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thread-16490 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16490 | How to make an MD more appealing for a PhD program in basic research (neuroscience)? | 2014-02-03T01:02:27.663 | # Question
Title: How to make an MD more appealing for a PhD program in basic research (neuroscience)?
1 year and a half away from completing my integrated MS in Medicine, I have decided that, once complete, I won't be pursuing life as a clinician and want to do research in Neuroscience instead.
Now, I already have a paper published (jointly) and two more almost ready to be submitted, after having worked in both the genetics and pharmacology labs, where my tasks ranged from data gathering ("pen and paper research") to Western Blotting and micro surgery in mice.
My grades are not very good though, and I'm looking for ways of making my CV more appealing, besides asking for a summer intership in one the groups I like (all in Germany by the way).
Would having a specialization (Neurology, Psych, etc) be a plus? On which skills should I work?
# Answer
PhD programs are wanting to recruit people who are capable of doing advanced research. Grades are a proxy that people use to try to estimate which members of a population (almost none of whom have publications) will be able to acquire the skill set necessary to publish in the future. And, grades aren't a terribly good proxy. Therefore, the best thing you can do to get into a good grad program is going to be to keep publishing, and ideally in the best places possible.
If you publish research, then you'll be able to get letters of reference that talk about your skills as a writer and scientist that *should* offset any difficulty with your grades.
You'll need to tell some kind of story to tell in your cover letter about why your grades are bad, and how they don't represent the work you will do in your phd program. (ideally a letter writer should address this fact too).
Good luck!
> 5 votes
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Tags: phd, cv
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thread-18692 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18692 | What kinds of reference letters sound best to letter readers? | 2014-03-29T21:04:36.030 | # Question
Title: What kinds of reference letters sound best to letter readers?
Since I'm only starting my mathematical career, I've only ever requested letters from my advisers. So I was wondering what kinds of letters sound good to people reading reference letters? How does a neutral but good reference from a famous researcher compare against a strong letter from someone not-as-well-known?
This is admittedly very situation dependent and subjective. But I thought I'd solicit opinions anyway, since they're always interesting to read.
Edit: I'd appreciate it if you could share your personal experience too. When you were on a faculty hiring committee, PhD/postdoc admissions committee or anything else, what sort of letters had the most effect on you?
# Answer
For the targets you mention, the perception of the letter is highly biased by prior familiarity with the letter writer. It's very common to say things like "*Well Prof. X doesn't like anyone, so if they call this person 'decent' they must be pretty awesome*", or "*Prof. Y loves everyone, so this letter is more useful for what it doesn't say than what it does*", and so on.
Having said that, some of the things that help me when I read a letter (for postdocs or faculty hiring)
(*Caveat: I'm at a US university and am most experienced in reading letters from US-based researchers, so cultural differences are important*)
* **Who writes the letter**
* **the nature of involvement they have with the applicant**: "was a student in my class" is barely adequate, "was my summer intern" is not terrible, "worked with as a colleague" is excellent, "was my Ph.D student" is important, but can also get downweighted.
* **The level of specificity in the letter**: "We worked on problem X and Applicant came up with the key idea and did all the work" is good. "We were stumped on problem Y for ages and Applicant made the breakthrough" is even better. "We all worked on this problem and Applicant contributed ideas to it" is lukewarm.
* **Points of reference**: "You've probably heard of Prof. Awesome who works in this area, and Applicant is awesome-er", or "there are 5 people on the market this year in this area, and Applicant is at least 2nd best".
* **Things not said, or said in code**: "Applicant prefers to work alone" could sometimes mean "Applicant is an obnoxious lout" or "Applicant has no social skills", depending on the context. "Applicant works hard at their presentation skills" could mean "they give lousy talks". And so on. Here again, some prior familiarity with the letter writer helps.
> 10 votes
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Tags: recommendation-letter, citations
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thread-17830 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17830 | How to tell an over-confident student they still have a lot to learn? | 2014-03-06T13:45:27.783 | # Question
Title: How to tell an over-confident student they still have a lot to learn?
In one of my classes, I had a student who generally understood stuff faster than the others. In tutorials, he would ask a lot of questions, mostly of the kind
> "I tried this method instead of what you suggested, is it correct?"
Now, this probably sounds like the dream student, but I quickly realized that he was not really after my input, but rather seeking acknowledgement of his superiority (possibly showing off before his friends).
The exchange would often go like this. If what he suggested was correct, fine, I would say "*great!*" and move on. But quite often there would be flaws in his argument, which I would naturally point out. He would always assume that I misunderstood him and when I was (finally) able to show him that his argument did not stand, he would say something like
> "Oh yeah, that's what I meant to say, but I phrased it wrong"
Note that this was an math class, so "phrasing it wrong" really means "failing to prove". When he asked a genuine question and I started providing an explanation, he would cut me off halfway through with something like
> "Right, I get it, it's because this and that"
and convincing him there was actually more to it was yet another struggle.
I am concerned because I really feel he could be an amazing student if he would only accept that he does not know everything beforehand and therefore sometimes makes mistakes. Also, it seems like my time could be better used than in convincing a student that I'm worth listening to.
**How can one explain this to such a student without humiliating him?** Simple reasoning and proof by example (you'd think after the tenth time I pointed out his mistakes he would have learnt that he sometimes does them!) apparently just bounces off of him.
# Answer
> 69 votes
I would suggest against \[a deleted answer telling to put a lot of weight on simplest textbook examples\] (I consider "ha! you missed the example from chapter 2" to be highly unpedagogical, as it is "appeal to authority" and "you should read and remember rather than think").
I think two things may help:
* give him problems and require *written* solutions (it is harder to boast, or mask omissions, when one writes), solved "down to the last $\epsilon$", as you "want to see the proof, not just be convinced that he can prove it",
* give more advanced problems (still, which are within his reach), for which answer cannot be hand-waved (e.g. "what is sum of", "give an example of set, such that...") OR don't tell the answer in advance (so instead of "prove X given Y" ask "decide whether X holds for all Y").
In both cases, I would tell him (in person) that he is very smart, and you give him more advanced problems because of that. (And that he still needs to learn to be precise enough for mathematics.)
Maybe he does want to show you that he is smart, and as you do not acknowledge it he, well, tries again.
In any case, I would not undermine his skills. In mathematics & theoretical physics I know a lot of people who underestimate their skills, but not many who overestimate *for a longer time* (such subject makes one humble, sooner or later).
# Answer
> 41 votes
I feel that generally your focus is misplaced. It appears to me that by focusing on how to deal with this one student, the learning environment of the other students is somewhat compromised.
First, I would strongly suggest that you need to put this dude into his place. Let's not ask "How can one explain this to such a student **without humiliating** him?" Let's think "How can one explain this to such a student **through humbling** him?" There are numerous indications that what he does is disruptive:
> *Example 1:* In tutorials, he would ask a lot of questions, mostly of the kind "I tried this method instead of what you suggested, is it correct?"
If the tutorial is about A and he decided to use K method to solve it. Wonderful, but were the actual materials covered? If he seeks this kind of "Look at me! I am awesome!" feeling, I will deter that gratification by allocating the last 10 minutes to discuss alternative approaches on solving the problem set. Don't feed the troll, make him wait and train on his patience.
> *Example 2:* "Oh yeah, that's what I meant to say, but I phrased it wrong". Note that this was an math class, so "phrasing it wrong" really means "failing to prove".
Did you actually tell him this thought? You do not need to say "You are wrong." You can, however, say that a certain attitude or a certain pattern is wrong: "While your attempt is well intended, I wish to stress that in mathematics, one wrong phrasing can buy you the direct ticket to failure."
> *Example 3:* When he asked a genuine question and I started providing an explaination, he would **cut me halfway** "Right, I get it, it's because this and that"
That's an unprofessional behavior and you should have slapped him right there. Simply smile, slowly raise your palm to signal a stop, and calmly say "Please hold on and let me finish, there is more to it, and I want to present a full picture."
Overall, I think this student needs circumstantial challenges (in other words, come to feel how the world actually runs) and he should turn out fine. I am more concerned for the rest of the class; If I were one of the students, seeing this alpha male's obnoxious behaviors go unchallenged, I would seriously doubt why I should be here, and should I even ask a question.
# Answer
> 37 votes
I also think that he seeks recognition, from you and maybe from his peers. I also think giving him more advanced questions might humble him, but I think this wouldn't be the most effective way, because it wouldn't give him the recognition he seeks from his peers.
The following is how I have dealt with these kind of students, and how my teachers dealt with a much younger version of me :) And it proved to be very effective.
Whenever he offers his new version of a solution, don't argue with him, but tell him "this sounds like an interesting approach, I think you should share it with other students". And ask him to come and write his solution on the board and explain it to the other students. You should also go and stand or sit in the far end of the class, so basically you temporarily switch roles. This has three effects:
1- **He will ask fewer questions:** Even though he wants to show off his superiority he doesn't want to stand in front of all students and explain a solution EVERY TIME. Even if he likes to, his fellow students will be fed up with him, and they will communicate it in their own way, in or out of the class.
2- **It humbles him** When writing and explaining to other fellow students, they are going to ask him questions and point out his mistakes. If they don't, you can ask them to ask him questions if they have any, or to point out the mistakes. If they manage to do so, he will feel that he is not that smarter than his fellows after all. If they don't, you should give them hints to find his mistakes. Also, since this is in written form, and in front of many people whom he communicates with on a daily basis (much more than you), it is much difficult for him to hide his lack of understanding.
3- **He will think more about a solution before jumping in and offering a wrong one** Because he is explaining it to many people, and not only you. Thus, the cost of making mistakes will be higher, and he will think his new solution through before proposing it.
Now these effects will not happen over night, but after 2-3 class sessions I expect him to improve his attitude enormously.
Let us know if this, or any other suggested solution, helped.
# Answer
> 13 votes
I recognize this student's desperate need for approval. If you are going to try to work on him, try to nudge him in the direction of deriving satisfaction from the math itself, rather than impressing others with his abilities. You might try this line of approach--"I knew a guy once \[Hi, my name is Mike, I'm the guy, btw, just so you don't have to feel you are being deceptive.\] who had a light turn on in his head at one point that changed his life. He realized that he got much more out of loving the math itself than loving the attention he got from being good at math. He had a lot of raw talent, but he realized he was wasting effort trying to impress people when he could have spent that effort getting better at, and more out of, the math."
This is a really delicate thing for you to approach, however, because that need for approval is probably due to some severe self esteem issue which you don't know the source of (and possibly the student doesn't either). Seeking approval from other people is like an addiction--you can't change it over night, and you find yourself returning to it again and again even when you wish you could stop. \[Eventually, you post on message boards all over the internet seeking upvotes... :) \]
Another approach you could take would be to be much more indirect about his psychological issue, but possibly accomplish something in the same direction, while overtly focusing only on the math.
"I think you know that you are better at this than the other students. But I think you're aiming too low--you can really learn to excel at this. Do you want to do that?"
If he answers in the affirmative, tell him what you think he needs to do. A critical skill in academia is learning from other people, so he needs to not cut people off in the middle of an explanation. A critical skill in mathematics in particular is precision. He needs to learn that "I meant to say x" is not going to cut it in math. If he meant it, he should have said it, otherwise, it's wrong. Tell him that up to now you have not wanted to be too hard on him, but if he wants to be really good, you're going to quit pulling your punches and not let him weasel out of a failure to make a complete argument.
Basically, ask him if he wants a coach, or a coddler. If he wants a coach, you're going to judge every statement like a mathematician reviewing a submitted paper would. If he doesn't want that, then it's his choice; you tried. At that point you have done what you can for him, and all that's left to decide is whether he's enough of a distraction in class that you need to address that aspect for the good of the other students.
# Answer
> 13 votes
I am going to write an answer based on the student's perspective. I'm graduating college now, but I feel like I was almost just like this kid in Freshman year of college / Senior in High School.
You mentioned the kid is smart, and quite talented. Too much for his own good. I hated mathematics and still got A on it while not even paying attention to the teacher. The kid needs to be challenged but not at the expense of the class. I later figured out I like challenges the most, and more hands on things than math even though I was super quick to learn it. I sat in the back, solved a rubik's cube, and waved the teacher off because I didn't need to do my homework. The previous week I corrected a question on the midterm exam and got extra credit because no one else saw the flaw.
Here is what my genius math teacher did to me that worked wonders looking back.
A) Instead of just numbers on the sheet, take what he is excited about learning and have him a problem on that. For me it was programming so he said can you graph this on a computer where it shows and calculates the area under the curve? Hah! I didn't even know what I was getting into. Yeah! sure no problem. By trying to do it in a way that made sense to me I willingly did more various types of problems than we would have in class because I was trying to graph areas under all sorts of various curves. He tricked me, and I liked it.
Just use what he likes, and find a real world problem :D. Even if it were surfing or something crazy ask him to calculate how high and fast he could go on a wave given a certain value.
B) Group project that is required to participate in and peers give a portion of your grade based on rating. I didn't really care about my grade honestly because I knew I could pass any test. I cared more about what others thought of my abilities. When we did the group project and some of it was extra credit we all got a's because I wanted to solve the extra credit and I let my group do the other 2 regular problems. It's a way of allowing your student to satisfy his show off ability and still learn. we did not always do group projects, only a couple in the semester.
# Answer
> 6 votes
Your student was probably smarter than all of his teachers in high school, and has never experienced academic failure --I think a lot of college freshmen start out that way.
I would sit him down, and tell him plainly:" You aren't getting your money's worth from this class, because you aren't taking advantage of my teaching."
Chances are, nothing will get through to him but a F on his report card (maybe not in your class, but it will happen sooner or later). However, you will have done your best. If he doesn't respond, I would limit the amount of time you spend on him, and focus instead on students who might have less raw talent, but who are more open to learning.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I am writing from a student's perspective, and I've got this to say:
Why try to humble this student? To me it seems that this student has his own pace at which he learns mathematics, and his pace and yours just don't happen to be perfectly synchronized. There are hard lessons in his future, to be sure, eventually something won't come as easily and will require deep and concentrated thinking on his part. But I think lessons like these are things that should be experienced with the body. Nothing teaches better than failure (or equivalently for well-motivated students, anything less than shining success), and these lessons you wish to impart to him will probably only be truly appreciated when he comes across his first real obstacle.
I am more concerned about the potential to hurt your student's youthful self-confidence. Let his energy drive him! Definitely press (as my professors have) the need for practice and getting your hands dirty! But it would be a great crime to him to shoot him down just because you see him as overconfident - if he is, then he'll have to pay for it eventually, but that lesson is well earned and well learned and should really be experienced for oneself.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Sometimes people are so un-selfaware that subtlety won't work. You may have to just directly tell him how he's coming off. It's possible to tell someone in a way that it's clear that you're at least trying to give blunt but helpful criticism rather than just putting that person down. It's definitely possible that the student will still feel humiliated if you choose to do this, but I think it's also an important life skill to be able to maturely deal with valid (or even invalid for that matter) criticism that you don't like.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I am currently taking part of an 8 week software development hack school. The class has about 14 students with varying levels of experience and knowledge. The informal format has been the best learning experience I've ever had for a couple reasons..
* The teachers meet each student where they are at. Each student is encouraged to excel at their own pace. This is great because it doesn't slow down the students with more development experience... This is HUGE! Fast learners shouldn't be forced to learn at a slow pace.
* All assignments are project based (typically created small apps) and are generally "graded" on effort and not getting the correct or best solution.
* Varying levels of experience creates a highly collaborative environment. I'm somewhere in the middle of the class and am not afraid to ask the more experienced students for help and they are not afraid to share their advice.
I don't believe it's a teacher's job to tell a student they have a lot to learn. Life generally teaches us all how much we have to learn :-)
# Answer
> 2 votes
> Note that this was an math class, so "phrasing it wrong" really means "failing to prove".
That's something important to learn in a math class. If some of your students don't get it, it might be worth to spend half an hour of your next class to explain the context so that everyone gets it.
I think teachers way to often spend to much time on trying to teach techniques while not teaching fundamentals of their subjects like this idea.
# Answer
> 1 votes
You should not take this as an affront against you, but rather as a strange way of learning, and then work *with* the student to allow him to improve.
It seems like your student has a psychological need to be "right" and feels mental pain from being "wrong". As these things tend to be irrational, it doesn't need to make any sense to you or even himself. You can take this into account and instead of trying to prove him wrong, you teach him to take his mistakes not as failure but as key-points for tasks to improve.
Phrases that could help your relationship:
* "I see that in its core your explanation is correct, but some words could be misleading to a reader, so it might for example be better to use *this* instead of *that*."
Concept: Accept that he got 60% right, help him on the other 40%.
* "I see that you are a very eager student. How about you formulate your findings into an essay so that the others can benefit from your knowledge as well? I will of course give you a bonus for it."
Concept: Accept that he has a strong need to improve outside the bounds of the class, give him the opportunity to do so, and a reward if he does right.
* "That is a great answer, but have you taken into account that *this*?"
Concept: Reward him from being a good student, then encourage him to optimize the details without explicitly calling them wrong.
> “Problems are Only Opportunities in Work Clothes.”
> \- Henry J. Kaiser
# Answer
> 1 votes
I think you should feed his curiosity and let the rest of your class benefit from his way of thinking alternate solutions to the problems. One way could be where you have already established there is a flaw in his solution; but, are having a tough time getting through explaining that to him and/or for him to accept it, share a portion of the board with him during class while you continue to teach the next concept to demonstrate that while his questions are encouraged, they are taking up too much of yours and other student's time just to level set with him. This will force him to think twice before defending a wrong solution. Who knows, he might also teach you something.
Another suggestion is to have different levels of homework based on your lectures over a span of a day or a week and increasing levels of difficulty for extra credit. The ability to do the more complex should exempt the students from doing the lower level. Finally, share the solution at the end of the deadline for submission and dedicate a 15 minute Q&A session over the complex solutions. 1. To demonstrate understanding of concepts 2. To use the concept in a real-life problem 3. To partially use multiple concepts over the span of the lectures or the level of understanding you expect your students to have at the point in the semester.
Note: The use of him implies him/her.
# Answer
> 1 votes
I had a very similar situation. And my first thoughts were: "Great! I have a smart active student". However, soon other students started to complain that he is confusing them, and they lose focus when I explain material outside of lecture material to him. Therefore, I stopped answering his complicated, though good questions. Ans said something along the lines off: "This is a very good point; however, it is beyond of the scope of this lecture, but I would be happy to discuss it after class." We had some great discussions after class.
My main point: Your active student might be confusing others by bringing up new concepts.
# Answer
> 0 votes
Possibly he is more comfortable processing problems in written format, but a little bit tongue-tied in verbal expression? It seems quite a common combination - to be talented at abstract thought but less confident in oral communication. I've definitely had that experience, of being frustrated and impatient with stumbling over concepts in speech, when they are perfectly clear in my head. The fuzzy verbal arguments and the early interrupting could be signals "I'm embarrassed / not comfortable in this mode of communication". Maybe you could meet one of his non-standard solutions by saying "can you write it down step by step and I'll check it over to see if it's correct".
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Tags: teaching
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thread-18513 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18513 | Is "no late work" a common policy? | 2014-03-25T14:58:54.507 | # Question
Title: Is "no late work" a common policy?
When I wrote my syllabus for this term, I added the line "Late work will not be accepted." In the past, I just took off a large percentage of the grade per day, but I became tired of the added work of managing papers that students handed to me at random times and places.
The students, naturally, complain this policy too harsh, especially when some larger projects are worth 25% of their grade. I searched the Internet to try to establish what the norm is. I found many syllabi from famous universities, but found very few even list any policies at all.
Is "no late work" a typical rule?
# Answer
One issue not covered by the many good answers is *proportionality*.
There's nothing wrong with having firm deadlines and sticking to them, or allowing a grace period with corresponding deductions, and so on. But it's your job as lecturer to make sure the 'punishment fits the crime'. If you have a zero-tolerance late policy and a short time window for a hard assignment that counts for a lot of points, then the policy is disproportionately harsh even if it's fair and clearly stated. I bring this up because you mentioned assignments/projects that carry upto 25% of the grade.
This is partly why I use a sliding scale late policy, where students can turn in things late, but lose a percentage of their score for each day they're late, upto a week for a 2-week assignment at which point they earn nothing. If you wish to have firm deadlines for a project that accounts for a large portion of the grade, then you might consider creating intermediate deadlines to break up the penalty. This way, students can learn the consequences of missing deadlines without facing huge penalties. It is also more robust to unforeseen events that no one can control.
> 51 votes
# Answer
Disclaimer: I am a student in Central Europe (Computer Science), but an enthusiastic one ;)
"No late work" rules are common for both courses with many (\>100) and with few participants. Usually, there will still be a couple of students trying to get a deadline-extension, but in my experience this number is far smaller if you make the "no late work" rule clear to everyone.
Just keep in mind that students have other work besides your course and make sure that there's enough time to do the assignment. I don't really see the point to give less than two weeks - if a student falls ill for a couple of days or is otherwise occupied, a second week will give him or her the chance to nevertheless produce a good solution.
Even for regular homework assignments, I think that giving the students two weeks time will result in far better hand-ins: they can ask questions/request clarifications one week after the assignment was published in the lecture.
> 21 votes
# Answer
I am sure this varies between lecturers/courses; some universities may have more or less stringent policies but none that I have seen. In my own surroundings, a deadline used to be a deadline. This has softened over time due to many circumstances. Lecturers/teachers are more stressed and enforcing deadlines inevitably involves more work; students seem to find more and more excuses for not being on time. It is hard to point the finger in one or the other direction.
It is, however, interesting to think about the fact that deadlines are still deadlines in society. If you do not send in your tax report in time you are fined; if yo do not pay your bills you are "fined" etc. More critically, if you cannot finish a work task on time you may lose out on salary increases promotion or even lose a job, the latter particularly if you run your own business. So learning to cope with deadlines is important yet it seems to not be prioritized.
So what can be done? Key is to be very clear on what will happen from the start. If you make assessment criteria you can state that a late task means fail/zero points or whatever the perspective is. At the same time you can say that for a larger task, points will be deducted or grade lowered a step at a time after each time period the work is late. My former advisor gave all of us the option of being late but told us that points will be deducted. It was up to us to judge if we would benefit from being late (Better answer gave more points than was deducted for being late). This fostered some form of responsibility where you as a student had the power to decide.
So I do not think that it is difficult to impose rules for lateness that allows students to assess the effects of being late. Learning is of course about learning a subject but it is also about learning to function in society (in the work place) and that involves developing work standards that are good. So when imposing rules that involve lateness, it is also important to make the rules very clear and also to provide suggestions for what you perceive as a good work ethic/schedule to pass the tasks well, i.e. provide the students with enough information to also see what will not work. If you fail to do so the lateness effects may only seem as punishment.
> 14 votes
# Answer
I would say that in general it depends. If assignments are going to be happening regularly or are kind of a hard mathematics course (think calculus, differential equations...) then I think the no late work policy is valuable. This is particularly true if you plan to post a solution to the assigned problems shortly afterwards.
On the other hand in a class that I teach most of the assignments are more project oriented. As a result they will take longer than a normal assignment, and they are also far more open-ended (a solution from student A may look nothing like solution from student B, but they may both be completely valid). As a result the approach that some students use may lead them to take longer on an assignment than others. I use a sliding scale as discussed above; Typically I allow 1 week grace where each day costs a few percentage points, and after that the assignment is not accepted.
as for pros and cons,
pros:
* students seem to like the flexibility, sometimes many of their assignments are due in one or two days and this allows some buffering (at a cost)
* with a digital submission like blackboard the late grading is very easy to do
* assignments appear to have more work put into them, instead of students doing the bare minimum they tend to explore their solutions more
cons:
* since introducing the policy some students tend to turn in homework later (typically 1-3 days)
* some students treat the final deadline (1 week late) as the deadline, so a limited number of students will turn in their homework late consistently
Overall I am happy with the solution though, and I would suggest offering a slight grace period where it doesn't make your life too difficult. The main approaches that I've seen being either % off per day, or x number of free late days for the class.
> 10 votes
# Answer
As an undergrad computer science/philosophy major at a top 10 school in the United States, I would say that 90% of the classes I have taken have had a no late work policy. Particularly after the end of freshman year, it's understood that you need to get your work in on time.
However, it's usually understood in these classes that there is still the option to ask the professor for an extension, which will almost certainly be granted in cases of illness, etc, unless the class is just too large/has an automated grading system (checkouts of code on a particular date from SVN, for example) that prevents this. The late policy covers the case where a student just doesn't hand in his or her work when it's due and says nothing to his or her professor, and there is really no excuse for that.
> 9 votes
# Answer
I think it depends a lot on the culture and the institution. In America, er, a decade or two ago, I remember there was usually some penalty for late work at the Universities I and my friends attended, but "no credit for late work" was rare. However when I was at university in England, there were no penalties for late work in any of my classes. Even very late work was not considered a problem. Personally, I found that having all the time I needed to do the work, resulted in me being far more productive (if not as timely, but no one cared about that), and doing much more interesting and better writing, as well as not abusing my sleep by staying up all night.
> 7 votes
# Answer
I have never seen a no late work policy; on the contrary, most of the classes I have taken/TAed accepted late work and took off no credit when the amount of time late was reasonable (1 or 2 days if you were asking questions / professor knew you were working on it.) This is probably due to the fact that most of my classes have had 5-10 students in them; the classes that I have taken with 20+ students have all accepted late work with a similar penalty as the one you described.
The question follows: Do you want every students best work, or do you want every students best work within a very strict time frame? If an assignment is difficult, and not just time heavy, it might be worth relaxing a no late work policy in my opinion.
It is entirely possible to have a hybrid, in which weekly assignments are not accepted late but larger assignments can be late with penalty.
> 4 votes
# Answer
I specify a due date, but have a 48 hr, no questions asked, grace period. If a student gets an assignment in by the due date, I give a small amount of extra credit (typically 0.25 pts added to his or her final percentage\*). I do not accept assignments after the grace period. I never get complaints about this policy.
* I don't round final percentages. Students are in charge of their own rounding by getting the extra credit for turning in assignments by the due date
> 4 votes
# Answer
I've always been a student that turned in HW late, and it varies widely depending on the professor. In general, I have found the humanities departments the most harsh about deadlines. The natural science classes are more lenient, with some professors clearly stating that they will accept late HW with a deduced grade. Others will accept late HW unofficially before they return graded HWs to students, and yet others will work with you more flexibly. There hasn't been a single professor of mine that hasn't accepted at least some late HW from me.
As a TA, I fully accept late HW, with no deadlines, and likewise return the HWs to students late (you can call it a "suggested deadline"). My teaching principles are fairly libertarian, and my students tend to learn a lot during the semester. That's what I care about. The only time I care about HWs and examinations is to see whether I'm doing an effective job at what the students' pay me to do, which is teach them. It's only fair to examine the students to see if I'm failing them.
It's appalling to see professors demand of their students, who, just in case anyone forgot, **pay** the professors' salaries, demand of their students to learn a certain way within a definite deadline. Nothing in my experience has been more detrimental to my learning. I've gained the most out of classes that allowed me to turn in HW late.
Just in case anyone thinks that students who fail to "respect" deadlines are intrinsically procrastinators, I declare that it was quite the contrary in my case. The reason I submitted HWs late was to ensure I read the whole relevant text before attempting the HW. I wanted to know exactly what I was doing when I solved a problem, rather than use "ad hoc" methods to get something that resembles the correct answer. Moreover, I would often find a passage in a text that interested me, so I would pursue the topic and do some research. Sometimes this "research" would take a week out of my time, but I learned more from the self-driven pursuits than all the professor-imposed, who was paid by me to teach me, HW combined.
It's time we do away with harsh grading policies and strict deadlines, because I don't know a single person who has ever learned that way.
On the other hand, I do know a lot of wage-slaves, also known as employees at major companies, who rent their bodies to their masters; and the masters certainly will demand of their subjects to have work done on time and subject themselves to meaningless evaluations by authoritarian figures. That isn't the environment in which people can learn and discover; that sounds more like mines, sweat-shops, and assembly line to me. Unless one wants to impose an assembly-line education, which is what's common in USA universities these days, I'd advise against serious deadlines.
> 4 votes
# Answer
I remember an answer I once got for a piece of work handed in a few minutes late (and rejected):
> *How can you have nothing ready for 30 days and then suddenly have something in the last few hours?*
In fact, I had been working on it the whole time, trying to constantly improve it, despite the fact that I had a working solution early on. Waiting was a mistake and helped me learn to prioritise.
So welcome be hard deadlines, they teach *planning* **and** *prioritisation*, and save examiner time.
> 4 votes
# Answer
My problem with a "no late work" policy is that it disincentivizes learning. If a student forgets an assignment or can't quite finish it in time, they no longer have any reason to learn the material; they get no credit for learning it because they cannot turn it in late. Because of this, I favor a 10% or even 20% per day penalty as oppose to a no late work policy.
I also think the "prepare students for the real world" argument is invalid. In the real world, if you miss a deadline for something (work deadline, tax filing, etc.) you will get punished somehow, but you likely still have to complete the work; it doesn't just disappear. Also, preparing the students for the real world is a secondary goal at best. Helping students learn the material should always come before preparing them for the real world. Internships and first jobs are much more suited for preparing for the real world.
> 4 votes
# Answer
As an undergraduate, I have had a few classes like this, but if it's a class with lots of HW assignments, usually the professor will grant extensions if you ask; sometimes there are also a set number of "late days" that students can use, so maybe you can do that so that the volume of late submissions is reduced, or just take 50% off for one day and 100% off for more than one (that way I doubt many people would ever submit late).
I just want to make it clear that any professor should, of course, always grant extensions in the event of an emergency (family emergency / illness); to do otherwise is, well, barbaric.
Edit: I don't think you're obliged to give full credit if there was no extenuating emergency circumstance (e.g. illness) and the student didn't ask you beforehand. If they thought they might not finish in time, it's definitely their responsibility to tell you that. That said, giving 0% for such a case is also pretty harsh.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I think the focus of teaching should be students' learning, and all policies including late assignment policies should be designed with the goal of improving student learning and experience. A good fair policy would encourage learning and good behavior, a bad unfair one would do the opposite.
I think students generally care too much about grades, it is important to refocus them as much as possible on learning. Assignments, tests, and grades are tools for teachings not goals of teaching.
The hard deadline policy is common but I think it is also a common experience of instructors that it doesn't work well. It is important to think about why it is so, if we understand why hard deadlines do not work well then we can design better policies.
In my experience, the followings are the main reasons for missing deadlines in most cases (roughly based on the justifications my students gave me when asking for extensions in my previous courses):
1. Technical difficulties: small unexpected submission difficulties, i.e. they have finished assignments but they were unable to submit it before deadline, e.g. they lost power just before deadline.
2. Procrastination: Considerable number of students leave working on assignments to the last minute. They are also not good with estimating the time they need to finish assignments. So they go over deadline.
3. Special cases: events beyond students' reasonable control prevented them from finishing assignments, e.g. serious illness.
Of course we would not want to penalized students for the 3rd reason. But we should also try to help those in the first two groups.
One common alternative to hard deadlines is having grace days, but it has a too high administrative overhead in my opinion, and it doesn't really work much better. They will use up their grace days and then go over deadline. If we give them a grace day for all assignments then we are essentially shifting deadlines in their minds.
After discussions with a few more experienced instructors I switched to something similar to Suresh's policy for my last course and it worked quite well. There was almost no serious complaint. Here is the policy I used:
> 1% penalty for every 30min after the deadline.
First, it is easy to implement. I use an online submission system so it is quite easy to compute and apply these penalties using time-stamps for latest submissions, it is a simple script.
Second, it is effective way of helping the first two groups. This policy gives them two extra days after the deadline if they really need. Most late submissions miss the deadline by a small amount of time. Being essentially a continuous linear penalty function it makes sure the penalty is proportional: a student who goes over the deadline a few minutes doesn't loose too much points. I give students typically 2 weeks for submitting assignments. I don't think it makes sense to give more that 2 extra days. Too many days and too soft penalty will essentially shift assignment deadlines in their minds and cause further procrastination. The hourly lateness penalty creates a sense of urgency that daily penalty would not. I had around 100 students and they seldom went over a few hours. I also put deadlines on Friday evenings. Students who don't like doing assignments hate to spend their weekend on them. Student who submit their assignments on time do not have to worry and spend their weekend working on assignments, this adds an extra incentive for them to finish it by deadline, or if not possible with as little lateness as possible. In addition, it also makes sure that the following week we can focus on our topic without them worrying about assignments.
To deal with the 3rd group I don't use my late assignment policy, I use an special consideration policy. If a student misses an assignment deadline with a good reason, e.g. serious illness supported by medial documents, I apply my special consideration policy to accommodate them e.g. I may move the points for the assignment to other assignments.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I think the appropriateness of such a policy depends on the class and the students within it, and even when it exists, I'd consider flexing it for extraordinary circumstances.
For example, I once had a student who turned in late work because they were called up to respond to a national emergency. Is that really something I should have savaged their grade for, even if generally the class had a pretty strict deadline policy (because I was trying to turn grades around fast)?
> 2 votes
# Answer
I don't know about "typical," but I have definitely seen it used. I've taught mostly in design schools where understanding the importance of hitting deadlines is a core part of the training.
Having said that, most instructors are a little more moderate. Some will say students are allowed one late assignment per semester, some will accept any assignment late for half-credit.
My own personal policy was this: As long as you made a reasonable effort to turn an assignment in on time you could always improve your grade on that assignment by resubmitting any time before the end of the semester. If you missed that first deadline, no deal. But if you turned in a project at, say, 25% completion on the day of the deadline and then before the end of the semester managed to get in the remaining 75% you could have full points. But that's just me.
One other thing I go out of my way to say on day 1 is that communication is important. I had a student who didn't show up for class all semester only to tell me two weeks before the end that he'd been caring for an ailing relative. I could have made an accommodation in week one, but what am I supposed to do in week 13?!
> 2 votes
# Answer
As an undergrad engineering/computer science alum, I will say that I am biased towards having a late policy. Scale the assignment difficulty appropriately to account for "extra" time at a penalty and codify the policy to be clear and non-negotiable, ie 10% off per day. The other option is to tell students late assignments are not accepted, but extend deadlines appropriately based on student feedback. The goal remains the same: maximize participation.
The reason I support this is pedagogical. It is not to account for students being irresponsible. It is to attract more students to complete an assignment, allowing them to be methodical and calculating with their learning experience while ultimately maximizing the value they receive from a course.
The goal with college classes, from a *pedagogical* view, is to maximize turnout and participation. These are solid measures indicating that students are learning and that the college experience is economically valuable. If there is a no late assignment policy and 25% of students received a zero or extremely low mark for being unable to "complete" on time, we have an issue that could potentially be fixed with a course policy change. So I argue that it is better to have a late penalty while scaling content difficulty appropriately.
I was exceptionally busy during my senior year, taking the max amount of credits where all classes were advanced level/difficult. I recall one class where the policy was no late assignments. This was a very difficult programming class. I was on the wire for time, and pulled repeated all-nighters to complete an assignment for this course- right past the due date. I was very stubborn and I refused to just give up, although in the back of my mind I considered the high likelihood I would receive a zero. It ended up being accepted with no penalty and I received a high grade where the average grade was significantly lower.
Many would say this is not fair. But from my perspective, I learned more actually doing the assignment rather than being defeated - the alternative fate would have been to cease all work and receive a zero had the policy been uncompromising. As someone who is a perfectionist- I prefer not to stop until I know I have produced something that is robust and meets all requirements- this hits home even more for me. I believe that from a learning standpoint, accepting late assignments is far more likely to result in higher quality education. If a late penalty makes a course "easier", scale the content appropriately. Or surprise the students on a case by case basis at the instructor's discretion.
The goal is to get as many students as possible in a course to give a best effort attempt on an assignment given a variety of schedules, circumstances and uncertainty in the assignment itself. If after some date they receive a zero you will always chop off a number of students who **can do the assignment** with more time, and would with the opportunity, even with dramatic penalty.
> 2 votes
# Answer
An important role for a college professor is to prepare the students for the real world. And in the real world, deadlines are firm. You think a customer or an employer cares that you have a "good excuse" for being late? That you "tried"?
Trust me, you'll be doing all your students a favor by accustoming them now to the reality that schedules are unforgiving.
> 2 votes
# Answer
When I was a student, one of the first things we were told was "No late work is accepted. Not even if it is only a matter of seconds. Not even if the printer catches fire or you're snowed in".
My university had previously just subtracted from the grade, and had been warned by the authorities that this was against the rules. So they stopped doing that, and instead enforced a zero-tolerance rule of "respect the deadlines".
And honestly, it worked well. The only requirement is that you make absolutely totally sure that all of your students are aware of these rules! Like I said, it was drilled into our heads on day 1 (and repeated regularly ever since). And it was enforced for the entire Computer Science department, not just for individual courses.
Of course, students can always ask (preferably in advance) to have an agreed-upon extension in special cases (perhaps in case of extended sickness, or whatever else it might be), but if it's just a matter of "I didn't finish in time", then tough luck. You either hand in what you have, even if it is incomplete, or you don't hand it in at all.
Honestly, I kind of think it is the only fair policy. Lowering a student's grade for handing his work in late strikes me as much weirder. Their work should be graded on its quality, and nothing else. "your ability to manage time" should not be part of the curriculum. If two students hand in equally good work, they deserve the same grade.
I think the important point is that being late doesn't mean that you can't hand in your work. It just means that instead of handing it in late, but complete, you hand it in on time, but incomplete. And you get graded on what you handed in.
> 2 votes
# Answer
The university I attended had a no late work policy, however, some of the modules *did* allow a 24-hour late work window, but work submitted in this 24 hours was capped at 40% (Minimum pass grade).
> 1 votes
# Answer
I work at a middle-ranking UK university and we have a rule of 5% per day for 5 days then zero. I think it becomes counted as a cost by some students. "No late work without a doctor's cert", providing everyone knows well in advance, seems as fair as any other, what with the deadline being part of the test.
> 1 votes
# Answer
Your students have the reasonable right to expect you to operate the policies decided by your department. Whilst I have every sympathy with the notion of 'a minute late = no marks' providing exceptional circumstances are accounted for, it's really not your decision but rather a decision that should be made by your department and uniformly applied across different courses.
It is unfair on students for your course to operate a different policy to the other courses they are taking because it (a) unfairly requires them to prioritise the work for your course over other courses and (b) it requires them to *notice* that you've set different regulations. So, whether or not your method has merit, you should adopt the same system as other courses they are taking.
I'm kind of surprised that your university/department does not already have a formally stated and agreed policy on this.
> 0 votes
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Tags: teaching, grading
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thread-18707 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18707 | "We" when I mean "I" or should I say "the author"? | 2014-03-30T10:54:20.560 | # Question
Title: "We" when I mean "I" or should I say "the author"?
I am currently working on my thesis and facing the problem of choosing between "I", "We" or "the author" when I want to talk about things I defined, decided etc. I am the only author of my thesis, but using "I" is not very common, is it? I saw quite a lot of work of single-authors that used "We" when referencing to themselves.
"The author" seems nicer to me, but it is not common?
Any recommendations or remarks?
# Answer
**Short answer** It varies. Ask your advisor!
According to my advisor (Social Sciences, using APA style manual), 'the author' is always correct, and the use of 'I' hurts the eyes and the sensibilities!
Although many style guides now permit the use of 'I', especially for a single-author paper, you will find that many academics have been taught to avoid 'I'. They may express strong dislike for the use of 'I', and your work may subtly and unconsciously be considered 'less good' because of your pronoun use. 'The author' is always considered correct. The bigger problem is probably learning how to write fluidly and concisely with this construction. Vary your sentence structure, and absolutely do NOT begin every other sentence with 'the author found/did/decided'!
