative, I got a decent score in GRE physics. Can any of these make up for my lack of formal education in CS?
# Answer
I'm no expert, but with research experience and already having a Masters in physics, I think that you should directly apply to the PhD programs. During your first two years, you're going to take courses anyway. So **unless** you don't think that you'll be able to handle those courses, I think that doing another masters and then your PhD will be a waste of time and money. It depends on where you want to go, but a lot of schools will make you take courses in your PhD even if you already have a masters in CS.
> 4 votes
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Tags: phd, graduate-school, graduate-admissions, masters, computer-science
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thread-14076 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14076 | Abbreviation of qualification | 2013-11-14T08:23:12.333 | # Question
Title: Abbreviation of qualification
What is the correct abbreviation for National Certificate in Financial Planning? NatCertFP or maybe NatCertFinPlan?
# Answer
The two abbreviations you mention yield respectively **2** and **0** results in a Google search. Do not abbreviate that name.
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, writing, new-zealand
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thread-14072 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14072 | Data Collection in Academia: Insights? | 2013-11-14T00:41:20.060 | # Question
Title: Data Collection in Academia: Insights?
Data Collection is a primary objective in many academic fields and can be approached primarily through three different lenses - qualitative,quantitative and mixed methods.
With particular attention to computer science and HCI (human-computer interaction), what are some primary approaches to data collection? Specific references to primary, secondary and tertiary sources would be much appreciated.
# Answer
> 3 votes
The first introductory text I used is Survey Research Methods by Babbie. It gave (and still serves as a refreshment of) a pretty comprehensive look to the whole process, and the writing and layout are quite easy to understand.
I'd also consider a Google search on different syllabi using phrase like "research methods syllabus filetype:pdf" and see what most instructors recommend. You can modify the search phrase to make it closer to your field; you can also change the `pdf` to other extensions such as `doc`, `docx`, or even `ppt` if you desire other types of document.
I'm sorry to say that we can't be ready to run a study just by one book. Common methods such as interview, focus group, and questionnaire are their own field of research: For interview and focus group, you'd have to expand into the field of communication and qualitative analysis. For questionnaire design, you may have to further tap into some psychological manifestation of questions, measurement theory, and item response theory.
To build a better foundation, I'd also recommend flipping through Craft of Research by Booth et. al. and it will also pay off to befriend some statisticians or people major in statistics because you may need to learn something about probability-based sampling as well.
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Tags: phd, books
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thread-14084 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14084 | Computer Science PhD with Geology BS | 2013-11-14T14:53:47.840 | # Question
Title: Computer Science PhD with Geology BS
I am planning to do my PhD in CS (Robotics to be specific). I will be completing my masters with a thesis and a publication in a field that is very closely related to CS. However, my BS is in Geology. So I am mostly concerned whether I will be considered for a PhD at a school since my undergraduate major is not CS. I feel this way because I contacted professors at some schools and they didn't respond back to me.
# Answer
> 2 votes
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.
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Tags: phd, graduate-school, graduate-admissions, computer-science
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thread-14081 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14081 | Caption or title: which should I use? | 2013-11-14T14:20:27.500 | # Question
Title: Caption or title: which should I use?
I have a figure in my paper. If there is much to say about the figure, I will have a brief title and a descriptive caption for it.
What about the figure about which I have not much too say? Do I replicate what I have written in the title in the caption?
Since caption is also used for reference, it must exist. Can I then remove the figure title and use the caption only?
# Answer
What is your paper for? I think figures (for example in journal articles or thesis) usuaully have a caption below them, in addition to their number:
> **Figure 1.** Cumulative food intake in rats during intragastric treatment
But typically there is no "title", unless you have a "list of figures" somewhere in the beginning of the document: then it is ok to use the same phrase as caption and title, because they are not written at the same place.
> 4 votes
# Answer
My preferred format is
No title in the figure
in the caption small title. very extended caption describing the figure and a small summary of the results addressed by the figure
> 2 votes
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Tags: publications, writing
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thread-14073 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14073 | Is there a case for SLOs? | 2013-11-14T04:33:35.190 | # Question
Title: Is there a case for SLOs?
SLO stands for student learning outcome. At the community college where I teach, what seems to have happened is that our accrediting body told us we had to have them, and since they effectively wield the death penalty over us, we complied. Administrators may also have bought into the idea at some point.
What is the history of SLOs? Is there any published, intellectually rigorous justification for them?
I'm inclined to be extremely skeptical of them. They seem to be an incompetently executed type of standardized testing, without any of the scientific rigor that has been built up over a century of development of the field of psychometrics. In particular, standardized tests are supposed to be both *valid* and *reliable*. A typical SLO is probably not valid (because it tests too small a subset of the subject matter) and not reliable (because it is too short an instrument to produce a result with a reasonable variance). We could fix these problems, and then we would have ... a professionally developed standardized test. E.g., in my field, physics, we would have something like the AP physics test, the physics portion of the MCATs, or the physics GRE.
Administrators and accrediting bodies seem to believe that SLOs could be used, for example, to measure whether a particular educational innovation has been successful. The problem here is that one then has to interpret the *difference* between one set of test scores and another set of test scores, but the difference between two low-reliability (high-variance) numbers is essentially meaningless. This is also a problem that plagues "value added" measurements (Baker 2010), but it would be far more severe for SLOs because of their far lower reliability.
Arum 2011 (p. 140) discusses this sort of thing in the context of the seepage of NCLB-style testing from K-12 into higher education. They discuss the Spellings Commission report (Spellings 2006) as an influential document, although I think the fad for SLOs began to get underway before 2006, and the report suggested standardized tests such as the CLA, rather than what people now refer to as SLOs. A disgruntled member of the commission (Zemsky 2011) says that in retrospect the main outcome was to transform accreditation from a pro forma exercise into an audit-like procedure designed to give the federal government coercive power over colleges and universities.
Is the whole thing a Dilbertish emperor's-new-clothes exercise, or is there some intellectually rigorous case to be made for SLOs?
*References*
Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 2011; summarized online in http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat\_atlarge\_menand
Baker et al., "Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers," Economic Policy Institute briefing paper, Aug 29, 2010, http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/
Spellings et al., Commission on the Future of Higher Education, "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education," 2006
Zemsky, "The Unwitting Damage Done by the Spellings Commission," Chronicle of Higher Education, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unwitting-Damage-Done-by/129051/
# Answer
> 1 votes
While this is not a perfect answer (not a rigorous study of the costs and benefits of learning outcomes) I hope it will give some insights.
Learning outcomes are not all that rare, although I do not remember seeing them much in the US when I was there.
One of the key reasons for learning outcomes is to be able to evaluate how closely Module A in School X matches to Module B in School Y. If you are teaching a subject titled "Contract and Negligence Law in New Zealand" then the learning outcomes kind of write themselves. If you are teaching a subject titled "Modern Business Practices" then it is less clear what it is that students who passed that subject actually learned.
So, leaning outcomes, I believe, are mainly for the benefit of administrators so that can 'map' modules across universities. However, I also believe that they have great value for us as teachers. I believe the more we can formalize, in writing, what students will learn, the more transparent we are being and the fewer (unhappy) surprises people are likely to have. Students will better understand what they are supposed to learn, as will their parents (if they are involved in the process) and other teachers will be able to see how our modules fit together with their own simply by reviewing the learning outcomes.
Typical learning outcomes might include (in my field): Understanding teamwork and team development. In this case, you do not need to look at differences in test scores. The outcome is not an improvement in knowledge (take a module where you have already learned the outcomes and you will likely learn very little) but rather an absolute "The student will understand this." If the student did not understand before, they should understand at the end, or they should fail.
I do not believe the goal of the learning outcome is that it is one-question on a final exam but rather it is what gets assessed by the assessor. How you do that is up to you. For the example of team work I have several tests to see if students understand the key points that they should have learned.
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Tags: exams, accreditation
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thread-14115 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14115 | Why do conferences have such short page limits? | 2013-11-15T06:03:48.230 | # Question
Title: Why do conferences have such short page limits?
These days, most of the conferences I attend provide their proceedings on a USB stick, or online only. Yet at the same time they have a strict page limit, which is usually set to something between 4 and 8 pages. I'm curious about the rationale for such a small limit. This is probably something that varies between fields, although I've experienced it in more than one field myself (subfields of artificial intelligence and physics). It doesn't seem particularly limited to big conferences.
I realise that super-long papers would hard on the reviewers, who have to do a lot of work for a large conference. But on the other hand, a very short paper will have to leave out a lot of background and important information, which at best will make it difficult to read, and at worst will make it impossible to judge on its merits. It's also a lot more effort to write a four-page paper than a 10-page one, unless you happen to be presenting a single experimental result using an established methodology (which is rarely if ever the case in artificial intelligence and related fields).
Looking at conference proceedings from the 1950s through to the early 1980s, it seems that proceedings papers were generally much longer. As an extreme example, I know of one that's over 100 pages (it's quite a famous paper and the length seems worth it), but up to 20 pages doesn't seem uncommon. In the '90s the standard seems to have been 10 pages, at least in subfields of computer science. Although there's obviously selection bias involved, these old papers don't seem particularly longer than they need to be, and their length allows them to make rather deeper points than could be made in a modern 4-page paper.
I'd like to know the reasoning behind short page limits at conferences. Is there a school of thought that says these extreme limits lead to better-quality papers, and/or less work for the reviewers? Or is it just a holdover from the recent past, when big conferences were expected to provide a paper proceedings to every participant, who would then have to carry the whole thing home?
# Answer
There are a number of inter-related reasons for short (and shorter) conference paper lengths:
* The 10-12 page limit is typically so that reviewers don't have to review an inordinately long document.
* Final versions are also limited in length because the fact that proceedings are now mostly electronic doesn't mean that the cost of publication is independent of paper length. Editing costs are per-page (one can of course argue that professional editing does little for a conference paper, but nevertheless that's how it's priced).
* in order to make sure "what you review is what you get", one generally enforces the page limit at submission time as well
* finally, the 4-page limit I suspect is so that a fleshed out version of the work can be published in a journal without questions about the level of original content over and above what was presented at the conference. In this sense, the 4 (or 2 page) conference version is merely a short advertisement.
> 9 votes
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Tags: conference, writing
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thread-14040 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14040 | Short reference on writing numbers and units | 2013-11-12T15:46:26.430 | # Question
Title: Short reference on writing numbers and units
What's a quick and useful reference, either in print or online, for writing numbers and reporting measurements in scientific texts? Something I could distribute to all new students, which would cover things they should be taught but do not always know, like:
* how to write big/small numbers in scientific form (1.78 10<sup>–12</sup>), including proper spacing?
* how to write units of measurement, in text and in abbreviated form? includes: when do you capitalize units, when do you pluralize them, etc.
* how to properly report significant figures, etc.
* when do you write variables in italics/roman/bold/underline?
# Answer
> 5 votes
I guess these recommendations by the American Physical Society might be just what you are looking for. In particular, Style and Notation Guide for Physical Review/Physical Review Letters deals with scientific numbers, units, figures/tables, and use of roman/italic fonts. (For some strange reasons, it requires a secured connection to see the file; in case you couldn't see it, there is an excerpt here).
# Answer
> 4 votes
The American Chemical Society offers an online version of its *ACS Style Guide*. While this used to be available only in print, it is now apparently being distributed free of charge—or at least is available at any university with a subscription to ACS Journals. However, since it's intended to be a resource for anyone planning to submit to an ACS journal, I suspect it's generally available. The link above will take you to the specific chapter on math and units of measure.
# Answer
> 1 votes
The SI unit brochure (BIPM) is actually quite clear and well-written, and backs up many of its points with logical/physical justification. I would say the style guides (should) build on this.
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Tags: writing, writing-style, formatting, online-resource
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thread-14126 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14126 | Adjunct professor capacities | 2013-11-15T13:37:28.553 | # Question
Title: Adjunct professor capacities
Can I mention an adjunct professor as my proposed supervisor for graduate studies, or adjunct professors are not allowed to be supervisor?
Are there anythings that I should be aware of before mentioning his/her name in my application?
# Answer
The easiest way to resolve this question is to e-mail the person and ask whether they anticipate taking new graduate students in the near future. This is worth asking even for non-adjunct faculty (since they may have all the students they can handle already, they may be retiring soon or moving to another university or an administrative position, etc.), so nobody will be surprised or take offense at the question.
As for what sort of answer to expect, it depends on what sort of adjunct professor it is. Sometimes researchers from other institutions (government or industrial research labs, museums, etc.) hold adjunct positions at universities. They may or may not be allowed to supervise graduate students, depending on the terms of their appointment, but it's common to allow this; often it's part of the point of the position. On the other hand, there's another sort of position sometimes called adjunct faculty, namely low-paid temporary workers hired to teach introductory courses, and these jobs are not likely to involve graduate supervision. You should be able to tell pretty easily which case applies to any particular person by looking on the web, and in any case e-mailing them (as described above) will give a definitive answer.
> 9 votes
# Answer
If you just want to know “in principle”, look at your university's policies… This is something they decide. For example, the University of Manitoba says:
> a) The Adjunct Professor may be thesis/practicum supervisor or co-supervisor of, or serve on the thesis/practicum committee for, graduate students registered in the Faculty of Graduate Studies. In the event that the appointment of an Adjunct Professor expires before the graduate students have completed their programs, the Head of the department/unit shall be responsible for recommending reappointment or naming a replacement.
Whether it's a good idea is an entirely different question…
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, masters, advisor
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thread-14143 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14143 | How far do you commute to graduate school? | 2013-11-15T18:33:38.707 | # Question
Title: How far do you commute to graduate school?
I decided that I want to go to graduate school. I started looking into some local schools, but none of them have any programs that are very appealing. I found a program that is two and a half hours away and classes are held on Saturdays. Is this ridiculous? How long is too long of a commute? As much as I would love to just move there for a few years, I have a husband and a toddler. I can't uproot them as well. My only other option is to take the program online. Do people even take online programs seriously in the job market?
# Answer
Indeed, it matters if it is just a course-work based program or if it requires research, lab work, etc.
You'll need to check with your program to be sure what's expected of participants, and if you reach out and contact an enrolled student (or if their admissions office has a student they could direct you to for such questions) you can ask them for their experience of "what it really takes", and what options you have.
For one example, all around the USA there are "weekend {MBA/etc}" and sometimes "executive" programs. These are designed precisely for people like you, people who are working full time during the week, who live far out of town, etc.
The first step is determining what is really needed - is that one day all you really have to be there for, in person? Are there demonstrations, oral reports, projects, group meetings, etc, that must be done on any other day of the week?
To continue with this answer, we must assume the answer is "yes, the program really only requires you to be here Saturday, and everything else can be done at your home, email, web, etc".
As a matter of my experience, I have not done this myself, but I've worked with about 4 people who were doing exactly this. They would finish their work on Friday, commenting about how they had a long drive ahead of them. If they had a morning class some would go down on friday night, stay in a hotel (or couch surf, or stay with a friend/family), and then go to their classes. When they were done they'd drive home and be there in time for dinner.
Some others drive down early on Saturday, did class, and drove back all in one day. This is doable - they were doing 3 hours each trip, so 6 hours of driving in one day. But I must warn you - according to psychological/cognitive research, people do not habituate to commutes of this length. If you find a way to enjoy the drive as an experience, like your chance to listen to audio books, loud music, be by yourself to meditate and think, etc, then that's fine. Most people just always hate it - it's one of the few things we, as human beings, suck at just getting use to.
In the experience of my coworkers, none of them liked the drive. But in the case of all of them, they decided that the unpleasantness was worth it because their degree was important to them, and all it cost them was a chunk of their weekend. They didn't like it, they always looked a bit down to have to make the drive the next day, but they did it anyway. Another coworker stayed with family/friends and stayed the whole weekend, driving back Sunday night.