> 2 votes
# Answer
"`We`" is correct, even if you are the only author, by "`we`" you express "`me and you, my dear reader`". Therefore it's completely fine to use it in your thesis.
> 3 votes
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Tags: thesis
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thread-18699 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18699 | Referencing a Tapestry (History) | 2014-03-30T03:15:43.540 | # Question
Title: Referencing a Tapestry (History)
I would like to reference The Bayeux Tapestry for a paper. Guidelines state to use "standard footnotes" and doesn't dictate any particular system.
The Tapestry is located in Bayeux, France and the exact date and the creator are not known but thought to be approximately 1070 and commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux.
What would be the most appropriate way to reference such an item?
# Answer
> 7 votes
This website from the library system at the University of Tasmania provides guidelines for citing works of art in the MLA style. Briefly:
> Citing the original work (you went and saw the Bayeux Tapestry)
Artist (Last, First). *Title of Work*. Date. Medium. Location of the work.
*Bayeux Tapestry*. ca. 1070. Tapestry. Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, Bayeux, France. (Since the artist is unknown, leave this field out.)
> Citing a reproduction of the work (in another source)
Artist. *Title of Work*. Date. Medium. Location (if appropriate). `Source reference.` Plate/page # (if appropriate)
*Bayeux Tapestry*. ca. 1070. Tapestry. Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, Bayeux, France. *Everything You Want to Know About the Bayeux Tapestry*. Ed. B. Ayeux. Bayeux, France: Bayuex Publishers, 2014. Plate 3. Print.
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Tags: citations
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thread-18697 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18697 | Interviewing for tenure track jobs: When will the committee contact your references? | 2014-03-30T01:20:19.400 | # Question
Title: Interviewing for tenure track jobs: When will the committee contact your references?
The title says it all.
Does the committee typically contact your references (or request that reference letters be sent) a) before you phone interview b) after the phone interview but before the on-campus interview or c) after the on-campus interview? Can anything be interpreted from the timing (e.g. after the on-campus interview) of the committee's initiation of contact with your references (or their request that letters be sent)?
# Answer
> Can anything be interpreted from the timing (e.g. after the on-campus interview) of the committee's initiation of contact with your references (or their request that letters be sent)?
As the comments on your question suggest, the culture on this issue are highly field/department/institution dependent. Below are some reasons why different time tables may be considered (or not considered) for requesting letters from your references. However, if letters are not requested with the application, then a request for letters at a later time means that your application has made it past one or more rounds of winnowing.
As far as **contacting** references, it is probably safe to assume that such contacts can occur at all stages of the hiring process at most institutions/departments depending on the candidate. If such a contact occurs, it is probably a good thing. If the hiring committee was not interested, why would they bother to contact your references?
> With the initial application.
This is an equitable way to handle letters of reference if you are not expecting a huge candidate pool or if your department wants to use letters of reference to help eliminate candidates that might not fit with mission and culture. For example, if no letters that accompany an application to a primarily undergraduate institution address the candidate's teaching style and/or efficacy, that may be a flag. A research institution may be on the lookout for individuals who too closely duplicate the niche specialty of existing faculty (ultrahigh vacuum single molecules spectroscopy).
> After the initial application, but before any phone interviews.
This is probably the way to go if you expect a large number of applications (or a large number of applications from candidates who are below the minimum qualifications). In this case, you can apply a first-pass filter to select only the candidates meeting the qualifications (e.g. a Ph.D. in Biochemistry or Molecular Biology preferably with a focus on proteomics) and remove the inappropriate candidates (M.S. in Electrical Engineering).
> After the phone interviews, but before potential onsite interviews.
As mentioned, given the cost of onsite interviews, this is another logical time to check references. Likely, however, letters have already been requested, and at this stage the hiring committee may be contacting the references for further clarification. For example, "Candidate X is ABD with a proposed defense date of July 17, 20XX. We want candidate X to start on August 10. Will Candidate X be ready to defend in that time frame?"
> After the onsite interviews.
There seems to be no good reason to wait this long before asking for letters. Hosting onsite interviews is expensive (the institution or department usually pays for these, perhaps in contrast to industry). Again, references may be contacted to clear up questions. For example, "Candidate Y is completing a postdoc with you on synthetic fuels from biomass. However, Candidate Y's research presentation was on supramolecular tensors. What is Candidate Y's experience in this area?"
> 7 votes
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Tags: job-search, citations, interview, tenure-track
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thread-18715 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18715 | Color space for papers: CMYK or RGB? | 2014-03-30T13:19:25.540 | # Question
Title: Color space for papers: CMYK or RGB?
This is a bit technical question, but might be frequent enough in this community.
My PI and I disagree on which color space to use for figures and manuscripts.
I like CMYK, because I care about how it prints out. Even for online-only publications, a lot of people still print them out to read them. (I also care about black & white printing and color blind friendly colors, but that's another story). My main tool for editing figures is Adobe Illustrator with CMYK default (of course I can change it).
My PI likes vibrant red and blue colors which are in RGB space and not in CMYK. I agree that it has better visibility on screen or presentations. It would also be more flexible for switching for different requirements since RGB space is in general larger.
What is the best practice for preparing manuscripts with color figures (and possibly color text)? Do you make the figures in RGB which has a larger color space, and only adjust to CMYK when sending the accepted version to the publisher? Or let the publisher figure it out? (What about self-archived preprint versions?)
(I don't want to worry about color space consistencies and do more research!)
# Answer
You follow the publisher's instructions.
If your target journal asks for CMYK, you give them that.
If they ask for RGB, you give them that.
If they (are one of the few IME that) express no preference, then have a think about whether the charts will be viewed more on screen (use RGB) or printed on 4-colour printers (use CMYK).
> 12 votes
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Tags: publications, paper-submission
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thread-18731 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18731 | Is it appropriate and useful to inquire if an open position has an internal candidate? | 2014-03-31T06:23:35.110 | # Question
Title: Is it appropriate and useful to inquire if an open position has an internal candidate?
It is not unusual for institutes to advertise positions (faculty or not) for which there is an internal candidate. In such situations, for external candidates, it may be difficult if not impossible to get in. When a position is advertised, is it appropriate and useful to inquire if a position has an internal candidate already? It might save a lot of time for the external candidate and possibly others (such as recommendation-letter-writers).
# Answer
I assume that there are often-if-not-always internal candidates for open positions, in academia and outside. There are always students looking for Ph.D. slots, Ph.D. students looking for postdoc positions, assistant and associate professors looking to move up to the next level. (Same for non-faculty positions, but that seems OT.) Sometimes the people responsible for the position may not even know yet about such internal candidates, because they may not yet have sent in their application.
So the question probably rather is whether these internal candidates are already frontrunners. The professor may want his extremely productive Ph.D. student to continue in the postdoc slot but may need to advertise externally for some procedural reason. The department may want to continue a certain research specialization and plan on promoting the retiring professor's assistant prof. In such a situation, external candidates will need to be very convincing to win.
But: how often will the external candidate be told this? If the external advertisement is legally required, the hiring people may even open themselves up to litigation if they openly tell an applicant that they are only soliciting outside applications as a fig leaf.
On the other hand, the department may explicitly be searching for "new blood", so internal candidates may actually have worse chances than external ones. Which, again, nobody will tell you (or the internal candidate).
Of course, it makes sense to tap your network and see whether the grapevine can tell you more than official channels. However, this kind of information can be unreliable. So if you hear from multiple sources that a given position will be filled internally, it *may* make sense to not make the effort.
Thus: there will likely be internal candidates, but you will probably not know how good their chances are. If you are a good match for the position, go and apply. Don't worry about internal candidates. This is one part of the hiring situation you can't control, just like the mood of your interviewers. Giving up on an application because there is an internal candidate will be counterproductive in the long run.
> 26 votes
# Answer
I think it is only really useful if you know somebody at your target institution personally and are able to inquire "off the records". Formally asking a stranger whether an application procedure is just for show seems pointless - as Stephen says, the only realistic answer will be **No, of course not**.
However, note that your connection does not necessarily need to be somebody on the hiring committee. Oftentimes, it is enough to know another PhD student, who can then open his ears a bit for you. If there already is an internal "favorite" for a given position, this is often not really a secret internally. For instance, I have seen a case where, when the contract of a highly distinguished postdoc ended, a call for a assistant professor appeared out of thin air with a scope that looked as if it was copied and pasted (which it might actually have been) from the postdocs research website. From the outside, this might not have been insanely obvious, but internally, everybody knew who will be hired for this position.
> 10 votes
# Answer
It's usually a good idea to make some informal contact with the person offering the job before you submit an application. Send an email to briefly introduce yourself and maybe ask some questions (are there teaching opportunities for example). I've heard of cases where there will be a delayed or curt reply which may indicate that they're not interested in you. On the other hand if someone is genuinely looking for someone they are more likely to reply promptly and positively.
> -1 votes
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Tags: job-search
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thread-18730 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18730 | Can I volunteer to work with my Masters thesis advisor, when I am funded by different advisor for PhD | 2014-03-31T06:05:38.047 | # Question
Title: Can I volunteer to work with my Masters thesis advisor, when I am funded by different advisor for PhD
I completed my master's dissertation with an adviser and was interested in the PhD program. Unfortunately I was told that my master's adviser didn't have funding and the other professor in department was doing an interesting research about an emerging field and he agreed to fund my PhD for next 4 years. He is aware that my previous lab let me go because of funding issues. Research in my previous lab and present lab are completely different, they are in no way related.
Now I still have strong interest in my adviser's work partly because some of the projects were my ideas and I don't want others to end up implementing them and also research is significant enough to have a journal published on it (an important addition to my resume). They have time till August to finish them off and I estimate they require at least 2-3 hours of work a day. I was considering volunteering for my Master's adviser and finishing off those projects. Will it be OK if I volunteer in my personal time to try and finish them? Do students ever do this?
# Answer
> 2 votes
Your personal time is yours by definition. A good idea though might be to talk to your Ph.D. advisor. If your former and current research projects do not overlap to much and you do not use results obtained in one lab and not yet published in the other lab I don't see any problem. Of course there may also be some personal animosity or rivalry between the former and current advisor so its a very good idea that your Ph.D. advisor is aware of this other activity and does not find out about it from a third party.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Since your PhD is funded there will naturally be expectations from your supervisor and funding body to deliver results in the future. While you are free to work on other projects I would advise you not to divert too much time from your PhD project. Provided you can balance your time then yes why not enjoy yourself and finish your masters projects?
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Tags: phd, research-process, ethics, etiquette
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thread-18723 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18723 | Harvard Multiple authors- Alphabetical or not? | 2014-03-30T23:29:35.737 | # Question
Title: Harvard Multiple authors- Alphabetical or not?
I apologise if I have missed this in the Harvard guidelines but I was wondering whether the order of multiple authors matters. For example a book by A Smith and A Jones. How should it be written:
(Smith & Jones, 2014) Smith, A. and Jones, A. 2010. Another Book. 5th ed. New York \[etc.\]: Book Pub.
or must it be written alphabetical of surname:
(Jones & Smith, 2014) Jones, A. and Smith, A. 2010. Another Book. 5th ed. New York \[etc.\]: Book Pub.
I understand all the other rules regarding the list been alphabetical and date ordered where multiple authors exist but haven’t seen anything explicitly mentioning this.
Thank You
# Answer
Always use the order of authors as given in the book or article, regardless of the reference style (Harvard or otherwise).
The order of authors has some significance in many disciplines (for example, in my field the first author is the one who did the most work). So, no referencing system asks you to change the order of authors.
> 2 votes
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Tags: research-process, writing, citations, thesis
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thread-18743 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18743 | Do I need to search citation sources for a rather generic graphic that I have drawn myself? | 2014-03-31T11:53:49.570 | # Question
Title: Do I need to search citation sources for a rather generic graphic that I have drawn myself?
I'm about to write up my PhD thesis at the moment and for the theoretical part I have drawn some graphics that are of rather generic type -- crystal structures, crystal lattices and the like, similar to the image below (taken from Wikipedia, just as an example):
This type of image is very well-known in my field and can be found in every type of book about crystallography looking more or less the same. Also I am 100% sure that I have seen any of the features, that I have included in my own graphics, already in other publications, albeit maybe not all in one single graphic. Most of the graphics' properties, such as the atom positions and all the properties derived thereof, are commonly known facts, so only the style of the graphics may be something unique to a special graphic.
As I have seen them so often and worked with them for some years now, I can draw them out of memory without looking them up. Also I draw them with the features that I need to show my point. Therefore it might happen that I am reproducing someone else's graphics without being aware of it. As the question arose in the comments, in conclusion I draw graphics whose base structure is given by commonly known data using widely employed ways to draw such graphics, which contains the danger that someone could have drawn the same or a very similar graphic before.
Would this be OK or should I dig into literature to find if there are sources that could have been the inspiration for my own graphics?
# Answer
> 12 votes
If you create an image yourself that is not modeled after/derived from someone else's, you don't have to go out of your way to learn if someone has created a similar image.
For example, if I create a flow diagram of a common process for my paper, it's likely that many other papers have a similar diagram (because the technique of using flow diagrams to illustrate a process is pretty standard). That's perfectly OK as long as I didn't intentionally copy them.
(As always: if the *technique* of visualization or the *data content* of the image is not general knowledge, cite it.)
# Answer
> -1 votes
No, it's not ok to use someone else's graphics without checking whether you have the rights to those graphics. That could easily be a breach of copyright. Nor can you reproduce someone else's representation without crediting them: that's plagiarism.
You can either create a novel graphic yourself, or you can find someone else's graphic where you can establish that you, and your publisher, will have the appropriate rights to reproduce it.
If you've reproduced someone else's graphic (that is, both their style and their content), you will need to attribute it. Just having absorbed it and then unknowingly recreated it doesn't stop it being plagiarism.
If it really is a common enough type of image, you shouldn't have any difficulty in finding a citable version of it. You then add a caption, following the publisher's style guide, along the lines of "image source: author's own, after Metebelis (1973, p10)"
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Tags: citations, graphics
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thread-18741 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18741 | Citing a Hollywood movie in a scientific paper | 2014-03-31T10:30:35.687 | # Question
Title: Citing a Hollywood movie in a scientific paper
I realise this is a bit of a silly question, but I'm writing up a conference paper on a model that's named after a Hollywood movie. What is the appropriate way to cite the movie in the paper? Should it have its own entry in the references (and if so, in what format?), or should I simply say something like "...after the 1986 movie of the same name"?
# Answer
> 24 votes
I'm coming from a humanities background so there may be some differences in actual citation styles but I think the following would be used by most styles.
* Name of movie
* Director
* Distributor
* Year of release
* Medium consulted (DVD, VHS etc)
* Sometimes the main performers(depending on citation format)
In text styles of course depend on whatever citation style you are using. I know for example MLA is (Director, *Movie Name*) and APA is (Director, Year).
For your example of Highlander in the APA style it would be (Mulcahy, 1986) for a inline citation and your reference entry (assumed DVD) would be - Mulcahy, R. (Director). (1986). Highlander \[Motion picture on DVD\]. Thorn EMI.
This Link has a pdf showing examples in MLA, APA and Chicago style.
# Answer
> 18 votes
In my research area (databases/distributed systems) projects often have a name taken from something out of pop (or not-so-pop) culture. It seems that if any reference for the allusion is given, it comes in a simple footnote. Your suggestion of "after the 1986 movie of the same name" would likely be perfectly adequate.
On the other hand, if some aspect of the movie actually influenced your work and you discuss it a bit, a full-on citation might be more appropriate.
# Answer
> 8 votes
If it is just the name, I would not cite it. (Unless you really want to or the title may be otherwise strange, ambiguous or misleading (never assume that everyone gets any cultural reference, no matter how popular among your friends).)
I always though that it is up to reader's wit to catch the reference. The same as for project, grant or technique names being contrived acronyms. For example, for FROG (i.e. Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating) I would be surprised by someone citing an article on amphibians.
And from my personal experience: I published an article with title **Qubism**: self-similar visualization of many-body wavefunctions, but there is no citation of **Cubism**.
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Tags: citations
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thread-18761 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18761 | Leaving soft-money job for tenure track position that doesn't start until August: when to tell current advisor? | 2014-03-31T17:42:46.513 | # Question
Title: Leaving soft-money job for tenure track position that doesn't start until August: when to tell current advisor?
A verbal offer has recently been extended to me for a tenure track position that I'm 95% sure I want to accept, although I have not officially (verbally or otherwise) done so yet. This position is slated to start at the beginning of the next academic year.
Right now, I am working as a very junior-level "soft money" research faculty at a nearby university (with a considerably more renowned research reputation than the university where the TT job is, if that matters). I have a primary mentor there who I obviously have to notify about my change of position but the question is: **when**? This mentor is a reasonable person and we get along fairly well but I'm not sure how s/he would react to this news.
Obviously, there is "work in progress" at my current position that I am fully committed to finishing and, in a perfect world, I would maintain my current research collaborations in my new position. I would even accept some minimal responsibilities (not necessarily requesting pay) after I leave to make the transition smoother and to ensure that these collaborations remain strong and I do not leave them "high and dry".
Any advice from the managerial end or from someone who has been in a similar position would be greatly appreciated.
# Answer
**DO NOT** say anything at all until your TT offer is signed, sealed and delivered. Hopefully this can be expedited.
Once that's done, you should tell your mentor the information as soon as possible just so that s/he doesn't get the news from elsewhere.
> The overall message you want to convey is: "I've enjoyed working here, and am excited to move on to the next phase of my career. I value the collaborations I've had with you so far and want to make this transition as easy for everyone as possible"
Don't worry about their reaction though: that's not something you can control, and for the most part a mentor will be happy for you (as well disappointed). Just make sure above all else that you are straightforward and open, and don't try to hide/shade/evade the truth for fear of "offending" anyone.
**Note:** As regarding financial commitments, it might be possible to carry over some of the money to your new position, at least for travel/equipment/students. You should make a list of potential carryovers, and bring that up for discussion when you talk to your mentor.
> 15 votes
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Tags: career-path, advisor, job, tenure-track
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thread-18729 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18729 | Why do some Elsevier journals use a single column format? | 2014-03-31T04:40:39.117 | # Question
Title: Why do some Elsevier journals use a single column format?
I believe that the majority of Elsevier journals use a standard dual column document class.
However, some journals that are owned by Elsevier use an alternative single column format (e.g. J. Comput. Phys.; J. Sound and Vib.).
What is the reason for using a different format for these journals? My first guess would be that since historically those journals were single column format they may keep this format, but why then did Elsivier move them to their own single column format (narrow margins and smaller font) instead of moving to dual column (easier to read) or just keeping the same words-per-line that the journals had beforehand?
Personally I find it more difficult to read the current single column format (post 2002)
# Answer
> 15 votes
*(Copy Editor speaking `;-)` )*
When designing a journal's typesetting style, there are several things to consider:
* What are the **paper size restrictions**? Can you choose any paper size or choose from a short list, or is it fixed? For instance, Springer uses it's own paper size for many publications, The journal I typeset is stuck to A4 because it's the cheapest to print here, etc.
* What **font size and family** is going to be used? The smaller the size, the more characters per line you get, as well, sans-serif fonts make it harder to follow a line of text in a long paragraph.
* What are the **typical contents of the papers**? For papers with many *long paragraphs*, it's almost necessary to have narrow columns (I'll explain that later). For papers with lots of *colour photos and graphics*, you want to allow graphical appendices since colour printing is then cheaper and printer handling easier. For lots of *math formulas*, you prefer wide columns so that they fit better. For lots of *very small graphics and tables*, you might prefer two columns so that you can put more easily two of them next to each other.
* **Who** is going to use the final template and how? Do you have a professional typesetter to carefully typeset all the papers? Do your audience use Word or LaTeX more? If they use Word, you think twice to make the journal two-column since you can be close to sure that people will mess the template up.
**What is "narrow" and "wide":**
* *Narrow* is basically anything with less than 66 characters per line on average. It's been proved over centuries that this is the limit width on which the eyes are able to follow the line correctly and switch to the next line correctly. With sans-serif fonts, the width should be a bit less since the serifs significantly help to follow the line.
* *Wide* is anything that allows you to conveniently typeset long formulas. The rule-of-thumb I know is: At least 50 characters per line on average. Remember that being too wide makes it difficult to follow the lines correctly. However, this is not much an issue if the only long text in the typical articles is the introduction and most of the other paragraphs are less than 4-5 lines.
The decision of Elsevier to make some journals one-column and another ones two-column on the same paper size might be, seeing the arguments above, quite justified.
# Answer
> 12 votes
Mathematics journals (including many published by Elsevier) are usually single column. I assume this is because of the frequent need for long equations. The longer lines are somewhat more difficult for the eye, but one gets used to it.
# Answer
> 5 votes
One column is just as standard as two column. Tradition, in conjunction with type-setting standards, likely determine the state of affairs. Many journals have traditionally been printed in a smaller size than letter/A4. For the large format, two column is more efficient. That is, you can squeeze more words into a page than for a single column. With smaller formats this is no longer true because the two-column format requires smaller font size to maintain readable lines; lines with to few letters are detrimental to the readability since it fragments the text. Hence it becomes more a matter of choice which way to go, one or two column. In addition, one column is easier to type set and one column figures in a small format also becomes small.
# Answer
> 3 votes
One possible explanation for the variety of formats is the fact that Elsevier acquired a lot of other publishers; they tend not to change the format of an newly acquired journal, probably for brand issues (the cover and style are well-known to the audience, changing them could be disturbing).
This does not explain why the journals where single columned by their original publishers in the first place, but other answers have tackled this issue.
# Answer
> 2 votes
One reason for one-column format has already been mentioned: especially for math papers, it's useful to display long computations and formulae (even with one column, it can be a nightmare to make them fit the page!).
I don't know if anyone shares this, but I see another reason to prefer this format: when reading an article on my computer (which cannot display the entire page on the screen), I find it very annoying to get back to the top of the page when I finished the first column instead of just keeping scrolling down.
I suspect however that habit plays a large role in the appreciation of such and such presentation and that helps explain why the practices seem to be so homogeneous in a given field.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Of the Economics' journals that Elsevier publishes (and there are lots of them!) I think all (if not almost all) are single column. Which journals use double column? Why would they use double column? I referee a lot for Elsevier's economics journals, it would be a nightmare to read double column economics papers.
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Tags: journals, formatting, elsevier
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thread-18776 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18776 | Is sending a CV with recommendation letter a good idea? | 2014-04-01T01:42:06.253 | # Question
Title: Is sending a CV with recommendation letter a good idea?
My coworker requested me to write a recommendation letter for an academic position (postdoc). I myself am a postdoc, and afraid that my name may not be known well enough.
In order **to support my credentials**, I was thinking of either including a short bio or attaching a full CV with my recommendation letter. Is this a bad idea?
# Answer
> 9 votes
It's a little unusual. Typically you insert relevant material into the letter. Something like
> Dear So and So,
> I'm awesome in these 10 different ways
>
> Now let me tell you about Candidate.
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Tags: recommendation-letter
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thread-18785 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18785 | Inline citation within my inline citation (MLA) | 2014-04-01T06:24:45.317 | # Question
Title: Inline citation within my inline citation (MLA)
I am using a source, which, across the three sentences I am citing, includes two parenthetical citations.
For example:
If this is my sentence, and now I cite: "this is my source sentence one (Other Author 1891). And, he continues with more (A different author 1912)." (My Source Author)
Must I include my sources parenthetical citations within my quotation? My inclination is no.
Thanks for any help.
# Answer
According to the MLA style detailed here you can use the following for inline citing as per the example you gave.
> **Citing indirect sources**
>
> Sometimes you may have to use an indirect source. An indirect source is a source cited in another source. For such indirect quotations, use "qtd. in" to indicate the source you actually consulted. For example: Ravitch argues that high schools are pressured to act as "social service centers, and they don't do that well" (qtd. in Weisman 259).
>
> Note that, in most cases, a responsible researcher will attempt to find the original source, rather than citing an indirect source.
So from the information you gave, your cite would be (qtd. in My Source Author pagenumber)
It may also be of benefit to enquire if your department have a style-sheet that would give guidance on referencing.
> 0 votes
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Tags: citations
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thread-18400 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18400 | How does a global organization compare global degrees? | 2014-03-21T18:26:24.417 | # Question
Title: How does a global organization compare global degrees?
Being a US citizen and native, my view of degree progression is
1. Bachelors, 4 years of study
2. Masters, 1-2 years of study, thesis or portfolio required
3. Doctorate, 3-4 years of study, comprehensive exams and dissertation required
How does this compare globally? My current understanding is that European schools invert the Bachelors/Masters terms. How does a global organization's human resources department track this for comparison? How do you ensure you are comparing apples to oranges? What are the names of the systems (if they have them, possibly American, European, or another nomenclature)? I recall looking for a simple presentation of this information before, and not being able to find it, so I hope to solve this once and for all here.
# Answer
> 8 votes
In Finland (and other Nordic countries) the situation is almost the same as what you describe. Here, the degree progression is
1. Bachelor's degree, 3 years (180 ECTS credits), includes a thesis without original research, e.g. literature review (10 cr)
2. Master's degree, 2 years (120 cr), includes a thesis with research (30 cr)
3. Doctorate, 4 years, completed by either writing a monograph or a stapler thesis consisting of a preface and four or more publications, some universities also require 6-12 months of coursework (40-60 cr)
Prerequisite for a bachelor's degree is three years of upper secondary school.
I think this applies for most other European countries as well.
# Answer
> 8 votes
In Europe most countries use the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) as have been stated in the other answers. By this system it should be easier to compare a Higher education award from one country to another as the number of ECTS need to gain the award are now comparable regardless of the name of the award.
According to the EU this is what ECTS achieve. Site link here (This page also has a pdf ECTS users guide.)
> By making higher education comparable across Europe, ECTS makes teaching and learning in higher education more transparent and facilitates the recognition of all studies. It aids curriculum design and quality assurance and allows for the transfer of learning experiences between different institutions, greater student mobility and more flexible routes to gain degrees. ECTS is closely related to the modernisation of higher education in Europe. In particular, it is a central tool in the Bologna Process which aims to make national systems more compatible.
The EU also has this page where you can set it up to compare the frameworks within Europe.
In some of the other answers you will also have seen reference to 'Bologna Process' This is the process that is overseen by the European Higher Education Area to assist with the standardisation of Higher Education awards across Europe. Their website also contains National Reports from all countries in the process.
The UK Government have also released comparison Documents link here for degrees around the world as compared to UK degrees. This Document details the characteristics of Masters degrees as viewed by the UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.
In Ireland (my home country) the National Qualification Authority have an Interactive Framework page that shows the breakdown of all levels within the education system. They also produce a document that compared the Irish framework with that of the countries of the UK.
In Ireland there is also a International Qualifications Database where you can search by country to compare them to the Irish framework. This also includes undergraduate and professional degrees.
The European system, while very integrated, still has some differences from Country to Country at the moment, such as how grades are awarded on a per country basis.
Wikipedia has a page that, although not exhaustive, describes the degree system by region.
# Answer
> 7 votes
## Global organizations *don't* compare global degrees.
The specifics matter mostly to academic organizations - which tend to be not global, so they are out of scope.
For global multinational companies, the HR organizations tend to be mostly local due to differences in employment legislation, labor markets, etc. As far the information matters for hiring and comparing local candidates, this is done by local HR, who don't compare global degrees.
The central corporate HR of huge multinational companies simply doesn't care about details of your degree, just as for most other historical data of any specific local employee. They care about the internal job titles, expenses and performance metrics; possibly some business area specific certification; but your degree doesn't particularly matter, it's an "untyped line of text in a CV". If *parts* of the organization deal with, say, R&D and worry about the degrees - then they do that locally. If the corporate holding company needs some rough statistics from all their local subsidiaries, then local HR's report their people by mapping it somehow to the "mothership" country standards.
That being said, European area (including not-EU) has mostly standardized to the 'Bologna' process; there are local flavors but they're moving to be standardized. For the rest of the world, you'd have to consider each case (country pair) separately to say what is equal to what, all the simple rules-of-thumb are just rough approximations.
# Answer
> 6 votes
Here in Serbia, the situation is similar to other Bologna countries.
Prerequisite for university education is finished elementary school (9 years, recently extended from 8) and a four-year secondary school.
Next step is the choice between the "academic" and "vocational" studies.
In the academic progression "tree" steps are as following:
* + 3-year (180 ECTS points) basic studies giving title of "something",
followed by 2-year (120 ECTS points) Master studies giving title of
"master of something"
+ 4-year (240 ECTS points) basic studies giving title of "graduated something" followed by 1-year (60 ECTS points) Master studies giving title of "master of something".
+ 5-year (300 ECTS points) integrated studies, mostly in medical fields, giving titles of "Master of something" or "Doctor of
something" or "Magister of something", depending on field.
+ 6-year (360 ECTS points) integrated studies, in medical field, giving title "Doctor of medicine"
* 1-year (60 ECTS points) specialist studies, master studies as prerequisite, not required for doctorate, giving title of "Specialist of something"
* 3-year (180 ECTS points) doctorate studies, master studies as prerequisite, giving title of "Doctor of some sciences"
In the vocational tree steps are as following:
* 3-year (180 ECTS points) basic studies giving title of "vocational something"
* 1-year (60 ECTS points) specialist studies giving title of "specialist vocational something"
There is no direct path for transfer between vocational and academic studies, however schools are allowed to accept equivalence and credit certain exams.
I don't have any hard data about the pre-Bologna system at the moment, but major differences were that there were no master studies. Studies in the technical fields were all 5-year, while most humanities were 4-year.
Doctorate studies were separated into two steps:
Magister studies which had course-work and a thesis starting with "technical qualification exam" and ending with a minor thesis and "research qualification exam".
Doctorate studies themselves which had no coursework and only required publishing an original thesis.
Currently, Bologna-style doctorate studies are combination of previous magister and doctorate studies and contain the technical qualification exam and the research qualification exam.
Furthermore, in technical fields, the thesis results had to be original to science in general, while in humanities, thesis results had to be original in Serbian science.
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Tags: masters, degree, bachelor
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thread-18792 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18792 | What is a TA called when he/she is in charge of organization? | 2014-04-01T09:32:52.577 | # Question
Title: What is a TA called when he/she is in charge of organization?
I am a non-native speaker and writing my cv. In my subject (mathematics), there are small exercise groups where you have to grade the students' homework and discuss it with them; some are hold by students; some by PhD students or postdocs.
What are the correct terms if you have done the following things:
1. You are a (PhD) student student holding the exercise group, grading homework, but nothing more.
2. You are the one who is in charge of organization, i.e., you design questions for homework and the exam, you make announcements, moderate the meeting of those people having an exercise group (see 1), but you don't have an own exercise group.
3. Same as 2, but you have an own exercise group.
4. The course is so small that there is only one exercise group. You are holding this group and are in charge of the organization.
Thank you very much!
# Answer
First to answer your titular question:
> What is a TA called when he/she is in charge of organization?
Such a position does (in theory) not exist, as a TA as by definition supposed to "assist" somebody else and not run the show on her/his own (I am aware that this is not how it sometimes works in practice).
Generally, you need to keep in mind that title and scope of academic positions, especially regarding teaching, are quite different between US and Germany, so you will likely not be able to do an accurate 1-to-1 mapping. I would write "Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter" in the CV and explain what you actually did. Translating it to english is prone to confusion.
If you write **TA**, people will underestimate your responsibility in the course, if you write something like **lecturer**, people may infer that you already had a faculty position and will be confused by the perceived mismatch with the rest of your CV.
> 8 votes
# Answer
In my program, such a person might be called 'head TA'.
Personally, in versions of my CV where I've wanted to highlight teaching experience, I write **Teaching Assistant** followed by the responsibilities in italics. I have also done this for classes that I've taught (listed my particular responsibilities while teaching), since the amount of responsibility one has while teaching can vary widely - I've also listed class sizes, since that might be pertinent information for whoever is reading it. (My more research-focused CVs just contain lists of courses I've been a TA/instructor for, with no greater detail than that.)
> 3 votes
# Answer
I think any of the duties you mention are consistent with being a teaching assistant.
Regardless, your CV should list your official job title as it appears on your contract. But it's a good idea to add another line or two explaining your duties in more detail. You could also list the classes you taught.
> 3 votes
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Tags: cv, teaching-assistant, terminology
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thread-18767 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18767 | Research publications per capita? | 2014-03-31T19:34:17.920 | # Question
Title: Research publications per capita?
I came across yet another infogram, originating from this Nature article, showing the top-40 countries in terms of scientific publications produced for 2011.
The data are based on publications from Thompson Reuters/Web of Science. Similar data are available from Scimago (spanning 1996–2012).
Presented this way, there's some "bias" towards countries with a larger population. I was thus wondering if statistics on the number of scientific publications **per capita** was available for countries?
... just out of curiosity.
# Answer
> 39 votes
1. Taking the data from Scimago for number of publications in Scopus for each country including the years 1996–2012 (`Pubs`), and
2. taking the 2012 populations for countries from Worldbank (`Pop`), and
3. writing a small script to join on country name and curating the subsequent results,
... we get the following (**edit**: *note that the list scrolls down!*):
```
No...Country.......................Pubs/Pop
1....Switzerland...................0.04948049
2....Sweden........................0.03949838
3....Denmark.......................0.03724673
4....Finland.......................0.03512776
5....Iceland.......................0.03384176
6....Netherlands...................0.03266005
7....Norway........................0.03235590
8....Monaco........................0.03153357
9....United Kingdom................0.03034517
10...Australia.....................0.03013565
11...New Zealand...................0.02928470
12...Canada........................0.02848185
13...Israel........................0.02841134
14...Singapore.....................0.02814340
15...Belgium.......................0.02684193
16...Austria.......................0.02538793
17...Slovenia......................0.02456816
18...Liechtenstein.................0.02302488
19...Ireland.......................0.02280205
20...United States.................0.02250084
21...Germany.......................0.02177218
22...France........................0.01953477
23...Spain.........................0.01643973
24...Greece........................0.01601820
25...Italy.........................0.01575377
26...Czech Republic................0.01557232
27...Estonia.......................0.01429077
28...Japan.........................0.01392641
29...Croatia.......................0.01346473
30...Portugal......................0.01319425
31...Luxembourg....................0.01267497
32...Korea.........................0.01157157
33...Hungary.......................0.01128115
34...Greenland.....................0.01071429
35...Cyprus........................0.00913291
36...Poland........................0.00899290
37...Lithuania.....................0.00829172
38...Bermuda.......................0.00745301
39...Faeroe Islands................0.00668606
40...Bulgaria......................0.00620812
41...New Caledonia.................0.00605143
42...Malta.........................0.00601626
43...Grenada.......................0.00528995
44...Palau.........................0.00510745
45...Latvia........................0.00497760
46...Romania.......................0.00432618
47...Kuwait........................0.00423781
48...Barbados......................0.00421932
49...Turkey........................0.00414781
50...Russian Federation............0.00408719
51...Serbia........................0.00399812
52...Chile.........................0.00394931
53...San Marino....................0.00374436
54...Seychelles....................0.00373640
55...Guam..........................0.00360543
56...Tunisia.......................0.00355685
57...French Polynesia..............0.00341107
58...Malaysia......................0.00339218
59...Brunei Darussalam.............0.00326268
60...Armenia.......................0.00315417
61...Jordan........................0.00314134
62...Lebanon.......................0.00309093
63...Puerto Rico...................0.00305665
64...Cayman Islands................0.00297030
65...Argentina.....................0.00288041
66...Qatar.........................0.00282271
67...Uruguay.......................0.00281334
68...Trinidad and Tobago...........0.00279863
69...Macedonia.....................0.00273227
70...Iran..........................0.00265369
71...Belarus.......................0.00262056
72...Oman..........................0.00247495
73...Bahrain.......................0.00247073
74...South Africa..................0.00244784
75...Ukraine.......................0.00241902
76...Brazil........................0.00232119
77...Cuba..........................0.00218313
78...Dominica......................0.00216227
79...Saudi Arabia..................0.00208004
80...United Arab Emirates..........0.00206949
81...American Samoa................0.00204978
82...China.........................0.00198446
83...Montenegro....................0.00175661
84...Fiji..........................0.00174223
85...Botswana......................0.00172363
86...Georgia.......................0.00166009
87...Virgin Islands (U.S.).........0.00164332
88...Tuvalu........................0.00152130
89...Mexico........................0.00137863
90...Costa Rica....................0.00135080
91...Andorra.......................0.00132721
92...Jamaica.......................0.00128646
93...Moldova.......................0.00127910
94...Thailand......................0.00123095
95...Marshall Islands..............0.00119874
96...Bosnia and Herzegovina........0.00116017
97...Egypt.........................0.00110861
98...Mauritius.....................0.00110573
99...Samoa.........................0.00093706
100..Panama........................0.00093654
101..Northern Mariana Islands......0.00091924
102..Gabon.........................0.00091696
103..Venezuela.....................0.00090597
104..Turks and Caicos Islands......0.00089432
105..Vanuatu.......................0.00086952
106..Antigua and Barbuda...........0.00084204
107..Gambia........................0.00084188
108..Morocco.......................0.00083801
109..Azerbaijan....................0.00080366
110..Tonga.........................0.00077186
111..Mongolia......................0.00076525
112..Colombia......................0.00075234
113..Belize........................0.00069432
114..Bahamas.......................0.00069362
115..Algeria.......................0.00066821
116..Namibia.......................0.00064132
117..India.........................0.00060709
118..Swaziland.....................0.00056459
119..Guyana........................0.00053183
120..Albania.......................0.00048797
121..Congo.........................0.00047290
122..Sri Lanka.....................0.00040530
123..Solomon Islands...............0.00040393
124..Maldives......................0.00039889
125..Bhutan........................0.00039767
126..Aruba.........................0.00039069
127..Kenya.........................0.00038740
128..Zimbabwe......................0.00038282
129..Senegal.......................0.00036806
130..Suriname......................0.00035732
131..Cameroon......................0.00034761
132..Kazakhstan....................0.00033660
133..Pakistan......................0.00032448
134..Peru..........................0.00029889
135..Ecuador.......................0.00029486
136..Ghana.........................0.00026906
137..Uzbekistan....................0.00025359
138..Benin.........................0.00025232
139..Bolivia.......................0.00024428
140..Nigeria.......................0.00024256
141..Papua New Guinea..............0.00023985
142..Nepal.........................0.00022093
143..Malawi........................0.00021098
144..Burkina Faso..................0.00020486
145..Uganda........................0.00020330
146..Sao Tome and Principe.........0.00020202
147..Guinea-Bissau.................0.00019536
148..Vietnam.......................0.00018557
149..Zambia........................0.00018529
150..Iraq..........................0.00017914
151..Syrian Arab Republic..........0.00017648
152..Tanzania......................0.00016707
153..Nicaragua.....................0.00016106
154..Lesotho.......................0.00015549
155..Djibouti......................0.00015471
156..Togo..........................0.00015159
157..Equatorial Guinea.............0.00014804
158..Paraguay......................0.00014026
159..Philippines...................0.00013611
160..El Salvador...................0.00012751
161..Bangladesh....................0.00012593
162..Mali..........................0.00011910
163..Kiribati......................0.00011906
164..Tajikistan....................0.00010988
165..Sudan.........................0.00010700
166..Cambodia......................0.00010468
167..Guatemala.....................0.00010131
168..Madagascar....................0.00010097
169..Mauritania....................0.00009194
170..Central African Republic......0.00008817
171..Ethiopia......................0.00008738
172..Honduras......................0.00008720
173..Comoros.......................0.00008223
174..Indonesia.....................0.00008169
175..Rwanda........................0.00007864
176..Yemen.........................0.00007203
177..Niger.........................0.00006895
178..Dominican Republic............0.00006860
179..Eritrea.......................0.00006035
180..Mozambique....................0.00005971
181..Sierra Leone..................0.00005720
182..Haiti.........................0.00004305
183..Turkmenistan..................0.00004156
184..Timor-Leste...................0.00004131
185..Guinea........................0.00003336
186..Burundi.......................0.00002853
187..Liberia.......................0.00002792
188..Chad..........................0.00002249
189..Angola........................0.00002123
190..Myanmar.......................0.00002040
191..Afghanistan...................0.00001626
192..Somalia.......................0.00000589
Countries missed by the join ...
Population not found for following countries mentioned w/publications:
Anguilla
Bouvet Island
British Indian Ocean Territory
Cape Verde
Christmas Island
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Cook Islands
Côte d'Ivoire
Democratic Republic Congo
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Federated States of Micronesia
French Guiana
French Southern Territories
Gibraltar
Guadeloupe
Heard Island and McDonald Islands
Hong Kong
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
Macao
Martinique
Mayotte
Montserrat
Nauru
Netherlands Antilles
Niue
Norfolk Island
North Korea
Palestine
Reunion
Saint Helena
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Pierre and Miquelon
Saint Vincent and The Grenadines
Slovakia
South Georgia and The South Sandwich Islands
Svalbard and Jan Mayen
Taiwan
Tokelau
United States Minor Outlying Islands
Vatican City State
Virgin Islands (British)
Wallis and Futuna
Western Sahara
Publications not found for following countries mentioned w/populations:
Cabo Verde
Cote d'Ivoire
Curacao
Hong Kong SAR
Isle of Man
Kosovo
Kyrgyz Republic
Lao PDR
Libya
Macao SAR
Micronesia
Sint Maarten (Dutch part)
Slovak Republic
South Sudan
St. Kitts and Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Martin (French part)
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
West Bank and Gaza
```
# Answer
> 19 votes
Supplementing badroit's answer (my point is not to use different source, but to show at the same time total and per capita data).
Taking data World Bank Open Data for Population and Scientific and technical journal articles, for year 2009 (for newer there is no up-to-data publication data), and using a short Python script, we get:
Only top 50 countries are shown.
* Height: publications per capita per year (in 2009),
* Width: country population,
* Area: total publication count per year (in 2009).
Source code: on IPython Notebook Viewer, on GitHub Gist. (Quick and dirty, be warned.)
---
Tags: publications
--- |
thread-18777 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18777 | How often do you get to "play with" scientific instruments? | 2014-04-01T02:12:07.923 | # Question
Title: How often do you get to "play with" scientific instruments?
I tend to learn and understand a subject to a much deeper extent if I am able to play around/experiment/mess with something that demonstrates the principles.
I'm starting a Neuroscience PhD program in the fall and would like to know how I could maximize the opportunities to experiment with various equipment at the university. I'm interested in working with things like fMRI, MEG, EEG, electron-microscopes, and supercomputers.
How easy is it to informally play with these types of equipment when they might be sitting idle?
Note: I'm looking to do this safely without any intent to damage the equipment. Primarily, I'm looking to replicate the findings of classic experiments and discover aspects that didn't make it into the published papers.
# Answer
It depends to a large degree on who owns them.
If it's your lab group, and your supervisor's happy enough, you can probably use them whenever you like.
If they're owned by the department/division/etc then there's likely to be a formal booking system. Once you've booked a slot, though, I'd imagine you can do whatever work you like on them.
Provisos in this are cost and safety.
Cost, because some of the stuff you're talking about is pretty pricey. An fMRI session can be charged at over $400 dollars per hour.
Safety applies to you and the equipment. You may well intend to be safe and not damage the equipment, but that can be easier said than done. As such, you're never going to be allowed to use certain items without having gone through the necessary training - so you'll have to convince your supervisor that doing such training is a good use of your time/funding.
So in your lab, play around time will I suspect be limited, save on equipment you use daily. But if you must get your hands on a piece of kit, fear not, for there are workshops and courses you can attend! These often occur in conjunction with a conference/meeting/etc of some kind, where a sponsoring vendor will kindly 'donate' a piece of equipment (in the hope you'll buy the same brand later down the road) and as a group you get the opportunity to spend a while using it under the company representative's watchful eye. Keep an eye out for these, and try to arrange to publish a paper in the conference, or give a talk in the meeting, and I'm sure you'll be given the funding to go.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Pat's right about the more expensive and controlled equipment like fMRI and MEG machines, but I wanted to add more about the other equipment. I previously worked in an engineering lab that took on a lot of cognition research, and we had close ties with a neuroscientist and professor on campus, as well as a physics lab.
* You didn't mention it explicitly, but do you know if you'll be working with a lab yet? Some grad students are funded as TAs instead of RAs (or not at all!), which doesn't put you in front of the equipment until it's research time (if even then, depending on your thesis.) Make sure your advisor knows about your desire to get hands-on; it's a good trait, and they'll know more about the opportunities.
* EEG equipment can be expensive, but pretty simple. Same with GSR (Galvanic Skin Response.) Clinical EEG data often requires gel or saline to make contact with the scalp, and can have 16, 32, 64, or even 128 electrodes in a "cap." It's possible to have a setup that requires two people to properly configure, which limits availability. But other than that, it's only permission and careful handling keeping you from using it while idle, assuming there's a dedicated set of research EEG equipment.
* An electron microscope station would likely have a small library of prepared samples to peruse. Preparation is not a trivial task for many things, so you aren't likely to get more than this without actively working with one for research.
* Supercomputing abilities don't necessarily require a supercomputer. Computing clusters are very common, and many institutes have them. Some big schools have huge dedicated clusters, but many have small department-funded clusters. You may have to search or talk with IT (who may not manage them, but need to know about them,) but it's still possible to get an account. Department-sized clusters aren't large enough to handle college-wide access, but aren't often used at 100% capacity by their owners. There may also be an associated Computer Science class that will give you access and teach you how to use one effectively, though it may not count towards your degree.
The experimental labs are your best bet for finding equipment you can use, since medical facilities are pretty tightly controlled and clinical equipment is protected. This may mean going cross-discipline depending on your institution, but that is often encouraged. Ask around, but remember to be respectful of the equipment and the group's time and resources. Having a plan ahead of time is part of this; if you have a concrete goal (think lab exercises rather than pure research) they will be more willing to share.
> 2 votes
---
Tags: phd, research-process, graduate-school, thesis, productivity
--- |
thread-18619 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18619 | Do you have to find out/ prove something to get a PhD? | 2014-03-27T19:30:24.660 | # Question
Title: Do you have to find out/ prove something to get a PhD?
I went on a trip to Oxford with my school, and I asked a lady whether or not you have to go and discover something in a PhD? She said no, and it's more research. But I read up somewhere that you do have to discover something to get a PhD.
I just want to know precisely how a PhD works.
Will some subjects- like Maths or Computer Science- require you to go out and prove something, and are others- like English- just require the student to do extensive research?
Note: by getting a PhD, I don'y just mean anyone getting it, I do mean someone who's actually studying for one.
# Answer
Getting a PhD almost always requires one to have some original contribution to your field. That result doesn't always have to be an earth shattering proof of something completely original. Your work can build upon existing work, or draw connections between a variety of different topics that no one has noticed yet, or even just suggest that there is a problem that nobody has considered yet. The point is that there has to be something unique, and original that counts as your contribution to the body of knowledge. That isn't easy to do certainly, but it isn't impossible for normal people to accomplish through lots of time and hard work either.
> 32 votes
# Answer
I fully agree with @shane's point: you need to have shown some original contribution. But I think something else is also important, and sometimes plays a major role: you have to show that you have mastered the *trade* \- which means, in practice, that you are able to perform whichever experimental/theoretical things a scientist in your field is supposed to be able to do, and write about the results in an understandable manner. In this way you show that you are worthy of being taken up in the community of scientists, which despite our feeling that science is about facts, is still rather important.
> 6 votes
---
Tags: phd
--- |
thread-18793 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18793 | What are the different components of degree titles called? | 2014-04-01T09:34:37.903 | # Question
Title: What are the different components of degree titles called?
Some degree titles have many components, e.g.:
```
Master of Arts in Psychology: Behavioral Health
|_A__|_B_____|_C___________|_D________________|
```
Another e.g.:
```
Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction: Special Education
|_A__|_B__________|_C___________________________|_D________________|
```
What are these components called?
# Answer
To take one of your examples:
```
Master of Arts in Psychology: Behavioral Health
|_A__|_B_____|_C___________|_D________________|
```
"Master" is the degree. Etymologically, "degree" comes from "degré": the step of a stair (or rung of a ladder). "Degree" can be synonymous with "level" or "extent" - it is a measure. You could say "the level of a degree", but that would be a tautology. It's not incorrect, but "level" is redundant there - "degree" already says everything that you'd be trying to get from "level". Degree is a very flexible word, and can be used to refer to just part A, parts A+B, parts A+B+C, and parts A+B+C+D.
Then either: "Psychology" is the subject and "Behavioral Health" is the speciality, or "Psychology: Behavioral Health" is the subject. You might also hear "field" used instead of "subject".
"of Arts" doesn't really have a well-recognised name. You could call it type, kind, field, sort, school or faculty, but in the end, if you want to ask what sort of Master's someone has, you'll probably end up saying something like: "What kind of Master's? Master of Science, Arts, MBA, something else?"
> 6 votes
# Answer
I would think "Master of Arts" is the degree, this is because in medieval universities the arts faculty was the first faculty one had to graduate from before being admitted to higher study. So the master of arts looks like it should be thought of as the name of a degree awarded by the arts faculty.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I am not aware of either (a) a consistent way of referring to the parts of the degree title or, more fundamentally, (b) a consistent way of deciding even what goes into the degree titles! None of my degrees have a colon or any listed specialty or sub-field. For that matter, what I translate from Latin as a masters degree is actually a Scientiæ Magister (which should properly be abbreviated SM, not MS).
According to academic tradition, all PhD are degrees in philosophy. As a result, a PhD in biology is a doctoral degree in philosophy (in the sense of thinking and research) with an specialty in biology. On the other hand, a DSci would be a doctoral degree in science in the field of biology. It's not clear to me that we would want to refer to the fields or specialties in that case the same way in any sort of rigorous way.
EnergyNumbers' answer seems like a good attempt to parse out the answer. That said, I agree with Shane's answer that "Master of Arts" is the name of the degree. So, in:
```
Master of Arts in Psychology: Behavioral Health
|_A__|_B_____|_C___________|_D________________|
```
I would say that A+B is the degree. A is not the degree because an MBA is simply not the same degree as an MS, MFA, MPH, MPhil, etc.
C is the field, subject, area, or specialty. D is the sub-field, sub-area, or sub-specialty. I think adding a "sub-" makes this relationship clear.
I would call "A" the type, or maybe the level, of the degree. I like level because if I were to ask someone what their highest level of degree was, I would expect to hear something like doctorate, masters, bachelors, or associates and would not expect to hear that it was a bachelors of science.
> 3 votes
---
Tags: degree
--- |
thread-18827 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18827 | Can I add my middle initial to my author name in preceding articles? | 2014-04-02T06:11:32.970 | # Question
Title: Can I add my middle initial to my author name in preceding articles?
So I'm not sure what to do. I've been listed as a co-author on my first publication in X journal, with a decent impact factor. Now I just realized that my middle initial wasn't included on the first publication.
Can I start using my middle initial in future publications? I know it's only my first, but that paper could get plenty of citations in the near future. (just hypothetically)
What do you think?
Is there a way to link the 2 names? Could I link them if I publish again in that same journal, specifically an ACS journal?
# Answer
In the modern day of vastly intelligent computer software and important internet presence, it is highly unlikely that a missing middle initial will be the cause of "nonrecognition" of your name. As Stephan wrote, a bigger problem is name confusion; it is definitely a good idea for you to start including your middle initial(s) in future publications. I'll answer here focused more on how to make sure the names are "linked".
My Google Scholar profile, which is compiled entirely by a computer (my only contribution there was identification of duplicate entries and removing them), even picked up some of my undergraduate term-reports which I put on my website many years ago (and which are now no longer available). Of my published papers, I've listed at various times my name as
* Willie Wong
* W W Wong
* Willie W Wong
* Willie W-Y Wong
and I don't seem to have had much trouble\*.
If you want better control over the articles associated to your name, you can always register for Web of Science researcher ID and/or an ORCID which are both designed to help alleviate the problem of name collision and name changes throughout the career of a research scientist.
For fields which encourages the use of arXiv, the author identifier also helps group all of your pre-prints, and allows you neat things like a Javascript widget for your own website showing your recent pre-prints.
For mathematics, the AMS maintains author profiles (they recently upgraded this!) to which you can also submit corrections to include omitted paper or to exclude misattributed papers by other authors. (The AMS author profiles are only accessible through a MathSciNet subscription.)
I am not that familiar with other fields, but you should look around to see if your scholarly society provides a similar service to help maintain a comprehensive publication record for authors.
\*With Google, at least. Microsoft Academic Search has some trouble coming up with my complete list of publications.
> 12 votes
# Answer
You will probably not be able to change your name on an already-published article. (Is it already fully published? You can of course change things at the proof stage.)
So the question is whether it makes sense to use your middle initial going forward. I think that yes. There are millions of "John Smith" out there, so it would be much better to be "John Y. Smith" so people can identify your papers among the many by other Smiths.
The drawback, as you mention, is that people may not be able to link your very first article to you. Yes, that is not nice. But believe me, in ten years you will be much happier if people correctly identify your papers than if this one single article is linked to you (along with possibly a lot of other papers someone with the same name as you wrote, if you decide to leave out your middle initial in the future).
Plus: literature databases are getting more and more sophisticated. I assume that things like missing middle initials should not be a problem for long in linking papers to authors. After all, later publications of yours will not only connect in terms of your name as an author, but also in terms of subject matter, collaborators, affiliations... All things that any decent machine learning algorithm can easily take into account.
> 9 votes
---
Tags: publications, personal-name
--- |
thread-18821 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18821 | How strong of an obligation does an advisor have to attend his/her Ph.D. students' graduation? | 2014-04-02T02:44:52.960 | # Question
Title: How strong of an obligation does an advisor have to attend his/her Ph.D. students' graduation?
I will be graduating my first Ph.D. student this summer. My student is quite strong and has done good work, and I am quite proud of him!
I do face one conundrum. He has expressed the hope that I would be there for his Ph.D. hooding and graduation ceremony. It seems like an utterly natural, totally reasonable thing to ask for. I was tenatively planning on being out of the country at the time, so I need to decide whether to cancel my plans to attend his graduation.
On the one hand, missing my student's graduation seems like the equivalent of missing your best friend's wedding. Or perhaps worse, missing your child's wedding, or your own. On the other, this seems to be very common. My own Ph.D. advisor was out of town for my graduation and I asked another professor on my committee to escort me in his place.
Is there any kind of consensus?
# Answer
> 27 votes
Obligation? Unless through your institution's academic responsibilities there is a requirement to attend, then none.
However, if you equate it to being on par with missing your own child's wedding, then I think you've answered your own question.
You only get one 'first Ph.D. student'.
# Answer
> 15 votes
Congratulations on your first PhD student!
I don't think there's any hard-and-fast rule about attending your student's graduation. It comes down to how much you want to be there, how strongly your student feels about you being there, and how compelling your other plans are.
There are certainly some people who don't care much about this kind of thing. (I am one of those people; I gave my father wholehearted permission to skip both my high school and college graduation. Neither of us has regretted his absence from those ceremonies in the slightest.)
Then there are some people who really care about graduations, and want the people who were instrumental in their success to be there. And you're right that it's a reasonable thing to ask for, if it's very important to the student.
So, see if you can find out what category your student falls in. From your description (he "hopes you will be there") it could really be either one. If it turns out he feels really strongly about it, you can look into canceling your trip; if not, I don't think it's a big deal.
# Answer
> 8 votes
I am a phd student myself, and to be honest I couldn't care less if my advisor was at my graduation. The graduation ceremony is not something you should cancel any plans over. If you missed my thesis defense however ...
# Answer
> 6 votes
Being hooded by my advisor was a really big deal for me. Without him, I wouldn't have gotten the degree. If your student as explicitly asked you to attend, I would do it- if you have a good personal and professional relationship with this student, your absence would be significant.
---
Tags: graduate-school, etiquette
--- |
thread-18771 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18771 | What the benefits of summer school when working on masters degree? | 2014-03-31T21:01:12.163 | # Question
Title: What the benefits of summer school when working on masters degree?
I have recently started my graduate studies and I am still new to some of it. I always worked in the summer during my undergrad, but I've heard that working in the summer while working on a masters isn't what I am supposed to do. I can believe this, but I am confused. What are the benefits to taking a few classes in the summer? I don't need to retake anything because I failed or need the requirement, because I am just starting out. I need some advice on this.
# Answer
> 3 votes
The trouble with "what you're supposed to do" is that it often applies to some imaginary archetypal student or, worse, students of a very specific class and privilege. Not all students have the means to go without working, to help pay their own way through school. Academia is *just* starting to wake up to this fact, thanks to the consciousness raising of folks like Sarah Kendzior.
If you can find a part-job related to your field of study, then it's definitely OK for you to work over summer break. I was able to do this while in my MLS program.
If you are unable to find work related to your field of study--and if you aren't involved in student organizations or showing that you're otherwise productive in your "non-school" hours by starting to attend conferences, write papers, etc--then I could see it being a drawback to have a job in your "off" time.
---
Tags: graduate-school, summer-school
--- |
thread-18556 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18556 | Design of "Members Page" for Academic Lab Website? | 2014-03-26T12:55:22.307 | # Question
Title: Design of "Members Page" for Academic Lab Website?
I am a Computational Biologist as part of an academic lab group working on the Immunogenomics of disease vectors (which may be relevant to the following).
I am designing part of a web-page that showcases the members of the group by:
* Two portrait photographs
* A personal statement (50 words)
* Summary of their work (50 words)
* Fun group photographs
**Questions**
* What are the "Do"s and "Don't"s in designing a members page of a group such as ours?
* Do you know of any exemplar members pages or group websites?
A template in wordpress so far: http://www.vigilab.org/
# Answer
All I know is what I want to see when I visit an academic's member page:
1. Their name and a picture (to confirm it's them)
2. Contact details
3. Their rank and position
4. How long they have been working in the group
5. A full list of publications with links to full-texts and a good .bib entry
6. A short bio / summary of work, including service and awards
7. Some teaching information (if applicable)
8. Supervision details (if applicable: whom they're supervising or they've supervised)
9. Project information (which projects are they funded from/P.I. of, etc.)
Keep it professional, clean and brief.
You may want to list details like publications on a separate linked page if they are too long/cumbersome.
> 13 votes
# Answer
Designing a group web page is easy (and fun). **Maintaining** a group web page is hard and boring. As a consequence, most web pages (and parts of mine right now sadly) are old and out of date.
The only real solution is to keep as little information on this group page as possible, and decentralize most updates to the person whose information it actually is (and presumably who cares the most)
This is why @JeffE's statement is relevant. That information is mostly fixed, and points to where the real information is.
So unless you plan to maintain this page as a full time job (in addition to your other work), put as little information on it as is necessary. Having no web page is much better than having a web page with incomplete information and stale links.
> 9 votes
# Answer
In terms of exemplar websites, I like the style of the Ketterson Lab group, who have very basic info on their site that includes a link out to the lab members' websites--where more up-to-date info is the responsibility of the lab members.
http://www.indiana.edu/~kettlab/people.html
> 1 votes
---
Tags: research-process, job, graphics, website, design
--- |
thread-18747 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18747 | Understanding an abnormal grade distribution | 2014-03-31T12:58:50.533 | # Question
Title: Understanding an abnormal grade distribution
I have three years of experience teaching as part of a team (many teachers, some with more experience, agreeing on a syllabus and preparing the tests together), but this year is the first time I am fully in charge of some courses.
After grading the mid-term exam for one of my class, I noticed I had a weird grade distribution:
(If this is useful, there are 24 grades, the set of grades is { 1.2, 1.4, 1.4, 1.9, 2.0, 2.3, 2.6, 2.6, 3.4, 4.2, 4.2, 4.3, 4.6, 4.6, 4.8, 4.8, 4.9, 5.3, 6.0, 6.2, 6.4, 7.1, 7.8, 7.8 }, the average is 4.25 and the standard deviation is 2.01.)
I have looked carefully at all my previous tests, and I can confirm I have never seen a curve like this before.
In my short experience, I have heard, read of reflected that a distribution with two curves would probably either mean that *a*) a large subgroup of students cheated or *b*) as a teacher I am mostly addressing the best students and letting the others down.
But this looks like there are actually three curves, and I am wondering which characteristic of my teaching or my students could explain that.
Besides, if someone is aware of any scholarly work on this subject, that would be lovely. I couldn't find anything myself.
# Answer
> 37 votes
There are several possible factors here: given the relatively small number of points available, lumping can skew how grades are distributed, particularly if they're also awarded in whole number increments. (That is, there's not enough refinement in the model to separate things out.)
Another issue is that the sample size is relatively small; twenty-four students is not a particularly large sample size—your standard deviation here is two points out of 10! Also, you should try plotting the data according to half-integer bins (0.5 to 1.5, 1.5 to 2.5, etc.); you'll end up with a *very* different distribution.
So, basically, I wouldn't try to draw any definitive conclusions from such a plot or distribution.
# Answer
> 87 votes
I agree with the other answers that this may be an artifact of the histogram. May I humbly offer a few alternative ways to plot these grades?
All of these essentially show that your effects are likely due to small *n* and possibly an essentially discrete underlying data generating process.
R code:
```
require(hdrcde)
require(Hmisc)
require(denstrip)
require(beanplot)
require(beeswarm)
grades <- c(1.2, 1.4, 1.4, 1.9, 2.0, 2.3, 2.6, 2.6, 3.4, 4.2, 4.2, 4.3, 4.6, 4.6, 4.8, 4.8, 4.9, 5.3, 6.0, 6.2, 6.4, 7.1, 7.8, 7.8)
opar <- par(mfrow=c(1,6), mar=c(3,2,4,1))
boxplot(grades, col="gray90", main="Standard\nboxplot",yaxt="n")
hdr.boxplot(grades, main="HDR\nboxplot",yaxt="n")
bpplot(grades,xlab="",name=FALSE,main="Box-Percentile\nPlot")
beanplot(grades,col="grey",yaxt="n",main="Bean plot/\nViolin plot",border="black")
plot(c(0,2),range(grades),type="n",xaxt="n",yaxt="n",xlab="",ylab="",
main="Density\nplot")
denstrip(grades, horiz=FALSE, at=1, width=1)
beeswarm(grades,pch=19,main="Beeswarm\nplot")
par(opar)
```
EDIT: (sorry, I'm a statistician, I can't help it...) I went and took Jack's kernel density estimate and resampled 24 "students" from it a couple of times. In each case, I plotted a histogram. The result is below. We see that *even an innocuous unimodal curve can lead to pretty bumpy histograms*, because of the discretization and the small sample size.
R code:
```
dens <- density(grades)
opar <- par(mfrow=c(2,4))
for ( ii in 1:8 ) {
samp <- rnorm(length(grades), sample(grades, size = length(grades), replace = TRUE), dens$bw)
hist(pmin(10,pmax(0,samp)),breaks=0:10,xlab="",ylab="",main="",col="gray")
}
par(opar)
```
# Answer
> 28 votes
I did a Kernel density estimate plot of your data, shown below. You have a central lump of candidates with 4-5ish and a second lower lump of students who've done pretty badly.
# Answer
> 17 votes
Just adding to the other statistical analyses here...you can't really be sure that this sample doesn't come from a normally distributed population of grades from similar students in similar classes. Here's some more R code for analyses and their output: `x=c(1.2,1.4,1.4,1.9,2.0,2.3,2.6,2.6,3.4,4.2, 4.2,4.3,4.6,4.6,4.8,4.8,4.9,5.3,6.0,6.2,6.4,7.1,7.8,7.8);qqnorm(x);qqline(x)`
Compare your grades to: by Skbkekas
Your grades on the left don't fit the QQ line wonderfully, but they're not deviating very systematically. The numbers on the right are from a normal distribution; other than being more numerous, they seem similar.
Your grades are basically not skewed (`skew(x)` = .12). They are platykurtic, but you don't have enough of them to disregard the possibility that this difference from a normal distribution is due to sampling error with much confidence. Here are results of an Anscombe–Glynn kurtosis test (`require(moments);anscombe.test(x)`): kurtosis = 2.03, *z* = -1.23, *p* = .22. FWIW, you can also test the null hypothesis that your data came from a normally distributed population using a Shapiro–Wilk test (`shapiro.test(x)`: *W* = .95, *p* = .27), but normality testing may be 'essentially useless' (this may apply to dedicated significance tests of kurtosis or skewness too).
You seem to refer to the modes or local maxima as curves. @StephanKolassa, @aeismail, and @JackAidley have already demonstrated how misleading histograms can be in this regard. @RedSirius' comment is on-point as well, and you've acknowledged the effect of bin size in your comment, but haven't edited your question to clarify what this doesn't answer for you <sup>(hint hint ;) ;)</sup>. It's unclear what more needs to be said here. You haven't got much evidence of anything unusual, much less have you given a serious external basis for your proposed interpretations regarding cheating or uneven service to students of different aptitudes, so it seems further speculation could only grasp at proverbial straws.
However, it may still be worthwhile to recite some (maybe insufficiently examined) academic truisms:
1. It's very hard to make one size fit all when students greatly outnumber instructors.
2. In the case of students who exert near-zero effort, you really can't help enough.
3. Cheating probably won't matter enough either if that's the main form of effort exerted.
# Answer
> 8 votes
Remember that the central limit theorem assumes independent samples. This is often a bad assumption for students. Cheating is of course a possibility, but it could also just be that they study in groups (most people find this very helpful). The spikes in your data could just correspond to groups who study together and have similar strengths and weaknesses.
# Answer
> 6 votes
I have a theory that can explain situational anomalies such as this in classroom that's as situationally accurate as I have time to puzzle out.
To simplify the mathematics of the problem, I'm omitting some scale factors from my math which serve as little more than visual clutter.
Let an ideal bell curve be defined by `C(x)`.
Your set of students is `S`, and you have a magical function `Q(s)` for `s ∈ S` which yields the "quality" of a student's work.
Now consider a test. The test consists of a set of problems (call this set `T`). Each problem `p ∈ T` has a difficulty, given by `D(p)`. The probability of a student `s` correctly answering a problem is defined:
*P<sub>correct</sub>(s, p) =*
It then follows that a student of higher `Q` than the `D` of the problem will be more than likely to solve it, and one with a lower `Q` will be less than likely.
Let's define the ideal score of a student taking a test to be `S<sub>i</sub>(s, T) = Σ P<sub>correct</sub>(s, p), p ∈ T`
If you were to take the ideal score on a particular test for each student in your classroom, you would get an ideal distribution, and chances are that if your students actually took the test, you'd get a distribution that at least roughly approximated the ideal one.
The important thing to take away from what we have so far is that, for an population of students taking a test, the difficulty of the problems on the test mathematically affects the grade distribution you're likely to have.
For example, assuming your student population is roughly bell-curved, you might see a grade distribution like your observations if your test questions have roughly these difficulty levels:
```
[2, 2, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10, 10+, 10+]
```
A large number of students would get the 2 easy questions right, but since there are few questions of low-intermediate difficulty, some of the students on the lower end of the curve wouldn't be able to get any harder ones right. On the very high end, there are some questions that might be extraordinarily difficult for the skill level of the students (this can happen for a number of reasons) that most of the class got wrong (assuming the grade is out of 10 points total).
Assuming your class distribution is something like this,
```
0-2|
3 | 1
4 | =2
5 | ===4
6 | ====5
7 | ====5
8 | ===4
9 | =2
10 | 1
```
Their ideal distribution (as defined previously, rounded a bit to reduce clumping) would look something like this:
```
0 |
1 |
2 | ===4
3 | ===4
4 | ===4
5 | ===4
6 | ==3
7 | =2
8 | 1
9 |
10 |
```
Which resembles, in a muted way, the observed curve you experimentally observed.
Also, realistic situations won't have such elegant mathematical solutions (like a student's probability of getting a question correct), so this model should only be viewed as a reasonable, educated approximation.
TL;DR It's possible the questions on this one test were more difficult and less comprehensive than you thought when you handed it out.
# Answer
> 4 votes
If every student were able to solve every question with an independent probability p, then you would expect a normal distribution. But that is actually not a very good model.
Let's say you have a good number of problems in your test that any decent student would be expected to solve. Solving all of them gives you grade 5. Therefore you get lots of students on grade 5; everyone who is doing reasonably well in this course; some are a bit lower because of stupid mistakes which just happen, plus a few who are just badly prepared and have no chance to pass.
Then you have a few really hard problems. The average student solves none of them. Excellent students solve one or two or three, until they run out of time.
That kind of test could produce your distribution even with a very large number of students.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Difficult class scenario with pretty standard student groups:
1. Champions - **ambitious** and hardworking / clever / interested
2. Mere students - *every hour on this subject hurts but I* **must** *pass it*
3. Underachievers - no time, no effort or no idea how to handle the topic
If the test wasn't important enough or was too difficult, breakdown above explains it all.
Champions didn't manage to max it out but they collected pretty nice scores of around 6-7 points. Mere students managed to learn enough to halve the test. Underachievers found out that without grasping the topic they aren't going to shine here.
Groups 2 and 3 blend together, which is visible in plot from Jack Aidley, hope I can borrow it :)
Is the level high? Was the test well-constructed and offering questions of different difficulty?
If so, then I think that's the case and you just managed to see who your students are. You might want to find out whether the problem is lack of motivation or being unable to jump into the subject.
# Answer
> 1 votes
I think you have over-tailored the difficulty of the questions to the range of abilities in the class. This is a similar theory to @gnasher729's.
Obviously this is all guesswork based on the data, and you will have to decide yourself if it makes sense or not. But it would be consistent with the data if you had two extremely easy questions (which absolutely everyone could solve), three slightly harder, three harder still and two impossible ones which no-one could solve. Everyone fell into one of three levels, with some of the students also making one or two errors on questions which they knew how to solve.
If one point doesn't correspond to one question, than the same thing could still be the case, but with a different amount of questions.
So you tried to spread out the difficulty of the questions (as is normal) but a) you clumped to many questions of the same difficulty together and b) you spread the clumps out too much, with 4 of 10 questions not giving any indication at all as to the relative ability of the students (because everyone got 2 of them, and no-one got the other 2). My guess is that the time-limit of the exam was not a big factor, since people work at different speeds and time limits probably therefore smooth out grades.
There is any easy way to test this theory. Did the students who got 2, 5 and 8 all get the same or very similar sets of questions right? My theory predicts that they did.
## Edit
Looking closer at the numbers (this is still guesswork), I would now say that the 3 different ability groups correspond to something like 7.8 questions (with quite a few making one or two points worth of mistakes), 4.8 questions (with most not making many mistakes) and 2.6 (with most making 0.5-1.5 points worth of mistakes).
# Answer
> 0 votes
I believe that part of your issue is how you're doing the rounding for the graph. Instead of rounding up, let's just round to the nearest integer.
This looks far more like a normal distribution, if perhaps a little heavy in the back end. Honestly, rounding like this makes a lot more sense when dealing with a distribution of a class, because without this kind of rounding, something similar to what your graph looks like can crop up. This also explains why many of the non-integer graphs look rather normal as well.
---
Tags: teaching, grades, statistics
--- |
thread-4745 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4745 | Is it reasonable to collaborate with a professor when you are employed by a different professor? | 2012-10-14T17:49:07.017 | # Question
Title: Is it reasonable to collaborate with a professor when you are employed by a different professor?
How wise is it to collaborate with another professor while working as a staff under one professor? Is there a ethical conflict in doing so even if the other professor is from a slightly different area?
Also, how should one develop his/her own expertise while working as a postdoc under one professor? Is it wise to also work with other professor with slightly different research interest?
# Answer
> 21 votes
It depends totally on your status, and what exactly this collaboration entails. You say “working as a staff under one professor”. If you're on a short-term contract (say, post-doc), then it's probably **not okay** to do independent research on something completely different. You were hired on a project and it's unlikely that you have any significant time left for something else. On the other hand, if this new collaboration is related to your project *and you involve your professor in it*, it is okay (and he will welcome this initiative from which everyone involved benefits).
To the above, there are a few exceptions:
* People who just arrived usually have some unfinished business with their previous institution, and they are given a bit more leeway in finishing it: revisions to make to papers on track for publication, conference attendance, etc.
* People who are leaving due to their contract ending have to get involved with other projects to get a new job. They have to go fishing around, and this sometime requires a bit of extra work.
* Finally, if your activity on the side is quite unrelated to your main job, and you manage to do it on your own time without prejudice to your employer, you may do so. Some people write books, some get involved in open source software unrelated to their employment, etc.
---
If you're working as an longer-term staff researcher in someone's group, then it is expected that they respect your academic freedom. To a reasonable extent, you are free to engage in new collaborations with other people, and not necessarily involve your group leader.
# Answer
> 25 votes
In contrast to F'x's opinion, I think collaboration with people outside your group is not just wise, but actually **necessary**, at least if you are working toward an academic career. You *must* develop both a wide professional network and broad independent research experience. As long as everything is out in the open, with everyone's knowledge and agreement, there is absolutely no ethical conflict.
This does not mean that you should shirk your paid job; any outside projects must be on your own time and must not interfere with your official duties. Similarly, you can't use your supervisor's resources without their explicit advance permission. And your supervisor may be happier if there's some chance of involving them in your outside projects. But ultimately, how you use your own time is your own business. (Any supervisor who tells you otherwise, or insists that you don't *have* "your own time", is simply abusing you. Run.)
# Answer
> 21 votes
If you are perfectly honest with all parties involved, then it shouldn't be a problem. Everyone involved knows where they stand.
One small point. In the UK, post-doc positions are funded by grant income. It would be strange if a post-doc had enough "free time" for other duties.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Let me give an answer from my own viewpoint - that of someone who hires and 'supervises' postdocs on a regular basis (in my field, mathematics).
I consider that a postdoc coming to my group comes for two reasons: (a) to bring new knowledge to our group, and (b) to learn things from our group. Both are good for the postdoc and good for the group - everybody profits from this arrangement. Learning things from our group is best done in close collaboration with the supervisor (me), while contributing to the group often benefits from a much wider scope.
So I tell my postdocs that I expect them to work half of their time on the project they are formally appointed for, and the other half on something of their own choosing - and I suggest that for this part they might also look for other connections within our group or department.
What this means for the OP is (as has already been said): discuss it with your supervisor, and ask yourself the question whether the 'outside' collaboration might also have benefits for your supervisor.
---
Tags: research-process, ethics, postdocs, collaboration
--- |
thread-17858 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17858 | How to automatically link LaTeX .bib references to a set of pdf full-text articles? | 2014-03-06T23:36:41.050 | # Question
Title: How to automatically link LaTeX .bib references to a set of pdf full-text articles?
I have a huge collection of PDFs of research papers. Many of these have valuable annotations. I also have a huge .bib file containing citations for these and many other works. Is there a reference manager software where I could import the .bib file and the collection of PDFs and somehow the entries in the .bib file could be magically linked to the corresponding PDFs? I would then like to use that tool to access my PDFs (of research papers). I think this was a feature request for mendeley long back http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/80946-automatically-find-pdfs-link-them-to-imported-me . As of today, I don't think that it has been implemented. I tried Quiqqa (http://www.qiqqa.com/) , but had no luck.
# Answer
> 7 votes
Here is one nearly automatic way to do it using Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/):
1) import the PDFs in Zotero. One way is to select multiple PDFs and drag them into a collection (in the LHS pane) of Zotero.
2) Select the PDF items (CTRL click in Windows for multiple selections), right click and select "Retrieve metadata from PDF". Note that this step searches online databases for missing information and seems fairly robust.
3) import the .bib file in Zotero
4) Go to the duplicates collection in the LHS panel and merge all the duplicates.
Issues:
1) In step 4, there may be false negatives if the automatically retrieved metadata (in step 2) is too different from the corresponding entry in the .bib file (step 3)
2) Step 2 might fail on old scanned PDFs.
# Answer
> 4 votes
One options is BibDesk (OS X), which can track links between files and associated citations.
Personally, not a fan of what it does to the `.bib` file, but could suit your purpose.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Try Tellico
A collection manager for linux which "provides default templates for books, bibliographies, videos, music, video games, coins, stamps, trading cards, comic books, and wines."
The reference manual states the following:
"If Tellico was compiled with exempi or poppler support, metadata from PDF files can be imported. Metadata may include title, author, and date information, as well as bibliographic identifiers which are then used to update other information."
Is that useful? If so, then you can check the site for reviews of Tellico and it works on the following:
* Debian
* Ubuntu
* Gentoo
* FreeBSD
* openSUSE
* PC-BSD
* Fink (Mac OS X)
* Fedora
* Linux Mint
* Pardus
* ArchLinux
# Answer
> 1 votes
EndNote x7 has this feature, known as "PDF auto import."
I tried it and it got 0/3 of my sample PDFs correct, all from IEEE conferences initially downloaded from IEEE Xplore.
One of the three articles was *closer* to having a correct reference (the others were useless). But that article had PDF metadata visible in Acrobat Reader (Title, Author, Subject). EndNote got page numbers right (somehow), the DOI, but failed at the conference name, and reference type (EndNote mistakenly thought it was a journal article).
---
Tags: productivity, reference-managers, latex, bibtex
--- |
thread-18859 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18859 | Is it legal to withdraw a signed offer letter from grad school? | 2014-04-03T02:11:25.677 | # Question
Title: Is it legal to withdraw a signed offer letter from grad school?
I am asking for my little cousin who is going to graduate school this year.
He has just signed an offer letter with school A, but just yesterday he got a better one from school B (may know school A quite well in the field). Is it legal for him to withdraw the signed letter from school A and attend school B, as long as he does it before the inter college deadline of April 15th? School A has also not yet issued any I-20 form to him (yes, we are international students).
# Answer
> 28 votes
The following answer only applies for graduate schools in the United States that are members of the Council of Graduate Schools, and have signed on to the CGS Resolution Regarding Graduate Scholars, Fellows, Trainees and Assistants. (Here is a list of these institutions.)
Furthermore, this agreement applies to offers of financial aid, not admission without aid. (Although many schools adopt a similar policy for offers of admission without aid.)
According to the Resolution:
> In those instances in which a student accepts an offer before April 15, and subsequently desires to withdraw that acceptance, the student may submit in writing a resignation of the appointment at any time through April 15. However, an acceptance given or left in force after April 15 commits the student not to accept another offer without first obtaining a written release from the institution to which a commitment has been made.
So the answer is: he can withdraw (in writing) his acceptance of **financial assistance** offered by School A before April 15 (if School A has signed on to the Resolution).
However, for general reference: you should really refrain from accepting an offer until you hear back from all the schools you are seriously considering.
---
Tags: graduate-admissions, graduate-school, withdraw
--- |
thread-18846 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18846 | How/when to retract a project from a student? | 2014-04-02T16:18:48.990 | # Question
Title: How/when to retract a project from a student?
Take, for example, that a student is nearing the end of their thesis project.
The supervisor has an idea for a new method that can help to verify the results of part of the project. He does not think much of the significance of the idea at the time, \[writes up a document outlining the procedure\] and passes it to the student to implement.