My father was actually going to do this for his PhD in English Literature, but found 1.5 hours back and forth while working 50-60 hours entirely too unpleasant, and stopped before even really starting it. Your value and personal situation - and how you handle long stretches of time in the car - will heavily influence your experience.
In short, "Your Mileage May Very". There is no "too long" or "too short" to commute. Commutes suck. As humans, we universally tend to hate them, especially while driving. As a personal note, I've found that anything over 20 minutes per day (if every day) starts to wear on me, and anything over 45 minutes is very displeasing (unless I'm on public transportation, which I find relaxing and can easily do double the time). Meanwhile, some people drive an hour and a half and just "deal with it" temporarily. I find road trips for 3 hours ok, but the ride back is rough even if I did very little that day, and I spend most of the next day tired. You'll kind of have to find this out yourself - might I suggest some trial runs to scope out the campus?
Finally, you could also try to find creative solutions, which will depend on your personal situation. Some couples, if they are both off during the weekend, will travel together and one will go to school while the other has a Family Fun Day. Since this is almost always done on trips to a larger city than one lives in, there are often museums, parks, movies, etc. This can be anywhere from relatively cheap (pack a cooler and picnic, choose low/no cost fun things to do) to prohibitively expensive.
As to online classes, that really is a separate question you might want to search for, with lots of good answers all over. To give you an executive summary: it depends on who you ask - but some people say they worked for them just fine, and there are some people who give them no value. What percentage of hiring decisions will consider them a negative? No one seems to offer good data, and I'm aware of no quality comprehensive studies for any area of degree. Education is strictly "let the buyer beware" in the USA, with little exceptions. (They are starting to crack down on some aspects that involve federal student aid, but only on the worst offenders.)
> 6 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, distance-learning
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thread-14130 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14130 | What do I do if a university does not inform me of my masters application status? | 2013-11-15T14:39:02.597 | # Question
Title: What do I do if a university does not inform me of my masters application status?
I have applied to a Canadian university to study a Masters degree starting Fall 2013, and they didn't accept or reject me, the online application clearly states that I will get notified by an email of their decision and I am pretty sure I didn't receive any emails from them (yes, I check my spam folder everyday).
Do I have any recourse for recouping my application fee? Whom do I contact for this information?
# Answer
There are multiple questions that remain unanswered here:
* Did you meet all of the deadlines for the admissions process?
* Did the people who wrote your letters of recommendation send in their references on time?
* Did the school promise you a reply-by date?
* If so, why did you not contact them at that time?
* Did you get an email confirming that the application was complete?
If any of those were missing, then it's entirely possible that you didn't have a complete application—in which case, the school is not necessarily required to do anything, because they don't have a complete record to consider.
Moreover, a lawsuit is a horrifically bad idea under the circumstances—it's far more time-consuming and expensive than anything you're going to get back from the school. It's a waste of your time and money (unless they rather unlikely made written promises of admission, in which case they may be in bigger legal troubles than just having to return an admission fee).
> 3 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions
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thread-14127 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14127 | Financial Support | 2013-11-15T14:10:59.763 | # Question
Title: Financial Support
If I do have a sponsorship for continuing my masters degree, will that increase my chances of getting accepted, or is money irrelevant in admissions decisions? I am considering computer science or computational engineering graduate studies in the United States.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Admissions in the US are not necessarily need-blind at either the undergraduate or graduate levels, **even if the university claims it is!**
Especially at the graduate level, it is more or less accepted that ability to "self-fund" one's education, through fellowships and scholarships, or other arrangements, can be considered as a factor in admissions processes.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, united-states
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thread-1020 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1020 | What is a fair metric for assessing the citation impact of journals across disciplines? | 2012-04-05T01:21:38.833 | # Question
Title: What is a fair metric for assessing the citation impact of journals across disciplines?
To quote Thomsons "a journal's Impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years."
I assume that disciplines vary in
* **average number of citations per paper**: Disciplines with fewer citations per paper will appear to have less impact.
* **citation half-life**: Longer half-lives means under-estimation of impact relative to journals with shorter half-lives. The Wikipedia article on impact factors summarises a study that found that "the percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly among disciplines from 1-3 percent in the mathematical and physical sciences to 5-8 percent in the biological sciences." (Nierop, 2009).
Google Scholar uses the five year **h-index**. See this listing of top ranked journals with various psychology related keywords in their title. The five year h-index indicates the number of papers with an equivalent number of citations. E.g., a value of 20 indicates that 20 articles published in the last five years have received 20 or more citations.
However, while the h-index might reduce the issue of different citation half-lives, it does not resolve it. And it does not address the issue of differential citation patterns across disciplines.
### Question
**What index provides both a reliable and unbiased assessment of the citation based impact of a journal when comparisons are being performed across disciplines?**
### Reference
* Erjen van Nierop (2009). "Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?". Statistica Neerlandica 63 (1): 52–62. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9574.2008.00408.x.
# Answer
There is no such index.
Publication and citation standards vary significantly between disciplines and even sub-disciplines. Without direct, deep knowledge of the standards in each community, it is simply impossible to compare impact of a journal in field X with the impact of a journal in field Y. (Eigenfactor's extraordinary claims to the contrary require extraordinary evidence, which they don't provide.)
Moreover, it's not clear why you should even try. Any judgement about the relative importance of Journal of X versus Journal of Y necessarily requires a **prior** judgement about the relative importance of *field* X versus *field* Y. HC SVNT DRACONES.
> 22 votes
# Answer
The CWTS SNIP factor controls for differing disciplinary citation rates and speed. See http://www.journalindicators.com It is also shown in Scopus
> 2 votes
# Answer
Here's an informal and difficult to quantify one: does it suffice to have a publication in this journal to get tenured? Or, in a reverse manner, can one get tenured without having published in a journal like this?
* In economics, you will get tenure in most reasonable places for publications in *Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review,* or *Econometrica*.
* In statistics, these would be *Annals of Statistics, Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B Methodology, the Journal of the American Statistical Association*, and *Biometrika*.
These are the fields I am closely familiar with. I can imagine that in most natural sciences, a publication in *Nature* or *Science* would boost your chances quite a bit. Finance has a system of ranking journals, with a handful of highly coveted journals designated as A-journals.
Getting reliable statistics along these lines is of course impossible. If Google were a little smarter, it would scan the CVs of those tenured and untenured (those who moved to another university after the typical period of 5-6-7 years), grab their publication records, and see what the journals are that those who got tenured had published in that untenured hadn't.
> 2 votes
# Answer
Moving from comments:
Defining field boundaries is an extremely difficult problem. Once those boundaries are defined (or as they are being defined) it is also difficult to judge which field individual journals belong to. The technical problem is one of "community-structure" or cluster detection, and is a big problem in computer science.
For the specific case of journals and citations, there is some cool work on this via statistical properties of random walks that makes nice definitions using the map-equation. However, these statistical methods sometimes produce oddities (I think I remember seeing Phys. Rev. Letters being classified as Chemistry based on the stats). It also doesn't always produce the fine-gaining desired, for instance eigenfactor seems to not have a Cognitive Science category, just a general Psychology category.
In general, I recommend taking a look around eigenfactor. Note that the website claims eigenfactor and article influence scores adjust for different fields, already (take a look at point #4). I am not sure how accurate this claim is, but I personally find their metric more reliable (not to mention more accessible!) than ISI Web of Science. I also think their approach is more developed than the freshly-pressed Google Scholar journal rankings based on h5-index. However, I would love to see eigenfactor and Google Scholar together.
If you are unsatisfied with eigenfactor's rankings, then a naive metric might be: classify journals into their fields and then assign each a ranking p, meaning the journal is in top p% of its field by some standard metric. This should give you a rough idea.
> 1 votes
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Tags: bibliometrics
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thread-14138 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14138 | How large may included parts from other people's work be in an academic paper? | 2013-11-15T17:04:59.523 | # Question
Title: How large may included parts from other people's work be in an academic paper?
Of course, it is absolutely important to quote all thoughts that did not originate from the author. This makes one think that it would be OK to include works of others when referencing them correctly.
For example, consider that one had that really great list of problems that also apply to your own paper. Is it legal and/or legitimate to write about that list, include the key points in your work and reference the original author?
I am facing that situation where I want to include some key aspects but quoting all of them and describing them individually feels like copying too much, even though I explicitly state that the aspects originate from another paper with referencing to it.
# Answer
You can include any material that is published as long as you appropriately cite the material (source). If you think any phrasing made by the author(s) is key, then you can do it as a quote where the text is reproduced in verbatim. If you do not use quotes you need to rephrase the text in your own words since it would otherwise be considered as a form of plagiarism. So, just be careful with referencing and quotes if necessary. It is better to have cited one time too many than the opposite.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Idea-wise it's hard to tell. It'd depend on how different your interpretations of the problems are compared to the original author's. It'd be prudent to consult a couple other researchers/peers for some objective inputs.
Format-wise, of course you can cite anything up to any amount. One way to do that is through block quotation. I have seen pages and pages of run-on quotes. Just double check, again, with some people in the same field to make sure your quoting style is not too outlandish, just because it's legal to do does not mean it's culturally appropriate to do.
Since it's just a list of questions, another way I can see working around this is to tabulate them in your work, attributing the list to the original author in the caption or footnote of the table. Then, in your text, refer to the questions through the table.
> 4 votes
# Answer
It would be prudent to look up the journal's policy on such matters, as the exact answer depends on the publisher. Example: Oxford Journals let you copy a maximum of two figures (post-1998) from a journal article, and five per issue. Above these limits, specific permission is needed.
*If in doubt, ask the publisher of the material you're citing if it's OK.*
> 2 votes
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Tags: publications, citations, copyright, quotation
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thread-14093 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14093 | "and" in section title: "Apple and Pear" or "Apple & Pear"? | 2013-11-14T17:28:21.443 | # Question
Title: "and" in section title: "Apple and Pear" or "Apple & Pear"?
In the main text of scientific papers, one should use and and avoid using &.
I wonder if it still holds true in section titles.
Is
> Apple and Pear
or
> Apple & Pear
more appropriate as a title?
# Answer
> 4 votes
Many journals specifically state what they expect, or often it can be ascertained by looking at their previous issues.
# Answer
> 3 votes
In general, the modern usage of the ampersand ("&") is restricted to collective proper nouns. While it was much more common to see people use the ampersand during the 18th and early 19th centuries, this has fallen out of fashion.
In formal writing, the use of the ampersand has largely disappeared except for collective nouns in a title, and in situations like table and graph legends, where normal rules of written English do not necessarily apply. For instance, "Crate & Barrel" or "McKinsey & Co." In standard running text, you would not use an ampersand in place of a traditional "and": for instance, you would write
> Mozart visited Vienna and Prague.
not
> Mozart visited Vienna & Prague.
However, in the legend of a graph, you could write either "(1 M NaCl & 1 M KOH)" or "(1 M NaCl and 1 M KOH)"; in many instances, the former might actually be preferable, because it's more compact.
This is also supported by many writing style manuals. For instance, the only mention the *ACS Style Guide* makes of ampersands is with respect to web addresses (where one would in any case not replace "&" with "and").
# Answer
> 1 votes
Following on Volodya's answer, you probably don't need to worry about this too much if you're planning to submit to a peer-reviewed journal - they'll just change it to their preference during the proof stage.
# Answer
> 0 votes
In addition to other good points made... On one hand, obviously it doesn't matter toooooo much, being understandable either way. A relatively superficial criterion is some mandatory style, which is presumably dictated externally: just do it. If there were any "real" criterion, it would be about scan-ability: is it more scan-able with Amper's "and", or with "and"? I tend to think that, given that everyone these days has more practice reading "prose" without symbolic abbreviations (somewhat in contrast to earlier times...!?!), a plain text "and" is "easier", if only due to habit "in these times". But/and the latter is what I consider, actually.
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Tags: publications, writing
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thread-14020 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14020 | Choosing reference letters | 2013-11-11T17:57:50.303 | # Question
Title: Choosing reference letters
I'm applying from Europe to US or US-styled Ph.D. programs and I'm wondering about who to choose for referees.
I graduated 2 years ago and my undergraduate professors don't remember me well, or at least I don't think so. In those two years I have worked as a research assistant in one lab, with three different post-docs. Should I diversify the source of my references and try to get references from my undergraduate institution or should I just opt for the people that I've been working with?
I think the latter group knows me better and has, generally, a better opinion of me and my work. Then again, I'm afraid that the single source of references will be suspicious.
I mentioned having studied in Europe because the undergraduate research options are typically limited, compared to American institutions where research experience is strongly encouraged. I only did a research thesis during my undergrad.
# Answer
Having sat (as a graduate student) on my department's admissions committee for two years, I can provide a few thoughts from my own personal experience.
First off, everyone has "good" references - it's very rare that a reference writer will say something negative or even something neutral. What sets apart the really good ones is that the writer can provide a specific, concrete anecdote that demonstrates an applicants skill set, attitude, previous successes, etc. So in that regard, knowing you the best probably trumps almost everything.
That said, having three letters from postdocs (none from professors), all of whom are in the same lab, is likely to make your letters somewhat redundant. If you worked with each of them on very different projects, or you know that they have very different things to say about you (in particular if they can speak to different aspects of your work or personality), this might make sense - but to have all three from the same place might be a bit much.
Not knowing anything else about your situation, it would seem that perhaps two letters from your current lab and one from a professor at your undergrad institution would be a reasonable balance.
> 2 votes
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Tags: recommendation-letter
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thread-14160 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14160 | Does research experience in a different but related field help in PhD application? (Pure Math->TCS) | 2013-11-16T06:21:54.477 | # Question
Title: Does research experience in a different but related field help in PhD application? (Pure Math->TCS)
I think the title itself is a good summary of my question.
But to make the situation more specific: I am a double major in math and computer science, and would like to apply to PhD program with theoretical CS as primary research interest. I am well aware that research experience helps a lot to show the committee that one has research potential.
All other academical records of mine are in decent shape so I want to shoot for the top programs. Now I am writing my SoP and here comes the problem: **I have only non-TCS research experiences.**
What I have in hand are:
1) serious pure math REU (not just expository) with a recently submitted paper
2) technical work (implementing and benchmarking) new numerical algorithm (scientific computing) with tech report
I was planning on doing a senior thesis, but my potential advisor is on a leave so it didn't work out. I went through the old questions and only found one related question. But I guess in my situation, it is worse because I have only research experience in entirely different subject. Although I am very proud of what I did, it is hard to sell them in SoP.
I always thought I don't need to do research in the **exactly** same area to what I want to do in grad school. Plus trying out interesting areas are fun. But it seems to me now that it was a very bad idea.
Doesn't **"I wish to study a\_0,a\_1 and a\_2 in A. I have done research in B and have been a trustworthy cheap labor in C. B and C are somewhat related to A, so I think I will do a decent job in A as well."** just sound miserable?
\[Thanks for reading - I know it is a bit long. Also I do apologize in advance if this question violates the rules - it is my first question ever. :)\]
# Answer
> 4 votes
I'm not an expert, but, from what I know, your experience is quite valuable. Even if you had computer science research experience, there's a good chance that what you would actually end up doing in a PhD program is far from the domain of your undergraduate research.
If you're still worried, note that theoretical computer science is all mathematics. I was an applied mathematics and statistics major and am currently taking a graduate course in approximation algorithms--it's literally a graduate course in theoretical side of applied mathematics. Other theory courses in automata, computation, machine learning, etc are also all math courses, but in the computer science domain. I actually think that your math/research background, if anything, is a huge plus.
What PhD programs are really interested in is whether or not you have done research in any discipline (preferably math/engineering for CS) and if you enjoyed it and showed an aptitude for it. You're ahead of the game, don't worry. On that note, if you know that you want to do TCS research, you could start now.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, computer-science
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thread-14146 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14146 | What do I do when a co-author takes too long to give feedback during the peer review process? | 2013-11-15T20:14:06.947 | # Question
Title: What do I do when a co-author takes too long to give feedback during the peer review process?