A week later, a problem arises. The supervisor questions whether the idea was in fact more significant than he originally thought - i.e. could form a paper on its own, and has realised that answering the students questions on the specifics of how to implement the said method would take up more time/effort then just doing it themselves.
So, how would the supervisor go about retracting the new project from the student? From the student's point of view, they would have a strong motivation to try and implement the idea that has been brought to their attention since it is directly relevant to their thesis work. Yet the supervisor does not want to be hassled by the student on learning the specifics (that would form the content of the paper), and does not want the student to claim partial ownership of the idea. The student has not yet produced any results using the method that has been passed to them.
The issues that I see are as follows:
* If the supervisor tells the student to relax and think about something else instead, they probably would not listen
* If the supervisor works independently from the student to produce the paper (figures, text, observing trends), then the student could still claim that they were involved (?) since they would have probably started working on it too
# Answer
> 38 votes
With the way this question is framed, "retracting" the idea sounds both difficult and unethical. Based on the information given here, my advice, and the only ethical path, is for the supervisor to collaborate closely with the student on the work. If the idea is good, the pair should work toward a co-authored publication. This question states that, "since \[the student\] has more free time on their hands \[they\] could potentially have some results first." In this case, it sounds like collaboration with the student is very likely to help.
Working with students means teaching and mentorship. It means that supervisors are, "hassled by the student on learning the specifics" and it often means, "answering the students questions on the specifics of how to implement the said method \[in ways that\] take up more time/effort then just doing it themselves." *This is part of the job of an academic supervisor*.
Moreover, I completely fail to see why co-authorship and shared ownership of an idea *between a supervisor and student* is a problem.
That said, one of the most important jobs a supervisor has is trying to decide when and what to delegate. It was the supervisors job to be more thoughtful and they need to deal with the consequences — whatever they are.
# Answer
> 28 votes
The stated scenario sounds awful, and the clarification makes it sound even worse. When you start a collaboration with a student you're advising (I'm using "you" colloquially), you don't get to "keep the good bits". That's grossly unfair to the student who is after all attempting to learn from you.
Yes, research is uncertain, and you can't always predict what ideas will become interesting.
**Which is why rules for collaboration are set up first, and are not contingent on the quality of the (potential) results.**
I understand that in this case, there's a worry about the student "slowing things down". But that's about convenience, not about doing the right thing.
And I should say that because this is a **student** and not a collaborator, all rules should be adjusted to give the student the benefit.
# Answer
> 13 votes
It is hard not to sense some kind of "foul play" by the phrase *He does not want the student to claim partial ownership of the idea* and the phrase "*just doing it themselves*". Who are they? The senior professor, the PostDoc or a graduate student? If the idea was not good, the poor student should bang his head to make it worthwhile. If the idea is good then you somehow want the student out of it.
The main question is why? If you write a seminal paper based on the idea, one more co-author would not hurt you. Why don't you want the student involved? He will provide help and you can explain to him that he is not going to be the first author and immediately all your problems are solved.
Once the idea gets out of your head and into somebody's mind (and possibly his PC) it cannot be contained anymore. What will stop the student to implement it on his own? If he is fast enough, he may even do it faster than the busiest, more senior team members.
I know I do not answer the actual OP's question but this is deliberate. I consider highly unethical the fact OP thinks he can freely change your mind, make people work on his ideas and when those ideas seem promising (which is partially due to the student's work - although he clearly denies this fact) he claims full ownership and decides who else should work on his idea. The only reason I see legit for this kind of behaviour is if there is a highly ranked conference approaching and the OP (by doing the work himself) might make it on time, something that will be impossible for the student to do. If it is so, then the OP may explain it to the student and implement the idea himself. All other possible reasons are either questionable or possibly unethical.
If you treasure raw research ideas that much (and most of us do), I would suggest next time be careful who you share it with. When most people get an excellent research idea they only share it with the ones who will work on it. Once they share it, they should stick with these people, unless something unpredictable (work-related arguments, work relocation) happens. But even then, plan changes should be fully explained. And since from your previous questions I believe that you are possibly a graduate student, please do not start your academic career by questionable practises.
# Answer
> 8 votes
The only time I can imagine retracting a project from a student, is if continuing with it would be detrimental to them or to the university.
Retracting in other circumstances is unethical. It's a breach of trust. And it's a fundamental failure at the task in hand, of being a supervisor of research students.
**It is my job, as a supervisor of research students, to enable them to become better researchers than me.**
<sup>++</sup>
The first time I was told that, by a very wise colleague, I was shocked. I felt threatened. My students would go on to take my research, my grants, my future jobs away from me.
Then I took a deep breath, had a think about what my role was, and realised he was completely right. And I accepted it, and now I revel in it.
If it ever got to the point where I didn't want to do what I practicably can to make them better researchers than me, then it would be time for me to step down from that role.
<sup>++</sup><sub>(yes yes, I know, it's my job to enable them to be the best researchers they can be, insofar as it does not ask for impracticable demands from me. The phrasing above isn't perfectly accurate. But it does have impact, and it does punch home an important message)</sub>
# Answer
> 6 votes
Too late, you should have thought that more carefully beforehand. You cannot undo.
Like it or not, this student is now your collaborator for this idea, so I'd suggest to get the best out of the collaboration that you can get. This means no races, etc. Try to give him chunks of work that won't require too many questions and interaction (if that's a problem) and try to publish asap, because you are collaborating with this person, but probably you are "competing" with other people in other places, who may be able to produce results faster than you.
Next time, think about it twice before you share your next idea, specially if you are going to be so possessive about them. Now it's shared.
If the problem is being hassled, you can postpone investing time specifically on that until the deadline for publication is met. Priorities are priorities. The student may not care after that or may have no questions. By your wording the problem doesn't seem to be that, though.
We can only hope there are micro-contributions in the future so that we can trace exactly how much did each person contribute to something and have the provenance of everything with a personal granularity. Either good or bad, it's not happening anytime soon. I'd think this would be good, specially if it helps to collaborate smoothly, there are many open problems that need to be solved, the more we can collaborate (if done correctly), the more problems we will be able to solve in less time, in theory.
“We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.” ― Winston Churchill.
---
Tags: research-process, ethics, authorship, intellectual-property
--- |
thread-18866 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18866 | Is it legal for a university to post a copy of a copyrighted (pay for access) journal article? | 2014-04-03T09:26:36.860 | # Question
Title: Is it legal for a university to post a copy of a copyrighted (pay for access) journal article?
Extensively using Google Scholar, I've realized that most of the articles belonging to publishers that limit access to material (i.e. ACM, IEEE, Elsevier) also have PDF versions available for free, and these files usually are hosted by universities or other aggregators like ResearchGate.
Is it legal for the university/organization to host a copy of an article, if this has been published on a conference or journal with paid access? Does it matter if the authors of the article belong to that university/organization?
# Answer
> 27 votes
To answer the (original version of the) question in the title:
> Are scientific articles of public domain?
the answer is **absolutely not, unless the relevant copyright holders declared it so or that its copyright has expired**. Note that public domain is emphatically different from open access.
To answer the question in the body:
> Is it legal for the university/organization to host a copy of an article, if this has been published on a conference or journal with paid access? Does it matter if the authors of the article belong to that university/organization?
the answer is **it depends**.
What does it depend on? Very simply, the **publication agreement** or the **copyright transfer agreement** or the **licensing agreement** signed by the author when the article has been accepted for publishing. For example:
As David Ketcheson points out below, a great resource for checking the self-archiving and open access policies of is Sherpa/Romeo.
# Answer
> 10 votes
To answer the question in the title: free access to an article depends largely on the version. It's almost always fine to post versions on your institutional page. Some journals do have embargo periods, during which you must refrain from doing so.
Depending on the field and journal, authors may post one of the following on their institutional website:
* *published version*: article as it appears in the journal
* *accepted version*: manuscript after peer review but prior to journal editting/typesetting; typically allowed after the article is published (ex: *Nature*, *Science*, *The Lancet*)
* *preprint*: manuscript before peer review (this is *almost* always allowed)
Many journals encourage disseminating accepted versions, including posting them to repositories like PubMedCentral.
Additionally, some fields make heavy use of preprint servers like arXiv to get work out to the public as soon as possible. This is particularly relevant for fields with long review times (maths, physics, ...).
# Answer
> 3 votes
Many universities now have institutional open access policies. Most of those policies assert a non-exclusive license to distribute research authored by university employees.
Does the university's pre-existing non-exclusive license remain in effect when a restrictive copyright transfer agreement is later signed?
This has been considered in great detail by Eric Priest in a study published in the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, Vol. 10, p. 377, 2012. This seems to be the most authoritative work available on the matter. His conclusion is that the non-exclusive license granted by Harvard-style open access policies will remain in effect in such cases, at least under US law. This is based on a careful analysis of section 205(e) of the US Copyright Act, which reads:
> (e) Priority Between Conflicting Transfer of Ownership and Nonexclusive License.— A nonexclusive license, whether recorded or not, prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed or such owner’s duly authorized agent, and if—
>
> (1) the license was taken before execution of the transfer; or
>
> (2) the license was taken in good faith before recordation of the transfer and without notice of it.
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Tags: publications, google-scholar
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thread-18861 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18861 | My supervisor spells my name incorrectly | 2014-04-03T07:37:48.870 | # Question
Title: My supervisor spells my name incorrectly
I've discovered that every time my supervisor has cited any of the papers or technical documents I've written she/he would:
* spell my name incorrectly or forget to add my name
* spell the article/technical document title incorrectly
These are citation made in articles already published (!!) or at final stage (where she/he denied to make any effort to try to correct them). Althought this means she/he also loses citations of these articles she/he is doing mistakes only on my papers/technical documents, not with others.
I am obliged to add her/him in every paper as co-author, although she/he never engages in any discussion concerning any of the papers or phd. This is not someone that has a flock of PhD and MSc students under her/his wings, the number of students are really reduced.
How should I react to this? What should I do about it?
# Answer
> 12 votes
Mis-citing articles (and worse, removing authors) is one of those crimes that academics take very seriously (and no one else really understands). If you were a collaborator, then repeated behavior of this kind would get your advisor in trouble not just with you, but with editors at the journals, reviewers, and so on.
So you really should bring it up.
How do you go about doing it ? Because it's your advisor, you have to be a little more gentle: some options:
* **keeping it specific to each mis-cite**: "I noticed you cited my work, but you omitted my name: can you please fix it". It sounds like you've been doing this already though.
* **the technical solution**: "Here's a BibTeX file containing all my papers: you can use that for citing" - this works only if your advisor uses some kind of citation manager to cite papers.
* **the direct solution**: "I noticed that in this, this and this paper, you omitted my name from the citation. I'd really appreciate it if you could contact the editors and submit a correction: I'd like to get credit for my work".
In other words, keep the discussion focused on outcomes and actions, rather than intent (because a) it's hard to argue intent, and b) you're in a position of weakness)
# Answer
> 8 votes
In accordance with the comments, I think you have two choices, get out or stick with it. Since you are determined to finish (no-one but you can weigh the choices) just try to do so and swallow the problems you describe. I am sure it is extremely irritating but focus on finishing and do not let your energy go to issues you cannot change. The sooner you finish the better. So, if you can, focus only on the work leading to your thesis.
That advisors put their names on papers, is a separate discussion and one which has been dealt with here on academia.sx for many cases. Search on, for example, the tag combined perhaps with .
In the end, you need to assess what you do and how you best should spend your time to reach your goal, the PhD. If you feel you are drawn into things that are not productive for this goal, use the goal as a reason not to involve: "I really must focus on my PhD, I fear I may not be able to finish in time otherwise". Also, it sounds as if you have numerous publications already, so try to probe what is enough, if that is not already clear. Simply try to find the path of least resistance to get to the goal.
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Tags: phd, thesis, supervision
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thread-18871 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18871 | How do you decide between two PhD offers? | 2014-04-03T13:16:07.063 | # Question
Title: How do you decide between two PhD offers?
I have two offers for graduate study within the UK and I am trying to make a balanced decision.
My offers are:
* Four year doctoral training centre at University of Oxford (approx. £14k/year)
* Four year PhD at the Cancer Research London Research Institute (LRI) (approx. £21k/year)
I suspect that the Cancer Research institute does not have a comparable international reputation when compared to Oxford. On the other hand, I've met the research group at the LRI and they seem nice. At Oxford I wouldn't be choosing my research group until after the first year. I already have significant ties to London and have been living here for four years.
What other factors should I be considering in order to make this a rational decision?
# Answer
> 4 votes
I am answering this on the basis that I was making this same decision myself a year ago.
Firstly, the LRI will be joining the Francis Crick Institute next year as it opens, which may end up being esteemed in it's own right if all goes according to their plans. It depends what you want to do after the PhD, if you want to stay in academia and cancer research, then it is the supervisor's esteem that is more likely to help you in the long run, as well as the impact of your papers. The label on the institute makes less difference as you go on (within reason of course).
Have a look at the recent publications of the group, maybe see how many have PhD students on good author positions in good journals; that's what will get you a post-doc ultimately.
The two being 4 year funded, the London one may be better financially overall. Integrated PhD programs (where you have 3 small projects in the first year, getting an MRes, then pick the final PhD project for 3 years, I presume this is the case for Oxford) in my experience tend to be more trouble than they're wort, unless you're not sure on picking a definite research project yet or don't have a Masters.
The issues can come from firstly, not getting the project you were hoping for after the first year, after the MRes, but now you're tied down to Oxford (may not happen, but does all too ofter) and also you now have 3 years to do your PhD, not 4. Why waste time on multiple smaller sub-projects at the start if you have a clear idea on what you want to do for your final project? Of course, the corollary here, if you don't have a clear idea exactly what you want your PhD to be on, then integrated programs can be a godsend.
My best advice on the rational decision front is don't. Relationship with group and particularly the supervisor is the main factor in a PhD, with a bad supervisor able to kill your career dead in the water, intentionally or not.
If you have a passion for the research, and get on well with the group and supervisor then I would definitely go for that PhD. Lack of these both for 4 years will likely mean you either drop out, or have a horrible 4 years and then hate your research.
I went for the lower paid, lower ranked Uni offer, and have no regrets. In fact, the higher paid one was industry funded, and they've since gone under, so I dodged a bullet there.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Oxford is a small city with an atmosphere absolutely steeped in scholarship – some thrive in it; some find the pressure it induces extremely stressful. I would visit Oxford if you can and try to establish whether that atmosphere is for you. If you’re prepared to relocate, you’ll have almost no commuting time and may be able to live in college accommodation. It would be possible in such circumstances to concentrate very intensively on your work. You would be surrounded almost entirely by others doing the same. For some this is heaven, for others it is hell....
In London it would be much easier to collaborate across institutions, and therefore to meet a wide range of researchers formally and informally, all of which will help enormously in coming up with good ideas for post-doc projects, if you want to think that far ahead. Living in London, it will be very convenient to attend meetings and seminars at the London colleges as well as to meet with policy makers etc, if that is important in your area. It also means that you can rely on the friendship network that you already have in place, something to bear in mind as you may go through a bad patch during your studies and it’s good to have an established support network. The first year in the new Francis Crick Institute is likely to be slightly disrupted as everybody settles in (think usual teething problems like no hot water for months, no telephones etc.) but possibly a tremendously exciting time.
But agreeing completely with Reuben, I would recommend taking some time to get to know your potential new supervisors and groups. Talk to former PhD students from the lab, try to go for a beer/coffee with some of the present students. The relationship with the supervisor(s) is absolutely vital. Try to work out what previous students go on to do – do they complete vaguely on time? Do they get good post-doc jobs afterwards? One advantage of going to Oxford is that it will give you one year to work this out, especially as you don’t mention wishing to work on a specific topic. But accommodation in Oxford is quite expensive, so £14k/yr may leave finances quite tight.
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Tags: phd, graduate-school
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thread-18888 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18888 | Can a master's thesis still be good if it lacks demonstrable results? | 2014-04-03T20:56:11.843 | # Question
Title: Can a master's thesis still be good if it lacks demonstrable results?
I am currently writing my master's thesis, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will not be very good. This is partly because I have been unable to test the system I propose in the thesis properly, because testing it involves test cases that has to be manually performed, and I simply haven't got the time/resources/mental sanity to do more than a handful of them.
The problem is that having little testing could be viewed as a large, weak point in my thesis, and is easily attackable when I shall defend it. My thesis is about detecting malware that requires human interaction (hence the testing difficulty), and by looking at some indicators I can determine what is malware and what is not. But my fear is that these results won't be very generalizable because of the small sample size. So my question is then: **can a master thesis still be good if the presented results only cover a laughably small sample size?**
# Answer
My Masters project (synthetic chemistry) didn't actually generate results other than failure and black goop (so nothing novel!) until the last two weeks of time I had in the lab, and even then, there was insufficient purity and quantity of my compound to do a complete 'standard' panel of analysis. It was the 4th year of an integrated BSc/Msci course, was graded including a viva and I achieved a mid 2.1.
The main purpose of a research Masters, at least in chemistry, is to accustom you to 'proper' research methods, while allowing you to pursue something novel and to demonstrate your ability to conduct research to a sufficient standard. In my cohort there was typically a tradeoff between novelty of project and quality of results, where one forgave the lack of the other.
As long as your thesis is written with an awareness of its deficits (aims far loftier/broader than the time/resources available sounds like a good start!) and you write good further work and conclusion sections where you tie this awareness in, making sensible conclusions and observations on the few cases you have achieved, I think it is definitely possible to write a good one! As Paul indicated above, you should discuss these concerns with your supervisor and possibly head of class (or equivalent). I am sure they will have dealt with someone with your concerns and circumstances before.
> 8 votes
# Answer
Good enough to publish your results: Most likely no. Unless low sample sizes are typical of the research papers in the same field trying to collect similar data, you can't expect lack of results to be publishable.
Good enough to still pass with your masters degree: maybe... It's up to your committee to decide. You need to discuss this with your advisor and committee members ahead of time.
> 2 votes
# Answer
> can a master thesis still be good if the presented results only cover a laughably small sample size?
It might be, if you can show a significant improvement over existing methods for said samples. If you can't do anything special with your "labour intensive" technique, it seems to have little merit.
> 1 votes
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Tags: masters
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thread-18874 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18874 | Starting a research with a professor as a business professional | 2014-04-03T15:01:49.053 | # Question
Title: Starting a research with a professor as a business professional
When I graduated from college in 2012, I was quite excited about my job (although it is a small hi-tech company.) My goal has always been to either start my own business or get back to school for PhD. Ultimately, be able to live a life filled with research, and learning.
I have been working for almost two years now. And before going back to school, I really want to publish a paper and make myself a better PhD candidate. And ideally this would help me better discover my field, gain confidence, and maybe discover assistantship opportunities.
I think I've found a quite interesting topic for a paper that also leverages my work experience in transportation technologies. The paper is about accident prevention and I am targeting a public health professor. I contacted the professor and I was not able get any response back yet. (It has been 2 days.) I am not sure about the right strategy to follow to communicate such idea and gain her interest. I wrote an email with 3 paragraphs and 350 words. And briefly tried to explain the possible research context and my intention in starting a PhD. But maybe I was just supposed to ask for an appointment? It is a wise way to sent a follow-up email stating how valuable I think this paper would be? and ask for an appointment?
# Answer
> 5 votes
Many professors take a while to respond to emails. I would give it at least a week before you follow up with her.
When you do send a reminder, keep it brief and polite, and send it as a forward of your previous email, so she won't have to go searching for your other message. Reminding her of why you think the paper is valuable could be a good strategy--if you do it in a way that's not heavy-handed and that you think is *true* (i.e., it's actually of value to her career aside from another line on her CV).
It's always nice to give her multiple options for responding--you might include a line to the effect of, "If you'd prefer to chat about this over the phone, I'm happy to schedule a brief call at your convenience." Saves her time from having to compose a reply email.
# Answer
> 2 votes
Your question doesn't specify how well-adapted the proposed research is to the particular public-health professor you've contacted. I think this is a key issue. Let me explain:
Most academics have broad training, *some* expertise across a wide range of areas, and then are true masters (in some cases, the top ones in the world) in a much smaller range of topics. I considered at this point giving examples from my own experience to indicate what sort of things which are "up my alley" that would get me to respond quickly rather than to be interested in principle but respond only much later or never, but this ran into the following issues: (i) the examples would be meaningful only to mathematicians with some experience in number theory, which I think the OP is not, (ii) unfortunately every time I came up with what I thought was a description of "my alley", I could then think of someone who sent me work or questions in that area to which my response was inadequate or even non-existent! But I think there is a lesson here: when you send a paper (or a question or an idea) to anyone, it is always a bit of a crapshoot: you may well get absolutely no response, and the reasons for this may have absolutely nothing to with you or your work. In fact history is filled with examples of much more famous mathematicians rejecting -- or worse, ignoring -- much more important work.
The moral of the above paragraph is this: you should cast a wider net. If there is one faculty member that you feel is the perfect person to get involved with, then you may as well contact them first, and the job of your message ought to be to convey to them why they are a perfect match for the project at hand (and that the project at hand may be worthy of their time). Even so, your perfect match may not see it that way or may simply be too busy to give you the attention you deserve. (Again, apologies to all the people who sent me good work or asked me good questions over the years to which I did not respond. I definitely respond to some of the correspondence I receive; I do not always have time to respond to all of it; and I sometimes make what looks in retrospect to be bad choices about what to respond to. In particular, something promising that I don't have the time to think about at the moment tends to get put on the "answer later" shelf, but my algorithm for addressing correspondence does not have a step which ensures that the answer will actually come later.) It is okay to write twice to someone when you think it is important, and the repetition can be distressingly effective: as I wrote elsewhere on this site, unfortunately for some types of correspondence I implicitly assume that if I only hear about it once then it cannot be so important. This gets me in trouble from time to time, but not as often as it should.
More likely though there will be several people who could help you with your idea. The classiest move is to contact each of them individually and explain why their expertise is well-tailored to your idea. The chance that you hear back from any one person increases dramatically this way. And then you can get started with the person who you hear back from. In some cases this may result in getting emails later on from people who were interested but didn't have time to reply. Those, as they say, are the breaks.
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Tags: phd, research-process, publications
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thread-18426 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18426 | Advantages or disadvantages of using public repositories for paper writing? | 2014-03-22T18:29:10.637 | # Question
Title: Advantages or disadvantages of using public repositories for paper writing?
What are pros and cons of using public version control system such as github for writing my papers and reports ?
Is it good to store copies of papers/reports being submitted to conference/journals on such repos. If no, wouldn't it make sense to not use them at the first place itself.
# Answer
There are a few parts to your question, and I'm not sure which one is most important. If the question is about the value of version control, then you should see the answers to this question (which also has a link to a question about which one to use).
If you're asking about putting it on a shared repository, then here are some reasons:
* **collaboration with others**. If multiple authors are writing a paper, then it's very easy for different authors to edit different portions at the same time without too much worry about conflicts.
* **portability**: I work from different machines, and it's convenient to have a single location to check in/check out from so I don't have to worry about edits on my home machine versus my office machine versus a laptop and so on.
If you're asking about making it **public**, so anyone can read/edit the paper, then I don't see much of an advantage in that. When the paper is done, it might be handy to be able to download the source of course.
> 3 votes
# Answer
One advantage of using those repositories (in public or private mode) is that you can show the changes and versions of some text. At the same time you can show variations of something through forks. Of course I have no idea why these features might be needed for publication of a paper, but if you are developing a paper collaboratively and you use some text based system, such as Latex, then it makes sense to use those repositories both for source sharing, backup and versioning, and alternative developments through forks. If you want to invite unidentified future authors (probably through fork) then it should be in public, otherwise private versions makes more sense for me.
> 2 votes
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Tags: writing, repository, version-control
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thread-18892 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18892 | Referencing specific files in source code in a dissertation | 2014-04-03T21:46:28.667 | # Question
Title: Referencing specific files in source code in a dissertation
I am making a statement in my dissertation based on a comment written in the Linux kernel source code. I would like to be able to reference this comment. At least I would like to be able to name the file to which I'm referring.
Is this (citing files in large pieces of source code) recommended?
What is the best way to go about doing this?
# Answer
> 1 votes
According to the MIT handbook in relation to writing code you should use the following when citing code.
* Generally, the URL and the date of retrieval are sufficient. Add more details if it will help the reader get a clearer understanding of the source.
* If you adapted the code, you should indicate “Adapted from:” or “Based on” so it is understood that you modified the code.
The page link above also includes the following in relation to open-source material
> When you use code from an open source project, you need both to attribute the source and follow the terms of any open source license that applies to the code you are using.
Finally, as always with citing, you should check with your Department to see if they have guidance or a citation style-sheet.
# Answer
> 5 votes
It's not uncommon in certain areas of CS to cite specific files. In your specific case, I would suggest that you include the git commit hash of the kernel.org sources in the citation, so that people can find the *precise* version your referring to.
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Tags: computer-science, citations, thesis, engineering
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thread-18909 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18909 | Does interdisciplinary research usually require reading/reviewing more literature? | 2014-04-04T10:43:37.957 | # Question
Title: Does interdisciplinary research usually require reading/reviewing more literature?
This may be quite a difficult question to answer in general, but I suspect that the answer is "yes" as less-well-defined discipline boundaries mean having to read more to cover all bases.
Can anyone with experience of both within- and across-discipline research weigh in on the matter?
# Answer
**Caveat:** I am a current graduate student.
I have a very interdisciplinary committee. My home department is information science and my committee members are from electrical and computer engineering, communication and statistics.
My research stands at the intersection of social network analysis, privacy and surveillance studies and spatial statistics. I defended my dissertation proposal late last year and my literature review was ~50 pages with over 250 references drawn from 6 disparate areas.
Some of my other colleagues who work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) (itself a rather interdisciplinary field) have lit reviews around the 40 page mark.
I constantly feel that there is always more to read and really important classical literature on privacy (dating from the 1700s) that I should read but haven't read in depth.
Before, committing to a dissertation in this field, I used to work in theoretical statistics, specifically estimation theory. My readings were focused and significantly lesser in number than the juggernaut that my annotated bibliography has turned out to be.
Perhaps, more pertinent, TOREAD folder used to have 2-4 articles at any given time. Now, that is anything from 8-10 in addition to 1-2 books at any given time.
Therefore, in response to your specific question, **Yes!**, it feels like I have to read more now that I work in an interdisciplinary space to "*cover*" all the bases.
> 6 votes
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Tags: literature, literature-search
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thread-18898 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18898 | How do I convince my professor to keep me as his student? | 2014-04-04T02:05:55.807 | # Question
Title: How do I convince my professor to keep me as his student?
This is a continuation of my previous question, I believe my advisor doesn't think I am smart. How should I deal with this?
It just so happens that when I asked my prof for feedback, he decided to just drop me. Obviously I had asked for feedback when I saw some signs recently which indicated that he wasn't very happy.
Now what do I do?
I really liked talking to this prof. I was enjoying the discussions. I thought things were well. But he seems to think that I get stuck with simple things! He probably also thinks that I am overambitious (in the few instances that I have tried discussing some other topics with him).
I wrote to my prof asking him to reconsider his decision and reflecting on what could be the issues of his disappointment and what I could do to improve. Obviously he didn't reply.
I met the grad coordinator. He has schedule another between with all three of us.
I wonder whether I should be optimistic about that meeting!
# Answer
> 33 votes
It's possible that you really *aren't* capable of doing the work, and that your advisor thought about this for a long time and decided that the kindest thing to do would be to drop you now, before you waste more time.
It's also possible that you weren't really applying your advisor's criticism - for example, you weren't taking him seriously when he told you not to get distracted by new ideas, but to focus on making progress on your original research. Your advisor felt that he was wasting his time because you weren't listening to his advice.
You should really talk to this professor's other students, and find out how they experience him as an advisor. If the other students get along just fine with him, and only you have this problem, then it's possible he just can't work with you.
However, in that case, he should really have spoken to you about the possibility of dropping you **before** he did it. (Not just making comments about your work, but explicitly telling you, "I can't keep working with you if this continues; this is what you need to do to show me you are making enough progress to continue.")
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In any event, I'm going to answer this question as if you *are* a capable student, and your advisor is just unwilling to let you learn and work at a reasonable pace. (Obviously, I don't know you, so I don't know if this is true.)
In that case,
**If your advisor isn't prepared to deal with a student who is capable, and clearly eager to learn and improve, then you should really reconsider *wanting* to work with him.**
There is a professor like this in my department - brilliant, great to talk to, and there is a lot one can learn from him. But he is under a lot of pressure to produce results (he's new, like your advisor). He is constantly making "threats" to get his students to produce work (e.g., telling them their funding the next semester depends on whether their next conference paper is accepted - although he doesn't follow through on these threats). He isn't willing to let students grow and develop as researchers - he expects them to work up to his standards, immediately.
This professor's students are leaving him in droves. They are either leaving school with an M.S. (instead of sticking it out for the PhD), or switching to another advisor. As a result, he's only published one paper in the last two years (which is far, far below standard in his field).
So, you should think about whether you really want to work with this professor, and consider asking the grad coordinator for another advisor. If this advisor is not a capable advisor, you will not be successful with him, no matter how brilliant he is.
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**If you decide you *really* want to work with this professor,** do *not* approach this meeting as a student who is begging an advisor to keep them on.
Rather, come as a student who is *willing* to stay with this advisor, but understands that **both of you need to change for this to work.** He will have to give you a reasonable chance to learn from, and apply, his constructive criticism. In return, you will agree to take his advice seriously, work hard, and do your best to improve and succeed.
Talk about how highly you value this professor's experience, and how much you want to learn from him. Explain that you take his concerns (about getting stuck with simple things and getting distracted with new ideas) seriously, and want to work on fixing those things - but that growth takes some time.
And of course, if you *are* able to work things out, and you continue with this advisor, make sure to talk to him often about what he expects from you, and how you are living up to his expectations. Work hard to apply his advice and improve your research skills, and *make him aware of these efforts* so that he doesn't think you are ignoring his advice.
# Answer
> 13 votes
Do not under any circumstances in any sense *force* someone to be your advisor that doesn't want to be. Your advisor has incredible influence over your success not only while doing your work, but afterwords, as he or she would be the most obvious person letters of recommendation should come from.
Some advisors are of the "throw them in the pool and see if they swim in my field" type, others are more of the "this is a sort of apprenticeship where I will guide you into my field" type, and there are many other possibilities. Choose one that doesn't want to get rid of you.
The last thing you need is to have the person who has the most influence over both your academic life and great influence over your post academic life to have grudging feelings about the whole affair.
I end with an old joke, but one that maybe sums up my recommendation.
"A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge."
I don't really believe in that as a principle for lawyers or for myself, but I do think that trying to make the opposition situation work, where antagonistic feelings have developed, is going to be disastrous.
# Answer
> 4 votes
Consider how the rest of the grad students in your group are faring and this professor's history with past students. If there are recurring problems with students, then you don't want to work for this professor. If there are no such recurring problems, then he is probably correct about your aptitude for this work *at this time in your life*. You are going to need to take a step back an re-evaluate yourself and what you should be doing right now.
Hearing from the comments that you are his first student, my inclination would be to drop him if I was less than 1/3 of the way through my research. Being a brilliant contributor to his field does not mean he is a brilliant advisor. In fact, he is the most inexperienced as advisors can come, having never graduated a student. He has no context in which to judge you other than what he remembers what his graduate student colleagues were like at a different school.
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Tags: graduate-school, advisor
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thread-18905 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18905 | How many major revisions are allowed when publishing with Elsevier? | 2014-04-04T06:38:02.820 | # Question
Title: How many major revisions are allowed when publishing with Elsevier?
I submitted my paper to one of the Elsevier journals in the field of molecular biology and evolution, I've got one major revision back; I fixed the comments, and sent it back to the journal.
It is still "under review" for 1.5 months.
What I want to know is
* Is it possible that this review comes out with another major revision?
* how many major revisions can I get?
* what are usually the time frames for the second round of reviews?
# Answer
> 3 votes
To give this an answer:
1. Yes, it is posisble that you are again asked to make major revisions.
2. It's completely up to the editor to decide how many rounds of revisions are appropriate. There's not a fixed number for all the publisher's journals.
3. You'll have to ask someone in your field, ideally someone who's published in that journal before. But it also depends a lot on how speedy the reviewer is, and how long the editor gives them.
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Tags: publications, elsevier
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thread-18902 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18902 | Is it possible to hire graduate students as freelancers? | 2014-04-04T05:14:40.993 | # Question
Title: Is it possible to hire graduate students as freelancers?
I am currently working in the engineering industry. I am developing software in this field in my free time. I got stuck in some algorithm, and I'm looking for help from academia (either professors or students).
Is it possible to hire professors or students from universities to develop an algorithm for me?
Do universities have some kind of forum to invite projects for its researchers?
(I also considered the option to hire from popular websites for freelancers; however, it is difficult to find many people who freelance in engineering. My budget is between 500 USD to 1000 USD for around 10 hours of work.)
# Answer
While people are, perhaps rightly, poking at your estimate of how long this will take and your budget, yes, its entirely possible to hire graduate students as freelancers. I worked on several projects during my graduate career as a consultant or freelancer. Generally speaking, there aren't great university resources for it, though you might contact a professor who works in the area to see if he or she have any students who might be interested in a consulting gig.
> 3 votes
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Tags: job, job-search, independent-researcher, research-assistantship
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thread-18925 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18925 | Is there a self-consistent citation system? | 2014-04-04T15:45:38.087 | # Question
Title: Is there a self-consistent citation system?
I study undergraduate philosophy. My school of philosophy allows its students to use whichever citation style they prefer to use. I've used a few different styles; however, I haven't yet found a methodical one.
I'd prefer to use a style enables the user to derive the formatting for any given type of reference (e.g. a website, or a paragraph from a printed publication of a compilation of translated public-domain articles) from a set of just a few rules.
Do you know of a system like that?
# Answer
Work out which journals you are most likely to be publishing in. Read their authors' guides. Pick the citation style that occurs most frequently.
Start using that now.
That way, you'll have all the tools you need in place for when you start submitting to those journals.
I think reference management software these days typically includes the ability to incorporate new citation styles, often encoded in CSL (Ctitation Style Language), as well as having the most commonly-used ones built in.
Any decent reputable citation style will be internally consistent enough, and will have rules for papers, books and various species of grey literature.
> 5 votes
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Tags: citations
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thread-18942 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18942 | Logic behind masters programs admissions | 2014-04-05T00:20:31.503 | # Question
Title: Logic behind masters programs admissions
I'm 2 years out of undergrad and thinking about applying to some math graduate schools, specifically operations research and maybe financial engineering. I was a math major, with middling grades, and now I work in IT.
My question is this: it seems that even for not top-tier schools, a high GPA is crucial, as are great letters of recommendation, wonderful GRE scores etc. Why? If I'm willing to shell out 50k for grad school, and I've met the prerequisites, and I show an interest in the subject, why wouldn't a school want to have me? Is it purely so that they can claim they have a low acceptance rate?
In other words, if a grad school (again, not top 10 let's say) has a surplus of people who want to take that program, in a field like math, why not just hire as many professors as it would take to teach them?
I guess I don't get all this pressure to be perfect.
Thanks!
EDIT: I am referring to masters programs in particular, where stipends are not as common.
EDIT: Ok, Pete and Paul's answers make sense, given the current set up of grad school. I can imagine a different set up, however, that would make it less competitive for students, more profitable for professors and more about learning than prestige.
# Answer
> 11 votes
Some points:
1) The line that jumped out at me and probably most other mathematicians reading your message was "If I'm willing to shell out 50k for grad school". Stop right there. Most people who go to math graduate school get paid stipends; almost no one pays the full tuition themselves. It is a little unclear why you are so willing to do this: it certainly does not seem like a wise career move.
2) Graduate programs have limited resources. If they admitted more PhD students then it might in the long run lead to more faculty, but this is an indirect and uncertain process. Moreover every graduate student is a huge outlay of time and effort on the part of the faculty, and while programs are not being ranked according to their acceptance rates (I don't know that these statistics are even reported), they are certainly being ranked according to their *completion rates*. Math graduate school is a challenging proposition, and a lot of people who enroll realize it is not for them.
3) The requirements for getting into a decent math graduate program are not "perfection". (In fact, a "perfect" academic record may in practice mean that the student did not suitably challenge herself.) They are looking for an academic record that gives them confidence that the student will actually succeed in the program. If you admit a student who is merely interested and willing to pay but turns out not to have the skills and the drive to complete the program, everyone's time has been wasted, and lots of the student's money has been wasted. This is not a desirable outcome.
**Added**: Yes, the above remarks apply primarily to PhD programs. (In fact I didn't understand the meaning of MFE, and I thought that OR stood for "Oregon" rather than -- my next guess -- "Operations Research". It's best to err on the side of spelling out abbreviations on a site like this.) Master's programs generally do have lower entry requirements compared to PhD programs at the same institution, and yes, paying your own way is somewhat more common, although I would still not recommend it to any but the wealthiest students. There are in fact some good master's programs in mathematics that one could get into by making clear in advance that no financial support was being requested.
To say more than this really depends on the department. Some places have extra resources for master's programs, but many do not: the master's program takes place alongside the more populous PhD program and is administrated and taught by the same faculty members with limited time and energy that they are trying to apply in the best possible way. Master's students who are not strong enough to receive funding may in fact be the ones who require significant extra effort to get them to finish the program. They may also require faculty to meet and discuss tough questions like whether or not they should be allowed to continue in the program. Speaking from my own experience: a few years ago I was largely open to the idea that anyone who has the appropriate undergraduate degree and coursework and is willing to pay their own way should be given a shot in our master's program. I do not feel that way any longer.
# Answer
> 13 votes
You should not pay tuition to attend grad school, excepting possibly certain "professional" schools like medicine, business, law.
That is, grad programs admit a number of students for which they have funding, and have faculty/mentoring support.
Programs do not get tuition money back directly (as counter-intuitive as this might seem), but have to calibrate grad admissions to match the faculty they have ... the numbers of which are determined by essentially unrelated issues. But, approximately, programs will not admit you if they are not confident that you can succeed in their program. So you should not begrugde that judgement. And, srsly, such judgements are made with much experience.
Yes, there is the issue of prediction of success, which is an element that did not enter in undergrad studies. That is, programs do not "admit everyone" and then allow people to fail. Nor is it just a matter of "trying hard". Beyond a certain point, there is an issue of natural ability. It is true that this is highly non-trivial to understand/detect/encourage.
Yes, there is a considerable amount of disingenuousness in how we describe graduate programs...
Perhaps reaction-comments from the OP could help refine useful answers.
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions, career-path
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thread-18914 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18914 | American universities - where does all the money go? | 2014-04-04T13:16:13.537 | # Question
Title: American universities - where does all the money go?
This question is about Title-IV eligable 4 year institutions in America, the majority of which are non-profit.
Colleges have a range of funding sources, including tution fees. Tuition fees have increased by ~500% in the past 5 decades, much faster than inflation.
My question is, given the increase in income from that source, and that the institutions do not make a profit, where is the money going?
For instance, is this offset by decreases in state funding? Are they spending a lot more on grounds maintainance or research?
I would prefer answers that refer to some kind of data, for instance graphs, university financial report...
# Answer
> 2 votes
The answer is completely different at different types of schools. At state schools in California, the increases in tuition have gone to offset decreases in state funding. At some private schools with big endowments, e.g., Princeton, it's simply not true that tuition has gone up dramatically. (Princeton is now about the same price as Berkeley for a kid from an affluent family.) At other private schools, the increased tuition may be paying for amenities like rock-climbing walls, or it may simply have increased because parents perceive high tuition as a sign of status and quality.
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Tags: funding, united-states, fees
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thread-18938 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18938 | Hosting a graduate student on a campus visit | 2014-04-04T20:25:01.580 | # Question
Title: Hosting a graduate student on a campus visit
A prospective graduate student is coming to visit a program and does not have a place to stay. As is sometimes the case, the program is not funding a hotel for the student and it seems likely that it would be an economic hardship for the student to host themselves. Let's say that the student is accepted to the program so this is more in the context of trying to impress the student and get her to join the program (although I'd be interested to hear if a similar situation with a non-accepted student would be different).
Is it appropriate for a faculty member to try to arrange for a host stay with a current student in the department?
Would it be appropriate for a faculty member interested in working with the student to offer to host the student in a guest room in their home?
Are there other or better options?
# Answer
> 21 votes
Always follow your school policy on the matter, if there is one.
> Is it appropriate for a faculty member to try to arrange for a host stay with a current student in the department?
It's appropriate for a faculty member to ask current students if they can help, then tell the visitor, "Here is the email address of a current student in the department who can help you arrange a host stay, if you're interested."
Then let the visitor make contact with the student. Don't be pushy.
> Would it be appropriate for a faculty member interested in working with the student to offer to host the student in a guest room in their home?
I vote "no" unless there's really no alternative - especially if the faculty member makes the offer directly to the visitor.
I have seen something similar (students living in the guest room of a researcher in industry who they are working with for the summer). Those students apparently were OK with it.
However, I have been *offered* this (visiting a professor in another country for the summer, he offers me a guest room in his home). I did not want to live in this professor's home, and it was mildly uncomfortable and awkward to turn down the offer. There is a power imbalance here that can be a problem.
If you decide to offer a guest room in a faculty member's home, definitely do it through a third party (e.g., have a student contact the visitor and say "Here are some possible hosts, including a guest room in this professor's home"). This way the visitor can turn it down without having to worry about offending the faculty member.
> Are there other or better options?
If your school has a dorm with spare rooms (or if a nearby school has a dorm), this is a good option.
# Answer
> 2 votes
Yeah, I'm afraid that's been the case at my alma mater more often lately due to budgetary issues...Kind of a pity we can't even afford to host prospective, accepted recruits when they come from out of state/country.
What I've seen done is for the department staff to coordinate with the department's student representatives in organizing the whole recruitment visitation event, which has included making hosting arrangements for visiting recruits. Usually it has involved sending emails around to current grad students asking if anyone can host a recruit. Responses and outcomes have been pretty good from what I've seen. I think that's something of a small miracle, considering most grad students live rather modestly. I don't think I was ever in a position to host anyone, but it seems enough other students have managed to make it work that the department can get away with not supporting visitors' lodging needs financially.
I'd expect faculty to have somewhat better accommodations available, judging from the few whose houses I've visited – much more spacious than any grad student's I've ever known. I'd also expect faculty to have a more vested interest in cajoling good recruits into enrolling, and also more interest in getting to know these students ahead of time. Faculty might have longer histories in the area as well, and therefore make better hosts and offer better introductions to the city outside the university. Some faculty are very busy, but some are tenured (insert joke about sea cucumbers here, but the implication that tenured professors aren't busy isn't to be taken too seriously), and no grad student has this luxury – they're all busy, or at least should be. For these reasons, I'm inclined to argue that faculty would actually make better hosts than grad students overall, if they could just be convinced to take that extra responsibility.
However, I'm not sure a faculty member should host his/her own recruit. Personalities can clash in unpredictable ways when people share their personal spaces with one another, and a long-term advisor-student relationship is not one with which to take such risks lightly. People sometimes depend on a sort of professional distance in relationships with authority differences (i.e., superior-subordinate relationships, to whatever extent that fits the advisor-student scenario), and learn to regret lowering their personal boundaries through particularly bad experiences. These are easier to put behind oneself if one doesn't have to work with the other person continuously over several years thereafter.
Furthermore, one wouldn't want to create an implicit expectation in a department that faculty should host their own recruits. Many people choose not to live in tidy, spacious, or peaceful places that a visitor of unknown sensitivities might need just to be able to relax and sleep. This is why it's important to request volunteers for informal hosting if it can't be done through a professional hosting service such as a hotel (or even a hostel). Some people are reluctant to host others for very good reasons, and shouldn't suffer others' judgment for failing to fulfill their expectations when they would be unreasonable. It's all too easy to produce a culture of implicit obligation inadvertently like this, so this justifies preventative precautions.
@ff524's points are well-made on this matter too, and the dorm suggestion isn't a bad idea either, but from a recruit's perspective, I would prefer to be offered a room in a grad student's house / apartment / foxhole. Dorms tend to be dominated by undergrad culture, which at some universities won't make the best impression on recruits. There's enrollment-incentivizing value in being welcomed into a tight-knit, professional environment that gives a realistic impression of what life is like for other grad students, who presumably don't live in dorms (unless they're RAs). Staying with other grad students is a chance to talk about the university or the city over breakfast or dinner, whereas undergrads might make somewhat less useful company.
I'm not sure whether I'm giving undergrads too much credit or too little in saying no more or less than this...Some dorms and undergrads could make very nice environments I'm sure, but others could be downright awful. It seems to me that there's much more risk involved in the dorm proposition than in having other grad students host recruits.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, etiquette
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thread-18950 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18950 | Safely negotiate a salary for a PhD offer - Germany | 2014-04-05T05:04:49.697 | # Question
Title: Safely negotiate a salary for a PhD offer - Germany
I have recently received an offer from a group which pursues topics I find very motivating and whose equipment is above average for my field.
The salary offered is 50% of the German TV-L E13 salary, which I think is acceptable by academic standards. However, all other offers which I have received are 65% of TV-L E13, though all of these other groups pursue topics which to me are slightly less interesting. To give you a bit of background, 50% has been the standard for a long time, but since a couple of years ago most groups in my field are deciding to award their PhD employees 65%.
I am very motivated by my particular interests, and had the salary been equal for all offers I would have taken this one without question. Sadly, the situation being as it is, I am quite split. Additionally, the professor made it quite clear that I would also have to get involved in teaching (not all other groups were as forward about this) - which I do not mind in the slightest, but which I think would give cause for extra consideration when calculating a salary. Regarding the professor's interest, he seemed very keen to have me on board, but also very confident I would take his offer.
I would like to ask whether he could accommodate for 65%. But, since I am yet to decide, I would not like to lose the offer or put great strain on our future relationship if he refused.
The way I see it, academic culture treats monetary interest with a certain disdain, and I would like to ask you how I could best formulate my request.
**FEEDBACK: I have followed the advice offered here, and stated in an email to my prospective PI that I had received better paid offers, and that I would ask him if he could increase the pay, though I am aware of how difficult this could be for him. He took some time to reply (which initially gave me cause to worry), but apparently now he managed to arrange for 65%. I would encourage any of you to follow the advice presented here; and *do* try to negotiate as long as you do it *very* respectfully!**
# Answer
One of the mods here is a professor in a german university, I think he is able to add a better answer or at least confirm or discard mine.
Some considerations:
* As far as I know, many german PhD students, at least in CS, are actually employed full-time, which I assume means 100% TVL-E. In that sense, both 50% and 65% seem somewhat on the low side to me. At the very least, negotiating for 65% does not seem so unreasonable that it should offend anybody.
* However, don't be too disappointed if your negotiations go nowhere. I have heard from multiple people that academic salaries are oftentimes entirely unnegotiable in Germany (though not always)
* German PhD student salaries are internationally quite on the high side (also if you take costs of living into account), so even if you cannot negotiate, 50% might still be ok compared internationally. That being said, the question is always if the salary is enough for **your standard of living / circumstances**. If you have a partner and two kids, maybe 50% simply does not allow you to live. If you are alone and live in a dorm, maybe 50% is plenty.
* In germany, some amount of teaching is usually part of the job. That the one professor told you this before is a good thing. However, there is teaching and there is teaching. I have certainly seen groups where teaching load could add up to about 75% of a PhD student's work time. This is obviously terrible (independent of money issues). The hard part is figuring out whether this is the case in your specific group. The best way is to ask one of the current PhD students.
* Don't be too afraid that you may annoy your future professor. In my experience, the entire "academics frown upon money issues" is a bit of a show. The same professors who says such things at the same time have no quarrels at all negotiating their own contracts or department budgets. If your future professors gets annoyed by you mentioning that you have a number of better offers, you should likely go somewhere else anyway.
Now, for the actual negotiation, I would follow **moriary's** remark from the comment - simply mention (friendly and non-threatingly) that you are torn on accepting the offer, as you have counter-offers at 65%. As said, nobody should get annoyed by that. We are all adults, right?
> 26 votes
# Answer
There are two fundamentally opposing issues here. One is that
> You will not get a higher salary unless you negotiate.
while at the same time
> The only way to avoid the messiness of failed negotiations is not to negotiate.
You have to be prepared for the possibility that negotiations will not go the way that you want. So, really, the question is if the extra pay is so important to you that you are willing to walk away from the position if things don't work out the way you want.
Funding for research groups in Germany can resemble a zero-sum game: faculty members get a fixed budget from the university, as well as a mostly set budget from funding agencies: they get a certain allotment of positions to fill, and get paid based on the salary needed to fund those positions. But what this means is that to give you the extra 15 percent of the position, they need to come up with the funding from somewhere. This may or may not have been budgeted for in the original proposal; if not, finding the money to do so can be quite difficult, particularly in non-science fields (where there may not be a large amount of third-party and industrial funding available).
Even if the funding comes from the so-called *Planstelle* (or university funding), the issue is fundamentally the same: giving you an extra 0.15 position means that there's that much less for somebody else. So 2.0 *Planstelle* positions could be used to hire four graduate students at 50 percent, or three graduate students at 65 percent.
Furthermore, some faculties may have guidelines on what faculty members can offer potential PhD students; it may be worthwhile to contact the person responsible for doctoral students at the department in question to see if this is the case here.
However, unless the group is rather large, I'm rather pessimistic of the ability of the advisor to increase the offer. (If he could have, he probably would have done so, already knowing the state of competition in the field.)
> 15 votes
# Answer
My 2 ct:
* Who is funding the position? (I.e.: is the offer for a concrete project, funded by some funding agency)? If so, look up the funding agencies policies for PhD student funding (e.g. DFG recently changed the recommendation to 65%).
* Anyways, I don't think it will hurt to ask whether 65% are possible. After all, that is now the DFG recommendation. So you are not asking for an outrageous amount of money.
And, if they are not willing to increase the offer, they can easily tell you that this is not possible at the moment due to how positions are tied to projects or even that they don't do this in order not to have one highly paid student at the cost of some other student. (I've been in an institute where positions were more or less rotated among the PhD students in order to have roughly equal pay to everyone in the long run).
* Are you asking for better wage without more work or are you asking for more money, possibly for more work, e.g. because you need to feed your family. Particularly the latter reason may be a good point to tell during the negotiation (depending on where the position is - noone will believe that you'd be able to survive at 65% wage in Munich if you cannot do with 50% in Leipzig).
* There may be other ways to get more money, e.g. it may be possible to get paid the additional 15% if you are borrowed out to do teaching at some other institute for the respective amount of time. I've also been doing work contracts for university though my experience with (one) German university was that they took extremely long to pay (close to 6 months - seems rather usual: I've since heard that other universities have similarly bad reputation). However, this is IMHO only an option if you anyways think about running a free-lancing side-business - otherwise the burocracy will not be worth the hassle.
* Consider also asking whether and when you can expect an increase to 65%.
## Update ("soft" advise triggered by the OP's comments)
* The comments look to me as if the moment for wage negotiation is already in the past:
Prof: "\[blabla\] at the usual pay." Chimera: "... which I take to mean 65% TVL-13"
Is the moment I'd have considered the point to open wage negotiations.
* IMHO a vague offer like "usual pay" needs to be clarified into some hard number - so pinning that to something more concrete is not necessarily blurting out. After all, "usual pay" could be anywhere from 50 to 100% TVL-13 (and formerly even from 50% WHK upwards - but I don't know whether that is still done)
* Maybe the most important point that comes to my mind now: **Wage negotiation does not safe you from making up your mind about what you want.** Quite the contrary: you need to know those *beforehand*, otherwise you'll have no footing for the negotiation.
* In any case, having messed up these negotiations (assuming you *could* have gotten the interesting project *and* the higher wage which we don't know) is an experience for life. It may be good to settle your emotions by writing it off as "Lehrgeld". Yes, 10 000 € net difference over the 3 a hurts (that pain will make the lessons learned last...). On the other hand you're probably going to make more expensive decisions (and even mistakes) during your lifetime (e.g. buying once during our lifetime new car instead of a used one will easily cost you more).
At some point the most expensive mistake will be to keep fretting about this possible mistake instead of looking forward and trying to have a better next negotiation.
* I think there is a deep wisdom in the advise to practice job interviews and negotiations several times with jobs you are not really interested in getting before applying where you seriously want to go. Includes clarifying for yourself the lessons-learned (also by asking questions like this here).
* 10 000 € hurt, but as others have menioned, larger important points aren't negotiable (e.g. how much time you'll spend for teaching)
* or can be negotiated independently of the 50% vs. 65% question (e.g. your prof may be able to throw in helping you to get an international research stay etc.).
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The remaining thoughts are my very personal point of view.
* The unknown confounding factors ("Munich" vs. "Leipzig", family or not) are too large here to give much advise. Obviously, with a job offer in Munich and a family to feed I'd negotiate more (possibly to the point of trying to reopen negotiations) than as a single applying in Leipzig.
* Personally, I'd say that the 15% are in general not sufficient "pain compensation" for me for taking an uninteresting position. Of course that wouldn't stop me from negotiating.
But in order to weight this point you need to know that
* My personal experience (Germany, Canada, Italy) underlines rather strongly that the wage : costs of basic living are *extremely* favorable in Germany compared to other countries. To the point where I think that with few exceptions, even for students money problems are usually (exceptions being feeding a family in Munich - you get the idea) rather on the side of expenses than on the side of generating income.
But take that as a very personal thing - your priorities may vary: I'm aware that I happen to
+ have inexpensive hobbies (not very interested in cinema and pub tours and instead hiking, wild camping, biking and having the beer & wine at our own camp fire/BBQ - and I don't need the alps that urgently if I have the Sächsische Schweiz or the Thüringer Wald just a few km away; also not feeling an urgent need to get to the Andes or the Himalaya as there are large parts of Europe still unknown to me).
+ be quite good at repairing/renovating stuff
+ enjoy cooking our own meals with friends which also happens to be much cheaper than the pizza service and still cheaper than the mensa.
+ have studied in Dresden where rents were cheap, and now live in Jena which has crazy expensive rents compared to, say, Leipzig, which are however still low compared to about everywhere in former West-Germany. And to Italy (Trieste).
Anyways these points gave me the independence even as a student to be rather free in the decision what job offer to take and to follow my interests.
To put it the other way round: my advise is to make up your mind also how much this kind of independence (which can tremendously help your negotiation position) is worth to you. If you make up your mind now, you'll be settled when the more important negotiations come after the PhD. If you find out that you are not the person who is willig or able to go that way, that is perfectly OK as well. But it will safe you a lot of pain to know and act accordingly.
(You asked for *safe* negotiations, not e.g. for successful negotiation or how to avoid basic mistakes during wage negotiation.)
(And, just to let you know @TheChimera, of course I've also messed up job interviews. I believe everyone does at least once in a while.)
> 5 votes
# Answer
I agree with aeismail that negotiation is probably not going to work. He seems to know about universities; I work at a research centre from the Helmholtz group. At our research centre, some professors are already trying to get 65% for PhD researchers. But it is a matter which the board of directors decides once for the whole organisation, not something a single professor can decide for his/her chair. So, until the professors get the board to agree, it will be 50% for everybody.
You can still talk to the professor, the ones I know are reasonable and open in salary matters and I haven't experienced a hostile atmosphere in talks involving money/responsibility/tasks negotiations. But there is a very high chance that he has no say in the matter. Besides, it is rare for a professor to have to fill a position quickly; if you don't accept the position, they can just wait for the next good candidate (and there are enough of them). So, I am afraid you probably don't have many levers, even if the professor sympathizes with you and wants to work with you.
My advice is to try it (there isn't anything to lose), but don't get your hopes too high.
> 1 votes
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Tags: phd, salary, germany, negotiation
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thread-18971 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18971 | Downloadable list of all accredited U.S. colleges? | 2014-04-05T23:31:31.630 | # Question
Title: Downloadable list of all accredited U.S. colleges?
I am looking for a downloadable list of all accredited U.S. colleges. I have found many options to search databases, but I am looking for a downloadable list, preferably in spreadsheet format such as xls or csv.
# Answer
Here's what you're looking for on the U.S. Dept. of Education page in CSV/Excel.
Here's the header of the file:
```
Institution_ID Institution_Name Institution_Address Institution_City Institution_State Institution_Zip Institution_Phone Institution_OPEID Institution_IPEDS_UnitID Institution_Web_Address Campus_ID Campus_Name Campus_Address Campus_City Campus_State Campus_Zip Campus_IPEDS_UnitID Accreditation_Type Agency_Name Agency_Status Program_Name Accreditation_Status Accreditation_Date_Type Periods Last Action
```
> 15 votes
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Tags: united-states, databases, accreditation
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thread-18964 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18964 | Does starting a question with 'what is the impact of' make a good qualitative research question? | 2014-04-05T15:40:11.183 | # Question
Title: Does starting a question with 'what is the impact of' make a good qualitative research question?
I am studying the impact of the internet on a cultural practice in my country. I have been working on this project for months. I have already started data collection and analysis. However, lately I've become unsure of my principal research question. So, I'm studying an online community through online ethnography.
I am sure it is only a problem with the wording of the question.
What is the impact of the internet on ...?
I wonder if this is a qualitative question because I've read that qualitative questions should not start with 'what'. Is studying the impact of the internet on a phenomenon consistent with my methodology?
Thank you
# Answer
For any decent research question, I try to test it with all these criteria. Some of these sound very simple, but as I try to answer them, there isn't one of them that I find consistently simple. That might just be an indicator of my own limitations, though.
* Does it look like the sort of question that gets answered in the journals (/ conferences / predominant outlet in my specialism) I want to publish in? In your case: are there impact studies in the literature that use qualitative ethnography?
* Does it tell me who, what, when, where, why, and how? e.g. What sort of impacts? How will the impact be studied? Over what time period? Impact by whom, on whom? and so on.
* How will I know when it has been answered well?
* Is this a definite gap the literature?
* Will answering it make the world a better place (in however small a way, but at least in a net positive way)?
* Is this answerable with the resources (time, human, material) that I have available?
It's worth putting a lot of effort into getting the research question right. John Dewey is credited with saying something to the effect of "A question well put is half solved". Richard Feynman described research as being along the lines of: "write down the question; think hard about it; write down the answer"; and it's too easy to assume that the middle part deserves all the effort, but the first part and the last part repay effort too.
> 2 votes
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Tags: masters, thesis, methodology
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thread-18955 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18955 | How to effectively evaluate your instructor? | 2014-04-05T11:16:51.460 | # Question
Title: How to effectively evaluate your instructor?
I am a graduate student and going to assess my instructor in a month, with whom I was not very much satisfied. I had been writing the teachers' evaluation in past but didn't see a scintilla of improvement even after years in any attribute of instructor or course-material. Maybe other students were quite satisfied and I was just a statistical outlier. Apart from my disbelieve, what is the most effective way to communicate with your instructor via evaluation-sheet?
Thanks for any suggestions.
# Answer
> **What is the most effective way to communicate with your instructor via evaluation-sheet?**
In a word, *constructively*.
If you are overly negative, there's a good chance you will be viewed as a malcontent with an axe to grind. If you'd like to maximize the chance for real improvement, avoid blanket negative statements. For example, instead of:
> *This instructor was never available for consultation*.
try:
> *This class would be better if the instructor was more available to students*.
(You send the same message, but with a more constructive – and therefore more credible – slant.)
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Also, you should be realistic in what kinds of improvements you may expect to see. In my experience, some faculty take student evaluations very seriously, some don't. Some probably don't even read them; the forms are only completed because department policy demands it.
There's another important factor, too: the inmates shouldn't run the asylum. Some faculty regard student evaluations with disdain, and there may be legitimate reasons why. Sometimes professors who are easy graders get better evaluations from students, while more demanding professors get poor evaluations from students who are either lazy or else come to class with a sense of entitlement.
Truth is, there are a lot of dynamics that go into this. Just from reading your question, there's no way to tell if you're a good student who unfortunately had a bad professor, or if you're a bad student who got their feathers ruffled by a very good (yet challenging) professor.
A single evaluation won't have a huge effect either way, but, as I said at the beginning of this answer, I think your best chances for a positive impact comes by writing an evaluation with a more positive and constructive slant. In other words, try using the form to suggest improvements, rather than to harshly criticize. Such forms will be harder to dismiss outright.
> 14 votes
# Answer
To J.R.'s answer focussing on constructive comments, I would add that the comments are often more useful if they are *specific*, rather than general. A specific comment gives the lecturer something precise to focus on when making improvements.
For example, stating that *the description of endoplasmic reticulm was unclear* or *the first part of lecture 2 went too fast* is better than saying that *lectures were unclear*.
(Of course, these should be stated more constructively.)
> 8 votes
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Tags: teaching, professorship, evaluation-criteria
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thread-18981 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18981 | Returning to academia after a year in industry | 2014-04-06T13:27:59.677 | # Question
Title: Returning to academia after a year in industry
I need an advice about returning to academia as a visitor/post-doc after working for a year in finance.
I finished my PhD in summer 2013 with a good record of publications (3 papers in high impact journals). Both my bachelor and PhD were in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. Towards the end of my PhD I felt burned out and was unsure if I want to continue the same line of research.
Furthermore, almost all my colleagues who finished their PhDs around the same time struggled to find positions and all moved overseas, which was not an option for me at that time.
During this time a have kept in touch with my supervisor and colleagues. I also kept reading and searching for new interesting ideas. Recently I started to feel enthusiastic again and full of fresh ideas.
My question is do you think it is acceptable to approach my supervisor/colleagues and ask for a position and what is the best way to go about this?
# Answer
> 25 votes
Sure, why not? What you write makes me think that you could tell them exactly the way you tell it here: Being recovered from the PhD and full of fresh ideas.
It is not unheard of that PhD students need to recover from the PhD by doing some different kind of work for a while (such as a couple of years in industry, I've even heard of running a store in a completely different retail sector).
Personally, I think that it should be taken as a warning sign if this happens regularly. However, that consideration doesn't have anything to do with your position, but I think it is worth while remembering when you enter the side of PhD supervisors.
Regardless of how much enthusiasm you've gained back I think it would be a good idea to sit down and recall what exactly drove you away and what caused you feel (close to) burned out - in order to avoid getting there again. I somehow think it unlikely that a postdoc position would be more calm than a PhD.
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Tags: phd, postdocs, career-path, industry
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thread-18962 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18962 | Paid position at a US lab | 2014-04-05T15:02:48.863 | # Question
Title: Paid position at a US lab
Can one get paid while conducting research at a US university lab, without being a staff, student, visiting student, or a postdoctoral fellow? What are possible titles that are acceptable by grants? Assuming the grant sources are NSF and IARPA.
According to wikipedia, visiting scholar is a high level recognition. Is there an alternative for a paid researcher who does not hold a PhD and is not initially affiliated, but whose research is valuable to the lab?
# Answer
Given that most universities have different titles for different functionally similar positions, I wouldn't sweat it too much. The only places where things are different in my experience with NSF are for faculty and post docs. I know NSF has a rule about the total amount of time that a person can be funded (without explicit exception from the Program Officer) on an award (2 months), but these rules are generally only applied to faculty since they are expected to get 9 months of support from their institution. NSF also requires a Postdoctoral Researcher Mentoring Plan for any proposal that will fund post docs. This is there to ensure that post docs have their careers promoted appropriately and that they learn appropriate collaboration methods.
That being said, you don't even have to work at a university to be paid under an NSF award. There are frequent subcontracting relationships created to send funding to other institutions including private companies and contractors.
> 1 votes
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Tags: research-process, funding, independent-researcher, research-assistantship
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thread-18980 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18980 | What is the correct form of conferences/proceedings/transactions name in a citation? | 2014-04-06T12:05:57.423 | # Question
Title: What is the correct form of conferences/proceedings/transactions name in a citation?
I usually try to get citation from publishers website and import it into a reference manager like endnote. I have doubt about the correct form of conferences/proceedings/transactions name in citation. As an example, the provided citation for this paper in IEEE format is this:
> D. Bi-Ru and I. C. Lin, "Efficient Map/Reduce-Based DBSCAN Algorithm with Optimized Data Partition," in **Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2012 IEEE 5th International Conference on, 2012**, pp. 59-66.
It seems to be misplaced but as you could see in the "**published in**" section of IEEE webpage of the paper, the conference name is the same as this citation.
The same holds for proceedings and transactions.
Is this way of citation correct?
# Answer
I suspect that the reason citations are done this way (and now we're verging on english.se territory) is to allow for meaningful alphabetical ordering/indexing.
In this case, the "IEEE transactions on" is the generic part of the name, and should not be used for alphabetical ordering/indexing. This is analogous to how in indices you'll often see things like
> Korea, Republic of
rather than
> Republic of Korea.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Venue names are often inconsistent in such a manner. Even if you take your citations from a single source (e.g., DBLP), you will sometimes find different names for the same venue across different years.
When citing, the aims should be:
1. Give enough information for a reader to unambiguously find a paper
2. Give enough information for citation engines to unambiguously know which paper is cited
3. Present the citations in the format required by the publisher
4. Keep citations neat and consistent in style
With regards to this citation:
> D. Bi-Ru and I. C. Lin, "Efficient Map/Reduce-Based DBSCAN Algorithm with Optimized Data Partition," in Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2012 IEEE 5th International Conference on, 2012, pp. 59-66.
This seems to meet 1–3.
With regards 4, I would say it is not very neat. I would do:
> D. Bi-Ru and I. C. Lin, "Efficient Map/Reduce-Based DBSCAN Algorithm with Optimized Data Partition," in IEEE 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2012, pp. 59–66.
This reads more naturally, avoids repeating the year and uses an en-dash for the pages (okay, the later is being super-pedantic).
More correctly, you should probably have "in Proceedings of IEEE ..." but I always found that a waste of space.
If you're fighting a page limit, it is common practice to just write the abbreviation for *well known* conferences within the community (e.g., "CLOUD").
However you choose to format the venue, for the other conference/workshop citations, you should then include a similar style. In this case, all venues should include the edition (5th), the full title (International ...) and the abbreviation (CLOUD).
(And on a side note, I highly recommend switching to LaTeX/BiBTeX and pulling your citations from DBLP if you have medium-to-long term plans for researching in an area of Computer Science.)
> 3 votes
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Tags: citations
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thread-18775 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18775 | International Students transferring between graduate programs | 2014-04-01T00:40:43.813 | # Question
Title: International Students transferring between graduate programs
I'm an international graduate student in my first year as a PhD candidate. I'm looking to transfer schools for two reasons-
1. I had a hard time here with my health in jeopardy, so I'm looking to move to a school which is close to my extended family.
2. My research interests seem to be more aligned with a different school, which I had not considered when initially applying abroad.
I have a good research background in my field, and a four year bachelor's degree from a highly accredited institution in my home country. While I've taken all the first year courses necessary at my current school, I'm just finishing up and I haven't chosen a permanent advisor yet because I'd like to consider transferring.
Is this possible? If yes, could you guide me on how this process works? Thank you in advance.
# Answer
> 2 votes
Transferring schools is best done as soon as possible. Your first year credits may transfer seamlessly with another university, but the farther along you get the less likely the transfer will be successful. I would find someone at the university who has experience working with international students (there might even be an entire department dedicated to such) and ask specific questions of them (eg how to apply to another program, how to transfer in good standing etc). Then be in contact with the university that you wish to transfer to and make sure that you meet all of their requirements and apply for transfer prior to dropping out or officially leaving the program that you are in. You do not want to mess with your student visa etc, so make sure everything has transitioned successfully prior to withdrawing from your current location. Moving near family is a good idea, but also make sure that if you are really moving for health reasons that your health will be taken care of there. Make sure that the student health insurance will cover everything that you need for it to cover and that you can access specialists etc in the area that you are wanting to move to. Good luck!
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Tags: phd, international-students
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thread-18900 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18900 | How do U.S. research institutions typically reimburse a faculty candidate's airfare costs for multi-city trips? | 2014-04-04T02:16:57.460 | # Question
Title: How do U.S. research institutions typically reimburse a faculty candidate's airfare costs for multi-city trips?
I am interviewing at several research institutions in the U.S. for a tenure-track faculty position all around the same time. I booked a multi-city flight to avoid having to fly back to my current hometown between each interview because that would be lame. **I plan on asking the institutions for guidance on how to get reimbursed, but figured I would ask here about what I should expect or what is commonly done for this situation.** As an example, say for three interviews, ideally each institution would pay a third of the cost, but each institution has its own rules and they are not bound to do what other institutions would in any case.
So, how do U.S. research institutions typically reimburse a faculty candidate's airfare costs for multi-city trips?
Related: How to buy plane tickets for job interviews?
# Answer
> 8 votes
When looking for a postdoc and visiting multiple labs, I was asked to split the reimbursement for travel costs between the institutions. The exact details of how to split were left to me.
Most institutions expect to fund the entire trip for faculty candidates, so I don't foresee any problems with you asking them to pay less than what they expected.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I once visited an institution where they asked me to get an itemized receipt from the airline that broke down the fare by leg. (This information wasn't on my original ticket so I had to ask the ticket agent at the airport.) They then reimbursed me for only the legs going to and from their institution.
Of course, when multiple institutions are involved, you will still have to split intermediate legs somehow.
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Tags: job, job-search, interview, travel
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thread-18986 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18986 | How should administration punish sexual abuse/trade for grade? | 2014-04-06T15:28:17.393 | # Question
Title: How should administration punish sexual abuse/trade for grade?
It happens that some students offer sex for grade. Just considering the fact that popularity of this strategy can strongly weaken the quality of education, administrators should take some actions to avoid this.
What should a department head do to control this problem in his department?
1. How to punish?
2. Who to be punished? Student or professor? Or both ?
I am not asking about legal actions or university policies or discipline matters. I just wish to know What should a head/dean do in this regard to preserve the education quality.
# Answer
> 16 votes
Initially, like xLeitix, my response to this question was "Say what?"
Then I did some reading. For those who are interested, here are some articles on the subject:
Given this context: if sex-for-grades is sufficiently "popular" in your department that it can "strongly weaken the quality of education," then you have a bigger problem then how and whom to punish the next time it happens.
> What should a head/dean do in this regard to preserve the education quality?
In a department where sex-for-grades is common, you can't stop it by punishing it in an ad-hoc manner. You have to create a comprehensive policy; educate students, faculty, and administration about this policy; and then enforce it.
If you don't have a university policy (or your university policy is not sufficient), you can create a school-wide or departmental policy, depending on the scope of your position.
Your sexual harassment policy should **clearly** describe:
* Exactly what constitutes sexual harassment,
* What the consequences will be for those involved,
* and (the most important of all), How to safely report harassment.
In addition, you should then take steps to educate
* Faculty, on how to protect themselves against sexual advances from students (steps such as: keep a strictly professional tone in emails and other communication with students, have meetings with students with office door open, etc.)
* Administration, on how to respond to allegations against students/faculty with sensitivity and discretion
* Students, on how they can report harassment without fear of retaliation
> Who to be punished? Student or professor? Or both ?
As for **who to punish**: any faculty or administrative staff member who
* solicits sex from a student in return for grades, or threatens to fail a student who won't have sex with them, or
* responds to an offer of sex for grades with anything other than a firm "NO"
should be punished. Of course, it **must say so in your policy** and you must make sure to **educate faculty** about this policy.
Students are usually the disadvantaged group in this scenario, and punishing students could deter them from reporting sexual harassment. Therefore, I would advise against punishing students in most cases. I can think of a few exceptions, where it is appropriate to punish students: e.g., students who make repeated sexual advances, despite being warned more than once in an official capacity not to do so.
> How to punish?
depends entirely on what kind of punishment you can enforce, as a department head/dean. I have no idea what kind of power you have as a department head/dean in your educational system.
Typically in the U.S. it would be handled at a higher level, as Nate Eldredge pointed out, because department heads in the U.S. don't usually handle disciplinary matters.
# Answer
> 4 votes
In my university there is a rule which means markers are not allowed to have a 'conflict of interest' so if a professor is sexually involved with a student that is not against the rules however the professor would not be allowed to mark the student's work because it would be seen as a conflict of interest.
I think it's fair for professors and students to get involved with one another as long as they are consenting adults but I do agree that if that happens it would be unfair on the other students for that professor to mark the student's work (as I am sure most people would) and this is why I think a rule against that would prevent unfair advantage (or disadvantage - relationships can go terribly wrong!) so a rule against marker conflict of interest is a good way to prevent that happening.
If your institution does not have a rule about it, then I would say you need to accept what is done is done and learn from it because it is the responsibility of the institution to have rules about these things. You cannot really make it up as you go along because when you think about it, that is not fair either.
One final point: A student making unwanted advances and a professor has made it clear to the student that he/she is uncomfortable with those advances this is a different issue altogether because that falls under the 'sexual harrassment' banner and is unlawful in many countries and most likely against the rules too. The best way to deal with that is sort of carry on is to support the lecturer if the lecturer was unable to resolve the situation after step one e.g of steps:
**Step 1.** professor speaks to student and tells them they feel uncomfortable about the advances
If the problem persists
**Step 2.** verbal warning from the students personal tutor
If the problem persists
**Step 3.** written warning from the school/institution
If the problem persists
**Step 4.** final written warning
If the problem persists
**Step 5.** Expel student
If the problem persists
**Step 6.** Inform Police.
If the problem persists then the police would probably sort out a restraining order so just liaise with them and see what they can do according to the laws in your country.
Obviously, if the lecturer is trying to get sex and offering better grades then the same logic would apply. That is sexual harrassment and if a student complained about that I would go through the steps but step one would be to not allow the professor to mark work of the student (and probably not any other student either) until the matter had been resolved completely.
# Answer
> 2 votes
About hose situations, I have came to be witness of two situations (taking away the part that there is a consensus between the two parts to get involved in some sort of romantic/sex situation; so I am supposing before hand that there is no harassment involved).
1. The lecturer or the student proposes intimate relations for a grade change
2. The teacher and student were involved in a romantic situation, also in this kind of scenario I believe is the same as case 1. Just because I believe there would be a bias for the lecturer or favoritism for her/his romantic partner
In any case, about your questions:
* How to punish? This is not an easy one. I have seen one case in a Faculty in which the Dean decided to keep the lecturer involved in a romantic situation, just because he was very good in the topic he was teaching. The Dean only talked with him, and after some advices it was like nothing happened. For me it was a big mistake, they should have at least suspend him for at least one or two terms. I said that because after this guy was dumped by the girl, he still continue getting involved with other girls in the Faculty, but being more careful about his behavior for not getting caught.
In any case, I believe that people involved in these situations should be, at least, punished with a suspension. It cannot be left unattended.
* Who to punish? Here the situation needs to be taken with enough care, mostly for the part of the student. I mean if you make a public suspension to the student, and make public the reasons behind that decision; the student will mostly be facing harassment from their own classroom mates.
In this case, I believe to have a long talk with the student involved is enough, but the lecturer is the one who should be punished just because he is allowing that situation to happens and also if the is starting it, he is taking advantage of its position as a lecturer.
Hope this could help you in taking a decision. Good luck!
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Tags: university, administration, sexual-misconduct
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thread-19005 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19005 | How much can you trust a reference of a paper that is not available | 2014-04-07T01:48:08.640 | # Question
Title: How much can you trust a reference of a paper that is not available
It recently occurred to me that probably more often than it should happen, while reading someones paper, they see a reference to a different paper, and just use the reference without looking. In my area, a common example is in referencing data, such as average human height, etc.
I came across this as I was looking for data on human dimensions from a somewhat smaller country that does not use English. I found 9 papers that all referenced the same data sheet. I then contacted the author of that data sheet and was informed that there is no online version (never has been), and the only print copy exists in that country. The author herself does not have this book. I'm guessing the only reason the other authors referenced the data was because the author of the referenced data wrote a paper that referenced her own data.
I am not interested in how to format these citations. I would like to know if it is appropriate to cite this information at all, or cite that someone else cited it. I am curious as I am not sure about the accuracy of the information. If I do cite someone else's citation (which i am 99% confident they never saw the data), it seems like I can just make something up myself. Is there a way to express that maybe this data is accurate, but that I'm not sure, since it is the only available source about that data? Or should I ignore it all together and pretend as if there is no data?
# Answer
> 26 votes
> Is there a way to express this (not as a citation format), that maybe this data is accurate, but not sure, since it is the only available source about that data.
How about something like: "X, measured by Jones in 1950, is commonly given as the value for Y (as cited in Smith, 1989 and Cutler, 1995). However, the original manuscript by Jones describing this result is not generally available."
> Or should I ignore it all together and pretend as if there is no data.
Don't do this. If X is cited often in the field, then by pretending as if there is no data, you give the appearance of *not knowing* your field.
Whether or not you should *use* X (knowing that it is unreliable) depends on your purposes.
If your work hinges on having an accurate value for X, then you definitely should not use X if you cannot track down a reliable source for it. (Nor should you make something up.)
If you are using X just as a "sane" value for something, and it isn't central to your work, on the other hand:
If you think you have a better value than X, and can justify why you are using a different value than everyone else in your field, go ahead.
Otherwise, if you need a value, you should just use X (unreliable as it is). A bit of unreliable data that is accepted in your field is still better than a bit of unreliable data that you just made up with no justification.
# Answer
> 8 votes
Actually, "there is no online version (never has been), and the only print copy exists in that country" shouldn't be an obstacle - that's what inter-library agreements are for; univeristy libraries generally are able to get \[a copy of\] that book for you even it's not online and the physical copies are all located abroad.
It's not conventient and does take time for it to arrive, but if it's widely cited but suspect, then taking a look at the original (and publishing what you find out) would be a Good Thing.
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Tags: publications, citations, data
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thread-19013 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19013 | Should you hide that you are already enrolled elsewhere when applying for another PhD? | 2014-04-07T08:31:55.657 | # Question
Title: Should you hide that you are already enrolled elsewhere when applying for another PhD?
I plan to re-apply for a PhD in the US next year, but meanwhile, I decided to enroll in a PhD in my home country I read the similar post: Is it a good idea to stay an extra year at my masters institution while re-applying to PhD programs elsewhere?
However, I am wondering whether you should admit/declare (in your application), that you are currently enrolled in a PhD program or it is better to hide this information from the US universities? Thanks!
# Answer
I answered a similar question here: **No, you absolutely must not hide it.**
The application will request your complete educational history, with official grades and records from each institution. At the end, you will be asked to sign a statement that everything is true and complete.
Submitting an application that is false or has significant omissions is considered **completely unethical**. It's very likely that the institution where you're applying will eventually find out, and there can be extremely serious consequences.
If they find out while reviewing your application, they'll reject it immediately, even if you would otherwise have been accepted.
If they accept you into the program and then find out while you're enrolled, they may kick you out of the program, even if you're doing well. With a record of dishonesty, you will probably not get into another one.
If you enroll in the program and finish your PhD, and they find out about the false application years later, they can revoke your degree. You will almost certainly be fired from whatever job you have at that time, and you will not work in academia again.
So you really do need to include your current institution in your application. You'll probably also need a letter of recommendation from someone at your current institution.