Two years ago I did a piece of research for a journal's especial edition. I got the reviewer's comments, did all the corrections and sent it to my co-authors. One of them took so long to return his comments that the paper wasn't included in the EE. I then tried to submit it to another journal but again the same co-author took long time to provide his comments. Finally my boss suggested me to submit it to another journal (good one) without waiting for my co-author's opinion. I got the reviewer's comments back, I did all the corrections (I have 45 days), sent it to my co-authors and gave them a week to send me their comments. The same co-author is now telling me he's not happy I didn't tell him I submitted to that journal and that he won't be able to make comments in a week. I'm again in a catch-22. What do you do?
# Answer
It seems you are following your boss' (good) advice. Dealing with co-authors is not always easy as you have experienced. I think I have experienced a similar co-author, not responding but complaining whenever something happens. In my case, the co-author was definitely over-committed and the actions were basically a symptom of frustration about not being able to perform. Now, I think you have done the right thing to a point. The only thing that would have improved things would have been to provide the co-author with the information but with a strict deadline but not more than a week or two. Doing so at all stages, is the only way to deal with such cases. It is not very nice, or comfortable, but it is necessary to make a stand and convey the seriousness. In your case you have clearly had a lot of extra work due to the (lack of) actions from your co-author. I assume he has not apologized?
So what to do? Well, I would write and state that you are sorry the co-author feels left out (or however the co-author has phrased it). You can then state that the lack of response earlier made you assume the co-author was not prioritizing the work and that based on suggestions from your boss you have now taken the actions you have to get the material published. Be brief and courteous but do not add many excuses.
> 9 votes
# Answer
## Summary
* Apologize to your co-author for not telling him about the submission.
* Try having a meeting/phone conference with the co-author (if possible including your supervisor) to solve the immediate problems.
* Change your requests to the co-authors to an opt-in style.
* In the future, send out "submitted paper to :-)" with the final version to all co-authors as last point on your submission routine.
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> he won't be able to make comments in a week
That just tells you that you *won't have* his comments within the week. But you need to know when you *will have* them.
Usually, I'd ask back *when* I can have the comments. Here, however, things look more difficult. So:
* For one thing, I'd switch from email to phone (or a visit to his office). That eliminates the dead time between emailing several times and may allow you to extract a definitive answer for the time line.
* The second thing I'd probably do would be trying to have a meeting (or a phone/video conference if the co-author is too far away). If he told you that he cannot do the comments this week, send a list of possible meeting times for next week. I'd (try to) include a number of "weird" times (early morning before the usual office routine sets in, evenings, possibly even at the weekend). This serves two purposes: it makes absolutely clear how important the meeting is to you and it closes loopholes for him. Talk to your supervisor about this first, you'll probably want to have him at the meeting as well - so you need to find times that are OK with your supervisor as well (that's the "try to" above).
I'd probably email the list, ending with: if none of these is possible for you, please send me your preferred time for a meeting next week. I'd then do an immediate follow up-call "We need to talk about the paper. ... I just emailed you a number of possible times for a meeting". Ask him to tell you when the meeting would suit him.
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For the future:
> gave them a week to send me their comments
From the context I assume you wrote something like "please send me your comments within a week".
What about changing the question to an opt-in style: "please send me your comments asap. If I don't receive any within any within a week, I'll assume you're fine with the text as it is and move on with the submission." O course, you need to be extremely timely yourself if you do this and you need to give sensible deadlines.
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Submission without the OK of all co-authors is misconduct. However, if I understood the described situation correctly, a manuscript that was approved by all co-authors was sent to a different journal. Again, an opt-in for changes would have been the proper way, but IMHO it is not as serious as general "submit without co-authors approval": after all the text was approved by the co-author, and the choice of the journal should not make any *scientific* difference.
Also, if I understood correclty, the co-author in question does not complain about the submission, but about the fact that he didn't know about it. That again is a valid complaint, so apologize.
> 9 votes
# Answer
It's inappropriate to submit a paper for publication before all authors agree that it is ready. Your boss shouldn't have advised you to do this.
First, you should apologize profusely to your coauthor. Make sure he knows about the deadline, then wait patiently until he is able to give his comments. If the deadline gets close, you could ask the editor whether you can have more time. If not, it may be necessary to withdraw your submission and resubmit later.
When you collaborate with coauthors, you have to accept that the final product needs to be something that everyone can agree on. Yes, this may be inconvenient if one of them is slower, or has different standards than the others, and it can cause you to miss opportunities. This is the price of collaboration. If it becomes a problem, you should talk to your coauthors and try to work out a solution that's agreeable to all, but you cannot act unilaterally.
> 3 votes
# Answer
**Apologise to your coauthor.** Hope that he is not too upset. Ask him what to do next.
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In the future, do not ever submit a paper for publication without discussing it with all coauthors.
> 2 votes
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Tags: publications, collaboration, authorship
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thread-14155 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14155 | Ordering Chemicals for a laboratory on a Student or J1 Visa | 2013-11-15T23:41:21.207 | # Question
Title: Ordering Chemicals for a laboratory on a Student or J1 Visa
I just wanted to ask, if any time, any of you have had any issues ordering hazardous chemicals in a laboratory located in the US.
Specially if you had any of your students or postdocs do it, since I recently saw that they run a background check on you for certain chemicals, so I was just wondering if this may backfire sometime in the nearby future.
I ask this because my PI had me order a couple of chemicals, but my Postdoc is in computer science, so not at all related with this, I wanted to know if this may jump in some future in a Green Card application? Perhaps I'm just being paranoid.
Do you have any experience in your laboratories with this kind of issues?
Thank you
# Answer
> 1 votes
* If you mean order as in "sorting the bottles", then you anyways shouldn't do that unless you have the proper training so you know what you are doing. If I should give a paranoid guess: getting the training would have been the point that got you listed as owner of a "hazardous chemicals certificate". That's much easier from a large scale administrative point of view than knowing who entered which lab to touch a bottle at a nation-wide scale.
* If you mean order as in "administrative task to buy things": This type of ordering does not imply physical access to the substances. Lists of people who do that would be full of secretaries and administrative/procurement/bookkeeping staff.
* If you're trying to be paranoid: the other thing that is much easier to know than who actually enterd a particular lab is who is working in that group/building. From that point of view, you may already be listed as "possibly had access to X" if anyone from your lab does the order.
(Disclaimer: I'm German and in Germany and not overly worried what types of US visa I can have. However, I'm chemist, so if they list people in relation to harzardous substances, I'd expect to be listed by profession \[or by my publication list/affiliations\] anyways - even though taking also into account the amounts the most important hazardous substances I usually handle are alcohol/bacillol for cleaning instruments and the lab table.)
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Tags: visa, chemistry
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thread-14170 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14170 | Should a student mention about contacting a faculty in a SOP even if the faculty has not replied yet? | 2013-11-16T15:50:25.960 | # Question
Title: Should a student mention about contacting a faculty in a SOP even if the faculty has not replied yet?
In most cases it is advisable to contact faculty while applying to the graduate school. But not all professors reply to the emails and in most cases none of them reply to emails, so is it advisable to mention in the statement of purpose (SOP) that a faculty member was contacted even though no reply came from their side ?
# Answer
> 19 votes
I would recommend against mentioning e-mail contact with faculty unless you've had a substantive interaction, one that leads you to believe they would remember you and support your application. In particular, you don't want someone on the admissions committee to mention to a colleague "So, I hear applicant X has been in touch with you; what was your impression?" and receive the reply "I have no idea who that is."
If there has been no reply to your e-mail, you could still indicate interest in your statement of purpose ("Based on my interests in X and Y, I envision Professors A and B as possible advisors."). This would help classify the application and indicate who should look at it, without setting up the expectation that they will already know who you are.
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions, statement-of-purpose
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thread-14129 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14129 | Do Master of Research programs require prior research experience? | 2013-11-15T14:22:12.633 | # Question
Title: Do Master of Research programs require prior research experience?
I have a research question that I want to explore, so am considering completing a Master of Research (MRes) degree in the UK. I will soon finish a terminal master's program by coursework (in the US), with no thesis option, so I do not have a research background. Is research experience a typical prerequisite for an MRes?
# Answer
> 4 votes
**No, you do not need research experience to get on a UK MRes progamme.** Though it will help.
It may vary by institution; this answer is based on the one MRes from my subject area.
The UCL MRes in Energy Demand Studies has the following prerequisites (taken from that linked page):
> * Good numeracy and literacy and an ability to present ideas clearly
> * An appreciation of the importance of behaviour and society in energy demand
> * An understanding of or ability to learn basic physics and engineering concepts
> * Strong performance in a science, engineering or social sciences discipline
The course, in its first half, contains a lot of taught material. This covers, amongst other things, research skills.
Having research skills, or a research track record, will help you with getting onto the more competitive courses, such as this one; and it will improve your chances of getting your study funded too.
One of the selection criteria is (*ibid*):
> how your academic and professional background meets the demands of this challenging programme
so if you can show a research track record, that will help fulfill that criterion.
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Tags: research-process, graduate-admissions, masters
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thread-14166 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14166 | Should I link my research in my SOP? | 2013-11-16T11:46:00.097 | # Question
Title: Should I link my research in my SOP?
I have done some independent research that I wish to mention in my SOP. The full account of what I have done till has been published as an e-print on arxiv.org. Can I give a hyperlink to this e-print in my SOP?
# Answer
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.
> 13 votes
# Answer
Yes, you should absolutely list it in your statement, in the bibliography, with a hyperlink, along with all the other papers you cite in your statement.
> 9 votes
# Answer
No, you shouldn't list it on your Statement of Purpose. You should cite it properly in your CV / Resume, or in a separate list of publications.
You can certainly discuss the research that led to the paper in your statement, but if the statement-readers would like to read the paper itself, they can find the reference in your other material.
> 5 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions, independent-researcher, statement-of-purpose
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thread-14117 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14117 | Using comments from examiners in a CV | 2013-11-15T07:31:47.513 | # Question
Title: Using comments from examiners in a CV
I have just received feedback about my PhD (in my University, we do not do an oral defense, our dissertations are peer reviewed) - and I have received great and useful feedback and criticisms which will be a breeze to respond to.
Also included in the feedback are some very kind and positive comments about me as a scientific researcher. This leads me to my question, would it be appropriate to use the positive comments from the examiners when applying to academic positions? This of course, while preserving the anonymity of the examiners themselves.
Something along the lines of "Examiners to my PhD dissertation recognized my ability to *perform task*, stating *positive comment*".
# Answer
> 10 votes
Hum, I do understand the impulse, but I don't think a CV is the right place for that. You don't want it to look like the back cover of a crime novel :)
In my country (France), PhD thesis undergo both a peer-review and a formal defense. Thus, you usually come out of it with two written reviews of your thesis, and one written review of your defense. **It would be quite uncommon to quote these in a CV**, but in many applications it is fine (and sometimes *mandatory*) to actually **attach them to the application, as supporting material**.
So, unless it is common to do so in your system, I wouldn't recommend quoting praise for yourself in a CV (a CV is a list of facts, mainly, not opinions), but you can try to include it in the application if it is allowed. Either raw, or you could **quote it in the application letter, statement of intent, summary of your work, whatever**:
> The research topic of my PhD was to study the influence of UV irradiation on bacterial growth rate in the lab's fridge. I quantified the extent to which it was detrimental to the life of these poor innocent bacteria. I also made the case for a new classification splitting part of the UV range currently known as “UV-C” radiation into a new “UV-D” category, based on its distinct harmful effects on fungal growth.
>
> This work was well received by the community, with a total of 4 published papers and 3 conference talks during my PhD. The thesis peer-review committee called it *“a brave and well-inspired revolution of the old dusty classification of UV radiation”* and characterized the end product of the thesis as *“a clean lab fridge: the greatest service you can render mankind or, at least, labkind*”.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I don't know if I would include these in your own application materials, but I would certainly try to have this examiner write a letter of recommendation for you (many jobs will allow extra, optional letters if this one is an "extra"). It's going to sound stronger coming directly from a respected third party than if you provide the quote yourself, even if the actual material is the same.
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Tags: phd, ethics, cv, feedback
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thread-14178 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14178 | how to find whether this paper is already available or not, if authors just changed the Paper title & author name? | 2013-11-17T16:06:22.423 | # Question
Title: how to find whether this paper is already available or not, if authors just changed the Paper title & author name?
I am the editor. I received a paper from some author. I need to check whether that same paper is already published in some other journal or not. For example some authors downloaded a paper from some other journal, they just change the paper title, and author name and they send that paper to us. So in this case how can I find whether this paper is already available or not?
# Answer
There are several software available for checking plagiarism, which would also fit the problem you are investigating. The journal (actually the publisher) for which I am editor use iThenticate. I am not in a position to compare the numerous software and services around, some free, some commercial. However, a simple check that can easily be made is to to a Google search on bits of text. I have personally used this to check on similarities between manuscripts and earlier published articles to check on the degree of overlap and it works fine. It will give you a first indication at which stage you can decide on continuing with a more advanced analysis.
See also answers in What is the easiest way to check for plagiarism in student essay papers?
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, journals, plagiarism, online-publication
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thread-14125 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14125 | Optional essays | 2013-11-15T13:26:12.717 | # Question
Title: Optional essays
If you can upload a writing sample or a second statement of purpose in a university online application, and the department I am applying for doesn't require these two essays, would I get extra credit (higher chances of getting accepted) if I do upload answers to these questions, or they will not even look at them?
# Answer
> 7 votes
Less is more. The goal of your application is to present *tangible evidence* that you have the potential to succeed as a researcher (completed papers, projects, and to some degree coursework), and do so as quickly and concisely as possible. Adding more text simply distracts readers from the "important stuff," which they probably care about less than your letters anyway. In that vein, I'll stop here.
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions, application, united-states, statement-of-purpose
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thread-14133 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14133 | Choosing universities or programs | 2013-11-15T16:12:54.107 | # Question
Title: Choosing universities or programs
I am currently applying for two universities for graduate studies at the US, assuming both universities accept me (Hopefully) should I choose the university that fits me better or the university which is more selective (like ivy league universities).
My concern is that smarter students will overrun me in the top university, is this a valid concern or there is no academic competition between students since the admissions office and the designated department would not have accepted me in the first place if I had a non competitive enough profile?
# Answer
> 9 votes
> My concern is that smarter students will overrun me in the top university
Well, the good news is that the smarter students will be concerned about *you* overrunning *them*. It's called impostor syndrome, and virtually everyone at a top institution has it. (And I don't just mean the students...)
Also: being around people who are (much) smarter than you is a **good thing**, because it means you will **learn more**. (That's why you're hanging around a university, right?) The other good news is that in grad school, you will no longer be competing against your peers. The bad news is that you will now be competing against the *entire academic community* in your chosen area of study. So, it's probably good to have some other smart students around to talk to. Right?
My experience as a student at a Extremely Well-Ranked School is that other students are very supportive, and empathetic to the experience of getting through a tough program. In short: don't worry. It will be ok.
> should I choose the university that fits me better or the university which is more selective
Isn't this a tautology? The university that fits you better will fit you better.
A less sarcastic reply is: there is *nothing* that matters more in grad school (or in life in general...) than your relationships with the people immediately around you, namely, your advisor and the other members of your research group / lab. Even brilliant students who do not have a good working environment or a supportive advisor will flounder—I have seen it time and time and time again. In contrast, students who are not exceptionally brilliant but have a good relationship with their advisor / group tend to do well, at least well enough to move on to a satisfying career after grad school. Prestige, fame, money, and beauty are all higher-order terms. Pick the place where you will be happy.
# Answer
> 6 votes
> should I choose the university that fits me better or the university which is more selective
Assuming you're lucky enough to have that choice....
## Neither.
**You should choose the environment that gives you the greater likelihood of future success, as defined by your own academic and career goals.**
This may be correlated with the overall reputation of the university, but any such correlation will be *very* loose. The overall reputation of the *department* is a better proxy, but still loose. The reputations of your (probable) advisor or advisors, or even better, of their former students, is even closer, but still not the whole story, because not every student wanted to do what you want to do.