> 11 votes
# Answer
**No, you should not hide it.**
Consider the alternative scenarios:
* Unbeknownst to you, the supervisors know each other and find out that you are re-applying without informing either. This may leave you known as dishonest and cause lasting damage to your reputation.
* The supervisors do not know each other, and you do get the new position. Your old supervisor will naturally find out that you leave, and likely be annoyed (he/she will hopefully have invested time in you). As for your new supervisor... are you going to keep it a secret forever? Is the previous place so bad you would rather have a gap in your CV? I hardly think so. Eventually, your new supervisor will find out — which may again be detrimental to your reputation, because if you suddenly leave place A for place B, who knows if you may leave place B for yet another place, again unannounced? If I were a supervisor, I would be reluctant to invest resources (time, effort, money) in someone I'm not sure would live up to commitments.
The only exception one might think of is if your old place is so bad that the association would actively damage your chances. But as a PhD student, I think that's very unlikely. In fact, if you were at a bad place but realised it soon enough to change, that could be interpreted positively and the bad reputation of a former supervisor need not reflect badly upon you.
So, no, in my opinion you should not hide that you are already enrolled elsewhere, ever.
> 5 votes
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Tags: phd, application, transfer-student
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thread-18969 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18969 | In a faculty job search, when and how should I reveal my preferences? | 2014-04-05T19:37:58.447 | # Question
Title: In a faculty job search, when and how should I reveal my preferences?
I am currently interviewing for tenure-track faculty positions at a number of top departments in my field. Despite getting some very positive feedback about my interviews, I have not yet received any offers. So far I have tried to avoid any "game playing," being very explicit with each department about where and when I am interviewing. Likewise, in follow-up discussions with hosts, I have been careful not to state any strong preferences for one school or another, mentioning that I still have additional places to visit (seems only fair!). I am starting to wonder, however, whether this approach was a mistake, especially given that others in my field are already receiving offers.
The question is, how should I proceed from here? Part of the issue is that I do not fully understand how and when offers are made, which leads to several questions:
**Question 1:** *How often are offers made before the end of the interview period (i.e., before all candidates have been interviewed)?*
I know it happens, of course, but how frequently? (E.g., as a percentage of all offers made by the department over a 10-year period.) A related question is
**Question 2:** *If a candidate expresses that a school is her top choice, does it make any difference to the hiring committee?*
In fact, can expressing this kind of preference actually *hurt* a candidate's chances? E.g., perhaps it makes this candidate look like a "sure thing," which frees the department to first make an offer to another, "higher-risk" candidate. In general, when is a good time to express such a preference? Finally,
**Question 3:** *To what extent do different departments talk to each-other?*
For instance, is there any mechanism in place to prevent candidates from "falling through the cracks?" E.g., one can easily imagine a situation in which lower-ranked schools don't make a candidate an offer because they expect she will get an offer from a higher-ranked school; subsequently, the higher-ranked schools make her no offer and she is left without a job. Likewise, if I express a preference for school X before visiting school Y, do I risk pissing off my hosts at Y?
**Question 4:** *Do I just need to relax?*
I am almost tempted to write an email CC'ing all the department chairs, providing a complete ordering of my preferences... they can duke it out from there. (Or simply tell me that ***none*** of them want to hire me!) In general, the whole game-theoretic aspect of this thing makes me a bit queasy. Wish some brilliant economist would design a mechanism that is fair for both departments and candidates alike. Right now, it definitely feels like a buyer's market.
# Answer
I've served several years on the faculty recruiting committee for my (US, top 10) computer science department, including three years as the chair. Protocols vary significantly between different departments, different searches, and *especially* different fields, so take my experience as a sample, not as a definitive answer.
Faculty hiring is best thought of as a complex multi-player game of three-dimensional chess, using invisible pieces that occasionally explode, where nobody knows who the other players are or what rules they play by, and nobody wants to reveal too much information.
> Question 1: How often are offers made before the end of the interview period (i.e., before all candidates have been interviewed)?
It happens, but normally only when one of the early candidates emerges as an overwhelming favorite, and that candidate has another offer with an inflexible (or already extended) deadline. But nobody wants to be forced into this situation. It's *really* bad form to interview someone for a position that doesn't exist.
Some universities allow limited gambling with slots. A department might offer a position to candidate A, and then later make a second offer to candidate B for the same slot, under the assumption that at least one of them is likely to say no. If A and B both say yes, then both A and B get jobs. (I've seen this strategy go very "badly", with four low-probability offers made on the same slot, all of which were accepted. Gambling was outlawed for the next *n* years.)
> Question 2: If a candidate expresses that a school is her top choice, does it make any difference to the hiring committee?
Especially at universities that (a) forbid gambling and (b) do not let departments roll unused slots from one year to the next, departments do balance the desirability of various candidates against the estimated probability that they will accept an offer, to minimize the risk of not hiring anyone at all. (This scenario also tends to generate offers with very short and inflexible fuses, sometimes while interviews are still ongoing.)
But just telling us that we are your first choice probably won't help much. We *want* to believe you, and we appreciate your effort in making that overture, but we don't *really* believe you, because lots of candidates have said that and then left us at the altar. And even if it's true, you really don't want the rumor that that you prefer us to reach someone else. Best to keep mum until you have actual offers.
On the other hand, *evidence* that we are your first choice is taken very seriously. For example, if you receive an offer from somewhere else, especially from another top department, telling us in time to make a good-faith counter-offer is certainly better than not telling us until it's too late.
> In fact, can expressing this kind of preference actually hurt a candidate's chances?
No.
> Question 3: To what extent do different departments talk to each-other?
**Not at all.** Different departments are competitors; sharing information is counterproductive.
We do, however, gather as much back-channel information as we can, for example by scouring our competitors' web pages to see who they are interviewing and when. Sometimes I do hear rumors of the form "So-and-so is about to get an offer from X", but those rumors *almost* always trace back to the candidates themselves.
> one can easily imagine a situation in which lower-ranked schools don't make a candidate an offer because they expect she will get an offer from a higher-ranked school
Unfortunately, yes, this *does* happen, although I suspect more often at the interview stage than the offer stage. See "minimize the risk of not hiring anyone at all". Nothing you can do about it. Let it go.
> Question 4: Do I just need to relax?
Yes, always. I recommend building up an immunity to iocaine powder.
> 30 votes
# Answer
> **Question 1**: How often are offers made before the end of the interview period (i.e., before all candidates have been interviewed)?
I would say "early offers" only occur in exceptional circumstances. Universities have hiring policies and those policies require dotting i's and crossing t's -- paperwork and process -- particularly for tenured or tenure-track positions.
> **Question 2**: If a candidate expresses that a school is her top choice, does it make any difference to the hiring committee?
Let me put it this way: you do **not** want to express that the school is not your top choice. The hiring committee are looking for a monogamous relationship. Talking about all the other schools you're going on first dates with isn't a great idea.
> In fact, can expressing this kind of preference actually hurt a candidate's chances? E.g., perhaps it makes this candidate look like a "sure thing," which frees the department to first make an offer to another, "higher-risk" candidate. In general, when is a good time to express such a preference?
This makes absolutely no sense.
> **Question 3**: To what extent do different departments talk to each-other?
I guess you refer to the US? If so, I don't know but I would imagine there's very little communication on an inter-department level (though people in different departments may informally communicate).
> For instance, is there any mechanism in place to prevent candidates from "falling through the cracks?" E.g., one can easily imagine a situation in which lower-ranked schools don't make a candidate an offer because they expect she will get an offer from a higher-ranked school; subsequently, the higher-ranked schools make her no offer and she is left without a job. Likewise, if I express a preference for school X before visiting school Y, do I risk pissing off my hosts at Y?
This again makes no sense. A university is unlikely to avoid offering you a position because you might be "too good for them" or that you might get other offers (in the worst case, it only costs a university a couple of weeks to make an offer for a position that will last many years).
A university may avoid offering you a position if you seem disinterested or if it seemed likely that you were using this position as a short-term stepping-stone to elsewhere.
Different departments are not going to compare notes. They are competing with each other.
> **Question 4**: Do I just need to relax?
Yep. Maybe ease up on the coffee and take up croquet or smoking or something else instead.
> 13 votes
# Answer
Congratulations for getting as far as you have!
I think badroit's answer is very reasonable. I had two follow ups and elaborations.
> **Question 2:** If a candidate expresses that a school is her top choice, does it make any difference to the hiring committee?
It seems inappropriate, and slightly weird, to tell any school you are interviewing with where in your ranked list of preferences they currently fall. That's true for your top choice, your final backup, and everybody in between. Even if you are sure of your ranking, your preferences might change as you learn more about the programs and the particular offers.
That said, if you are legitimately excited about the possibility of joining a school's faculty, you should express that interest. If you feel like the faculty at the department would be great potential colleagues, say it! If you think they have great resources, say it! If you love the graduate students or the city, say it!
The comparison to dating with the goal of a monogamous relationship is a good one. Cultivating an air of disinterest seems unlikely to help and it's possible to show legitimate interest without being dishonest or leading people on. Everybody understands that you can be excited about one potential match, also excited about other potential matches, and that eventually you will have to make a decision.
> **Question 4:** Do I just need to relax?
Sounds like it. It also sounds like at this point, you've done most of what you can and the next steps are basically out of your control.
> 4 votes
# Answer
There's a saying in writing: "show, don't tell." I think it's a bad idea to make any comparative statements between schools (exception: if you have an offer from one school, immediately contact the others to withdraw your application or say you would prefer an offer from them). It's much better to *show* how excited you are about a school, by praising them and showing them in the interview that you've done your research.
If the interview's over, then I think it's good to say generic things in your communications with search committees and chairs, like "I'm really excited about the possibility of joining your department," but I wouldn't get more specific than that. Always be honest, but often it's better to not say too much until things work themselves out.
Incidentally, some brilliant mathematicians (with follow-up by economists) did design such a mechanism that is fair for both departments and candidates alike, and won a Nobel Prize for it (or at least the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, whose status as a true Nobel is somewhat debatable). If you would like to know why it will never be implemented in this context, read this comment thread.
> 3 votes
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Tags: job-search
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thread-18911 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18911 | What should you do if you spotted a non-trivial error in a highly cited paper? | 2014-04-04T11:32:06.873 | # Question
Title: What should you do if you spotted a non-trivial error in a highly cited paper?
I have seen question on here regarding a citation error in a paper here: What should I do if I found a citation error in a published paper?, but the nature of this problem is very different.
Basically, I came across an error in a paper (call this error 2).
I have previously contacted the author before regarding a different problem (call this error 1, say) in this paper, and I got no response. (That was what I still believe to be an unproven proposition, and is actually also related to this problem.)
The reason I decided to ask here this time is the following:
1. I am highly confident about error 2.
2. Its correctness has a direct impact on my current research.
3. The mistake cannot be easily fixed. (At least it appears to me, for the time being). I have spent months on a related problem before revisiting this paper and realised that I have tried this same technique in problem, which did not work in my problem, which led me to check why it worked in his paper - and it turned out, it did not.
4. The result was probably the first/the only result of its kind in the literature and the paper is fairly important with 150+ citations.
What should I do here? I have previously contacted the author and I have no reason to believe he would respond this time. I want it to be correct/easily patched because of reason 2. This paper was published in 1997 so it has been a while....
EDIT: Precisely for reason 2, I would much prefer some way of getting the author to respond.
EDIT: I had a discussion with my supervisor. He immediately agreed with me it was a mistake. The thing is when we tried to use a similar technique for a different problem, we fell down the same trap about 10 times. At the moment, we have no fix and the mistake is serious enough that it takes away a lot of credit from the paper.
# Answer
The main answer to your question is easy: **talk to your advisor**.
I find it a little curious that you have not done this already. As a graduate student, you read a very famous paper (in mathematics, more than 150 citations is a *very* large number) that was written a while ago, and at the first sign of trouble you contacted the author of the paper. That is already a little strange: although both are possible, the probability that you, a relatively young graduate student, have misunderstood something in the paper (or are applying standards that are different from those of the field you will be working in, or some other similar issue related to the fact that you probably do not yet have expert level knowledge and experience in this field) is higher than that the author has made a serious mistake. Writing to someone that you don't know at all and who is much more senior than yourself and pointing out a mistake is not without risk: the risk is that you will be wrong and they will dismiss you in the future as a less than serious person.
Your advisor is there exactly for such things: she is the person who is helping you transition from a neophyte to a journeyman to an expert, and she needs to see your mistakes and flawed reasoning in order to do this properly. Some outside expert really does not: they can wait to see the finished product that you become. Moreover, you are presumably reading the paper because your advisor wants you to, perhaps even because she directly told you to read it. Therefore a mistake in the paper is your advisor's problem as well as yours. Why are you holding that information back from her? You shouldn't.
Having said that, I feel like the OP is getting a fair amount of advice that would be more appropriate in other fields than mathematics. Especially:
> In mathematics it is very difficult to write a paper whose sole or even primary purpose is to point out a mistake (even if it includes a correction) in someone else's work.
This is a cultural reality of the field; it is certainly not entirely positive. In many other academic fields, one can "score points" by pointing out others' mistakes, and in some fields this is one of the best ways to score points. Mathematics is not like this: if you can get such a paper published it will "take points away" from the author and give you a certain amount of notoriety, but if this is for instance your first published paper then many people will look at you strangely, almost as if they expect you to make further trouble. (Again, I'm not endorsing this cultural practice; I'm just describing it.)
Similarly, I would say that contacting the editor of the journal in question is maybe step 10 of a procedure that is mostly designed to terminate after one of the first 9 steps. You should do this only after you have exhausted every other possible avenue.
> In mathematics -- very much unlike in some other fields -- it is prohibitively unlikely that an editor will publish any "commentary/correction/erratum" by you unless she believes that you are mathematically correct in the point you're making, and convincing someone with standing in the field like a journal editor that you are mathematically correct is largely what you're trying to do anyway.
Finally, while I barely know what a white paper is and to the extent that I do I'm not sure it's the appropriate terminology here -- in content I do agree with @eykanal's suggestion: it will certainly help your advisor if along with communicating the surprising news that Famous Paper X is wrong, you can supply a written version of your arguments. This can be hard to do: explaining why a difficult argument is subtly wrong is one of the sternest expository challenges in mathematics that I can think of. It takes a lot to go from "I don't understand the argument and find it rather unclear" to "I am convinced that it is wrong." By the way, in writing to an author it is a good strategy to err on the side of the former quotation.
> 50 votes
# Answer
I would do the following:
1. **Write up a rigorous white paper demonstrating the issue.** This should be your first step, as putting the idea to paper will help you think of aspects you may not have thought of yet. If you can successfully convince *yourself* in a written paper that this issue is valid, then...
2. **Present the white paper to your advisor.** This has numerous benefits:
* Your advisor will critique your writing, which is always a good thing; you will become a better scientific writer.
* Your advisor can provide specific feedback on specific aspects of your argument by simply referencing what you wrote and providing counterexamples. This will make the process of convincing him that there is a problem much easier.
If you can sucessfully convince your *advisor* that the problem exists, then it's time for..
3. **Work with your advisor to reach out to the author.** Working with your advisor will significantly increase your chances of success. You may also be able to progress to
4. **Write up your findings in a letter or article of your own,** depending on the nature of the issue.
Do note that you state that this paper has been reviewed and cited many times. While it is possible that you have found something everyone else has missed, your ideas will need to be iron-clad before anyone will even listen to you. I would spend the most time right now making sure you haven't made a mistake before reaching out to the author.
> 23 votes
# Answer
*Ask someone else* \- your age listed in your profile suggests that you're a grad student. Have you talked to your supervisor about this? Even better, do you know someone in your own department that has collaborated with the paper's author?
Put yourself in the author's shoes. He's probably bombarded with emails all the time from grad students he's never heard of, so unless you've collaborated before then he may not even read your email. An email from your supervisor or one of the author's collaborators is much more likely to get serious attention.
> 20 votes
# Answer
I agree with Moriarty entirely. The first step is to get independent confirmation that there is an error.
The second is to judge its severity and how it impacts on the conclusions of the paper.
The third is to contact the authors directly and perhaps ask them to list or fix the errata on their homepage and on any pre-prints.
Mainly my answer is to introduce the fourth option. Many journals allow for publishing reviews, comments or corrections on papers that have already been published. Here's an example of this in a reputable computer science journal (TKDE). Particularly if the paper is highly cited and the error underlines grave concerns about its contributions, this option is recommendable.
If the journal does not allow corrections, you may consider writing your own independent "correction" paper instead (as others have suggested), but this way, you may be expected to present new results, not just pointing out errors.
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But again, like Moriarty, I would highly recommend that you get the advice of a more experienced researcher, in particular before engaging in the fourth or fifth option.
> 10 votes
# Answer
Let me share my personal experience in a vaguely similar situation: Back in 2007 and within a couple of months of publication I spotted a huge mistake in a paper published in a journal that used to be A class but is more like B class these days. I wrote a proof of the error, showed how to correct it, and sent it to the journal. It took over one year of back and forth between the editor and I to get him to admit he had published a profoundly incorrect paper and to publish my "Comment": but I'll say that I probably got lucky that he admitted his error, got lucky that he cared to correct it, got lucky that he read my correspondence, etc.. If my experience is any indication, it will be very difficult to get across to the editor(s). At some point, about 6 months into the exchange, when it was clear that the editor was assuming I was in the wrong (he never read the math bits), I wrote to another editor and asked him if he thought I could damage my reputation by insisting so much, and he told me not to worry and go ahead on the quest for truth (but there was nothing he could do to help). The bottom line is you will hurt several people's pride and could make some enemies. I personally couldn't care less, but I'm atypical. And if you looked at my career, you'd probably think twice about upsetting the editors of an influential journal. Whatever you do, all the best!
> 10 votes
# Answer
The answer may be field-dependent, but in theoretical physics it is: **write your paper**. If the error is non-trivial, showing why something not works (or an counterexample) may be valuable. The same thing if the error is relatively simple, but most people are not aware of it.
Sometimes a critical flaw in one paper gives raise to a new field - see How the No-Cloning Theorem Got its Name by Asher Peres (or for a longer story, How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser).
An erroneous paper (with an error being non-trivial at this time) resulted in the non-cloning theorem, and later - quantum cryptography, quantum information etc. The error (assumption that a machine could copy any quantum state) could be addressed by a few lines of an elementary proof there no such machine could exist.
> 4 votes
# Answer
If you can give all the relevant details in a reasonably concise way, then it may be appropriate to ask a question on mathoverflow.net. I would strongly recommend that:
* You prepare your question very carefully, and review and revise it several times before posting to ensure that it is as clear and complete as possible and correct in all details.
* You phrase your question as "I do not see how this can be correct, please explain what I am missing" (even if you feel very sure that you are not missing anything).
If your problem is in an area that is well covered by mathoverflow, then this should be effective. Either someone will explain what you are missing, or the relevant experts will become aware that you have uncovered a genuine problem.
> 4 votes
# Answer
My advice is pretty much the same as everyone else's: talk to your advisor, go over the suspected problem point with him; if there is no resolution, reach out to others in the department (your advisor should do this).
Having said this, I'd like to relate a few incidents from my own experience. As a graduate student, I independently discovered a result in number theory that did not appear in the literature. I was unaware of the significance of the result, but it came up in discussion with my advisor. He informed me that Professor X had found this result, but had never published it, and that I should not publish it, thereby "scooping" the (world-famous) expert.
While working with my second advisor, in a different area, I read a paper by a major player in that area who had developed a widely used technique. I mantioned to my advisor that there was a point in the proof of that technique that I didn't understand and he told me that no one understood the proof, but all assumed it worked.
Many years later, I now work in a different area. But while I was getting started in it I ran across a theorem in a book by a well-known expert in the field. What it said contradicted other things I had read. Not fully trusting myself, I reached out to the author who acknowledged that what he had written was not correct. He was very grateful for the correction and saved it against the advent of a second edition of his book.
Finally, I wrote a paper which contained an error, an error I should not have made because I was familiar with a counterexample to the statement I made. No referee caught the mistake, and only one person ever wrote to me about it, and I am very grateful to that person. Everyone reacts to these things differently, but I did not take offense at the correction. Granted this situation is a bit different than yours, because the correction came from a well-known source, and not from a graduate student. I would like to think I would have been equally accepting if the correction came from a student. I was embarrassed to be corrected by an expert, whereas I might have been peeved to be corrected by a student. However, were it you who wrote to me, you would never have known my reaction. I would have thanked you for pointing out the error, and perhaps have apologized for making it. But that's just me, and I'm far from well-known in the field. So, I have no idea of what my more famous colleagues have to deal with on a daily basis. The paper in question has never been corrected to my knowledge.
As I said, everyone reacts differently in these cases. Work with your advisor. The most important thing for you is to determine if there is indeed an error in the paper, and, if not, to understand why the paper is correct so that you can move forward with a correct grasp of what the paper established.
> 4 votes
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Tags: publications, errors-erratum
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thread-19014 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19014 | How to proceed when advisor asks you to resign? | 2014-04-07T11:11:03.000 | # Question
Title: How to proceed when advisor asks you to resign?
This happened with a friend of mine and I am asking this question on his behalf.
My friend was recruited for a sponsored research project in the university and offered a part-time PhD along with that. He is currently completing his coursework (2nd semester) which is pretty exhaustive. He has been working pretty rigorously and one of his poster presentation was accepted in a reputed conference within 6 months of work.
Since the coursework in this semester was tough, he wasn't able to give any tangible output in terms of publications or concrete results. Now, suddenly he has been asked by his advisor to resign. This has come to him as a surprise since he was expecting some scolding as his guide is known for being arrogant (and he is very reputed researcher in the field).
He is unsure whether to leave PhD or how to proceed and convince his advisor.
I believe he is pretty new (1 year of coursework) to the domain and since the project is pure research, he does deserve a chance. But I am unsure of how one should proceed in such cases.
**EDIT** (based on queries in comment)
Part Time PhD: He was recruited as an employee for the project by the university. And also offered a PhD. The stipend comes from the project cost(funding agency) and not from university funds (as is the case for direct PhD recruits in my university).
Advisor being Arrogant: He is very knowledgeable and reputed but known for scolding students frequently.(Some faculty members also agree to this including my own advisor)
# Answer
> 16 votes
This is a difficult situation. Regardless of the facts of the matter, there appears to be have been a breakdown of trust/communication: either the advisor has been sending signals for a while that the person didn't pick up on, or the advisor is indeed pulling this out of the blue, which also signifies a breakdown of communication.
Probably the best first thing to do is for the student to set up a meeting with the advisor to understand the advisor's reasons. It's possible that a face-to-face meeting might allow the advisor to express their underlying concerns in a more productive way that could lead to a concrete plan for activities.
If that fails, or the advisor refuses to meet, the next person to involve is usually the chair of graduate studies at the department (or the equivalent). There is usually someone whose job is to oversee the graduate program and manage conflicts like this. They might be able to mediate a rapproachment between the advisor and student (or even find another advisor for the student). I've had to do this in the past when I served in this capacity.
Bottom line: **if the facts are as you outlined**, then I think the student deserves a more reasonable explanation from the advisor as to why they're being terminated. Sadly though, in my experience I've often found that students ignore signals being sent to them, and that advisors are unwilling/unable to give direct and clear feedback.
# Answer
> 8 votes
I generally agree with Suresh and Trylks advice. The relationship between your friend and his advisor is broken. That is a problem that your friend cannot avoid.
On the other hand, it is not only your friend's problem. It is his advisor's too and since he is the senior party, he is the one that needs to do more than your friend to fix it. I also do not get this "resign" thing. Your friend has a contract with the university, not with the advisor. It has also probably been assigned a committee for your friend's PHD that includes other professors except his advisor. If your friend is incapable for a PHD, again this decision is not entirely up to the advisor. It is the advisor that needs to prove your friend failed to meet the requirements of the project / PHD and your friend should not just "roll over dead" just because the advisor is not happy with him. So resigning is out of the question. If he has already a poster publication, did well in the required courses then I think the advisor will have a hard time proving your friend is incapable.
So, your friend should ask his advisor what he can do better to make things work. He should follow his advice, be extra nice and work extra hard. But there is absolutely no reason for him to resign. If the advisor is right (and as powerful as he believes he is), he can always fire your friend. But he will still have to justify to his fellow professors why he took a promising student such as your friend (otherwise your friend would not be selected for a PHD) and failed to "advice" him. It is your friend advisor's failure as well and both parties should suffer the consequences.
All this advice is based on your "word" that your friend did actually 90-100% the best he could. In any other case, where the advisor repeatedly warned your friend about potential improvements and your friend deliberately ignored him then he should just suck it up, take it like a man / woman and suffer the consequences. But if the advisor failed to effectively advice your friend, then this failure should be fixed by both parties and not simply by your friend resigning.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Situation: FUBAR. I'm quite sorry for your friend. Good thing is: things can't get much worse.
Now he is a student and the professor is reputed, if he resigns then they are both just human beings. These are two different contexts and your friend is, more or least, with one foot on each of them. With the insight of the second context and a potential imminent resign, I'd ask, from a person to another, "why?".
If it's for the lack of results/publications, your friend should check why did that happen and whether that is going to continue in the future. It's not only a matter of doing and finishing a PhD, but also a matter of how worthy a PhD with few publications is in the end, considering the opportunity cost and all the effort and time that it is going to need. It may be a "Pyrrhic victory" and that is something very few people warn about (actually I haven't seen anyone).
Your friend deserves an explanation. Please keep us posted.
On the other hand. This is a failure in communication, as @Suresh pointed. We only have one side of the story, your friend's, through a third person (you), so it's hard to know. But the description you make of the advisor is:
* he is arrogant
* he makes things suddenly with no prior notice
* he doesn't provide arguments or explanations
The best thing to do in such a situation (if possible, usually not easy) is to switch to a different supervisor, because that guy may be reputed and good at research, but he does not seem good (from your description) at dealing with people, managing them and advising in general.
But again, remember, it's hard not to be biased when all the information that we have comes from a friend of one of the parts...
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Tags: phd, research-process
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thread-19032 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19032 | How to find the list of universities running a specific program? | 2014-04-07T18:09:57.127 | # Question
Title: How to find the list of universities running a specific program?
Is there any way/resource for finding the list of universities offering a specific degree?
I want to find which universities have a specific program (both undergraduate and graduate).
My target is the US and UK universities, but other countries are also useful (though, I think it is difficult to search because of different terminologies in different languages for a discipline).
# Answer
The UK graduate schools are officially ranked through Research Assessment Exercise (being currently phased out to be replaced by Research Excellence Framework), so you can get a full list of programs that are of any worth here.
In the US, rankings are produced from time to time by the National Research Council. The most recent set is from 2009. The methodology and reporting format are beyond weird, but at least the list of programs is useful (albeit difficult to navigate in the Excel file format; I found my area, statistics, under "Physical sciences", for instance, which is a very distant shot). The 1995 rankings were done with involvement of real statisticians, so I trust them better.
> 3 votes
# Answer
First you should decide what is your major. For universities in USA you can use websites like US News or like BigFuture. You can google for finding university offering specific courses and degrees about UK. I believe for US universities US News is the best website.
> 0 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, university, undergraduate, united-states, united-kingdom
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thread-19018 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19018 | Abbreviation of Doctor of Philosophy: PhD or DPhil? | 2014-04-07T14:08:25.097 | # Question
Title: Abbreviation of Doctor of Philosophy: PhD or DPhil?
I am a bit confused about the proper abbreviation of `Doctor of Philosophy`. I sometimes read that this person obtained his D.Phil from X University, while someone else obtained his PhD from Y University. According to Wikipidia:
> The University of Oxford also abbreviates their Doctor of Philosophy degree as DPhil but in other respects is equivalent to a PhD.
Is it up to me to decide what abbreviation to use?
# Answer
> 16 votes
The awarding institution determines the abbreviation\*; someone made a Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford is a DPhil, someone made a Doctor of Philosophy at Cambridge is a PhD, and someone made a Doctor of Philosophy at a university in Austria is a Dr.phil. (before the name, not after).
\*At the time awarded, as pointed out in another answer.
Addendum: As Jack Orion points out, the abbreviation is of the Latin *doctor philosophiae*, which is why appears both ways around (Latin is more flexible in its word order than English). Many other degree abbreviations make their Latin origin more obvious (e.g. the MLitt for 'master of letters', *magister litterarum*; the LLB for 'batchelor of laws', *legium baccalaureatus*, with conventional doubling of the 'L' to indicate the plural).
# Answer
> 10 votes
Neither D. Phil. nor Ph. D. are abbreviations for 'Doctor of Philosophy', but for 'Doctor Philosophiae' or 'Philosophiae Doctor' respectively. Sorry to be pedantic, but when this is realised it becomes easier to understand why the Ph. D. abbreviation exists at all.
# Answer
> 5 votes
No - it depends on the degree you were awarded.
Most universities offer PhD degrees, with a smaller subset (usually UK red-brick universities & Oxford) that offer DPhils. Some of the 'new' universities of the late 60s-early 70s used to offer DPhils. I was awarded a DPhil at Ulster, but subsequent to this, they switched to awarding PhDs.
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Tags: phd, degree
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thread-19025 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19025 | Who can peer-review articles? | 2014-04-07T16:17:50.087 | # Question
Title: Who can peer-review articles?
I was unable to find any information online about this. I asked a colleague who told me that there are no restrictions on who may review an article, although he thought it was very unlikely that an un-published person may be asked to review. I would like a general answer to this question; nevertheless, the specific context is in the following paragraph.
I am submitting an engineering research paper in the near future and the submission process *requires* that I suggest at least three reviewers. One of the reviewers I would like to suggest has not yet completed their PhD, although they have three publications that are closely related to mine. I know that it will be up to the editor to decide whether to contact this person, but it made me wonder if there are any specific criteria that reviewers have to meet.
# Answer
> Who can peer-review articles?
**Anyone competent enough to be asked in the first place.**
For conferences (e.g., in engineering or computer science), peer-review is conducted by a Programme Committee. To be invited to be part of a Programme Committee (typically done by Chairs or Senior Programme Committee in larger conferences), you need to have a reasonable track record of research and a solid reputation in the area in question. I have seen PCs of reputable conferences in CS with many senior PhDs (I was in PCs myself as a PhD student).
For journals, you are invited to review by a member of the Editorial Board. They would weigh your experience and track-record accordingly. Again, you may get asked to review journal papers as a PhD student (I was also asked to review various journal papers as a PhD student).
Last but not least, you may be delegated a peer-review by someone who was asked to do a review (where that person was asked by the EB of a journal or as part of a PC for a conference). In that case, however, the responsibility for the quality of the review lies squarely with the delegator. In this case, a junior PhD student might be given a peer-review but with the idea that the delegator will check over it and discuss before submitting. (This is a good way to learn the process of peer-reviewing.)
> I was unable to find any information online about this. I asked a colleague who told me that there are no restrictions on who may review an article, although he thought it was very unlikely that an un-published person may be asked to review.
I agree with your colleague. The delegation of peer-review is left to the judgement of the EB/PC/Chairs. They will take into account seniority and research track record in their judgement. Formal restrictions would only serve to rule out qualified reviewers from an often already too narrow field.
> I am submitting an engineering research paper in the near future and the submission process requires that I suggest at least three reviewers. One of the reviewers I would like to suggest has not yet completed their PhD, although they have three publications that are closely related to mine. I know that it will be up to the editor to decide whether to contact this person, but it made me wonder if there are any specific criteria that reviewers have to meet.
I suggest submitting the name of the supervisor of the PhD student you think would be a good reviewer. The supervisor offers the editor a more senior name, should be knowledgeable in the area and if not, can solicit the advice of the PhD student in question or delegate the review entirely if appropriate.
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As per my comment (and as a side note since it is not directly asked about) I find the practice of suggesting reviewers for your own paper a little strange (though I have seen it before on occasion). First there's the obvious possibility of selecting one's friends or of prior deal-making (assuming the suggestions were taken into account ... otherwise why would they ask?). Aside from that, if I'm submitting to a journal in my area, I expect the editorial board to have some members that would be sufficiently knowledgeable about my topic to get the paper in good hands. Having to suggest reviewers calls into question (slightly) the competence of the EB and/or the relevance of the journal. In any case, if the journal is otherwise reputable, this should not hold you back from submitting.
> 23 votes
# Answer
To add one small thing to @badroit's answer, there are two very common ways to get asked to be a reviewer for a journal or conference:
1. know the editor or someone on the program committee
2. submit an article yourself for review
I've gotten more requests to review from my PhD supervisor who edited a journal and from journals and conferences I've submitted to. Journals are particularly prone to this in my experience--I've had review requests come in within a few days of my submission of my own article. Conferences tend to be delayed by a year such that submissions to the prior year's conference can generate invitations to review in the current year. This seems to be especially true if you've had a paper accepted.
So, that being said, eligible reviewers tend to be eligible submitters.
> 7 votes
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Tags: peer-review
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thread-19033 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19033 | Is there an alternative to Dean title? | 2014-04-07T18:16:51.983 | # Question
Title: Is there an alternative to Dean title?
Because of different backgrounds in higher education systems, different titles are popularly used for administrative titles in academia such as
> University level - President, Vice Chancellor, Rector, Principal
>
> Faculty level - Dean only
>
> Department level - Head, Chair
For leading a faculty, the only common term is `Dean`. Am I right? or there are other alternatives too?
And more interestingly, the title of `Dean` is only used for the manager of a faculty, not other positions. Correct me if I'm wrong.
What is the historical meaning of `dean`, and what is special about this title, which is only used for a specific level in academia.
# Answer
> 3 votes
The title "Dean" is by no means restricted to the leader of a faculty (or college, or other similar unit). For instance, most US universities have a "Dean of Students" who is responsible for student services, discipline, etc. Some have a "Dean of Residential Life" who runs the dorms. My alma mater had a "Dean of Student Activities", popularly known as the "Dean of Fun".
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Tags: university, titles, job
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thread-19060 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19060 | IEEE referencing : Acceptable reference format for personal work log | 2014-04-08T01:56:10.787 | # Question
Title: IEEE referencing : Acceptable reference format for personal work log
I’m writing an academic document and I can’t seem to find any specific mention of how to refer to a personal work log. Work logs are essentially to be published journals documenting what happened when in a computing project (but not published in an official journal).
The closest thing according to IEEE referencing style guide from the University of York is possibly a weblog. What is the best citation type for such a work log?
# Answer
If it's not published anywhere, be it in a peer-reviewed journal, conference proceedings, some book or whitepaper, then don't put it as a reference.
You could write,
> According to our work log, we first frobnicated the machine, …
The idea of including references is for interested readers to follow up on them. If it's some internal document nobody will ever see, then it does not qualify as a reference. It also makes it impossible for peer review to happen: you could claim anything and back it up with a reference to your internal document—and nobody could ever (dis)prove it.
The APA blog has an entry on that subject (emphasis mine):
> Likewise, if you have other **nonretrievable sources** (personal communications, like personal e-mail and phone calls), these **do not get reference list entries** either (although they do receive in-text citations, because they involve other people than just yourself).
> 5 votes
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Tags: thesis, citations
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thread-19047 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19047 | Who should approve changes in curriculum? | 2014-04-07T21:33:30.907 | # Question
Title: Who should approve changes in curriculum?
In the US and UK higher education system, who is responsible for a program curriculum?
For example, if planning to modify the curriculum by adding an uncommon course, who should approve this modification?
Consider that the change is truly uncommon. Can the department head decide about it? or needs the approval of higher officials (such as dean or VP for Academics) or there are boards and committees to decide uncommon changes (for the sake of education quality assurance).
# Answer
Proposing a new course or modifying the course requirements for any degree at my university requires several layers of approval:
* The department's (under)graduate study committee
* The tenure-track faculty of the department, by majority vote
* The department head/chair, who transmits the proposal to...
* The college executive committee
* The dean, who transmits the proposal to...
* The campus educational policy committee
* The faculty senate
The last step is usually pro forma; without a formal motion for a vote, the proposal passes automatically. Each of the other steps (and even the last step, if so moved) requires actual discussion and voting, and the discussion at higher levels is *not* limited to administrative matters as Ben Crowell suggests.
For courses, there is an escape valve called "special topics" courses, which can be offered on an ad hoc basis with only department head/chair approval. Most new courses start as special-topics courses; the formal approvals are only required to give the course its own number. But special topics courses can't be used as degree requirements.
> 3 votes
# Answer
In the US, this is a classic example of shared governance. Typically there will be a well-defined bureaucratic process for proposing a new course. You write an outline and fill out a bunch of forms. Then the other faculty in your department review it. There will also be layers of approval by managers, but the managers are supposed to be reviewing the course for administrative stuff (e.g., maximum section size, which has fiscal implications), not for content (which is where faculty are the experts).
It's important, especially at a community college, to make a course that will be useful to students if they transfer to another school. E.g., I recently proposed a course, Relativity for Poets, at the community college where I teach, and we wanted to make sure that it would transfer to the state university systems so as to satisfy gen. ed. requirements. At community colleges, these concerns may make it essentially impossible to offer a new and innovative course if there is nothing like it in the state university system.
Assuming that a new course does go through all the approvals, it's still not guaranteed that the school will offer it. For example, they could decide that it's too expensive to offer, or there might not be enough demand.
> 3 votes
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Tags: university, united-states, united-kingdom
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thread-19067 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19067 | How to get honorary academic position in UK universities? | 2014-04-08T10:26:44.647 | # Question
Title: How to get honorary academic position in UK universities?
To my knowledge, it is common in the UK universities to offer honorary faculty positions to their partners from other universities or outside academia.
Correct me if I'm wrong, these positions are non-salary for the sake of official bonds.
Then, how one can express interest for this kind of positions and official connections? Who is responsible for granting these positions?
AND do other countries have similar positions?
# Answer
A number of UK universities have their policies on the appointment of Honorary positions on their websites. It appears from a number of them that the appointments are usually made upon the request from for example, the head of a school, within the institution.
It appears (from the University of St Andrews) that appointments are made when it is deemed to be beneficial to both parties.
> An Honorary appointment is an arrangement which allows distinguished individuals from other institutions and organisations to collaborate with academic staff at the University of St Andrews and have access to certain University facilities to further their own research, cooperate on joint research or contribute to the teaching of the University. It recognises an ongoing association with the University.
In all of the policies it appears that the Head of School makes that application and it is the HR department that makes the final decision on the granting of the Honorary position.
I relation to gaining a Honorary position, I would think that if you are well known in your field of research there is a better chance of gaining one.
Here is a list of links to policies for the following universities.
1. University of St Andrews
2. Swansea University
3. UCL
4. Cambridge
In Ireland (my home country) I believe they are occasionally awarded. Trinity College Dublin have Honorary positions in their listing of academic titles
> 13 votes
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Tags: university, united-kingdom
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thread-19008 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19008 | Why do some professors have M.D. as well as/instead of a PhD? | 2014-04-07T06:13:35.853 | # Question
Title: Why do some professors have M.D. as well as/instead of a PhD?
I'm interested in stem cell, regenerative medicine, developmental biology, and genetics for reverse ageing. Since these topics are dealt with in one or both of medical school and school of science and professors have one or both of MD and PhD, I'm confused about my grad school prep. Also, I'm really not interested in clinical medicine, but I want to be a researcher throughout my life.
So, I think I need only PhD, but I'm wondering why some professors in these areas have MD? Is it just because they decided to become researchers although they initially intended to work as a clinical doctor?
# Answer
> 6 votes
I've worked with a fair number of either researcher MDs or MD/PhDs, and myself have only a PhD, so I'll try to give my perspective:
**Do You Need One**: Probably not, if you're only interested in the scientific questions about what you are doing, and are not particularly concerned with it's direct application to patient care or the clinical setting. Basically, if there is a department *outside* a medical school that can house your research, you're likely fine.