Strong universities have weak departments and vice versa. Strong departments have weak research areas, or toxic work environments, and vice versa. Strong advisors in strong departments may have no interests that overlap yours, or may have working styles that badly clash with yours, or may have insufficient funding to support you, or may be located in places that you find unlivable for financial or cultural reasons.
> does the university evaluation (acceptance) mean that I am capable of performing perfectly in their program !?
**Of course not!** There's no such thing as "performing perfectly".
But acceptance *with funding* usually means that the faculty—or at least the admissions committee—believes you have a strong potential for success in that graduate program.
(I write "usually" because a few lazy/unethical departments do intentionally accept more students than they reasonably believe can succeed. Especially if this is a serious concern, **talk to current students in the department before you accept.** And acceptance *without* funding only means that they're willing to take your money; run away fast.)
Finally: **Do not listen to the Impostor Syndrome.**
# Answer
> 3 votes
Short answer: why don't you come back and ask again when you got the acceptance letters from both schools? These worries seem premature.
Anyway, assuming this is more about applying to schools... I cannot tell you which to apply, but here are the components you should consider:
* It depends on the department you are going to. Not all departments in the selective schools are reputable. Meanwhile, some department in smaller schools can be the field's leader.
* It depends on your career aspiration. Graduates from reputable schools *may* face fewer barriers in advancing to become a researcher or apply for a faculty position. But this is only one piece of the puzzle; other factors such as research topics, track records, etc. matter greatly as well. If it's a skill-based degree, then check the field and ask around which institutes seem to be better recognized.
* It depends on what do you mean by "fits me better." At the very least, the chosen school should not give you more stress/misery beyond necessary (e.g. beyond stresses that is due to class work, high standard, etc.) If you have to endure extra burdens such as tension brought about by different value and culture of the organization's, then you better not go there.
* Competition happens *everywhere*. Organizational and personal cultures have a lot to do with it. There are departments/schools that particularly favor competitive students, either due to the professional nature of their degree, pride, or scarcity of resources. Personality of the classmates can also matter. Some people just love to compete, even in the most minor things of their life. Anyhow, to expect less competition because the people are more homogeneous is unrealistic; in fact, competition is the likeliest outcome to see in a homogeneous population.
* Some schools *may* consider accepting students from developing countries even the students deem slightly less competitive than the rest of the crowd. They do this for many reasons: to expand their influence, to leverage the intellectual bargaining power of the applicants' countries, to establish their department that is specialized in global work, etc. Regardless if this system is in place or not, there is always a spectrum of competency among the student body, whatever the makeup of the body is.
* Generally, I think you can benefit from some attitude readjustment. Unless you need excellent grades for scholarship or assistantship, graduate school is more of a competition within oneself than between people. As a foreign student, try your best to integrate into the local culture, make friends, build support networks, consult some cultural and study specialists at school, pay attention to your grades, ask questions, participate in discussion, bring what's unique about your experience to the table, and enjoy the stay and study. The whole process is a lot more than worrying about how not to make mistakes or fall behind.
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Tags: graduate-admissions
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thread-14173 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14173 | Creating paper on software tool | 2013-11-17T13:30:20.593 | # Question
Title: Creating paper on software tool
In my master thesis I developed a software tool that improves a common workflow used in a certain industry. Currently, no such tool exists, and this workflow is conducted manually all around the globe. I am currently in the finalization phase of my thesis and my supervisor told me to write a paper on the tool and the worflow improvement.
Now here is my Problem:
* I have the tool and I can show that the workflow is performed better with it (our industry partner puts almost no limits on use cases, interviews, etc)
* I have no idea how properly package this into a paper (also, what to objectively measure to "proof" the improvement)
Could someone please point out a few "good" papers, where a software tool was created for a problem domain (where no such tool existed before) and evaluated so that I can learn from it's structure, the approach and the proper "packaging" of the entire paper?
# Answer
> 8 votes
Although I don't have any specific tips on structuring this type of paper, you might be interested in this list of journals that focus on publishing scientific software. You should be able to find lots of examples of "software" papers there. Those papers that I have read in *Methods in Ecology and Evolution* have been particularly high quality, and you might try starting there.
# Answer
> 4 votes
If you just want to write a paper on the software itself, the list provided in user4936 answer is perfectly fine.
If you want to conduct a research on how the tool actually enhanced certain processes in a firm, you might go for a paper in an Information Systems venue.
Start looking for articles in what you can access of the Top 8 journals for IS. Look for "decision support system" and add some of your paper's keywords. You will find plenty of papers with methodologies.
Be aware that IS venues demand very strong theoretical background and motivation for a study. They like theory a lot. So, be prepared to read a lot and to write a lot :-)
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Tags: writing, computer-science
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thread-14182 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14182 | Funding for PhD students in the UK for EU student | 2013-11-17T17:19:48.707 | # Question
Title: Funding for PhD students in the UK for EU student
If I wanted to do my PhD in the UK at a renowned university in the natural sciences, how likely is it that one gets access to a fully funded PhD program?( living costs + fees). The reason why I am asking this is, that I see a lot of scholarships on the websites of the universities but I have never heard of an actual percentage of PhD student(coming from the EU) who got such a scholarship. Does anybody know? It does not have to be an actual number, but maybe you know something about this.
# Answer
I do not know actual numbers unfortunately but I will tell you what I know from my experiences in a Computer Science and a Statistics department (of different universities). Your question is tricky because there are a lot of different cases:
1. BBSRC, NERC or EPSRC funded places (by far the most common). UK Research councils are the standard funding bodies for PhD programs in UK; they usually do *not* cover maintenance fees unless you are a UK national. They pay only the registration fees for EU students. (I know, I am one). The success rate for something like this is the *highest* compared to the following options; it generally equates that of a PhD program acceptance rate to the university you are applying to.
2. University/departmental funded places. Generically also called `PhD bursaries`. UK universities have self-funded places but they are not very common; usually not more than 2-3 places per department. In most cases those are money on hand but registration fees are occasionally lifted, I think because you are an EU national that might be easier (I know that for an Indian national fees where not waived.) their acceptance rate is obviously harder than those of option 1.
3. Industry (or goverment agency) funded places. Industry collaborations do occur, I have seen some brochures but I don't know anyone that got them. Pretty much the same situation in terms of fee coverage as option 2 but they tend to be even more rare. I would guess it is not "harder to get" than usual departmental funded places given you actually apply to one. Almost certainly these are tighten with a faculty member and they are not "up for grabs" by all applicants.
4. General university scholarships. These are usually merit scholarships and you compete against the whole university. They are hard to get: In the medium size university I am now this translates into 25 places. They do not differentiate between costs, they give you a lamp of money (about £13k-15k) and you are on your own. It is not completely unusual to get one if you are an EU national and you have already a registration-fee-only scholarship. Obviously these are really hard to get, but selection is non-random: if you are great you might get them.
5. Supervisor money. Usually they are tighten to specific grants/research programs/etc. It is almost the same as option 3. This is *weird* money for you to directly tap into. Essentially they are money a supervisor/department has and it is decided that they'll be used to fund a PhD. They might not even be advertised. I know two cases, in first one fees were waived, in the second one not. Success rate? I have no idea, probably the probability of really impressing with your research potential, a successful and well-connected professor with a shortage of good PhD students (Given you are good, the hard part is actually finding the professor; not many people have a couple tens of thousands of pounds to allocate to a person they think is awesome.)
6. EU programs. *Sci-fi*. I know only post-docs that got these kind of funding. I can not give any estimates, I am just mentioning them cause I know they exist. I have come across them in relation with the Erasmus Mundus program, worth checking.
From what I understand, if you are an EU national registration fees are *somewhat easy* to be waived (ie. paid by the university or a funding body). Getting the extra money is the hard part but if your supervisor wants you, strings can be probably pulled. Teaching also pays good in UK in comparison with other countries. In general, **do not let finance hold you back from applying to places**. Especially for an EU national if they believe in you they will find a way to make you a somewhat good offer as your registration fees will not be horribly high to start with. Good luck!
> 3 votes
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Tags: phd, funding
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thread-14190 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14190 | How to respond to a perplexing review? | 2013-11-17T21:48:10.900 | # Question
Title: How to respond to a perplexing review?
I've received a perplexing peer-review to a submitted paper of mine. The editor asks for major revisions, and sent us two reviews. The first one is serious and raises good points: we'll work, amend the manuscript and send a detailed reply to the editor.
The second reviewer, however, has a 3 (minor) weird questions, and his fourth is:
> The authors claimed that “\[some sentence taken from the abstract\]”. Please give more detailed explanations
where the sentence is actually a summary of our two-page “Results and discussion” section, i.e. the core of the paper.
**I'm concerned that the second reviewer has actually not really read the full paper** \[1\], and wonder what the best option to deal with it. I've come with the following ideas:
1. In the response to the editor, respond to this request by simply saying *“This claim is backed up and discussed at length in section IV”*.
2. Do not respond, but write to the editor saying I am concerned about whether the reviewer actually read the paper at all.
3. Try to do some editing and write an evasive response, like *“We have edited the manuscript to improve the clarity of the discussion on this point”*.
I want to take option #1, because I think the editor will read between the lines. I'd hate to badmouth the reviewer (option #2), or risk deteriorating the manuscript by silly editing (#3).
**What's your take on this? Do you have advice or suggestions on how to act in this situation?**
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\[1\] I must say here that I started by doubting the clarity of our paper, first. Trying not to be overly defensive of my work! But after asking a friend a second opinion on it, he agrees with me that the review seems shoddy.
# Answer
> 43 votes
In my view:
Option 1 is fine. You are not required to do what a reviewer asks - if you choose not to do so you just need to explain why.
Option 2 is not a good idea. You **are required** to respond to every comment made by a reviewer, regardless if you agree or disagree.
Option 3 is also fine. This may be the safest bet - I am guessing you could probably even add a single sentence and the reviewer will almost certainly say its fine.
Probably both 1 and 3 are ok and will get you past this reviewer. You can also go for a combined strategy like: "We feel this claim is backed up and discussed at length in section IV. Nevertheless, we have edited the manuscript to improve the clarity of the discussion on this point."
# Answer
> 25 votes
The first thing to do, which I understand you have done, is to check all comments to see whether or not something is unclear or can be misunderstood. Your experience with the second reviewers matches what I see as an editor, that (very) short reviews often are sub-par, and essentially of very little use (applies to both positive and negative reviews). So this is unfortunately not unique.
What I think you should do is the following. Follow up the first reviewer's comments as carefully as you see fit. When you turn to the comments of the second author, try to treat them seriously as well. If you are lucky, maybe something you fixed in response to reviewer 1 will cover Reviewer 2's comments. If not, you need to try to respond to the comments even if you think they are pointless. Failing to respond, or trying to brush them off (regardless of how much you would like to do so), should be avoided. The example you gave should be possible to counter by simply saying that the abstract is not the place to expand on any discussion, since a detailed discussion is provided in the paper proper. Although this may seem unnecessary, you do not know how the editor will interpret the comments and your reply, so try to be clear and stay neutral.
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Tags: publications, peer-review, editors
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thread-14199 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14199 | Mentioning money in statement of purpose | 2013-11-18T08:46:28.220 | # Question
Title: Mentioning money in statement of purpose
I am currently working as a research assistant with a pay grade that is half of a typical entry level commercial job (computer programming jobs in particular).
Is it beneficial to mention this in a Statement of purpose for graduate admissions, so as to show that I sacrificed a better financial situation in favor of a research career? Is mentioning money a bad idea regardless of the context, or is it well known that research assistance-ships pay less than regular jobs?
# Answer
Actually its well known that research assistance-ships pay less than regular jobs. This is true.
But, I think you should not mention money in the research statement in a blunt way. But you can definitely prove your point in a subtle way:
> Like, After my undergraduate I got multiple offers from multi-national corporations but my passion motivated me to choose a research path over any other.
This is just an example, you can rewrite suiting to your needs.
> 14 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, motivation, united-states, statement-of-purpose
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thread-14202 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14202 | Undergraduate recitation/discussion session: when is it (not) counted as a credit hour? | 2013-11-18T12:32:14.290 | # Question
Title: Undergraduate recitation/discussion session: when is it (not) counted as a credit hour?
I am a member of a curriculum committee where we want to improve our undergraduate physics program. One way of doing that is to include weekly discussion sessions with our courses.
After looking at the undergraduate physics programs in some universities, including top ones, I have noticed the following:
1. Such sessions come under different names: recitation session, discussion session, tutorial session, problem session. Are they all the same thing? if not then what is the difference?
2. The total number of credit hours for a course that has 3 hrs lecture and 1 weekly discussion session sometimes is listed as 3 Cr. in some universities or 4 Cr. in other university. What are the criteria to include or not to include that session in the course credits?
(Replies are welcomed from math, chemistry, biology, computer science, engineering, geology, etc.)
# Answer
> 3 votes
Just add a couple more points that may be more applicable to you as a committee member.
Usually, most academic degrees granted by universities are accredited by some overseeing organizations. These organizations evaluate the school's syllabus, infrastructure, and other personal and academic factors, and determine if they would continue their acknowledgement of the degree's representativeness. You can scout around and see if your department has some of these accreditation processes, and learn more about the missions and criteria of those overseeing organization.
Second, check your school's and department's mission/value statements. When proposing a new course, these statements would come handy as a supporting point. Similarly, if your department has a good academic competency checklist, you can also refer to that list, and evaluate if, overall, your institute's degree is enabling these competencies, and if a discussion-type course can further strengthen so.
Third, understand the process of approving a course. This process varies school by school. However, most often there should be a committee (probably called curriculum and academic committee, etc.) that meets regularly to approve new courses or remove old courses. Ask if you can sit in one of those meetings and learn how the process happens. Meeting with the chairperson or secretary would also be helpful.
Fourth, if you happen to be a student representative, don't forget to use your connection to solicit students' ideas. Be very present and actively seek inputs (even it means standing out at a large lecture and ask them to fill in your online survey, etc.)
All these should give a good preparation.
Now, your question is difficult to answer because it does not just depend of school, but also is an evolutionary process of its own within each of the schools. A credit-counting discussion course might be a result of an informal journal club started a couple decades ago... likewise, a current informal discussion could be a remnant of a credit-counting course many years ago which was crowded out by expanded syllabus or was cancelled due to constant under-enrollment. You'd have to check with some more senior faculty members to understand the ins and outs. And here, knowing the school culture and history would help.
# Answer
> 2 votes
As JeffE states, there aren't really any hard and fast rules about when recitation sections count for credit and when they don't, because of the multiple overlapping credit systems used.
For instance, in the "Carnegie" units system, such as that used by MIT, the amount of credit associated with a class is strictly dependent on the number of hours expected to be spent on a class per week. For instance, a 12-unit course requires 12 hours of work per week on average, while a 9-unit course would be less than that. The number of hours spent in class is included in the total, but does not strictly govern it.
Other faculties may have their own rules for deciding how much a class is worth. My undergraduate institution, for instance, had a fairly strict reckoning system: 1 "unit" for most classes, 1.5 for language classes, 0.5 for labs "bundled" with a lecture course, and 1 unit for labs "separated" from a lecture course. Recitation and discussion sections did not carry any extra credit.
So it basically is what the tradition for your school in assigning credit should be, and what regulations your university has with respect to this matter.
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Tags: teaching, undergraduate, university, education
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thread-14197 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14197 | Will I be allowed to reapply for a mathematics NSF postdoc next year after declining one this year? | 2013-11-18T05:54:27.257 | # Question
Title: Will I be allowed to reapply for a mathematics NSF postdoc next year after declining one this year?
I am a mathematics PhD student in the US graduating this year. I recently received a very good 3 year postdoc offer in Europe, which I have to accept or decline in early December. Not being a big risk taker, I am leaning toward accepting the offer. I have also applied for an NSF postdoc, which I would prefer to the European offer but am obviously not a shoe in to get--and the results of which won't be known until February. If I accept the European offer, I will have to decline the NSF postdoc if awarded.
If I do that, would I be allowed to reapply for the NSF next year?
# Answer
If you accept another position before the NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships are awarded, you should officially withdraw your NSF application. The way the NSF postdocs work is that there is no second round of offers: if you are awarded one and turn it down, then it won't be offered to their next choice of candidate, who might have received it if you had withdrawn your application. Furthermore, I believe withdrawing will preserve your eligibility for next year, while you will not be eligible if you decline an offer (according to the official instructions).
> 24 votes
# Answer
I think Anonymous Mathematician has left out something pretty important here, which is that often these situations can be finessed. Have you spoken to the people at the school in Europe about the possibility of you getting the NSF postdoc? Often you can spend one year at wherever you applied to for your NSF and then move to a different place. It's also probably worth speaking to the project officer for the NSF; a lot of things about the fellowship are really up to him/her, so it's possible you could get approval to transfer your NSF to this new place. There's no guarantee, but it's possible with the timing they'll be understanding. You'll never know until you ask.
I completely agree that you need to withdraw your application from the NSF and any other jobs if you know you won't accept them this year. That's just common decency, and it will save people trouble.
> 12 votes
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Tags: career-path, job-search, mathematics, postdocs, nsf
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thread-14209 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14209 | My transcripts are not an accurate indication of my academic ability | 2013-11-18T16:46:47.043 | # Question
Title: My transcripts are not an accurate indication of my academic ability
Can the absence of an official academic adviser in the department at which I finished my undergraduate studies be used in my graduate application to justify some deficiencies in my undergraduate grades transcripts?
# Answer
> 10 votes
The lack of an official advisor is most unlikely to be of any benefit as an excuse for not doing well in classwork. Presumably you have a common core of classes in your major, and you'd better have a good explanation for any significant deficits in those courses. The lack of an advisor might have led to poor course choices in electives, but you could have ended up taking the same courses even if you had had an advisor. Moreover, your advisor didn't take your classes for you; he didn't do your homework or take your tests or complete your projects for you. Ultimately, **you** are responsible for your performance as a student.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, advisor
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thread-14216 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14216 | Academic Statement of Purpose vs NSF Personal Statement | 2013-11-18T22:40:12.860 | # Question
Title: Academic Statement of Purpose vs NSF Personal Statement
Beyond the obvious, that the NSF Fellowship Personal Statement is "Why am I good for the NSF," and the Academic Statement of Purpose on a graduate school application is "Why grad school and why grad school?", how different or similar are the two essays?
Having already written an NSF Fellowship application, I'm now in the process of writing my Academic Statement of Purpose for grad school applications, and I'm trying to figure out how similar these statements are going to end up being.
# Answer
There will be many common features, but the NSF has many highly stylized requirements, including "broader impact" and such, which would seem stilted or hypocritical outside that venue. NSF has a page limit, rigid formatting requirements, many other formal requirements, none of which matter in a statement of purpose. You have room to be more sincere, more genuine, explain more fully in your grad school application's statement of purpose. Also, unlike the NSF, where there is some compulsion to pretend that you already know what you're doing and will start research immediately, grad school applications (e.g., in mathematics) can easily and reasonably acknowledge that it might be premature to be thinking about PhD-level research prior to grad school.
(I don't necessarily hold a grudge against NSF over some of this, because they have to "make the sale" to Congress, in terms Congress-people can understand and find compelling, in order to get the money...)
> 7 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, nsf, funding
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thread-10522 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10522 | Should I stay in PhD program I dislike to have a shot at liberal arts teaching? | 2013-06-08T15:49:31.310 | # Question
Title: Should I stay in PhD program I dislike to have a shot at liberal arts teaching?
**TL;DR**: I'm a pure math graduate student who doesn't like research mathematics. Should I continue and get the PhD because I suspect I might like teaching at a 4-year liberal arts college?
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I am currently in a pure math PhD program at a fairly good university. I just finished my second year there, and after passing qualifying exams have been awarded a Master's.
Ever since I arrived in grad school, I have been fairly dissatisfied. I went to grad school because math in undergrad felt relevant, and I loved the feeling of leaping from logical lily-pad to logical lily-pad en route to proving something. In grad school, though, these feelings have become fewer and far between. I feel like things have become more mechanical and more like banging my head against a wall. For the most part, I find it very difficult to motivate myself to do my work; I never look forward to getting started in the morning. I have finished required courses and qualifying exams, but the difficulty continues as I do a reading course in preparation for work with an advisor.
Overall, I have realized that research math is not for me. I have quite enjoyed my teaching experiences, which so far consist of leading recitation sessions, tutoring, and the first week of teaching a summer course. Because of the heavy emphasis on "teaching to the test" in secondary education, among other things, I suspect I would enjoy teaching at, say, a liberal arts college more than teaching at a secondary school. However, I feel pretty inexperienced in teaching, and so I don't feel certain by any means about these feelings. This is now the only reason I would want to stay in graduate school. Is this enough reason to continue for the next 3-4 years to the PhD?
According to my advisor, I would be in graduate school another 3-3.5 years for the PhD. I would love to work at a liberal arts institution in the US, but ideally one where the research load is minimal/nonexistent. The impression I got from skimming MathJobs recently was that such positions were relatively rare compared to research-intensive positions. Do you feel like I would be very likely to find such a job if I stayed for the PhD?
Any advice is much appreciated! Thank you, everyone.
# Answer
> 27 votes
You should know that these days, most 4-year liberal arts colleges in the US expect their tenure-track mathematics faculty to do research.
Colleges want to be able to offer their students the opportunity to be taught by experts who are contributing to their field. There is also increasing interest in getting undergraduates involved in research, which means the faculty have to have research programs to get them involved in.
Of course, there is a wide spectrum of expectations. At the most selective liberal arts colleges, research expectations can approach those of a mid-level research university, demanding a regular output of papers published in good journals. Elsewhere there can be more flexibility, replacing a specific requirement for "research" with the broader term "scholarship"; they might require only occasional publications, and they could be projects with students, or articles about teaching.
But in general, if you want an academic job in mathematics that doesn't require you to do any research at all, you're going to restrict yourself to the least selective tiers of liberal arts colleges, or to non-tenure-track positions (and often liberal arts colleges tend to have relatively few such positions, compared to large universities).
You might have a look at MathJobs to get a sense of what jobs are out there, and what they expect. Note that there are not so many listings in summer, since this hiring cycle is mostly finished; many more will appear in the fall.
# Answer
> 12 votes
Notably given the especially difficult employment market in academia (in France but I guess it is the same everywhere), I always advise: do a PhD for the years doing research themselves, not for what you expect to gain from the title. As Dave Clarke stresses, doing a PhD requires a lot of motivation and hard work; but if you do not like the good times enough, it can be really wasted years. If you think you won't enjoy the years of your PhD, you should consider seriously all other opportunities you have.
By the way, I think the same applies to postdoc positions.
# Answer
> 12 votes
Although it is generally a good rule to think that one oughtn't commit to things one doesn't want to do... and the other answers reflect this in several good ways... sometimes there *is* an "entry fee" that is unpleasant to pay.
Yes, it is true that there is an ever-greater pretense that all faculty in colleges and universities "do research", but, as one might imagine, not quite all of this is cutting-edge... In fact, the requirements of completing a PhD at most "good" places are a bit more strenuous than the "research" required at little colleges. In particular, as I gather from substantial anecdotal evidence, it is possible to be much saner/human in "small" situations, about pretension-to-research. True, it may not be wise to be "too honest", as in many professional/human situations.
That is, you might try to view "the PhD" as simply a college teaching license. Certainly if you do *not* have it you'll be at an extreme disadvantage forever... One might view it as a prolonged licensure ordeal?
And, at the same time, it is quite excellent that you have realized so clearly that you don't want to "be a researcher". This is much better than the self-conflicted delusional versions of the story. But what remains is to gain the credentials. "Cred".
This is not necessarily a recommendation to stay in your PhD program, especially since your recoil has been fairly strong (though one doesn't know how to interpret printed words' intensity...) But, sure, no one likes to take "drivers' training", and many other things. But it can be done, routinely.
The last adverb is a significant point: unless you're at an elite place, and unless you are truly severely allergic to "higher math", ... "it's not that hard" to finish the PhD. The fact that you've already done the qualifiers and such shows that it is easily within your power... if you so choose.
So, srsly, the question is about what you want your appearance to be for the rest of your life. Not that being PhD'd makes anyone a better person! But, it adds something to the ol' resume, undeniably.
And, again-at-the-end, being "too honest" about one's disinclinations is not necessarily a good thing.
Good luck, ... in figuring out complicated things.
# Answer
> 11 votes
I know of people who have completed PhDs at prestigious institutions (in computer science) just so that they could teach at a liberal arts college. It certainly seems to be one way into that profession, and an admirable profession it is indeed.
Doing a PhD requires a lot of motivation and hard work, even if you are not aiming for a high profile research career. The question you need to ask yourself is "Are the benefits of finishing the PhD worth the effort? Will you be motivated enough to complete if you are not interested in research?"
Consider also doing some pedagogic studies, so that you know the theory of how to teach and, more importantly, how to help students learn.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I can't comment on the US, but in Canada there are a number of "lecturer" positions, even at research universities. Lecturers only teach; they don't do any research, and it is not necessary to get a PhD to be a lecturer (though I'm sure it doesn't hurt, and some positions do request a PhD). It seems that these positions are becoming more common, especially because the current Canadian government likes to cut costs, so funding is harder to come by. I would suggest searching for these types of positions, and hopefully that will give you an idea of what is out there, how many positions are available, and how many require PhDs.
Here's one example at my university that does require a PhD (in Psychology, not math, sorry).
EDIT: Having said all that, I don't think it's worth continuing your PhD if you're not enjoying it. If you don't like what you're doing, it's going to be very difficult to put the time and energy into completing your thesis. If the area of research is a problem (you're not interested in your research project, or you simply feel stuck), perhaps you can ask your supervisor for a different project, or switch supervisors, or even switch to another department, program, or university.
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Tags: phd, graduate-school, teaching, mathematics
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thread-14210 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14210 | Why is 3.0 GPA used as cut-off for job offers, etc.? | 2013-11-18T17:27:51.273 | # Question
Title: Why is 3.0 GPA used as cut-off for job offers, etc.?
My GPA is 2.97 and I am a junior in University. My resume is pretty strong, having around 2 years experience in the industry as a software engineer. I also include work samples with my resume, including small games and web apps. Recently I have been applying to several co-op jobs. In a few of them, I have been contacted by the employer and asked "Do you have a 3.0 GPA?". I respond honestly and say "no". Many of them seem to completely decline based on this alone, despite everything else I have on my resume.
This always seemed odd to me, because in and of itself, this focus on grade-point average influences poor academic behavior. It influences students to avoid taking anything challenging because the risk is too high. Also, many students have the advantage of being full-time students, whereas people like me work full-time while in school.
So why do companies base so much on GPA? And why is the 3.0 cut-off so strictly enforced?
# Answer
> 12 votes
*“why do companies base so much on GPA? — And why is the 3.0 cut-off so strictly enforced?”* — Because it is practical! As any **numerical indicator**, it allows one to make decisions very fast. Thus, it is not used the main decision factor, but simply **to weed out a large fraction of applications, thus reducing the amount of work required by individual examination of the remaining applicants' files**.
Does it mean that some exceptional applicants, with poor GPA grades, are left out? Yes. Is it understandable from the company's point of view? Yes, also: you have to compare the amount of work it would require to give each and every application a thorough review (huge) to the risk of loosing a potential top-notch-collaborator-who-had-a-poor-GPA.
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*Why 3.0?* — I'm not sure there's any good reason for that, and it would probably depend on the company/program. But 3.0 is a nice round number, easy to remember, and it falls in a convenient place in the statistical distribution: if you set the limit to 2.5, your threshold does not filter out enough applications; if you set it to 3.5, you're at risk of loosing to many good applicants (making you rely too much on this simple numerical indicator).
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*How to combat it, if your GPA is lower than 3.0?* — Rounding is one trick you might try (2.97 is 3.0, if two significant digits). More promising, though, are **getting very strong recommandations, if possible from inside the company**. Whatever the announced requirements are, there usually are ways to get your application file into the right pile, if you can get someone to speak for you.
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Tags: job-search, computer-science, grades
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thread-14224 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14224 | Potential disadvantages of a math postdoc in Europe vs US | 2013-11-19T11:00:47.793 | # Question
Title: Potential disadvantages of a math postdoc in Europe vs US
I am a mathematics Ph.D student in the United States, and recently received a 3 year postdoctoral offer in Germany, which I have only a few weeks to accept or decline. The offer is very good (high salary, travel funding, no teaching unless I want to) the PI is basically the top person in my field, and the position also solves my 2 body problem (my SO has a similar offer from the same place), so I am tempted to accept it.
However, I have sometimes heard that an American doing a postdoc in Europe is at a disadvantage applying for permanent jobs since European positions are often restricted to EU citizens and American schools are less likely to hire someone who did a postdoc in Europe. Can someone (on either side of the pond) offer perspective on whether my concerns are valid? I need to accept or decline the position before offers for US postdocs are sent out.
# Answer
> 17 votes
I'm aware of a few potential issues applying for academic jobs in the US after a European (or non-North American) postdoc. These won't necessarily come up in any given job, but they're the problems I've heard of people having. (Specifically, I know of different people who've had each of these problems individually.)
Many American schools are reluctant to hire someone who doesn't have adequate teaching experience, and especially at least some experience teaching service courses (courses to non-majors), since that's such a large part of the job in the US. European postdocs often have less or different teaching requirements.
Many schools can't afford to fly people in from Europe to interview for position, and will therefore officially or unofficially discount applications from someone in Europe.
There's still some variation in how people write recommendation letters, so a European writer is more likely to write a letter which comes across as negative to Americans. (More specifically, in the US, almost any negative comment in a recommendation letter, even a very mild one, is taken as a hint that the problem is much worse than is being said. In Europe, I'm told it's more common to include mild critique of an applicant in an overall positive letter.)
# Answer
> 13 votes
I'll contribute to answering on the European side… **nationality requirements for European positions are rare**, although not totally unheard of (especially in some strategic sectors). To give only a few examples, French CNRS positions and UK EPSRC fellowships have no nationality requirements.
More common, however, are language requirements: **positions that include some teaching** (lecturer, assistant professor, …) very often **require that you speak the language of the country**. So, unless you're targeting the UK in particular, if you get a post-doc in the EU, you'd better pick up the language!
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Tags: postdocs, career-path, mathematics, united-states, europe
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thread-14219 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14219 | Is an MLA citation needed for a broad description of a poem's theme? | 2013-11-19T05:10:35.137 | # Question
Title: Is an MLA citation needed for a broad description of a poem's theme?
I'm trying to figure out whether I need to cite these poems or not.
> “Out, Out—” has its morbid description of a young boy bleeding out and its underlying theme of death. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” has its pessimistic theme that nothing beautiful can stay beautiful.
I speak so generally that I
1. Have no idea if it's ethical or not to exclude citation
2. What I would cite were I to. Generally you cite poems by line numbers. If one were to cite a poem based on a description of its theme, doesn't that encompass the *entire* poem? This has more to do with the in-text citation part.
Thanks for any help
# Answer
In general, it's always a good idea to cite your sources. This can especially be the case with older poetry, where there are often differences in spelling, punctuation, and layout between different editions of the same poem.
So, at the first mention of a literary work, whether it's a direct quotation or an indirect reference, it's probably a good idea to cite the specific version of the poem you're writing about. This will make life easier for everybody involved. You would cite the overall poem, usually as a publication in a larger source, and follow the specific guidelines of whatever style manual the publication you are writing for (or the school you are attending) is using.