**Why Would Someone Pick One Up?**: There are many reasons for a researcher to have a MD or an MD/PhD - they're interested in the clinical aspects of the research science they do, have seen their interests evolve over time toward more research and less patient care, or are in research areas that necessitate having the expertise that comes along with having an MD. There are some medical school programs that are more oriented towards producing new researchers than practicing doctors, and medical schools are *massive* sources of clinical research in the U.S. It's really not surprising there's a number of professors out there with MDs - my doctoral advisor was one of them.
There's also some...field-specific traditions. For example, there are *tons* of MDs working in infectious disease research and epidemiology, because it spawns fairly naturally from "Treat this weird infection" to "Why does this weird infection infected X people?" to "How do we stop this weird infection from spreading".
# Answer
> 8 votes
There are two main tracks of medicine: clinical (the "standard" medical practice), and research. Typically, doctors who work in the latter tend to pursue combined MD-PhD programs, and consequently have degrees in both a traditional scientific research discipline as well as medicine.
It probably was easier in the past to make such a switch with "just" a medical degree; however, the increased specialization in the field makes it harder for a medical doctor to switch over to a research track without the increased training (unless he or she is working on the "clinical" side of therapeutic treatments designed in research programs).
# Answer
> 1 votes
Regarding why one would be interested in doing an MD/PhD combo:
In my region, and I believe this generalises to the rest of Sweden, clinicians are required to do get some research experience. So for most of those MD-to-be, that's the regular entry to academia.
Furthermore, if you are a clinician with a PhD on a field related to your clinical work, your chances of promotion towards higher positions in the hospital is significantly higher, apparently.
Sadly, I do not have any references on the internet for the last statement, other than the word of my colleagues in the hospital (as well as friends who did medicine at the uni).
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Tags: phd, graduate-school, medicine
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thread-19052 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19052 | How to get pornographic movies for scientific research purposes? | 2014-04-07T22:25:50.080 | # Question
Title: How to get pornographic movies for scientific research purposes?
Recently, I have being planning to design an automatic pornographic movie detector with the machine learning knowledge that I just acquired.
I am now in the stage of planning how to perform the system evaluation. The intuition is to just test the algorithms with some pornographic movies and some non-pornographic movies and compute the false negative/positive rates. I simply feel that for any evaluation method, I would have to obtain real pornographic movies to test the system!
Here comes the dilemma. As you know (or may not know!), basically all the pornographic movies are not free. I do *not* regard it as ethical to just download illegal pirated movies, as after all they are for a scientific research, which values copyright a lot. On the other hand, it is a bit awkward for me to request funding from my PI to buy the porn videos! Paying them myself is definitely not a feasible solution, either.
How may I handle this case properly?
# Answer
I really don't get this. This is a little like the Movies Classification Board or the Classification & Ratings Administration feeling awkward about asking to view the movies they are going to rate.
If you are developing an algorithm for detecting pornography, why would it be awkward to request funding to acquire test resources? This is an entirely **legitimate application, that has huge potential, both economically and socially** (note: use of bold inspired by OP). There are many researchers all over the world working in similar fields. Clearly, at some point you will need to discuss your work with your PI, and presumably, they are already aware of the work you have been doing in the previous 6/9/18 months, and perhaps already requires justification against existing research funding.
Whatever the case, your work will need to be approved by, and comply rigidly with, your institution's ethics committee.
There are also a number of steps you could consider before committing to viewing full-length extreme hardcore films. In making some suggestions, I'm going to make a few assumptions:
1. 1 Your definition of a pornographic movie is one classified as "mainly concerned with sex", and involves extreme nudity and acts of sexual behaviour.
2. Your algorithm looks at exposed and interacting body content in some way, and does not work on quality of script and acting (otherwise daytime soapies will bring up many false positives)
3. Your algorithm looks at small fragments of movie clips, and not the entire 60/70/90 minutes worth, or however long these movies go for.
4. Your PI knows what you've been spending your previous doing, which is most likely already associated with existing research funding.
So, some suggestions
* Acquire a number of movie trailers; these are usually freely available for all types of movies, and typically run for about a minute. Contact the various movie studios directly if you need to.
* Speak to your national Film and Television archive body. They are likely to have a number of suitable media to preliminary early test procedures on. Various bodies exist.
* Speak to other researchers in this field. There might be a good standard set of images/movies that can be used to determine baseline effectiveness.
* Go to your local friendly adult shop and check out the "specials" bin.
* Finally, and not the best approach to take, look at the internet. I'm guessing if you typed in the right combination of words, you'd get unlimited supply of short, copyright-free videos, to use both as a test group and control group. But I stress, this needs to be done in strict accordance with your institutions policies for network and computing use, and therefore should be approved by your PI and ethics committee.
However, whatever approach you take, the summary is: **talk to your PI**.
> 38 votes
# Answer
> As you know (or may not know!), basically all the pornographic movies are not free.
I find this not quite realistic: A fair chunk of the total internet bandwidth goes to porn. There are a lot of "free" websites. And a lot of "studios" offer samples which would suit your research, in my opinion.
You don't need a two-hour porn movie to test your algorithms.
Furthermore, what is the state of the art in this field? Is anybody else working in that domain? What are they doing, i.e. how are they getting films to test?
> 25 votes
# Answer
If your supervisor knows that she is funding *you* to do research about pornography, I don't think she should be particularly shocked by the the request. If your supervisor does not know, *that* will be the more awkward conversation and it sounds like its time to have it.
Additionally, good options might be:
* Look for freely licensed pornography. Creative Commons provides a way to search for freely licensed material including a way to do Google searches for permissively licensed video.
* Try to rely on a fair use justification and go ahead and use copyrighted works you can find for free online (e.g., from free porn video websites).
* You could ask commercial pornography distributors to donate material for science.
Of course, there are risks with going with the fair use argument and it's always best to get your institution's general counsel's opinion first.
> 13 votes
# Answer
I believe you're facing a no-problem kind of problem.
Many of the largest porn streaming sites do actually pay content creators so they allow them to serve the videos for free. What you describe is a fair use case, so, in theory, you shouldn't face any issues. Most studio-provided content on these sites are actually legally served for free.
When using one of those sites, make sure you search the studio pages rather than the whole site. Searching the whole site can indeed return pirated results.
<sup>(I'm posting as a community wiki because I think this is neither an academic answer nor an Academia.SE-worthy answer. It's better as a comment, but it doesn't fit as a comment)</sup>
> 7 votes
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Tags: funding, data
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thread-19075 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19075 | Should I comment on a cited paper in the paper-review part of my master's thesis? | 2014-04-08T14:38:27.627 | # Question
Title: Should I comment on a cited paper in the paper-review part of my master's thesis?
I'm writing my master's thesis and began to wonder if it is acceptable to comment on some of the publications I cite in my 'State of the art' part.
I have several papers where the results and/or methods are obfuscated. This is sadly not uncommon given the source of the author(s) are industry vendors who want to show their capabilities and domain expertise without actually revealing anything competitively substantial. The papers are all written by the engineering / research departments of various manufacturers and are published in scientific or engineering journals.
Some of the 'errors' in their publications are surely due to out-dated methods and/or models. However some others are just plain misleading, most certainly as a way to obscure competitive information. I don't have hard facts that they are entirely erroneous due to the omission of their data, but deriving from my research I am pretty confident that some of their results don't add up.
So I don't want to just write down what they found out and how, but also comment on how correct/incorrect their results seem based on my research.
*How should I best comment on these opaque industry publications?*
# Answer
> 9 votes
I'm not entirely sure about what kind of publications you are talking about when you say 'published by vendors' (white papers, brochures, user manuals?). But if you are referring to scientific literature, my answer is: by all means.
I don't se why you would refrain yourself from commenting the possible limitations or drawbacks of published methods. Just stay modest and consider the possibility that these publications came out a while ago and that the general knowledge in the field improved since then.
Being critical, if done properly (give objective reasons), is certainly something to be encouraged at the Master's level, and yes the appropriate section for this is the "State of the art" section.
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Tags: citations, industry, literature-review, publications
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thread-19061 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19061 | Which undergraduate research experience will help more for graduate admissions in mathematics? | 2014-04-08T05:11:59.500 | # Question
Title: Which undergraduate research experience will help more for graduate admissions in mathematics?
I was recently offered a six-month undergraduate thesis at two places. Let us call them A and B.
I am looking to apply abroad for my Masters in pure math next year. Hence, **recommendations are important to me. I am not sure which offer will yield a more useful recommendation.**
The professors who have accepted me at A and B are both the leading experts in my field of interest (Algebraic Geometry), and have won the highest honour given for Mathematics in my country. The professor at B seems vey encouraging and helpful, and has found the time to go through my math blog and offer feedback, while the professor at A has a reputation for being abstruse, and hence perhaps not ideal for a person not experienced in research. However, A is a much more reputed and well known school than B.
Should I go to A or B?
Will a recommendation from a well-known professor from a less well known school matter as much as one from a well known professor from a well known school?
Should my personal equation with the professor be the most important factor for me?
# Answer
> 3 votes
I understand your question as: *Which will be more useful for graduate admissions (all other things being equal): a recommendation from a professor at a well-known university, or a recommendation from a professor at a less-known university with whom I have a more personal connection?*
There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. The answer depends quite a lot on the degree of the difference (both the difference in reputation between universities, and the difference in how well each professor will end up knowing you personally).
As you have intuited, a recommendation from someone at a well-known institution is worth a lot more than a recommendation from someone at an institution that is not well known. On the other hand, a recommendation that describes your specific talents at mathematics in complimentary detail is worth a lot more than a perfunctory letter that says "Algebraically speaking did a thesis in my institution." (Meanwhile, you know nothing at all about the letter-writing skill of either professor, which is another important variable.)
There is also the impact on your development as a researcher. You would likely benefit from working with someone who takes a close personal interest in you. You would also likely benefit from being at a well-known institution that attracts many talented students and has a very productive research atmosphere.
Your decision will ultimately be a personal one, and we can't give personal advice on Academia.SE. However, since your goal is to go to graduate school abroad, I *would* suggest the following:
**Find out where undergraduate students who work with each professor end up.**
You can ask them directly, or talk to their students. In either case, you'd like to know:
* how many of their undergraduate students *want* to go on to graduate school in mathematics? How many of these actually do?
* for the students that went to graduate school, *where* did they go? Are these institutions *you* would consider attending for graduate school?
The "road less traveled" can be great, and rewarding, and all that. But it's also more difficult. If there is a well-traveled path that leads to your desired outcome, **get on that path** if you can.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, mathematics, research-undergraduate
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thread-19079 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19079 | Should you publish a rejected conference paper on arXiv? | 2014-04-08T15:46:59.533 | # Question
Title: Should you publish a rejected conference paper on arXiv?
Imagine you have a paper that got rejected from a top tier conference. You think it is of high quality.
Do you submit the paper to arXiv, or keep pushing for a conference later on?
# Answer
Submitting a paper to the arXiv does not preclude publishing it later in a journal or in the proceedings of a conference. In fact, one should not think of a paper which appears on the arXiv as being published. (There's no peer review, for one thing.)
In my community (`hep-th`, mostly) one always submits to the arXiv first, gathers comments, and only then submits for publication. Of course, other communities might work differently.
In the fields I am familiar with (maths and physics, mostly), I would submit the paper to the arXiv in any case. You can then decide how to actually publish the paper.
> 22 votes
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Tags: conference, arxiv
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thread-19071 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19071 | arXiv or MathSciNet statistics by MSC classes and time | 2014-04-08T13:06:14.657 | # Question
Title: arXiv or MathSciNet statistics by MSC classes and time
I suppose I'm not the first person who came across this idea. I would like to compare math branches by means of numbers of articles published. I have access to two large math article indices: AMS' MathSciNet and arXiv.
My question is: Is it possible (in either of them) to get the information *how many articles were published with a given MSC class, year by year*?
# Answer
> 2 votes
If you use R, you can use this script I wrote for scraping ArXiv metadata.
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Tags: publications, arxiv, statistics
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thread-19053 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19053 | What is the procedure for hiring a professor? | 2014-04-07T22:40:16.537 | # Question
Title: What is the procedure for hiring a professor?
When a department head needs a faculty member, how is the process of hiring one started and conducted (at least in US and UK universities)?
Of particular interest is the following;
1. Finance: Department head should ask the Dean for financing the salary? Who is the final decision maker?
2. Selection: Is the department head responsible for forming the search committee? and is he responsible for approving the qualifications? Can higher officials (e.g. Dean) interfere in the selection?
3. After the selection, how are the official matters handled? Who signs the contract? and who can terminate it (if not tenured)?
4. What is the role of human resources in this process?
# Answer
***(US-specific; public university)***
You'll find a huge variation in procedures across universities. There really isn't one standard method. Having said that, I can at least suggest what happens in (one) American public universities (private universities have different financing structure)
* **Financing**: In our universities, "slots" are line items that are approved by the legislature and are created ultimately by approval of the president of the university in conjunction with the dean of the college. There's a lot of negotiating that goes on to acquire one of these slots, and it's typically based on some "soft" arguments: "look how much research money we're generating, and how many students we're bringing in" and hard arguments: "We can only get this gigantic grant if you promise to give us a faculty slot" and so on.
* **Selection**: departments are usually quite protective of the search process, and control most aspects of it. Again, the degree of shielding depends on politics: it's not unheard of for deans to get actively involved, especially if the department is weak. Within the department, the chair might take charge of selection, or assign a committee to do it, and so on.
* **Official stuff**: a contract is ultimately signed by the university, and all official paperwork must go through them. Negotiations also happen with the dean via the chair.
* **HR**: They're usually involved initially, to make sure job ads are posted correctly, and in compliance with university, state and federal employment laws. They're also involved after the offer is made, especially if there are legal requirements, international issues and so on.
> 13 votes
# Answer
EDIT: Added dates to give a sense of the timeline.
Here's how the process works at my university (US).
1. The department votes (March or April 2014) to request a new hire or not. Usually at this point they will also specify--is this a hire in some particular field, or do we just want to try to get the best person in the field, regardless of speciality. This request is passed to the provost and dean.
2. If the request is approved (May or June), the department forms a search committee which writes and circulates the job ad (Sept or Oct).
3. Once all the applications for the job are in (Nov), the search committee reads the applications and selects between 15-25 people to interview at our big disciplinary meeting (January 2015). This is a first round interview that will usually discuss scholarship and maybe a little bit about teaching.
4. Of that field of 15-25, the committee will select three finalists to bring to a second, on campus interview. (February) The on campus interview is much more strenuous, usually lasting a day or two. At our institution it always includes a public job talk, which presents some facet of the candidates current research before the full faculty and graduate students. Some places it also includes a teaching demo. Invariably there is also a dinner after the talk at which the candidate still needs to be pleasant, conversational, and collegial.
5. After all the on-campus interviews have been conducted, the department meets and discusses who they want to pick. (Late Feb, Early March) Usually this involves a vote. At some places the faculty's vote is binding, at some places the faculty vote is simply advisory and the committee makes the official recommendation. But, at every school I've heard of it is the Dean or Provost who actually makes the final decision.
6. So, let's say the department has recommended candidate X to the Dean and the dean has no objection. Now the dean will call candidate X and offer him or her the job.
7. Usually some rounds of negotiation will follow. If the candidate has other offers, then usually the dean will have to improve the offer. Once a verbal agreement is made, the dean sends a contract to the candidate to sign and return.
8. Once the dean signs the returned contract, then, presto the candidate is officially a tenure track faculty member. (April or May 2015)
> 14 votes
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Tags: professorship, university, job, job-search, recruiting
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thread-19099 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19099 | First-year PhD student with weak CV/Resume; how to stand out in fellowship competitions? | 2014-04-09T02:40:23.567 | # Question
Title: First-year PhD student with weak CV/Resume; how to stand out in fellowship competitions?
I am a first year PhD in a large Social Sciences program at an American public institution. My CV is very weak as I am not yet published. I have research assistantship experience and teaching experience as well as a stint on a Fulbright. I'm applying to fellowships for the summer to gain more research experience.
I am working on a fellowship application and would like to stand out amongst the crowd. Other than my attributes above, I have nothing! My CV barely fills two pages. Will I be written off because I don't have much experience? I need fellowships like these in order to grow my tiny resume- but- I'm worried can't compete to get them without more.
Thank you for your help!
# Answer
Everyone starts out with no publications. Never mind starting a PhD in that condition: I *finished* my PhD at a top-three program for my field without any publications, and I still got a good postdoctoral position. How did I do this? Because of my advisor's recommendation. (And it was a sound recommendation: eventually I did get some publications...)
For graduate students -- and especially, early career graduate students -- recommendation letters are all-important. Do you have a thesis advisor yet? If so, go directly to her and tell her what fellowships you are thinking of applying for and asking whether that sounds reasonable and whether your application will be competitive. If you do not have a thesis advisor, try out the same conversation with several faculty members in your department that know you through your coursework, research or TAing. Emphasize that because you are young and unpublished, you think you will need strong recommendations from them to get serious consideration for summer research fellowships. Select from among these the ones who sound most enthusiastic.
In general, faculty in your department should be very supportive of your endeavor. On the one hand, such fellowships generally provide funding, and faculty are always very happy when graduate students can find external funding of any kind whatsoever, since internal funding is so limited and hard to come up with in these straitened economic times. On the other hand, if you get the fellowship you will be getting funded for doing *exactly* what you are supposed to be doing in the summer as a graduate student: research. So if you feel like the faculty you've spoken to are not helping you enough with this, it could be worthwhile to discuss this with someone like the graduate coordinator or department head: not in a way which casts any blame on the faculty members, but just to emphasize that you want to do this very desirable thing and you haven't yet found the right person to help you out.
Good luck.
> 26 votes
# Answer
@Pete L. Clark gives good advice. It's really your letters of rec that will probably stand out to committees awarding fellowships. I want to add one point though that may be helpful generally.
One way to stand out from the crowd in graduate school is to write well. Most academics think of their writing in very functional, utilitarian ways. If you can write winsomely, using vivid examples, and occasionally graceful turn a phrase, you will automatically stand out from the crowd. What you are trying to do as an academic is to gain a readership for your work. You are much more likely to succeed in this if people actually enjoy reading your work.
I recommend William Zinsser's book on Style to every graduate student I meet.
> 6 votes
# Answer
It might be an idea to contact the career or academic advisory department of your university and ask for an appointment with them to discuss improving your CV and get their input on how you can improve it and what you should and should not put in.
As regards gaining experience and kudos could be to consider publishing some of the Undergrad work you feel proud of. There are lots of open source journals which might be a good starting point.
You can also network with researchers using resources like \[researchgate\]\[1\] for ideas and to get experience peer reviewing articles so you can put your contributions onto your CV and maybe get some feedback on undergrad work you have already done to learn more about the whole process of peer review and network with other academics.
Ultimately getting ahead in academia is likely like everything else: more about who you know not what you know so putting yourself out there by banging on doors and networking is going to be the ticket to filling your CV with stuff. Ironically, it will probably mean you'll not need to show your CV to get the position you want the end, too perhaps.
Such is life.
> -1 votes
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Tags: phd, application, cv
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thread-19110 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19110 | What is a good method to assign topics to students? | 2014-04-09T13:49:17.347 | # Question
Title: What is a good method to assign topics to students?
I will be conducting a course with 10 students and will provide about 12 topics. Each student shall work on one topic. I will meet with the students and present the topics to them.
What is a good method to assign the topics to the students?
I would like to give them the option to choose their own topic, but I foresee problems when some topics are very wanted and others are not...
# Answer
> 7 votes
I have seen instructors/advisors assign the topics by random chance, followed by a brief 'trading session'. Students pick the topic out of a hat, but they then have the option to trade with other students. Of course, some students may be stuck with a topic that they didn't really want, but they should also have the option to work with you to tweak the assignment into something that they can be passionate about. Since you say that you will have more topics than students, you could also have the option to put their draw back into the hat and try again (after everyone else has drawn at least once). This method seems most likely to avoid the problem of a student feeling as though they were forced to take a 'very much not wanted' topic.
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Tags: coursework
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thread-19112 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19112 | How to mark student reports more efficiently | 2014-04-09T14:08:20.490 | # Question
Title: How to mark student reports more efficiently
I have been assigned to mark student reports for an engineering coursework, which mainly involves the use of a software. The main content of each report is around 15 pages. There are 45 reports in total. I am also required to write feedback to each student. I have not been involved in designing the assignment nor teaching the course.
The professor who assigned me this task told me that the marker last year took about 4 full days to complete the markings, and yet I have spent more than two weeks doing this (and not really doing anything else), and I am not yet done. I did need to spend some time familiarising myself with the subject matter and the software in the beginning, because I have never used the software before, but it is not that difficult to use.
Since this is my first marking experience, I am wondering whether it is normal to have spent so much time marking. Is there any strategy I can adopt to complete the task more efficiently, especially in my case where I am not involved in designing the assignment?
# Answer
Marking assignment is a very demanding and time-consuming task, especially if you intend to do it thoroughly (and you should). It is also a big responsibility, as you have the students' success in your hands. It might be that your supervisor underestimated the time necessary to take care of it, although it's difficult to say without knowing the exact content of the assignment.
From my experience of grading assignments and exams (topics: acoustics and fluid mechanics), 2 weeks of work for a class of the size you mention doesn't sound like a lot, especially if, as you said, you needed to get accustomed to the specific aspects of the course.
> I am wondering whether it is normal to have spent so much time marking.
My answer is yes, even though it depends on the type of exam. It might indicate that you take the task seriously, and it's a good thing.
Now as for:
> How to mark student reports more efficiently
Here are some of my usual approaches:
* Make sure you clearly identify the 'gold standard' to which you will compare the answers. Is there a ready-made solution (from last year) or do you need to make your own (if it's the later, the 2 weeks time frame is even less surprising). **The prof/instructor should help you with this step**.
* Grade a given section/exercise at a time, for all students and then switch to the next one.
* Do a quick overview of all the assignments to identify the good quality ones, grade them first.
* Take a break between individual exercises, maybe do some of your administrative or research work for a while (this to avoid overdose).
* Don't take cases of very low quality assignments personally (student clearly didn't attend class, tried to get away with an all-nighter, don't care about the grade, etc.). Students have their reasons. It's not you, it's them.
The good news is that you will theoretically be better and quicker at doing this next term.
Good luck!
> 4 votes
# Answer
I was in a *very* similar situation this past term. I was also tasked with grading engineering assignments that involved the use of software and a written component for which there were no solutions (mind you they were a little shorter than the ones you are grading). I am familiar with the software so it ended up taking me 5 days to mark.
Jigg has covered most of the bases, I just wanted to add another tip for efficiency:
In an effort to give them good feedback I wanted to write thorough comments. But after I got going on the marking I found that many students were making the same kinds of mistakes and I was writing the same comments over and over again. Eventually I just created an excel spreadsheet that really helped automate the marking that looked like this example:
The totals for points and points available are summation formulas so I didn't need to do any totalling myself. As I graded each assignment, I just compared it to the solutions I came up with and judged how well each of them met the criteria (nothing new). When I saw something wrong I just copied a detailed comment from the comments list and pasted it in the relevant cell. When I was finished with an assignment I just copied the everything in the thick black border into the online comments section, entered their grade, and moved on to the next one. If there was something new (and incorrect) that a student was doing I created a new comment and copied it into the list. Sometimes I also wrote something like "good work" next to the assignment total, just so that there were some positive comments.
Granted this worked really well when the students were all doing the exact same thing, but if your students are writing about different topics, it might not work as well.
> 7 votes
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Tags: teaching, time-management
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thread-19139 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19139 | Approach the professors about making the course more "relevant" | 2014-04-09T20:31:25.287 | # Question
Title: Approach the professors about making the course more "relevant"
I'm currently studying Industrial Engineering in Spain, one of the broadest degrees here that includes the subjects of Calculus, Fluid Mechanics, Electronics, Materials and Programming in C, among others.
However, there's one subject, Introduction to Computers, that I think has an outdated course. While this is a personal opinion, I do some extracurricular projects based on robotics (electronics + programming) and I see that there's a huge difference between the subject and what is being used in the industry.
In this subject we are being taught really low level computer operations and iteration, learning how to reinvent a wheel that probably no one of us will ever need to reinvent in our career.
**How should I approach the professors about making the course oriented to the current years?** I know I will not benefit from it, but at least my fellow mates would. As most courses here, it was probably written 15/20 years ago and hasn't changed much in the time being. Besides that, another related question would be, **is teaching outdated material the norm in most universities?**
A small example of what I mean: We had a programming exam with the Outdated Library<sup>TM</sup>, in which I decided to write the function `map()` as found in arduino. This made my code much easier to program/debug and faster to write. Most of the other students don't know something like this is even possible and need to go over each individual operation manually to map the different conversions.
# Answer
There is always some tension between teaching considerations in computer science and other fast-moving technology fields, and modern practice.
Since the field itself moves so fast, it is not necessarily *desirable* for a computer science course to really be up-to-date. Even if you taught students up-to-the-minute programming libraries and paradigms in their freshman CS101 course, by the time they graduate, many of these libraries will be outdated anyways. Furthermore, developing new course materials (or updating existing materials) takes a considerable amount of time and effort.
Also, modern programming paradigms are often too complicated to introduce to complete beginners. A deliberate decision is often made to miss out on "up-to-date" in favor of "simple for newbies."
The usual goal, therefore, is to teach students fundamental ideas and concepts that are timeless. The context in which these ideas are taught will probably become outdated pretty quickly. It's understood that students won't use this specific context again, because it'll be obsolete by the time they graduate; the hope is that the *ideas* stick, so that the students can understand the new programming paradigms they will be expected to learn on their own in the workforce.
For example:
> ASCII is dying, replaced mostly by its vastly more complicated superset, UTF-8. But UTF-8 would be crazy to teach in full, with all its byte-stuffing practices that mean different characters take different numbers of bytes, and all the combining characters and normalisation and so on. ASCII has the fundamental idea of characters-as-numbers, which is a useful (and timeless) principle, even if the exact encoding itself is getting more complicated.
Source: Teaching programming: Modern or Educational?
Having said that,
* This seems "stupid" and is demotivating to students who *are* aware of current practices
* In practice, teaching ideas and concepts is more difficult than teaching specific technologies and syntax. So often students miss out on learning the "timeless" ideas - which were really the whole point of the lesson.
In answer to **What can you do about it?**
You can certainly tell the professor, "I did XYZ as part of my project, and I think it would be interesting to share with the rest of the class." I often supplement my "fundamental" courses with "modern" concepts, and I love when these supplements come from the students themselves!
You can always ask the professor, "How is concept ABC used in practice, today?" I love getting this question from students - it gives me an opening to talk about fun stuff :)
But understand that teaching outdated material *is* the norm in many cases. There are good reasons for this; there are also good reasons *not* to do this. It's a difficult balance to strike.
> 18 votes
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Tags: university, coursework
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thread-19105 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19105 | How to find help when writing a master's thesis | 2014-04-09T09:16:43.850 | # Question
Title: How to find help when writing a master's thesis
What methods could you recommend for attaining assistance when writing a master's thesis, in the particular case when one feels uncomfortable seeking any more help from the advisor, because of his own anxiety and the advisor's personality and busyness?
Is there an option available to get independent help? How would one go about finding help so that he can get the thesis finished?
# Answer
At the end of the day, your advisor is the one who needs to *accept* your thesis. Seeking help from others may be useful for some types of questions, but you'll definitely want his feedback during the process to make sure you're developing the thesis to his standards.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Your advisors are the ones you should seek advice from, on how to write the thesis, and on fundamental research skills such as avoiding plagiarism.
If you feel uncomfortable about approaching your advisors / supervisors, you've got two options.
Either work out how to get comfortable approaching them.
Or get new advisors.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I agree with the others that bypassing the advisor is not a helpful strategy.
But, you should also understand that **the point of this exercise (the M.S.) is *not* to just end up with a finished thesis**.
It's to show that the student has developed the mathematical/scientific/technical and professional maturity to produce a piece of M.S.-level independent work, in spite of any personal and interpersonal problems that come up.
If the student has a problem with depression, he should seek help from a mental health professional. If the student has a significant interpersonal problem with his advisor, he can ask for help from the person at the university who is in charge of graduate studies. If the student has a problem with writing, he can ask for help from the writing center.
But ultimately, it's up to the student to get things moving. Having someone "walk him through it step by step so that he can get finished" is probably missing the point.
> 1 votes
# Answer
If there are problems approaching the advisor for help, I would suggest talking to the PhD students and/or postdocs who work in the same group as the advisor. They might be able to help. It would also be helpful talking to other students who are supervised by the same advisor. They might not be able to help, but at least you feel that you are not alone.
> 1 votes
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Tags: masters, thesis, advisor, interpersonal-issues
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thread-19127 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19127 | How are PhD students assigned to supervisors/professors? | 2014-04-09T17:10:07.383 | # Question
Title: How are PhD students assigned to supervisors/professors?
In my experience, there are two types of PhD students
(1) A professor offers a PhD studentship. Then, students apply directly and know their supervisor from the first day.
In this case, how a professor secure the funding for a PhD studentship?
(2) A department offers PhD studentships. After admission, students can choose their supervisors or the department will assign them to available professors.
In this case, how the capacity of each faculty member is determined to accept PhD students from available students of the department?
I know that the system varies from university to university, but I am curious to know the most common systems for each cases in North America and Eastern Europe.
# Answer
> (2) A department offers PhD studentships. After admission, students can choose their supervisors or the department will assign them to available professors.
>
> In this case, how the capacity of each faculty member is determined to accept PhD students from available students of the department?
This is generally the norm in US universities. How the capacity is set depends on various funding-related factors:
* Does the department support all incoming Ph.D students via fellowships ? Then there's a budget associated with this.
* Does the department support all incoming students via fellowship or teaching assistant positions ? Then based on estimated enrollment of students in courses there's a rough formula estimating number of TAs needed each year, and this factors in how many students are leaving.
* Does faculty funding support students (either from Day 1 or eventually) ? Then the department will solicit information from faculty on how many students they expect to support that year, and make calculations accordingly.
All of these are estimates, and can go wrong. So departments usually need some kind of cushion when doing calculations to adjust for that.
While departments might "assign" students to faculty when they enter, this is probably for administrative purposes so students don't slip through the cracks and have someone they can approach early on. Typically students and advisors choose each other once the students arrive.
> 11 votes
# Answer
> (1) A professor offers a PhD studentship. Then, students apply directly and know their supervisor from the first day.
>
> In this case, how a professor secure the funding for a PhD studentship?
Either through departmental funding allocated to a particular faculty member (perhaps a new professor was given a 'startup package' from the department), or through external grant money (which would usually dictate that the PhD student is to work on a specific project).
Relevant:
> 5 votes
# Answer
US mathematics departments are usually a delayed variation on (2). The department accepts applications. The student *may* in their application mention an interest in working with a particular faculty member, and a faculty member could lobby for a particular student, but in neither case does this actually create a binding advising relationship.
The department don't announce a fixed number of available positions, but they decide how many students to offer admission (and funding) based on current enrollment, funding, and general faculty availability. (Funding primarily comes from the department, not from the faculty.) Some number of those students accept the offer and show up in the fall. They may be assigned a pro forma advisor who helps them decide what classes to take, etc, but this person is not expected to be a research mentor. Then, over the next 2-3 years, the student is expected to make contact with various faculty members and eventually find one who is willing to be their advisor.
> 3 votes
# Answer
In Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences departments in the United States, it seems to be a hybrid of the two; the department admissions committee must accept you even if the professor you want to work for has RA funding for you (as opposed to TA funding generated by the school/dept). They evaluate you knowing that you want to work with Professor A. It's almost a given that the student has contacted Professor A prior to the application. The influence of professor A is persuasive (I assume) but not the be all end all, since often times the departments are looking to build a diverse class of not just research interests, but personalities and experiences. This is at least how both my advisors explained the admissions process to me at my current institution. This also seems consistent to how I've been admitted to other places.
> 1 votes
# Answer
Based on my experience there are actually three different cases:
1. A faculty members (having fund from a project with a company or a national grant or some other source) announces that there are PhD position(s) available. The topic you are going to work on is determined. Those interested, apply to the faculty member directly and s/he decides which one(s) to choose. After admission you become a student of the university of the faculty member, but the department or university don't have any say in the admission process. This method is usually used in Europe. This is similar to your "case 1". (Your answer: As I said it can be from a project with a company, a national research grant or other sources).
2. A university or a department in a university announces that there are some number of PhD positions available. You may correspond with some faculty members and get their approval, but the university or department has the final say. i.e. you may get the approval of a faculty member but don't be admitted by university. In this case you apply to university (or department) and they sort the applicants based on some factors and admit those number of people from top of the list that they announced. For example if they announced 15 PhD positions, then the top 15 applicants will be admitted. In this case it is usually asked from applicants to correspond with faculty members and get their approval before applying. This is similar to your "case 2". This method is usually used in Europe. (your answer: The capacity of each faculty member can be found out by corresponding with them.)
3. There is no official announcement from university/department. The university approves new students each semester. There is no limit on the number of positions. The applicant corresponds with a faculty member, and after getting her/his approval applies to the university(department). Since there is no limit on the number of students (in contrast with case 2), almost all students who get the faculty member's approval, will be accepted by the university/department. This method is usually used in north America.
> 0 votes
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Tags: phd, university, advisor
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thread-19151 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19151 | My Supervisors are not helping in writing recommendations letters | 2014-04-10T04:22:35.480 | # Question
Title: My Supervisors are not helping in writing recommendations letters
Maybe they are helping and I am the one who does not know how things really work and that's why I am seeking help here.
I am about to finish my Master in Computer science (waiting for the oral exam). And this is the time to apply for as many as possible PhD programs. The problem is that many of PhD programs ask for at least two recommendation letters (sometimes three) and they do not accept general recommendation letter. Rather, they send to the referee's email and ask him/her to write. Therefore, for each of them my referees should write a separate evaluation. So far I got them to write for three applications (two got rejected already). However, I feel I am still at the beginning and there are so many programs I need to try. I am totally aware of the program suitability and I should not apply for a program that I'm not 100% sure I have good chance.
Now the problem is that I chase my referees to write one letter and sometimes I miss deadlines because they are busy or not responding. I found only this question is very useful here but the issue is I follow all steps there to help them to write my recommendation letters, but they mostly do not. I am one of top 5% students of theirs and I published three papers with them.
I feel like I am stuck between the hammer and the rock here. My question is **what is the best tactic I can follow at this stage?** Cut down the number of programs I apply for? Or talk to the supervisor about the issue. What advice do you have for me? I really appreciate your advice.
# Answer
> 6 votes
I don't know how many letters you're asking people to write for you. However, when there is a separate form that needs to be filled out for each letter, that is asking for a considerable expenditure of time for your advisors. You need to be aware of this, and plan accordingly. You can't ask people to fill out fifty forms for you at once, and then complain when they can't get it done!
So it's not really about applying to "as many PhD programs as possible." Your advisors should be working with you to select the schools and programs you are going to apply to, and you should be working with them to ensure that you are not placing too large a burden on them. This includes giving them a list that clearly states all the schools and programs to which you are applying, as well as the deadlines, **as early as possible**, so that they have time to plan accordingly. Then, if there's no response a few days beforehand, you need to send a polite email.
But to keep sending out request after request for more letters in a season is a good way to annoy your letter writers. Organize and plan in advance.
# Answer
> 1 votes
I think that you should not worry too much; you mentioned that you have already published three papers with them, and that is the important part. For a PhD what it counts more to the admission committee is to see if you have research skills, and that number of papers it is pretty good.
Maybe you should try to approach one of your past professors directly, I mean to drop a visit and tell them about your problem. Take in consideration that most of them have a heavy duty work and that is why they are forgetting about your recommendation letters. Bottom line, approach to them directly and try not only with one, but with every professor that knows you and that have worked directly with you. I believe that they will be more than happy to help you. So relax and good luck!
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Tags: phd, professorship, application, recommendation-letter
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thread-19162 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19162 | Discussing with university professors before being undergraduate | 2014-04-10T12:24:51.177 | # Question
Title: Discussing with university professors before being undergraduate
I have applied for a computer science course at more universities, but one of them really convinced me with a very welcoming attitude. Even if I have not confirmed my place, I have a tutor and he introduced me to some professors in the university to discuss about some topics that I am interested in. But, I find myself in a rather delicate situation. I have just some basic knowledge in their subject, so a discussion with them wouldn't be so entertaining for them, I guess.
Of course, there are a lot of things that I would like to learn, and so many questions to ask, and they seem willingly to answer (actually, ever they do not know that, I will go to their university), so, to what extent may I ask them?
# Answer
Most professors will enjoy talking about their subject with a student who is motivated and interested, so you shouldn't be bashful about asking them questions. Just try to ask "good" questions, as opposed to questions which can be easily answered with a moment's search on Wikipedia.
> 4 votes
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Tags: university, computer-science
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thread-19154 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19154 | Should I treat specialized wikis with the same scrutiny as Wikipedia itself? | 2014-04-10T07:17:50.890 | # Question
Title: Should I treat specialized wikis with the same scrutiny as Wikipedia itself?
Suppose I am making a paper on the impact of popular TV shows on the spread of correct knowledge and facts about current and past events. Shows like South Park, The Simpsons and likely others often feature recent events in their storylines, as well as past events as well. These shows often have specialized wikias, usually in the form of "showname.wikia.com".
These wikias are mainly maintained by a dedicated subgroup of the fanbase for that show, people who usually know a lot about it. This means that the information on there comes from more reliable sources. In addition, since most of the information stems from individual episodes, there usually isn't any information about that episode outside of the wikia or the episode itself.
In cases like this, would it be appropriate to use the wikia as a source?
# Answer
I disagree with the answers that say "There's no difference."
In both cases, you should critically evaluate the content with respect to correctness, reliability, etc. However, there *is* a difference with respect to the *nature* of the content.
Wikipedia (for most topics) serves as a tertiary source. That is, it aggregates primary and secondary sources on a topic, but doesn't add original content or interpretation. (In fact, it is against Wikipedia policy to include original content or interpretation.) In these cases, you should find and use the original source, to verify its contents and to give credit to the real authors.
Dedicated wikis on pop culture often *do* contain original content. And quite a few Wikipedia pages on pop culture do as well, even though they aren't supposed to (see e.g., Mythology of Lost).
For example, the Lost wiki contains a great deal of interpretation and commentary (e.g.: an analysis of recurring themes in the series) - not just a rehash of the episode plots. This makes it a secondary source, not a tertiary source.
You *can* use this **original content** (having critically assessed its correctness and reliability), and of course if you do, you should cite it.
For example, suppose you are writing a paper on "Use of the flash-forward technique in early 21st century television" and you read the following on the Lost wiki (or on an equivalent page on Wikipedia):
> In Lost, the flash-forward technique was introduced in "Through the Looking Glass", although it wasn't made clear that it was a flash-forward until the end of the episode. The first episode to feature a flash-forward that was clearly shown to be one from the start was "The Beginning of the End". "Ji Yeon" was the first episode to intertwine flashbacks with flash-forwards, although the flashback element was only clearly revealed to be in the past at the end of the episode, making its temporality a plot twist.
Even if you then go on and watch the episodes "Through the Looking Glass," "The Beginning of the End," and "Ji Yeon" yourself, or read the episode scripts (i.e., verify the correctness of the claim by checking the primary source), you still cannot claim in your work that you identified the use of flash-forward in Lost all by yourself! The wiki page in this case is a secondary source with an original analysis and interpretation, and you should cite it as such.
> 10 votes
# Answer
I don't think wikia are any different to wikipedia: there is no expert quality-control editorial staff like a proper encyclopaedia has: there are only the site owner(s), and the collective wisdom and collective foolishness of the contributors.