For example:
> Poetovsky, R. "Sonnet 100" in *Every Sonnet Ever Written by Anybody*, ed. John Smith. Random Publisher, Some City (2000).
Then, if you go on to cite the poem again, you can refer to the specific lines as needed; general statements probably wouldn't need to be cited.
> 1 votes
# Answer
I think you answered your own question. Although my trusty handbook doesn't specifically address this issue, when citing a poem based on a description of its theme, you *are* referring to the entire poem. In text citation would thus be (Poetmann lines 1-100), where 100 is the last line of the poem. Obviously, if you later mention a specific line of the poem to back up your claim about the theme, you would cite this particular line as (Poetmann 6).
> 0 votes
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Tags: citations, writing
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thread-13671 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13671 | Pursuing Masters to get a better job | 2013-10-27T06:29:08.927 | # Question
Title: Pursuing Masters to get a better job
I am going to apply for the masters program in computer science to various US based universities. I am eager to apply to their professional courses which do not have thesis/projects in their curriculum, commonly known as MEng and MCS programs. These courses are more inline with the industry needs and that is where I eventually want to go after graduation.
As an international applicant if I apply to a program stating that I want to get a job in US because of better opportunities and doing masters there would help me in achieving my goal would it be frowned upon by the admission committee? How else can some convince that this is the right program for him?
# Answer
> 3 votes
> As an international applicant if I apply to a program stating that I want to get a job in US because of better opportunities and doing masters there would help me in achieving my goal would it be frowned upon by the admission committee?
**No.** That's what professional master's degrees are *for*.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I can't argue with what JeffE answered, but I would like to add that the reason you mentioned "I want to get a job in US" will be frowned upon by the US embassy if they knew about it, which means that they might not grant you a visa even if you were accepted by a university.
# Answer
> 3 votes
You should maybe steer clear from saying things like "I want to get a job in the US". Rather say you're passionate about computerscience and would like the experience of studying abroad to look at things from a different perspective, or to enrich your culture, etc..
There are plenty of good reasons to study aboard - but already talking about work I'd avoid ;)
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Tags: masters, job-search, computer-science
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thread-14226 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14226 | Remove submission during review | 2013-11-19T12:06:10.627 | # Question
Title: Remove submission during review
I submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal which is now in 'Submitted to Journal status'. Now I want to remove it to improve the write up, though the content is good. I don't want it to be rejected after waiting for 7 months which would be a lot of time wasted. I would rather remove it now and improve it myself or with the help of editing services. Should I email editor to remove it? I am worried because the reasons for withdrawals mentioned on their website are serious and I don't want to give that impression when my reasons is just to improve the manuscript.
When you feel your paper does not have high chances to get accepted, do you keep on working on it during the review and re-submit to a different journal when it gets rejected eventually? Or remove it immediately, work on it and submit again.
# Answer
*“When you feel your paper do not have high chances to get accepted”*… then I suggest you **don't submit it for publication in the first place!**
It has happened that I have submitted a work which I continued to work on improving, but it was definitely in some very specific cases, where
1. the improvement in question was nice but absolutely not crucial to the paper,
2. had no impact an any of the conclusions of the paper,
3. I was not sure the improvement would actually work.
Basically, something like submitting the paper while continuing to tinker on Figure 2, thinking without adding or removing any data there might be a better way to present it, but it required getting a new software license and learning how to use it. Or submitting a paper while thinking that “hey, this is totally publishable, but if I continue running the simulation while the paper is submitted, maybe I can get the curve on Figure 3 with a little bit less noise”. But **nothing as extensive as changing the text.**
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*What should you do now?* — Well, if you think reworking on the paper can in a significant way improve its chances of being accepted, I suggest you withdraw it from consideration. If you submitted not too long ago, the editor and referees might not even have wasted much time on it yet. So **write to the editor, *apologetically* explaining that you've realized you made a mistake in submitting your paper too early, and would like to withdraw it**. It's not a very nice thing to do, but I still believe it's in your interest.
> 13 votes
# Answer
Just to check: the changes you want to make don't affect the results of the paper, you just want to write it more clearly?
If the paper has already been under review for 7 months, they at least think it's good enough not to reject immediately, and the referee(s) have probably spent a fair amount of time looking at it. If you withdraw it now, you will have to start the whole process over when you resubmit.
I would probably do one of two things:
* Wait until you get a decision from the journal. There's a good chance the decision will be "accept with revisions". Then you can include your changes along with those suggested by the referee. Include a list of all the changes you made, so that the referee knows what to look at. Of course, if it's rejected, then you can make your changes before submitting to a new journal.
* Make your changes now, and quickly. Then contact the editor, saying something like: "Upon rereading the manuscript, I think its clarity would be improved by changing such and such. Would you be willing to consider this updated submission, and pass it along to the referees?" Again, include a list of the changes you have made.
In either case, it would help to minimize the amount you change: revise what you have to, but don't gratuitously make changes that aren't really necessary.
> 9 votes
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Tags: publications, journals, withdraw
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thread-14203 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14203 | Statement of purpose: how important is correctness of grammar and punctuation? | 2013-11-18T12:41:14.167 | # Question
Title: Statement of purpose: how important is correctness of grammar and punctuation?
English is not my first language, and I am concerned that my statement of purpose might contain some grammatical and punctuation mistakes that neither Microsoft word nor I can see. What is the best way to overcome this problem, and to what degree does this affect the admissions committee decision putting into consideration that English isn't my first language?
P.S. I don't have any native English-speaking friends and I don't trust companies or online sites to see my statement of purpose to check its correctness.
# Answer
> 6 votes
If the written question above is a genuine reflection of your English spelling and grammar abilities, then I strongly suggest you seek professional services to assist if you are in any way concerned about your abilities having an adverse impact on your application.
This application is clearly a very important step in determining your future, and if it is so important and you have concerns, it is not worth leaving it to chance. If you have no suitable friends, use a professional service. Plenty of other *native-English* speaking applicants who are competing for spaces with you will have done so.
I can't say for certain how a selection committee will factor your English as a second language. It is likely to depend on the institution and the course you are applying for.
# Answer
> 3 votes
English not being your first language should not be an excuse. No one is perfect and making a mistake is acceptable, surely if you're not a native speaker. But it makes you look less interested if there are a lot of mistakes in your text.
A native English speaker would be advised - since they might be able to phrase something better than someone who's just "good".
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Tags: graduate-admissions, united-states, statement-of-purpose
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thread-14124 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14124 | Statement of purpose book reference | 2013-11-15T13:12:33.733 | # Question
Title: Statement of purpose book reference
I am applying for graduate studies in the US and in my statement of purpose I mention the name of a book and it's author, as the book is very relevant to my previous research work and the author is working in the university I am applying too.
Is this okay, or should I not mention the book's name?
If it is okay should I quote the book's title or should I do any special formatting regarding this reference?
# Answer
> 4 votes
As mentioned in the comments by Anonymous Mathematician, there won't be a problem with mentioning a book that you read in your statement of purpose. If your statement of purpose has a list of references, you can include it there and just use the standard referencing style to cite it. If you don't need a list of references, then just cite the book in the text, e.g., "Reading the book 'A nice mathematics book' by , I found that...".
The difficult part will be to make citing the book really **worth putting it in your statement of purpose**. Which books someone read is probably not as important for computer science students as it is for students of literature. Think about the following questions, as examples:
* How did reading this book influence your decision to apply for graduate studies?
* In which way will your planned research build upon what you learnt in this book?
* Does the book define research problems that you are planning to tackle?
If you cannot write something along these lines when referring to this book, then I am not sure that it would be worth writing that you read it.
# Answer
> 4 votes
Yes, it is perfectly acceptable, if not *expected*, for research statements (aka "statements of purpose") in computer science PhD applications to include references to the research literature. I recommend citing them exactly as you would in a research paper.
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Tags: masters, united-states, statement-of-purpose
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thread-14231 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14231 | Traveling during PhD | 2013-11-19T16:39:23.080 | # Question
Title: Traveling during PhD
I've started a PhD position at a university in the US, but I'd like to travel during my time there. What's the easiest way to do something like that? Are there fellowships or grants available for students who want to study abroad for a semester or year, and if so, how can I find them? Or, is studying abroad typically a process that is dependent on who my advisor knows in foreign countries?
If it helps to answer this question, my field is statistics and I'm planning on focusing on spatial statistics.
# Answer
> 11 votes
It may depend on who your advisor knows in foreign countries --- or who *you* can get to know in foreign countries.
I've known people who've done this, but my impression is that in grad school it becomes less about "doing a study abroad" and more about doing a "visiting scholar" program at a particular school. That is, you wouldn't seek or find something like "I want to study abroad" or "I want to study in Country X". What you could do is find a particular school, department, or researcher in Country X and arrange to visit their department for a certain length of time. I'm in a department in the US, and we regularly have visiting scholars from a range of countries (e.g., Japan, the Netherlands, Finland, Brazil). We currently have one of our own students on a visiting scholar stay in Germany and another is planning a possible study in Singapore.
The thing is that, like anything else in a PhD program, "studying abroad" can't just be "studying", it has to be connected to your particular research. So you would need to build connections with particular departments.
Also, there can often be opportunities for shorter-term study abroad in the form of "workshops" or the like. These would be more in the range of 2-6 weeks. That's a lot less time abroad, but my impression is it's much more straightforward, because you just apply (instead of having to form specific personal relationships with other researchers). These workshops sometimes have fellowships available to cover some or all of the cost, and even if they don't, it's likely to be easier to get funding from other sources if you can point to a specific "thing" you're using it for (i.e., "I am going to this workshop on these dates to learn about these topics" rather than "I'm going to Country X for a while to hang out").
# Answer
> 4 votes
It is very dependant on the country you live in. There are plenty of countries whos universities have special programs for students studying abroad. In such programs, you are often in contact with other people from your university / country who study or live near you when you're in another country. They then organise several events to explore the culture there.
(I've attended keynotes about this as I'm thinking of studying abroad myself)
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Tags: phd, abroad, funding
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thread-14257 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14257 | Are there any legal issues in having someone's book as the basis and as a textbook for an online course? | 2013-11-20T15:44:17.870 | # Question
Title: Are there any legal issues in having someone's book as the basis and as a textbook for an online course?
I want to create an online course and use someone's book as the basis (follow the structure, topics) and as a textbook (use exercises, examples, etc). Note that I'm not going to distribute any parts of the book to my students.
What might be the legal issues here? How do physical universities deal with them?
# Answer
> 5 votes
I cannot see any problem with this as long as no copyrighted material is accessible in such a way that it breaks the copyrights of the book. Although the outline of a book probably can be considered the intellectual property of the author (and possibly the publisher depending on copyright), I doubt anyone would object since the purpose of writing a (course) book is to provide a product to support teaching of a specific topic. The structure of a book can often be the most logical way of presenting the material. The key issues is rather if you reproduce parts of the book such as providing the exercises on-line. As long as participants must obtain the material in the book on their own you should not worry. From this perspective it is no different from a normal university course (where it is also illegal to copy and distribute material freely from a book (or equivalent).
So for an on-line course, you just need to be very careful with reproducing text or figures from copyrighted materials in ways that breaks the rules. You can also contact the holder of the copyright (author/publisher) to obtain the right to provide parts within the course. The success of this may depend on the system you use for on-line material and what file formats you use for distributing the materials. Such details will likely be made clear by the copyright owner if you ask.
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Tags: copyright, online-learning, intellectual-property
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thread-13985 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13985 | How much will connections with the department chair help with grad school acceptance? | 2013-11-10T17:30:00.620 | # Question
Title: How much will connections with the department chair help with grad school acceptance?
As an undergraduate (not studying computer science) I was fortunate enough to work in the lab of the CS department chair at my university for an extended period of time. This work resulted in me being added as a coauthor to one of her most recent papers. She also knows me well - I took an intro CS course with her, and during my time in the lab we would be in contact practically every day. I definitely plan on asking her for a recommendation letter when I apply for graduate school in computer science next year.
Although I know that going to the same university for undergraduate and graduate school is sometimes discouraged, I would quite honestly be very happy to return there, as I very much enjoyed working under her, she is well-known in her field, and some of her research interests are very close to mine. In any event, it would be nice to have a "safety net" of sorts while exploring other options.
I know that every university has different policies about admissions decisions, so no one can speak to my particular case. But in general, how much would you say that having the backing of the department chair helps in graduate school admissions?
# Answer
> 5 votes
You're right, it's sometimes discouraged to get a graduate degree from your alma mater, but it's not as highly discouraged as getting a Ph.D. from the same place you got your master's degree. It really depends a lot on the culture of the department. When faculty are going over your letters of recommendation, test scores, and statement of intent, they're trying to mainly assess:
* How likely you are to succeed in the program
* How closely your interests align with faculty (*i.e* Can they help you? Can you help them?)
People can seem amazing on paper and turn out to be a disaster as a graduate student, and vice versa, and faculty will tell you they're taking somewhat of a gamble each year when they admit new students based on application materials alone.
If you've got someone on faculty who can vouch for your intellectual abilities and your fit factor in the department (and you clearly do), then I would say you're very likely to be in a favorable position over other applicants in that department. My department accepted a master's student who had just graduated with their bachelor's from the same department two years in a row.
As far as other programs go, it's extremely beneficial that you have co-authored a published article and would have a letter of rec from a department head. Not a guarantee, of course, but a massive help in any case.
# Answer
> 4 votes
With respect to getting accepted into your current institution, it matters a lot. If she recommends you, you're definitely in. With respect to other institutions, it depends on whom she knows. Recommendations can get you very far, to the point that **strong** recommendations from well known faculty pretty much trump all other aspects of one's application.
# Answer
> 4 votes
What's probably more helpful from knowing the chair of the department is that she probably knows other professors from other institutions whom she has met at conferences, workshops, etc. Talk to her about your options and use her as an advisor, rather than a boss in this situation. She should know that it's not usually a good thing to stay at the same place for your grad work and she might be able to say, "Yes. I know such and such professor at this university who would align with your interests. Let me talk to him/her and see if they're interested in hiring a grad student." That sort of recommendation, where you are applying for a specific position and it's no longer a cold call is far more useful than just applying blindly with good recommendations.
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions, computer-science
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thread-14270 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14270 | Should I ask permission of my co-authors when republishing an article? | 2013-11-20T22:14:39.337 | # Question
Title: Should I ask permission of my co-authors when republishing an article?
In the university that I am working, which is more technically than research oriented, they want me to publish one of my past articles in a faculty magazine that they are planning to print. I have chosen one from the IEEE, and I have read that they have that possibility. I would like to know if I should mention that to my other co-authors or is it not necessary?
Thanks for your help
# Answer
Yes.
As a courtesy, one should always inform co-authors of such things. One doesn't necessarily expect replies (since no action is required...), but one is taking action on "property" that is partially "owned" by other people, so some notification, or even request for permission (which would presumably be unhesitatingly granted), is entirely reasonable.
> 17 votes
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Tags: publications, authorship
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thread-14235 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14235 | How did modern western post-secondary education become tied up with research and publications? | 2013-11-19T18:21:45.080 | # Question
Title: How did modern western post-secondary education become tied up with research and publications?
Teaching, research and (academic) publishing are three different pursuits. Our society and its institutions, particularly most universities, enforce links between these in various ways.
People who have great teaching skills can not get teaching positions (at universities) because they aren't good in doing research, and some potentially great researchers experience setbacks in their academic career because they are horrible at teaching, and both can be penalized by failing to or poorly publishing their results.
How did this happen? Who does is benefit? How does intertwining these three requirements benefit the general knowledge and the academic community?
# Answer
Ca. the 17th century, typically research, teaching, and religion were the functions of a European university. For example, when Isaac Newton wanted to become a professor at Cambridge, he asked the king for a special dispensation to be excused from taking holy orders. He was expected to teach as well as doing research, but was apparently such a bad teacher that he often lectured to an empty room.
During this period publication was not as emphasized as it is today. There were no academic journals in the modern sense. People communicated their results directly to their students, by letters to their peers, and sometimes by writing books. In some fields, such as alchemy, secrecy was the norm.
Presumably the reason that research, teaching, and religion were all linked was that the system evolved from medieval institutions, in which the literate class consisted mostly of monks. Part of their job was to preserve knowledge.
I think the more modern, liberal, and secular model is what's known as the German university model. It dates to the 19th century and was influenced by personalities like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt. I think this was also the era when modern academic journals began to appear, and this was an important, positive development.
Some more modern phenomena in the US are research supported by grants from the central government; land-grant colleges; the delegation of a large amount of undergraduate teaching to part-time faculty; and the creation of community colleges, which have only teaching as their mission, not research.
> 16 votes
# Answer
There are advantages to having the same people do teaching and research. One is that students are being taught by an active researcher in the field, someone who is presumably up to date on the state of the art. They can provide students with meaningful examples that relate to current real-world research problems. Interested students may even get opportunities to do some research, either through a course project or as an extra-curricular activity.
There are also advantages to researchers. In my experience, one of the best ways to really get to understand something is to teach it; it quickly becomes apparent what you know really well and what you don't know so well. Students can also push teachers to look at things a different way, and can help fuel the creativity of researchers. Of course, the researcher has to be careful not to steal a student's brilliant idea for themselves, but rather to include the student in the research process.
That said, I think your comments are valid, and there are some drawbacks to having teaching and research coupled so tightly. As you observed, some people are better at doing research, and some are better at teaching. Universities have found ways to deal with this, such as letting more research-focused professors not have to teach much, and letting good teaching professors teach more. Even so, I had some professors in my undergrad who weren't very good teachers, and I think the reason the university keeps them around is because they are good researchers.
Some universities are moving more toward the model you describe, hiring full-time lecturers to teach some (especially first- and second-year) courses. This is a contentious issue in academics, and you're certainly not the only person who thinks research and teaching should be decoupled.
> 4 votes
# Answer
> We miss out on people who would make great teachers because they aren't good at doing research, and some potentially great researchers are left out of academic research because they are horrible at teaching
Dubious. The labour market is so flooded that institutions above the barrier can for "on-going" positions select who they like within the wage's established differentials. For bulk teaching, most Universities are reliant on casual staff who they sweat with the hope of an on-going position. So this statement is, outside of markets with limited labour supply, junk.
As far as the oversupply of labour, the Employers have a very good reason to offer more candidatures for PhD than the required number of future jobs plus a friction load for losses to industry practice. They're "deskilling."
They're also changing the nature of the commodity on offer (check word limits, class sizes, expectations of self-activity over a 30 year scale for undergraduates); and, of course, attempting mechanisation. From what I've seen mechanisation isn't increasing worker productivity, but, rather is more important in breaking down work cultures.
> How did this happen?
Proletarianisation, commodification, and capitalism. Ford & Taylor, my friends, Ford & Taylor.
You could suggest that it happened in countries without strong Academic industrial organisation (The United States, for example) due to particularism. But actually we can see the broad effects of this universally across "varieties of captialism" to greater or lesser extents. That it happens in undergraduate teaching and in research, with their different world markets, is indicative that it isn't just particular systems.
> Who does it benefit?
It directly benefits the bourgeoisie, as capital flight into newly commodified areas results in a period of primary accumulation, and as secondary accumulation takes off it often has a higher rate of profit. Basically, there's superprofits in Tertiary Education.
It also benefits consumers. Tertiary education is largely a required commodity to consume, see for example Australia's rate of tertiary education uptake. The more important question is why consumption is over biased (given the knowable workforce demands from employers) towards Higher rather than Further or Vocational tertiary education? Here I'd suggest that many, if not most, jobs don't require tertiary education to perform, and instead employers are getting labour discipline benefits. Consumers still gain some measure of benefit from the enjoyment of education, and the possibility of subversively exercising education in their employment anyway. Also, with the massification of higher education many more consumers get to enjoy this commodity in its dissipated "University" form rather than through Workers Educational Associations, Trade Union newspapers, or Party Education. (Personally, comparing the level of discourse in 1940s TU newspapers to contemporary bits of the internet where equivalent age bands try to discuss serious matters, I'll go with the "non-traditional" education system here for superiority.)
Research culture is a side effect of the commodification of undergraduate teaching. In 1987 when Australia commodified undergraduate education (HECS), it also began the audit of research (The "Publications" return portion of the current HERDC report). It has taken 25 years, and changes in the control over production in departments, but effectively HERDC points act as a method of realising research activity, in a similar way that the "Effective Full Time Student Unit" realises as a commodity teaching.
As far as the teaching / research nexus: using publicly available data I'm pretty sure that even in research intensive universities, all research outside of grant funded substantive positions is done as "overtime." Going back to the labour supply and generation of PhDs: the employer inculcates in apprentices the idea that 60 hour weeks are normal, and that the employer should have exclusive use of the employee for teaching and service for the "normal" working week. The natural form of resistance and sabotage to this would be to not publish. The results of not publishing is the guaranteed absence of an on-going position.
Sources: Vestes/AUR; Trade Unionism; long term wage/price series; managerialism & audit culture; Braverman on deskilling & proletarianisation
> -1 votes
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Tags: research-process, professorship, teaching
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thread-14266 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14266 | Is it unwise to list coursework on CV for PhD application | 2013-11-20T19:27:10.787 | # Question
Title: Is it unwise to list coursework on CV for PhD application
I'm a Master's student currently applying for PhD programs. I've seen conflicting advice about including coursework on my CV.
I'm wondering whether it's ever helpful to have relevant coursework listed. In my case, for example, I'm applying to programs that are more computation-based than my current program, and I'd like to show the CS course that I took while here.
# Answer
In my experience, most applications ask for your coursework separately so it might be a moot point. However, in case it's not:
I wouldn't list everything. I wouldn't even list all of my CS courses. I would only list things that are particularly interesting or unique, such as courses that had relevant projects that you can describe. Seeing a big list of courses without anything to differentiate it will probably do little to improve your chances, but if you have something like
```
CS 520 - Operating Systems -
Implemented a complete rewrite of the Linux kernel that does computation in negative time.
```
you might consider including it. I've found that it's more helpful to include projects (things you've done) rather than courses (things you've sat through).
> 8 votes
# Answer
## No.
Admissions committees can read your transcript. That's why they ask for it.
> 8 votes
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Tags: application, cv
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thread-14250 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14250 | Is it harmful to list too specific research interest in personal statement? | 2013-11-20T09:37:11.250 | # Question
Title: Is it harmful to list too specific research interest in personal statement?
I'm undergraduate who are applying US research program. I have one interest field in which I have read 1 survey and 3 other papers (I know it is not enough). I only have some vague and primitive idea so that I am not sure I will do research in the field in graduate program.
I'm afraid if I write my research interest too specific and there are no professor who has knowledge about or is interested in such field, the admission committee would think my goals do not coincide with their department research interests.
Is it a disadvantage to write research interests too specific?
*It is also possible that what I believe is too specific may be not specific enough for some professor.*
# Answer
> 6 votes
I am not sure if a statement would be harmful, it will be a question of how well you appear to know the field. You are right in that you have not nearly read enough. It would be better to simply state that you are interested in such and such a field without going into depth, after all being interested is hardly a problem. If you try to get into arguing for why a field is interesting without having a good grasp of the field, you run into the likely situation that instead of primarily showing your interest, you simply expose your lack of knowledge. No-one would expect an undergraduate to have deeper knowledge about a specific research topic but if you try to argue for some field based on very sketchy knowledge, you may come across as naive. I therefore think it is better to simply state fields that you are interested in without going into specifics. If you manage to read up on a field (which would take, likely significant, time) so that you have a perspective, then such a statement would be a definite positive. Coming across as having good general skill (knowledge and abilities) is still the most important aspect.
# Answer
> 2 votes
You should choose either where do you want to go (e.g. research group) or what topic you want to research.
If you choose the group because those guys are really clever and doing very interesting things (whatever they do!), or maybe because they are where you want to live for personal reasons and you don't care about the topic, then find out what kind of interests they have (specially what do they need to cover with new people) and be specific on that. You can ask them, everybody likes getting new people to work with/for them specially when they need more people and have money to pay them. If they don't have money and don't need people, and possibly are saturated of work and cannot supervise/advise more students, then probably you should search for a different place (and repeat the process in this paragraph).
If you choose the topic then you should see which are the best groups to work on that topic, who is doing interesting things, where they are, choose the research group of your interest and then repeat the process in the previous paragraph. Do this until it works for a research group.
Be aware that working for many hours a day, days a year and years in total is more exhausting if you don't really like the topic of your work. I know it's feasible, and it's even possible to get good results and survive (at least physically and academically, your soul may be crushed), but certainly it's more advisable to do this after finding a topic you love.
# Answer
> 2 votes
It's not uncommon for people to do a project entirely different from what they wrote about during the application process, so it's not necessarily a bad thing to write in detail about a project that would interest you. It's good to let the faculty know that you can sketch out one or more coherent, interesting, and potentially fundable/publishable ideas for a project that would be appropriate and manageable during your time in the department.
If you want to talk specifically about what you're interested in (and I encourage this), great - but get to know the specialties of faculty members before applying. You should be choosing the schools based on faculty, after all.
I think you're spot on about being too specific about a project causing a problem when there are no faculty on staff who specialize in that area. To be honest, it's in your best interest to not apply somewhere if there are few or no professors that specialize in what you're interested in. It becomes difficult not only for the student who may receive little help, but also for the advisor, and the result could be a poor working relationship.
Your letter of intent is one of the most important parts of your application package. If you don't talk specifically about a project you'd be interested in, then make sure what you do talk about is worthwhile and not simply filler.
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Tags: research-process, graduate-admissions, statement-of-purpose
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thread-14277 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14277 | Internship paid vs unpaid on CV | 2013-11-21T08:19:56.123 | # Question
Title: Internship paid vs unpaid on CV
I have interned in two companies while I was conducting my undergraduate studies, one of the internships was unpaid and the other covered transportation expenses.
My question should I mention in my CV that these internships were unpaid or voluntary? And does this issue make a difference in the eyes of the graduate admissions committee?
The nature of the internships is related to my undergraduate studies (general computer skills), but not very related to my research topic I want to peruse.
# Answer
> 5 votes
Whether you were paid or unpaid is a matter of compensation, which is not something a reviewing committee would care about. All that's important is that your credentials were strong enough to earn you the internship. Whether you were paid or not is irrelevant to the strength of your credentials.
# Answer
> 0 votes
To me it's *very* relevant. "*It's not about the money. It's about sending a message.*" What message? you may ask. It's not the same that some guys are willing to pay you as some guys accepting your free work, the difference is huge. Also, it's not the same committing to your work to the extent of working voluntarily for free when compared of working for a salary, which most of the people do much more gladly.
However, **I would not mention that**, again because "*It's not about the money. It's about sending a message.*" And in this case whatever the message is, you don't want to send it. This is not going to be used in your favor, and it can be perceived negatively (in either of both cases). Therefore it is some information not to tell (unless you are explicitly asked) so that people reading the CV can focus on whatever you want them to focus, which will be your skills as the best possible candidate (on any plausible universe!).
Then you can play the card of: "I'm committed" (thus expensive) or "I'm expensive" (thus expensive) or whatever card you may want, either to get the job, a better salary, more responsibilities, a plant in the window or whatever.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, cv, united-states
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thread-14301 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14301 | Defining book co-author | 2013-11-22T17:00:46.060 | # Question
Title: Defining book co-author
Must a co-author of a book have written literally half? Or can her role refer to significant contributions that actually made the book publishable, such as extensive rewriting and editing, knowledge about publishing, navigating manuscript through the publishing process, writing queries, etc., etc. The book, though very steeped in science, is written for the general public. I am the author of many books and the author approached me to navigate her through this process. She is now exploring whether I shouldn't be co-author because of my contributions. I know this is common in scientific journals, but can't find answer re books. Thank you!
# Answer
A co-author is
> An author who collaborates with another to write something.
There is nothing in the definition that states that each author must have written literally half of the book. Obviously, if there are more than two co-authors (perhaps more common for articles, your question seems to indicate that you realize this), they cannot all have written exactly half of the book, and it is rather unlikely that each will have written exactly one-third or one-fourth or...
In your situation, if the original/first author offers you co-authorship, accepting is a judgment call on your part. You have authored many books; is this one worthy of being added to your list? On the other hand, if you are not offered co-authorship, but will be acknowledged otherwise for your contribution, it is probably best to accept this with good grace. Next time--assuming that you might collaborate again--be sure to clarify potential authorship roles before beginning the actual work.
> 5 votes
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Tags: publications, authorship, books
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thread-14303 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14303 | Letter of Recommendation Expiration Date | 2013-11-22T19:18:26.850 | # Question
Title: Letter of Recommendation Expiration Date
I have 9 and 10 months old recommendation letters. Can I use these when applying to graduate programs (United States)? Is that okay with the admissions committee?
# Answer
> 10 votes
In addition to other points already made, in most situations *you* do not send the letters yourself, but have the recommenders send the letters *directly*. Sometimes this involves simply uploading the letters to a web site, but this would be done \_by\_the\_recommenders\_, not by you.
Thus, some action will be required by your recommenders.
# Answer
> 6 votes
To elaborate on Nate Eldredge's point, this would be a bad idea on several levels:
* It will look bad with the committee. Presumably the letters are dated and people will notice. It will probably not be interpreted charitably.
* Presumably an updated letter will may more good things about you, since it will mention whatever you've been doing for past 10 months. Hopefully you've done *something* worth noting in that time.
* It's also bad form to use letters so long after they are written without contacting the authors. I don't think there are any precise cutoffs for when one transitions from OK to not OK, but I feel like 10 months is pretty firmly in not OK territory. You need to give the letter writers the chance to update their assessment, hopefully for the better.
I don't understand why people being out of town is a problem for contacting them. As Nate says, just send them an email. The ball will be in their court, and they can figure out whether it's practical or not.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, recommendation-letter
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thread-14291 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14291 | How should students react to inaccuracies in professors' teaching without causing resentment | 2013-11-22T02:54:04.567 | # Question
Title: How should students react to inaccuracies in professors' teaching without causing resentment
I am an undergraduate in the UC system. I sometimes encounter situations where professors or TA's make errors, or there are inaccuracies in the material. These situations tend to be quite awkward for both the student and the TA or professor.
It is painful for me not to speak up, but there is a fear, possibly exaggerated, that this could lead to resentment by the TA, or professor, or even future unfair treatment.
The most frequent response by senior students is that the professor is always right, and you should never attempt to argue with the professor. Confronting a professor about a misconception could end up being detrimental to the student in the long run.
**What should a student do (and how?) when a teacher makes an error or gives inaccurate information or material?** Is there any reasonable way to anonymously point out mistakes?
# Answer
> 51 votes
I think your fears may be exaggerated. I can't think of a professor I've ever met who I think would be offended by having a mistake (politely) pointed out, much less retaliate.
Accusing anyone flat-out of being wrong, or worse yet, lying, will certainly make them defensive; and if it turns out they were right, it will be more embarrassing for you. So I don't suggest thinking of it as "confronting" the professor. What I would suggest instead is to approach the question as something that you don't understand. "Hi Professor Smith, in class today you said X. But I'm confused, because I thought that Y." Listen to her response. Be open to the possibility that you are mistaken, or have misunderstood what she said, but if your doubts aren't cleared up, figure out what part still seems wrong to you, and ask about that. "I still don't understand; what about...?" Stay calm and polite. If you find you are getting worked up (or she is), take a break. "Let me think about that, and if I still have questions I'll come back later." Hopefully in the end, everyone agrees on where the truth lies, and nobody feels too embarrassed.