If you are writing about, and analysing, the wikia itself, then cite the wikia.
If, however, you are writing about the thing that the wikia itself writes about, then where possible use the wikia as a lead to find sources, but not as a source in itself. For things such as a preçis of a particular episode, then the production company or original broadcaster may have an episode guide. At very worst, you may have to cite the wikia itself: in which case, be sure to cite a specific version of a page, but IMDB may be a better source.
> 8 votes
# Answer
How do you think Wikipedia is less reliable than a smaller, not widely known topic wiki?
* We all know that Wikipedia is *only about 99% reliable*. \[1\]
and
* We all *know nothing about the reliability* of the topic wiki.
That does not sound like a good base to conclude the topic wiki is more reliable than Wikipedia, - it's reliability is just much more unknown.
The effect is that every second person on the street can explain to you how Wikipedia "is not reliable", "contains errors" -
while you or your Professor have a hard time ensuring that the topic wiki is even somewhat reliable at all!
For example, it's hard to tell whether a *"dedicated subgroup of the \[actual user base\]"* is influenced by some important person or subgroup following some non-neutral motivation. What's missing compared to Wikipedia is transparency... or at least we are not sure it's not missing.
Wikipedia has lots of transparency on even the tiniest discussion.
\[1\] <sub> *The 99% is just an example value for illustration, and wrong for sure. (But which way?)* </sub>
> 0 votes
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Tags: citations, online-resource, wikipedia
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thread-19164 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19164 | What happens if your manuscript is accepted as a filler? | 2014-04-10T12:39:06.013 | # Question
Title: What happens if your manuscript is accepted as a filler?
I just got a response from a journal of the MAA that my manuscript is accepted as a filler.
**The correspondence reads:**
> "The Editorial Board likes your submission and has asked me to move it to the "Filler Archives." Filler pieces are used only on a space available basis. Hence, it is now in a queue with other filler pieces awaiting publication. It is impossible for us to predict if or when we will use it, but if an opportunity to publish it arises, then we will let you know. If you choose to publish it somewhere else, please inform us so that I can remove it from the archives".
Since it is impossible to predict "if or when" they will use my submission, this could mean that I might wait "forever" for publication? I am a little bit confused and I would like if anybody has any similar experience to give me some advice.
*What should I expect about the publication of my paper given its acceptance under "filler" status?*
# Answer
Yes, this is different from being accepted for publication (instead, it's closer to not rejected). It means they might publish it soon, they might publish it at some point further in the future, and they might not publish it at all. I have no idea what the statistics are, and they may vary depending on the current editor in chief.
Here's some background:
The Mathematical Association of America publishes several widely read, high-quality journals that focus on exposition rather than original research (most prominently the American Mathematical Monthly). There's a lot of competition to publish in these journals, which means they reject many submissions, including almost all submissions to the Monthly.
The Monthly has a tradition of using short, interesting submissions as filler (and I think other MAA journals do as well, but I'm not certain). This tradition arose in the print era, when it was more important to ensure that the number and layout of the pages came out right, and it has continued since readers enjoy the filler and there aren't many good places to publish pieces like this. The filler articles are generally not considered particularly important, and they are chosen to fill the available space, to complement the main articles, or just because they caught the editor's eye.
So why would someone allow their submission to be used as filler? One reason is that there may not be other good opportunities for publishing it, but I think the general reason is that the author doesn't consider it a big deal. The typical filler article is short and entertaining, but not a major part of the author's career. If your submission really matters to you, either because you would feel insulted to see it used as filler or because your career would benefit from having it published soon, then the filler archives are probably not a good place for it. (You might get lucky and see it published immediately, but probably not.)
> 23 votes
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Tags: publications, journals, mathematics
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thread-19165 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19165 | How far can research deviate from the original research proposal? | 2014-04-10T12:41:26.980 | # Question
Title: How far can research deviate from the original research proposal?
During the course of a research project, one may have new, more promising, ideas that were not foreseen and thus not covered in the original research proposal. What should one do in this case? Is it all right to work on the new idea under the original proposal? Or should one stick to the lines suggested in the original proposal and perhaps submit another proposal for the new idea although this means that one has to wait before he can work on the new idea?
# Answer
> 9 votes
There's two opposing forces here:
1. You're probably not doing research if you can say exactly what you are going to do beforehand in the research proposal. At the heart of research is exploration. Hence it is expected that you demonstrate some agency and adapt the research as you explore the topic more.
2. On the other hand, the people who fund you are funding you to work in the area of the proposal. Switching to a completely **disconnected** topic on a whim is (generally) not an option.
> How far can research deviate from the original research proposal?
This is difficult to give a concrete answer to and it will differ from fund to fund. Most generally, if you can show the funding body a path from what you proposed to what you ended up doing (i.e., you can show that your intent was to follow the proposal, but you discovered new evidence that a better alternative was possible and you followed that alternative instead), then I think you're on safe ground.
In other cases, it will depend entirely on what your funding body is looking for and how they justify their funds to their bosses. You will have to try understand what the objectives of the funders are: is it publications, creation of a product, teaching and dissemination, contributing towards some high-level national/EU directive, etc.? Will your new direction likewise satisfy those objectives under what was originally agreed in the proposal? These are important questions. (Even if you stuck steadfastly to the topic proposed, groking the motives of your funders and what they will look for during reviews is vital for success. If you understand these motives well enough, then as a side result, you'll have the answer as to how much deviation is acceptable or even desirable.)
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Tags: research-process
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thread-19179 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19179 | Is it advisable to self-advertise in conferences being on the job market | 2014-04-10T16:03:06.670 | # Question
Title: Is it advisable to self-advertise in conferences being on the job market
While giving presentations in conferences or talks in research meetings, is it ok to self-advertise that I'm on the job market (academic or industry)? Is it advisable or does it make more sense to mention that during networking in teams?
# Answer
It is ok, but it may not be ideal. Academia often frowns upon open self-promotion (more than it probably should, in my opinion), and flat out saying that you're on the market in a public presentation seems a little...well, "desperate" is too strong, but the next thing, perhaps.
Some thoughts about how/when/whether to do this:
1. Cultural nuances can vary in very subtle and localized ways. If you are going to a big conference in your profession or field, there must be other people there who are on the job market. Look to them and see how they are behaving: is anyone else advertising their availability in their presentations? If not, maybe don't do it yourself without an especially good reason. If so, look to the audience members and see how they're reacting. A little face-reading will probably tell you whether people are happy to hear this kind of information.
2. Consider trying to disburse this information slightly less directly. For instance, ending a talk with something like "**Please** come talk to me if you're interested in X \[or, by implication, me\]. I would be very interested to take these things further." Then, when someone talks to you one-on-one or in a small group, you can work the fact that you're on the market organically into the conversation.
3. Whenever you go to a conference and you're on the job market, concentrate on making meaningful academic and social connections with people, especially potential employers. Don't prioritize selling yourself directly. If they meet you and like you and your work, you can follow up later by letting them know you're on the market. And you should.
> 11 votes
# Answer
In circumstances such as this, a little levity can help a lot. Outright saying
> I need a job, please hire me!
is going to come across as desperate, melodramatic or tacky. Presenting it a little bit more humorously:
> And if you'd be interested in a postdoctoral associate who can tell you about X, I may be able to help you out. . . .
Or something in a similar vein will not. You'll make your point, but it won't come across too negatively. Of course, if a potential advisor isn't amused by such a comment, this could be problematic—but I'd argue that someone who has no sense of humor whatsoever might not be a good advisor to have in the first place.
> 6 votes
# Answer
I have seen many people do this and I don't see any problem with it.
Does it help? This is much less clear. But it seems very unlikely to hurt.
> 5 votes
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Tags: phd, conference, job
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thread-19175 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19175 | What is the likelihood of a PhD admission if a professor agrees to supervise? | 2014-04-10T14:22:49.913 | # Question
Title: What is the likelihood of a PhD admission if a professor agrees to supervise?
A very nervous potential PhD student here!
Long story short, I have been applying to quite a few bioinformatics PhD programs in the US and been rejected from most of them. I did my masters in the UK, and had unfortunately fallen ill during its course and had to take a break so didn't end up doing great. My undergrad GPA is ok (3.12). I did however do good work during my Undergrad and masters, and have a really supporting recommendation letter to show for it.
I had a very promising interview with a professor from a Flagship State University who has agreed to supervise and fund me (Research assistantship). Suffice to say our research interests match a lot and I also think the professor would be a great supervisor. The professor has also been actively following up on my application within the department.
My question here is, what are my chances of getting admitted?
The department doesn't have a "PhD program" per se (i.e. traditional program where students are admitted and then find a supervisor). Students seem to contact supervisor and find funding through that route and then apply. I am not sure how the application processes work in the US.
# Answer
> 7 votes
Your odds are better than they might be otherwise, but they're not necessarily 100%, either.
Part of the issue is that some schools may not recognize or honor such "claims" or "gentlemen's agreements" to fund people after they are accepted. More importantly, the issue is that US admissions are typically done at the departmental level, not the faculty member level. That means that a professor telling you that you'll be admitted is not necessarily a guarantee, because the admissions committee has to make that call. (On the other hand, if the advisor in question chairs or is a powerful member of the admissions committee, that changes things substantially!)
# Answer
> 2 votes
In addition to @aeismail answer; I would say it depends to the university policy/routine in handling applications.
Most likely there are three entities involved in any application:
* School/Faculty of Graduate Studies (GS)
* The department
* The potential supervisor
Your chances depends on how applications are usually processed between these three entities.
* Some schools they just need a commitment from a faculty member to accept you; ( that is, GS decision always align with the supervisor decision).
* Others the final decision is made through GS - after receiving the input from the department.
# Answer
> 1 votes
*This answer is coming from my experience at one major research school in the US.*
This is department dependent. In some sciences (e.g. those where many professors have their own "lab"), it's essentially a *prerequisite* for you to have a professor who is willing to work with you and let you join their lab. So, in this situation, having this commitment from a professor is not a particularly strong "+" for you, but not having such a commitment would probably rule you out entirely.
In other departments (e.g. my PhD department: Statistics), a vast majority (if not all) PhD students did not have an advisory commitment from any faculty member before applying. However, it did appear that those who ultimately failed the qualifying process (exams, etc.) were those who had not had significant research progress with any faculty. I don't know if this was a causal relationship or just the simple fact that those who were working on research were those that were generally better equipped to pass the exams.
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Tags: phd, graduate-admissions, application, research-assistantship
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thread-19202 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19202 | How can you get to do a Short Oral Presentation at the International Congress of Mathematicians? | 2014-04-11T02:14:08.960 | # Question
Title: How can you get to do a Short Oral Presentation at the International Congress of Mathematicians?
I am wondering, how hard or competitive is it to obtain a slot for short oral presentation(20-minute talk) at the International Congress of Mathematicians?
Generally, how many slots are allotted for such presentation?
# Answer
> 3 votes
Short answer: I don't know, I've never been on an Organizing Committee.
Long answer: You likely can look at statistics for attendance versus capacity of venue. At the last few International Congresses I have attended, usually there are about 2000 or more from the host country, and anywhere from 1000 to 2000 from other countries. There are about 20 plenary lectures, about 150 invited lectures, about 1000 Oral Communications and not quite as many posters. Also some interesting prize lectures, roundtables, and a few other items. (I am doing this from memory. I don't think attendance has surpassed 5000 lately, but I won't guarantee it. I could be off on any of the numbers by a factor of 2, but I don't think so.)
I have submitted abstracts for short communications since 1994, and have had them accepted in all but one case (and in that case there were facilities for last minute "impromptu" sessions: the organizers kindly let me have a slot for one of those). My unscientific guess is that the rejection rate is determined mostly by capacity, and that about half the local attendees and more than half of the non-local attendees submit abstracts, which would lead to about 2500 petitions for 2000 slots. My estimate of the population whose desire to satisfy vanity overcomes their fear of public speaking would suggest that 2000 petitions are for oral communication, and so roughly half are filled.
*FUZZY DATA:* I submitted two abstracts this year, one a week or so before the first deadline and one a few days afterward, possibly after the first and before the extended deadline. They were given designation numbers below 1900; this supports my guesstimates.
*LESS FUZZY DATA:* at this writing, about one month before the 2014 Congress, registrations are pouring in and number near 2900. There are almost 500 posters accepted and a little over 700 short communications, with some designation numbers reaching over 2300. Not substantive, but if the code numbers reflect submissions, this would imply an acceptance rate near 7 out of 24 for oral presentations, and a little less than half for all presentations. Off by less than an order of magnitude.
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Tags: conference, mathematics, presentation
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thread-1206 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1206 | How many people read an individual journal article? | 2012-04-20T00:29:48.290 | # Question
Title: How many people read an individual journal article?
### General background
Some time ago, I was reading a blog post, where there was some discussion about how many people read journal articles. I think that such an estimate is important when trying to assess the impact of research on society. However, whereas internet sites readily track usage. Such information seems a little more difficult to come by when it comes to readership for a particular journal article.
### Initial Ideas
* **Articles vary**: Obviously journal articles vary in many ways and just as with citation counts, readership is likely to be highly skewed, perhaps something like a power function. In addition to academic impact, presumably articles that are available for free on the internet are read more.
* **Time since publication**: The number of reads increases over time, but the rate of readership presumably varies over time (perhaps a spike on initial release, and then gradual decline as relevance dissipates).
* **Definitions of reading vary**: Read counts would also increase or decrease based on how reading is defined. At the low end is a glance at an abstract. At the high end is carefully reading the entire article. I'd be happy with a working definition that involved reading at least two pages.
### Initial Data
* PlosOne article statistics: As a very rough guide, it suggests that mean views per article is around 800 per year.
* Journal of Vision: this article reports some download statistics: "In the most recent accounting in July, 2008, the top five articles were each downloaded between 1,993 and 3,478 times."
* Some journals list subscription counts
### Initial Guess
I find it useful to have a ball park estimate of these things. My own initial guess, based on minimal data, is that readership is between 50 and 1000 times the citation count for the article. Linking the estimate to citation count makes it easier to estimate for a given article and should incorporate effects like time and journal prestige.
### Question
* What is a good estimate of how many people read a given journal article?
* What data and sources of information justify this estimate?
* Is there any established literature that can inform such an estimate?
# Answer
> 17 votes
Sounds like a Fermi Problem :)
A question I asked myself recently, based on the many cases of plagiarism by top-politicians in Germany in humanities, was, are in humanities more articles/texts published than scholars can actually read completly. The amount of copied text in single phd thesis showed by plagiarism-detection communities in Germany like *Vroniplag* or *Guttenplag* is shocking to me. Often 50% of text is not marked correctly as citation. Even the supervisors at the local universities look like they never read some of these thesis completly. I really hope this is not representative, but fear it might be the tip of the iceberg in humanities (in Germany).
Personally, coming and working in a STEM field, I did a very specialized thesis, there are often less than a dozen groups worldwide working on such a narrow-specialized topic (matter of scientific competition/finding a niche, time, expertise and lab hardware in such fields). **So there will be articles in peer-reviewed journals that are not really interesting to more than 20-50 researcher and probably a similar number of industry-researchers worldwide in STEM** (competition between companies and research groups being not that different due to economic contraints). Without modern search engines, most non-scholars/private men would have a hard time to find such articles. This is another point in your estimation. The reader count for nature/sciene vs. very specialized journals varies a lot, I don't think any average number really helps you a lot or is that interesting. If you know your specialized field, you should notice pretty fast studying some journals, how many scholars have really a interest in that field.
Your PlosOne link is interesting. I can back this up a bit to give you at least a rough magnitude of order, what the reader count of top, specialized, ... journals is. I think it's quite normal, to read articles not completely (even if you cite them), but I take a close look on articles I downloaded, often due to the fact that I use many keywords and google operators to really filter out the stuff I'm looking for. This is something that varies also a lot between different scholars/students. I'm often shocked how students make use of search engines, if it is laziness or ignorance of search operators. This can save you so much reading time. **Therefore, I think the extrapolated reader count based on citation factor might be more representative and reliable than using site views/downloads** due to scholars, private people, laymen often downloading articles with information they didn't look for because of bad search engine use. Growing redundancy/plagiarism is a further factor here.
Some possible heuristics:
* comparison of published aricles per month and web site/interface visitors per month on download platforms like PlosOne, arxiv, nature.
arxiv has around 6000 published articels per month, unique visits 100000, 12,4 million downloads by academic institutions, 50 million overall vs. 12x6000 articles 2011 means **downloads/view of abstract of around 170 (I used 12,4 million here)**, of course, that doesnt count articles not published in that year, **so the average read count of a single arxiv article is probably lower than 170 and more touching the 20-50 mark I explained above. But here you have IMO a reasonable and quite objective minimum and maximum limit for a scientific article other scholars are really interested in, 50-170**
nature has 900000 unique visits per month, around 200 articles per month, so you see why having an article published in nature is probably more worth than 10 articles on arxiv, PlosOne or many other specialized journals in a distinct branch, even if they are peer reviewed ;)
* looking up bibliographies of a some phd thesis in your field at your local university, the number of cited articles is in STEM often in the range of 50-200 (You see even here it varies a lot what a single phd student will/has to read). Of course you do not cite all articles you read, but the factor shouldn't be higher than 2 between (or your search engine use is imho suboptimal) cited and read articles. Considering the phd student will publish 3-5 (in STEM reasonable number or 1 nature article :) ) articles during his phd work and multiplying 3-5\*20-50 (average read count by institutional scholars) you also get the number of articles in a phd thesis bibliography of 50-200. Pure Chance?! Looks like a strange calculation, but there is a link between how much article input a average scholar needs and how much output he creates (thats why I multiply both values) and it strengthens my experience/analysis above that 10-100 readers is a reasonable magnitude of order for people being really interested in an single average article. To me it doesn't look like pure chance, but that's the main problem with Fermi questions and answers :)
PS: notice this analysis is focused on STEM, I believe the average read count is much lower in humanities and side-effects like different languages and plagiarism seem to play a bigger role to make a really objective guesstimate
# Answer
> 4 votes
Smithsonian.com recently noted that there are about 1.8 million scholarly articles and scientific papers published each year in 28,000 journals. About half of these are not read by anyone other than the author, a journal editor, and a couple of reviewers. They report that 90 percent are never cited by other papers.
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Tags: journals, bibliometrics
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thread-19178 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19178 | Advantages and disadvantages of doing a PostDoc | 2014-04-10T15:26:02.713 | # Question
Title: Advantages and disadvantages of doing a PostDoc
Maybe the answer to this question varies depending on the field of study. I am asking it from an Engineering perspective. I am currently enrolled in a PhD program in Mechanical Engineering (carried out with an industrial partner) and would like to join a research department in the aeronautical/aerospace industry.
For PhD students in a similar situation, what would you consider to be the main advantages (and disadvantages) of doing a Post-Doc ? Should you target a better ranked university than where you did your PhD, same level or lower ? or should you rather join industry straight after finishing the PhD ?
Feel free to share your thoughts and experience. There's probably multiple answers to this question.
# Answer
> 7 votes
I have a situation somewhat related to yours: I did a PhD in engineering with an industrial partner, and I'm now a post-doc researcher in a reputable university. It sounds, when you say 'doing a postdoc', that you have the impression that it is the logical 'next level' in the sequence: bachelors - masters - PhD - … but it is not.
There are no 'advantages' or 'disadvantages' in being a postdoc researcher for a while. It's just that, with some rare exceptions, you will not get a **faculty** position right after you graduate from your PhD.
The time spent as a postdoc is usually the time where you gain experience, hopefully make your peers aware of your existence, publish (or finish publishing) the chapters of your PhD thesis and maybe that study that you feel will make you stand out, etc. in other words: giving yourself the pedigree that will make you interesting for an **academic** hiring committee.
Since you have no intentions of becoming a professor, there are no real reason to 'do a postdoc', unless there aren't any other options (which I assume is not the case for you, as an engineer with experience in translational research/industry).
# Answer
> 3 votes
You would like to join a research department in the aeronautical/aerospace industry. It seems to me joining industry straight after finishing the PhD is the most logical next step for you.
I can think of only two reasons you want to do postdoc, one is that you really want to stay in Academia and the other is you cannot find a good industry research job after you get PhD.
If you have some unfinished academic research after you have done PhD, doing postdoc may or may not let you finish it depending on what postdoc you can find. But, once you go that route, you may be further from industry. Good job opportunities are sometimes instantaneous. Grab it or lose it.
I am an industry retiree from the sector you are in. I know for fact that they need and they should have more PhDs like you to do more research.
If you want to do postdoc for whatever reasons and your ultimate goal is to join industry, I think the rank of the university you do postdoc does not matter much. The usefulness of the research topic does matter. Industry wants profitability.
Lastly, if you really want to stay in Academia, then don't go to industry after PhD. You could feel unhappy. In that case, postdoc with high rank university is what you want to do.
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Tags: research-process, postdocs, engineering
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thread-19199 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19199 | What are the obligations of a principal investigator? | 2014-04-10T22:41:30.630 | # Question
Title: What are the obligations of a principal investigator?
Obviously a Principal Investigator (PI) has many responsibilities toward his or her subordinates, including mentoring them, helping to direct their research, providing funding, and resolving difficulties.
But, in practice, it is often possible for a PI to avoid many of these responsibilities and "get away with it". By this I mean that failing to address these responsibilities has little effect on the PI's own career.
For example, it is often understood that a PI should have some input when PhD students are writing manuscripts. A PI with a large lab may have a policy of leaving students to fend for themselves in this regard. With some intelligent selection at the hiring stage, this PI may ensure that most of his or her students are already capable of writing papers with no assistance. The few that slip through will fail to have a productive PhD, but this will not directly impact the PIs career all that much.
Similarly, a PI may be unable to come up with good research ideas, but this can be compensated for by actively seeking out graduate students who do have good ideas. Since it is rare to explicitly state in science who had the idea for a project, the PIs CV will still look good thanks to the papers the students end up publishing.
However, an example of an obligation is applying for grants. If a PI is ineffective at securing grants, it is very unlikely that their career will not suffer. Students and junior lab personnel simply don't have the knowledge or experience needed to put together a good application, and while post-docs can secure their own funding, the majority of funds in a typical lab is brought in by the PI. If the PI decides to not bother himself with obtaining funding, the lab will become financially hamstrung, research will suffer, and even to a casual outside observer it will be obvious that the scientific output of the research group is appreciably constrained.
My question is, which responsibilities cannot be avoided by a PI without necessarily producing severe negative consequences? If after a cursory examination, a PI's career seems to be going well, which responsibilities can we be certain have not been neglected?
# Answer
> My question is, which responsibilities cannot be avoided by a PI without necessarily producing severe negative consequences? If after a cursory examination, a PI's career seems to be going well, which responsibilities can we be certain that they have not neglected?
In my (extensive) experience with large labs, the only responsibilities that a senior professor can never delegate are networking, certain types of review work (e.g., reviewing for well-respected grants) and certain committee / administration / board work. Basically everything else seems to be fair game.
I find it interesting that your prime example are grant proposals - in many groups in my field, writing grant proposals is mostly a postdoc responsibility, so that is certainly *not* a duty that is never delegated. However, that might be an european speciality.
I would say your question is actually standing on ill assumptions. You assume that successful profs. are distinguished from no successful ones via the things that they still do themselves. In practice, this is generally not correct. In my experience, most large labs work well because **the prof. has a track record of acquiring good people to do things for her/him**, not because (s)he does so much her/himself. Further, successful profs. are able to establish mutually beneficial relations with those good people. That is, if you want long-lasting success, you cannot expect e.g., your postdocs to just write grant proposals for you all day because you told them to. You need to find a model how **it is actually in their best interest to do so**. All successful profs. I know are supremely good at binding strong people to them via the power of mutual interests.
Now, all of this is not to say that a prof. **has** to delegate everything, or that any given professor even wants to. I know many successful professors that would never delegate some aspects of their job (for instance teaching), either because of a sense of responsibility or because they just honestly like doing certain things themselves. This is just to say that I have seen almost anything being delegated in different large groups.
> 4 votes
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Tags: professorship, responsibilities
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thread-19198 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19198 | How to make suggestions to professors on how to teach? | 2014-04-10T22:13:01.157 | # Question
Title: How to make suggestions to professors on how to teach?
This is my first time posting here and I apologize if this is not in the relevant forum or site. My question is: is it possible to approach professors to changing their teaching style? and if so, how would it be best to approach this topic?
# Answer
> 4 votes
It depends on what your goal is.
If you have a particular course and a particular professor, and you want to see changes before the course ends, you may need some political power or not. Many professors appreciate feedback, some don't, and you can usually tell by noting which ones ask for it. If they do ask, follow their format for giving feedback, and add a note saying that you have more specific suggestions if they wish to discuss it further. If they don't, you will either have to drop it or try a different tactic.
If the course has teaching assistants, you can usually give some feedback through them, although to promote understanding, you might give them a copy in writing to hand to the professor. If there are none, you may have to submit feedback through the department; there usually are people in that department in charge of the quality of teaching, and they can advise you at least as well as on this forum.
If the issue is more with a person than a situation, then I recommend getting advice from colleagues of that person on how to make such an approach. Through the department is likely the best way, but it highly depends on the situation.
If the issue is more with a class structure than a person, you can make suggestions, but they will likely be referred to the next class.
The applicability of all of the above is subject to class size, level of instruction, and many other factors. Without more specifics, I imagine your best answer in the long run is by using official channels. That way if anything goes wrong, the process can be blamed and not you.
# Answer
> 3 votes
One thing you might to do is go to office hours and ask thoughtfully prepared questions.
"I looked over my notes on X, and I still don't understand how it's related to the rest of the material. Could you please explain further?
"The theory is interesting, but I'm still confused as to how this applies to examples. Could you suggest where I should learn about these?"
"When you talk about Y, I gather I'm supposed to have mastered that already, but actually I haven't. Where should I learn about this?"
Possible outcomes vary. Maybe you will find that you signed up for a different course than you should have; maybe the professor won't care; but possibly, the professor will take your questions as some evidence that h/she should adjust his/her teaching strategy a little bit. (And will also answer them!)
# Answer
> 1 votes
I think there is a misunderstanding. Although professors are hired by the university to serve the learning experience of the students (among other things), they are not "hired" by the students. This is a logical misunderstanding in US universities where students pay tuition but this model does not apply to the rest of the world. In this sense, professors, like all regular employees should and are evaluated (in terms of performance) only by their employer (university / state) and not the customer / student. Also, professors stay in many cases, for many years in the same institution where students (undergraduates mostly) stay for a limited amount of time. Therefore although the student might or not pay for the university services he is bound to leave eventually, whereas the professor probably outstays generations of students.
With that being said, one student's opinion is not really relevant. If the university has some sort of professor evaluation by the students, then the student by all means should clearly express his opinion. But going to a professor and just saying "I do not like your teaching style. Change it" is simply rude (and I say that as a student myself). How can I tell someone how to do his work when I have not done it myself? The same goes for all employees from waiters to bouncers (there such comments might get you in trouble), unless the employee has been rude to you and you must defend yourself. In all other cases, you should not tell people how to do their job, you can only tell them how you like to be treated. If you do not like the way they do business you must find someone else that suits your style. In universities where the professor grades you (and not the other way around) I would suggest even extra caution.
You should also not forget that your guess on what is wrong or right is based on only one opinion (yours and your friends) where the professor has based his teaching style on hundreds - thousands of students. His style might or might not suit you. There is not one-size-fits-all. But why he has to change his style for you, when the things you propose might alienate other students? The answer is simple. In 99% of the cases he simply will not. Also consider the fact that probably your comment on his teaching style will not even be an original one (somewhen, somewhere some other student might have expressed a similar discontent to yours).
So, what can you do? Negotiate. Ask him / her for more slides if he has any; Ask him for more personal assignments or for pointing you to extra reading material, basically everything that will help you benefit more from his class. Ask him to repeat what you did not understand. But most of all ask nicely and with respect. That way if he says no, it will be his fault and not yours.
# Answer
> 0 votes
I suggest the following:
1. Ask students who have take that course before.
2. Look at ratemyprofessors website for his/her reviews.
3. If there is no past info about him, then ask a "**smart**"/"deep" questions POLITELY in class. If he get angry, then he probably not like your suggestion to change teach style.
4. Ask other students too to see if they have same problems. Then, you will know that its not just you. If only you have problem and most people "get it", then you can take their help instead of prof.
5. If all 1 to 4 are okay, then politely suggest improvements. Show him what you have not understand and how he can explain better. If you need more problem solving in a class, then request for it. Choose words carefully.
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thread-19223 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19223 | Panic Attacks during an exam - Can the student be re-tested? | 2014-04-11T15:05:30.917 | # Question
Title: Panic Attacks during an exam - Can the student be re-tested?
I am a student who is currently undergoing therapy for mental health issues and I seem to be making good progress towards normalcy according to my therapist. Recently, I took an exam for a co-ordinated course and I completely panicked on the exam. I made a brave attempt to remain calm and answer the question to the best of my abilities and could only manage to earn 5 points overall.
Based on my predicament, can I approach my professor and department chairperson with a request to re-take the exam? I can of course ask my therapist to provide documentation detailing my case. Do universities make allowances for students who can demonstrate a genuine case for a panic attack?
**EDIT:** I do realize that I should contact the counselling center beforehand to make arrangements to take the test there but unfortunately, I was doing quite well and my therapist did not see a need to supply me with a note documenting my need. I completely blacked out when I saw the questions as they were quite long and bore no semblance to the practice exams or the homework questions.
# Answer
> 46 votes
If you are in the US, your school is required by law (the Americans with Disabilities Act, often abbreviated ADA) to make reasonable academic accommodations for students with disabilities. This includes mental illness.
In the US, schools have a formal ADA policy that describes the procedure for requesting accommodations. This includes a description of *who* to contact to make these arrangements. This person is trained in dealing with these issues.
Your next step should be to contact this person, find out what can be done about this exam, and find out what accommodations they can offer for future exams. (For example, they may help you arrange to take future exams in a separate room with no other students and/or with extended time, which may help you stay calm.)
# Answer
> 15 votes
> Based on my predicament, can I approach my professor and department chairperson with a request to re-take the exam? I can of course ask my therapist to provide documentation detailing my case.
Approach only the professor first. If you are already escalating to the department head in your first mail, the professor may not take it well. That being said, I see no reason why you should *not* contact her/him.
> Do universities make allowances for students who can demonstrate a genuine case for a panic attack?
Most universities have a contact person responsible for accessibility and non-discrimination of students with disabilities. I am not sure whether they are in general also responsible for documented cases of mental health issues, but it would not surprise me. In the future, it makes sense to get in touch with the responsible contact person *before* the exam, so as to clarify whether something can be done in advance to make taking the exam easier for you.
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Tags: exams, health
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thread-19220 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19220 | Easier to obtain permanent position in Europe after being faculty in US? | 2014-04-11T13:44:58.533 | # Question
Title: Easier to obtain permanent position in Europe after being faculty in US?
I am currently considering junior faculty positions in the US and Europe—my partner is European, and for a variety of reasons (family, etc.) we would like to end up there in the long term. Being from the US, however, it is unclear to me which is a better strategy for obtaining a permanent position:
1. get tenure (or at least, "be successful") at a good North American department and use that leverage to negotiate a position in Europe, or
2. spend that same time / energy making personal connections in Europe.
The reason that the answer is not clear to me is that 1. the country in question has a relatively small number of permanent positions, and 2. my impression is that in many European systems, personal contacts still have a rather significant effect (even among candidates with excellent qualifications).
I am interested in both **quantiative data** (e.g., what percent of hires are domestic vs. foreign in various countries/systems) as well as personal experience.
Thanks!
# Answer
Are you actually deciding between particular positions in Europe and in the US? It's not clear to me what you are actually suggesting doing in option 2. There's no question that you should be making personal connections in Europe, particularly whatever country you're hoping to move to, but unless you have a job offer there, you should just try to find a position where you can be successful and reasonably happy, whichever continent it's on.
I think it is true that it's dangerous to take a position, thinking you'll move later. A lot of people find it harder than they think; in a lot of cases this is more because they get settled and lose their motivation, rather than it actually being out of reach.
As for how serious a possibility it will be to move later if you're starting a position in the US, I think this is the wrong forum to ask. You should find a senior person you can somewhat trust in your target country and ask them (if you don't have such a person, try to cultivate them). It's going to vary a lot depending on the country, the field, and unfortunately with time (just because it seems hard now, the situation might change later), so I don't think general facts will help you much.
> 3 votes
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Tags: job, job-search
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thread-19231 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19231 | Submitting Long Papers versus Short Papers | 2014-04-11T16:54:53.837 | # Question
Title: Submitting Long Papers versus Short Papers
I am new really to submitting papers for publication. I have an upcoming deadline for a conference. My paper seems to fit the guidelines for a long paper but it is closer to short paper length than long paper length.
* How could I submit it?
* Could I submit it as both a long paper and short paper?
* If I submit is as a long paper, could it be accepted as a short paper if it were rejected as a long paper?
# Answer
> 12 votes
> How could I submit it?
The length guidelines are generally for *maximum* length. You can submit a "long paper" that is shorter than the maximum length allowed for a long paper.
I've published papers 25% under limit without any comments from reviewers on the length. If there is enough original research content for consideration as a full paper, you should be OK.
However, you should consider whether it actually is substantial enough for a full-length paper if it's so short (your advisor can help you make this determination).
Whatever you do, *don't* pad the paper with unnecessary text (fluff) and/or giant images to fill pages so it looks longer. This lowers the quality of your paper. (As a reviewer, I have seen authors do this and it looks *terrible*.) If you decide you need to add to your paper to make it substantial enough to be a long paper, then you have to add substantial content.
> Could I submit it as both?
Not unless the conference explicitly says this is allowed (usually it isn't). Submitting the same (or a similar) paper as both a long and short paper will get both papers rejected as duplicate submissions.
> If I submit is as long could it be accepted as short if it were rejected as long?
This depends on the conference. It will either say something like, "Rejected long papers will *not* be considered as short papers" or "Rejected long papers *may* be considered as short papers."
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Tags: publications, conference, paper-submission
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thread-19240 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19240 | When citing a paper on arXiv, how important is the category? | 2014-04-11T15:00:32.197 | # Question
Title: When citing a paper on arXiv, how important is the category?
The arXiv documentation says that we should reference arXiv documents using references of the form:
```
arXiv:YYMM.NNNNv# [category]
```
e.g.:
```
arXiv:0706.1234v1 [math.FA]
```
However, most papers that I am aware of do not bother to include the category. i.e. they have references of the form:
```
arXiv:YYMM.NNNNv#
```
Furthermore, I can't find a BibTeX bibliography style which automatically includes the arXiv category (taken from the `primaryClass` in BibLaTeX).
Also, the arXiv documentation page "Preparing TeX/LaTeX Papers for Submission" suggests that arXiv documents should be referenced using just the arXiv ID, e.g. `arXiv:0705.1234` (i.e. without the category).
My question is: is it OK to produce a list of references *without* any arXiv categories (i.e. just `arXiv:0705.1234`)?
# Answer
The arXiv documentation page on "Understanding the arXiv identifier" contains the following sentence, which directly answers my question:
"*Note that the identifier no longer contains any classification information and thus reclassification after an article is announced is possible.*"
> 7 votes
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Tags: citations, arxiv, bibtex
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thread-19133 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19133 | What are the things one should consider when invited to contribute a book chapter? | 2014-04-09T18:07:47.463 | # Question
Title: What are the things one should consider when invited to contribute a book chapter?
What are the things one should consider, as a postdoc, before accepting or rejecting an invitation to contribute a book chapter? The proposed book is a handbook in a developing field of engineering.
# Answer
When I get an invitation to contribute a book chapter (or conference paper in an invited session), I usually ask myself the following questions:
1. Can I have a reasonable contribution ready for the proposed submission deadline?
2. Is the venue I am invited to a good fit and does it provide the best possible visibility for my contribution?
3. Do I want to invite the person inviting me to similar occasions in the future?
Ideally, you should be able to answer at least questions 1 and 2 with "yes" before accepting the invitation. If your answer to question 2 would be "no", it may still be wise to accept the invitation in view of question 3. For this type of invitations, I would try to find a smaller contribution which fits the visibility of the proposed publication venue. In a book chapter, for example a summarizing synthesis of some of your previous results might be appropriate.
> 7 votes
# Answer
It almost certainly won't earn you any money.
It probably won't be read by many people. It will be cited by even fewer.
The collaboration may lead to future projects together.
It may involve a lot of work.
You might enjoy the process. Or hate it.
It may or may not help your career progression, depending on your field, your career to date, and the posts you apply to. If it's a book that will become a standard for one or more taught courses, your contribution may be crucial for your future teaching career.
In this particular case, when the putative author is a rising young authority in an engineering field, it's a rapidly-developing field that's attracting significant international interest, and many universities are introducing new courses in the area, then, (depending on the publisher, the other authors, and the other chapters) there's potential for the book to have quite a significant audience, so contributing to the book chapter would be attractive.
> 9 votes
# Answer
I would like to add the following:
* If there are other, more experienced, persons in the specific field, who would likely do a better job than himself, perhaps it is best for him, for the sake of all the potential readers of the book, to decline the invitation and recommend these other people instead.
* An invitation is something that is unexpected, and meeting it would likely require an extra effort in addition to his normal responsibilities. Unless he is able to manage his resources well without encroaching what belongs to his family, for example, then perhaps it would be prudent, despite all the prospects it might offer, to decline the invitation.
> 1 votes
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Tags: publications, books
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thread-19229 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19229 | Is there a reliable indicator for which which NIH RFAs are open to post-docs? | 2014-04-11T16:43:39.607 | # Question
Title: Is there a reliable indicator for which which NIH RFAs are open to post-docs?
I haven't found any guidance on NIH's websites so far whether or not someone who has a Ph.D. but is not yet full-time faculty (e.g. post-doc) is eligible to be named as a co-PI on an R01 grant.
For that matter, the individual eligibility criteria are really vague-- it's not clear that they even exclude a post-doc from being a sole PI on an R01 grant. That makes me think that I'm looking in entirely the wrong place to see if I am eligible for a given RFA.
Is there a foolproof indicator of whether or not a given RFA is open to post-docs either as sole PIs or co-PIs?
Thanks.
# Answer
> 5 votes
Ask your institution's Sponsored Research Office (SRO). These organizations are often called by other names like Office of Sponsored Projects (or Programs), the Sponsored Programs Office, or something similar. It's their job to understand the rules and regulations associated with external grant funding for research institutions.
In my experience with NSF (not NIH), the eligibility requirements for institutions and PIs are spelled out in each RFA/RFP. I have frequently seen limits on the number of proposals that a PI or institution can submit, and there are frequent limits on the types of institutions that may submit (e.g. 4-year, degree granting colleges and universities only, etc.), but I have never seen a limit in the RFA/RFP for the qualifications of the PI or co-PI.
My institution, however, does put limits on who may submit. Post docs, as far as I can remember, are not given blanket authorization to submit. They, and even more junior staff, are allowed to submit grant proposals only with an exception as approved by their unit head (dept. chair, center director, etc.) and, I think, the VP for Research's office. These are, in my experience, always granted for post docs.
That being said, the proposal preparation guide requires you to describe your qualifications for submitting the research, including prior work, prior grant support, and other relevant material. If you haven't been a co-PI before, a proposal with you as PI probably won't look as strong to the review panel. It's probably best to start as a co-PI with a more senior, experienced researcher as PI. This is true even if you will primarily lead the day to day work of the project.
This is all based on my experience with NSF, but I don't think NIH is much different.
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Tags: postdocs, funding
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