If you think she's simply misspoken about something in class, or written something incorrectly on the board, point it out right away: "Is that X supposed to be a Y?" If there's something deeper, it may be better to discuss it in office hours or by email; I know that when I'm teaching, if I think I may have a serious mistake, I get flustered and it throws off my rhythm. I'd rather have time to think about it offline, and then correct the error in the next class.
I think the other comments saying "Be sure you are right!!!" are excessive. It's not a bad idea to try to think carefully about your question; if you can clear it up yourself, you'll learn better. But don't hesitate to talk to the professor. Even if it's you that's confused, part of my job as a professor is to clear that up. And if it turns out I'm wrong, of course I want to know.
Your suggestion of having some sort of middleman to anonymously forward queries strikes me as a bit extreme. Again, I think you may be more intimidated by your professor than is really warranted. It may help to try to get to know your professors better: early in the course, make it a habit to drop by their office hours. Ask some trivial questions if you like. "Are we going to study Z next week?" Then later, if you have more substantive questions or concerns, you'll feel more comfortable approaching them.
Anonymity seems unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive. If you come to me with something you don't understand, and I'm able to clear it up, I won't think less of you; instead, I'll be pleased that you now understand it better. And if it turns out I was wrong, I won't resent you; I'll be impressed that you understand the issue deeply enough to spot the error, and grateful that you brought it up. But if you're really timid, you could consider sending an email from an anonymous account. ("I'm sending this anonymously because I'm embarrassed that it may be a silly question." Either way she'll probably assure you that it isn't.)
One final comment: If you have mentors suggesting that professors are never wrong, find better mentors! I agree that it is not pleasant to *argue* with anyone, but that doesn't mean you can't discuss your question and try to sort it out.
# Answer
> 28 votes
I suppose there are some insecure professors who resent having mistakes pointed out, but in my experience they are relatively rare. I'm impressed when a student catches a mistake, and I'm happy to learn they were paying close attention. I'm certainly not alone in having this reaction, and I'd say it's a pretty standard response.
Of course, it depends on how you raise the issue: if you act like you are pained by the falsehood, or you question the professor's competence, then it's easy to cause offense. Instead, it's safer to take a neutral tone, with an understanding attitude (based on the fact that it's difficult to teach a semester-long course without ever misspeaking).
For some errors, you should mention them as soon as you detect them. For example, if your professor drops a sign in a calculation, then the earlier it gets corrected, the better. No reasonable person could take offense at having this pointed out, so the only danger is being too eager to point out mistakes and inadvertently complaining about correct calculations. That would be annoying if done frequently.
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a statement is an error or an intentional simplification or approximation. For example, if someone does a calculation using Newtonian gravity, then it's almost certainly unhelpful to interrupt to complain that general relativity would be more accurate. If you can imagine that the statement might be deliberate, then it's probably better to raise the issue outside of class. It's helpful to phrase it in the form of a question: "I was wondering why we neglected relativistic effects. Do they matter at the scale we're working with? Do you know of any good books where I could read about these corrections?"
Sometimes you just have to understand that the discipline in question is based on an approach you don't like. For example, you might complain that your biology professor is always talking about evolution, or that your philosophy professor doesn't use an Ayn Rand-approved definition of freedom, or that your economics professor studies models that assume people are rational utility maximizers. You should definitely not start a conversation by saying "Why are you teaching this nonsense? Surely you know it's all wrong." It's reasonable to ask foundational questions about the field and why the standard approaches have become standard, and you might learn something interesting (for example, that behavioral economics exists). But you should approach the issue respectfully, with the goal of improving your own understanding rather than condemning the field itself.
In your particular case, I'd try to handle things delicately. The fact that you frequently run into these situations makes me wonder whether you are taking a very literal approach to truth, and perhaps counting many models or simplifying assumptions as outright falsehoods. There's nothing wrong with that philosophically, but approximations are a fact of life. If you start complaining whenever anything falls short of the literal and exact truth, then you won't be happy anywhere outside of pure mathematics. Furthermore, when you talk about how painful you find falsehoods taught in class, I wonder whether you make that pain apparent when asking questions. I certainly don't want to discourage you from challenging falsehoods or from asking questions, since both activities are crucial parts of academia. However, it's worth making sure your strong feelings aren't playing an unproductive role in your interactions with professors.
# Answer
> 14 votes
Falsities is a strong word--be very sure that the teaching is actually inaccurate before confronting your professor. And if you feel that you MUST say something, it is best handled in an area less public than a lecture hall. Also, a professor is far more likely to admit to having been mistaken if you approach them with the attitude of trying to understand their viewpoint and/or teaching, rather than trying to point out where they are mistaken. You may discover that you have misunderstood, and the professor is actually correct. On the other hand, your humble, 'trying-to-learn' question may impel the professor to take a second look, and discover where s/he has been inaccurate or mistaken.
I don't believe that there are many (if any) professors who will deliberately teach falsehoods to their students, especially in a course where, as you say, the material is of a technical nature and mistakes easily provable. So when you approach your professor, do so with an intent to discover where YOU are mistaken. You may both learn something.
# Answer
> 0 votes
There is a difference between having a discussion and having an argument. Once you know the difference you then need to be able to recognize when the two parties appear to have a different view of which applies.Once you know that you need to know how to change the situation to one of agreement. Once you know that your question will not bother you.
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Tags: professorship, ethics
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thread-14308 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14308 | Compound used in publication | 2013-11-22T21:38:06.807 | # Question
Title: Compound used in publication
There is a paper in which the authors find a compound that is antimicrobial. I would like to experiment with it (I haven't yet asked the authors for it), but I'm anticipating the worst, that is that they will refuse. What can be done there? Are they obligated to provide the compound besides requesting being paid for postage and other expenses?
# Answer
> 4 votes
The academic standards require that the paper explains how the compound was obtained, so that the results can be reproduced by others. So, either:
1. The product is commercial, and the paper should say how it was obtained? if it's not stated, you can ask the authors for the provider and reference.
2. They extracted the product from a natural source, and then the authors will describe the extraction procedure.
3. They synthesized it, and thus they report the details of the procedure, as well as the reagents used (and providers). You can buy the reagents, and reproduce the synthesis.
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Tags: responsibilities
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thread-14320 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14320 | Statement of Purpose length and bibliography | 2013-11-23T10:46:51.130 | # Question
Title: Statement of Purpose length and bibliography
If the desired length of a SOP is 1.5-2 pages, is it okay to have an extra page for bibliography? (so that I cite books/papers in the formal way)
**Clarification:** I mean 2 pages of text, plus 1 page of bibliography.
# Answer
In my general experience, a statement of purpose rarely needs to be so detailed as to necessitate inclusion of a bibliography. That said, there is nothing expressly preventing you from including a bibliography. On the other hand, part of me is skeptical of the wisdom of including a full-page bibliography in association with a two-page statement. It may seem very much like overkill.
Unless you're citing each and every one of the works in the bibliography individually, I don't see a logical reason to include that many works. I'd stick to just the essential citations needed to explain what you want to do.
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, citations, statement-of-purpose
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thread-5556 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5556 | What incentives do academics have to write text books? | 2012-12-01T17:29:36.100 | # Question
Title: What incentives do academics have to write text books?
As noted in this question, academics should write research articles. In many fields, these are way more important than books. It's original research that counts for getting a PhD position, a post-doc, a tenure-track position, grants, etcetera. Writing a good textbook about an advanced subject is very difficult and very time-consuming. Its advanced nature means it won't sell many copies, so the money can't be much. Then why is anybody writing advanced scientific textbooks at all? What are the incentives?
# Answer
Another reason to write an advanced text is that you have developed a body of research around a topic, and it's stabilized enough that you can present the material in a structured form. The incentive here is that the distilled understanding helps you understand your field, and it helps others work in the area as well. In addition, a well-written book can get you lots of citations, impact, and recognition (the same kinds of things you get with papers, but possibly even more).
> 28 votes
# Answer
As someone who is working on an advanced textbook, I've had to ask myself that question. It's certainly not for the money (which I expect will be not nearly enough recompense for the time spent working on it). Here are the answers:
1. **Citations:** Not a big factor for me, since I expect citations to my book will displace a lot of citations for my older papers and shorter expository work on the subject, but as other people have noted, for a lot of people it is an important factor. A book that becomes the "standard reference" for a topic can garner huge numbers of citations. (Also true of review articles.)
2. **Creating a textbook:** It can serve as a textbook for a class I have taught before and may well teach again. This is a class for which there is no existing good textbook. In this sense, for a big investment of time now I make my life easier in the future by creating a good resource for students taking my class.
3. **New research ideas:** Writing it presents an opportunity to organize my thoughts about the field, and to go through and find and fill holes -- or just things I think haven't been done the right way -- in the existing literature. In this respect, it is an extension of my existing research program and inspires new research to fill the holes that I find.
4. **Understanding existing literature:** Writing the book also provides a good incentive for me to go back and understand other peoples' results that I think should be included in the book. There's one paper in particular which is important, but very difficult to understand, and I've put off making the effort to figure it out for many years. The book provides an additional motivation to actually do it, and furthermore make it accessible to others as well.
5. **Teaching new people about my field:** This is partially altruism and partially self-interested. The altruism part is probably self-explanatory. The self-interest part is that if I can provide a good introduction to the field, I may convince more people to work on an area I am interested in, and furthermore can get them to think about it in the ways I like.
Just one or two of these reasons would probably not be enough by itself, but the combination makes it, I think, a good use of my time. I've written these answers as they apply to me, but I think the same mix of reasons, with different weightings, apply to other people who write advanced textbooks.
> 13 votes
# Answer
People around me that wrote a textbook almost always do that because they want to share the course material they developed for, say, an introduction to hydrology course. They are proud of the material, and feel that the specific approach their material takes is not yet represented in the current textbooks. So, I think for a lot of people they feel it is a significant addition to their field. Mind that these almost always already have tenure.
In addition, in the German system there is an additional reason to write a book. Writing a book (or monograph) is one option to get your habilitation. This is an additional step to take in addition to a PhD thesis, often written with at least 10 years of experience.
> 12 votes
# Answer
In the Wiki page for Richard Feynman,
> > Feynman has been called the "Great Explainer". He gained a reputation for taking great care when giving explanations to his students and for making it a moral duty to make the topic accessible. His guiding principle was that, if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. Feynman **gained great pleasure** from coming up with such a "freshman-level" explanation.
My undergrad major is math. Among all the mathematicians, the ones I remember most (good and bad) are the authors of the math textbooks I used in college.
As for the more advanced scientific textbooks, I believe that the efforts putting all the research results together and organizing them are **no** less valuable than the individual articles.
> 10 votes
# Answer
One case is where you already have the material (course notes, material you gathered from organizing a tutorial on a topic, etc): publishing it as a book used to make it widely available, a lot more than photocopies. Now, with the advent of the WWW, printed books might be less relevant for diffusion, however.
Another incentive, in case you don't have the material ready, might be the same as for writing reviews: if your book is successful, it will be highly cited and enhances your status in your field. Also, you can try to imprint your own ideas and vision for the field in the next generation of researchers.
> 6 votes
# Answer
While this SE website mostly attracts people from more technical and scientific fields which progress through research articles, there are whole areas of academia where the first question that comes up to junior faculty is, "So, what is *your* book about?". In social sciences (at least in the less technical programs) and humanities, you are expected to publish your dissertation work as a book, so by the time you go for tenure, you need to have at least one, better two -- another one based on your more recent work (which, by the way, is called *scholarship*, rather then *research*). You can easily tell by looking at the CVs of professors in say sociology whether they are in a *research* department or *scholarship* department: the former list papers first on their CVs, while the latter put books first (and may not have any papers at all).
Having said that, in the technical fields, it is often valuable to have the material summarized in one source, sometimes even for your own reference. That's how some of the advanced textbooks are formed. Some books are produced as edited collections of invited papers from a specialized topic conference, and it may have been a part of the grant funding that you, as the conference organizer, promised to the funding agency, so that your results are disseminated as widely as possible to the people who could not make it to the conference. (Other people mentioned other obvious ways for the books to shape up, mostly from lecture notes.)
A lot of books are written on sabbaticals, when top folks move away from the daily routine and can concentrate on what they enjoy most: playing in their dirt, moving around their Greek letters and integral signs around, etc. Publishers often approach high profile people and suggest to send their books to them; even I get these generic emails from Wiley or CRC or Springer from time to time. Of course, for publishers that's their business and a way to generate money; I don't think the authors are compensated even remotely enough for the trouble of writing a book. At my consulting rate, writing a book is an undertaking worth a new BMW X5; if somebody else is paying for that, as is the case with sabbatical professors, then this may be an entirely different business :).
If your own field moves through research papers, then you simply won't have the time to work on any books, unless this has been discussed with your chair and faculty, and everybody unanimously agreed that you are so good and so famous in your subfield as to afford spending a whole year away from the programmatic research writing a stupid book.
> 2 votes
# Answer
There are many possible motivations for writing a textbook. A few textbooks bring in very large amounts of money for their authors. E.g., Jim Stewart, the author of a home-run calculus textbook, used $24 million from the book to build a house that is famous.
Probably the most common reason for writing textbooks is the reason that I've done it: because I thought the books already on the market were crap.
> 1 votes
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Tags: books
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thread-14326 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14326 | Am I allowed to publish reviews submitted for courses in open-access journals? | 2013-11-23T17:03:05.733 | # Question
Title: Am I allowed to publish reviews submitted for courses in open-access journals?
Question is rather self explanatory.
I understand that the article was submitted within the context of a course within the university, but it is nonetheless my intellectual property. I also generally cannot seem to get a clear answer from the university's staff.
**Generally, is it acceptable and legal to submit an article or review submitted within the context of a course to a journal for publication?**
# Answer
I cannot see anything in general that could prevent you from submitting a report written in a course to a journal. There are of course several issues you need to be aware of. First, did you do the entire work yourself from coming up with the idea through researching the topic and writing? You need to look if someone else's "intellectual property" is involved. Second, you do not state under what circumstances your report was written. Submitting a manuscript to a journal involves meeting certain standards so under what I would consider normal circumstances, course reports would not be in shape for publication. One obvious reason for this is that reviews typically involves reading and summarizing/synthesizing a very large number of papers, work that cannot fit into the short time span of a course. So, in general, I doubt the scenario you describe would work without significant extra work. I have no doubts the core of a useful paper can be achieved within a course format but from there to publication is a different story. So without additional details, it is difficult to assess the likely success but the principle stands, yes it is acceptable and legal as long as the work adheres to general publication ethics.
> 5 votes
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Tags: publications, intellectual-property, review-articles
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thread-14329 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14329 | Citing books in scientific articles | 2013-11-23T19:13:46.020 | # Question
Title: Citing books in scientific articles
I'm writing an article that has something to do with the multipole expansion with irreducible tensor operators. The topic is old, and I only find books talking about it.
So is it OK to cite tertiary sources (books) in scientific journals? or must it be a primary source source article? Or does it depend on the journal?
The question I'm asking is general about citation rules, and not for this specific case, though this specific case with irreducible tensor operators is what I'm facing right now.
# Answer
Yes, citing books is fine (including anything from research monographs to elementary textbooks). The question you should ask yourself is what the citation is for. What are you trying to convey to the reader? For example, if you are trying to assign intellectual credit, then you should cite whoever originally made the discovery. However, that's far from the only reason to give a citation. If you are providing references to background or more detailed explanations, then all you need is a source that explains what you need, and sometimes a textbook will be clearer or more useful than a research paper. If you are supplying a citation to back up a potentially controversial claim, then you need an authoritative source.
The specific topic you mention is mathematical, in which case the distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources is not particularly important except for assigning credit. As far as explanations go, any derivation will do. Of course, the form of your citation should indicate your intention. For example, if you cite a textbook, you can say something like "See \[insert reference\] for an exposition of the theory of irreducible tensor operators" to make sure it doesn't look like you are claiming this book is where the theory originated.
Of course other fields may attach far more weight to these distinctions.
> 12 votes
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Tags: research-process, publications, journals, citations
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