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thread-20963 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20963 | Going back to university after suspension, how do I move past the shame? | 2014-05-14T21:31:25.640 | # Question
Title: Going back to university after suspension, how do I move past the shame?
I was suspended for 1 year from my university for copying an assignment from an online source. There were several extenuating circumstances but I won't go into them as they are irrelevant, I did cheat and I do deserve the punishment I was given - that is not the question.
After I found out my sentence, I found it very hard to attend classes relating to that department, or to look professors or my deans and advisors in the face and carry out conversations with them. The professor who's class I cheated in is one I was hoping to talk to as she is in the same area that I hope to go into one day and I really enjoyed her class, teaching methods, and enthusiasm for the subject. I also am extremely saddened by the fact that since I'm a fourth year, this means all my peers will be graduating and will have left by the time I come back and I'm finding it hard to cope with the thought of being without them for the rest of my undergraduate career.
My question is how do I cope with the stress and shame I am feeling and how do I get over that so that I can return to the academic environment in 1 year? Can I ever approach that professor again, or should I avoid her? I'm asking this here because I'd like the opinions of those who are on the other side of this.
# Answer
> 55 votes
The university *suspended* you, which is a signal that it is still willing to have you as a student after serving your suspension. (If it wasn't, you'd have been expelled.) Therefore, upon your return, this professor (and every other professor) has the same professional obligations towards you that she would to any other student: to accept you in her classes, to treat you with courtesy and respect, to help you learn the material, to grade you fairly based on your work and the standards of the course. It is possible that your assignments may face extra scrutiny for plagiarism, but hopefully that is irrelevant as you're not going to do it again.
It's possible that relations may be strained between you, but I think this may be more on your side than hers. Speaking for myself, I certainly find it disappointing when a student cheats, but it's not as if I'm going to declare a personal vendetta against them and seethe with fury every time I pass them in the hall. That would be unprofessional, and not worth the emotional energy anyway. We go through the disciplinary process, I hope that they learn their lesson, and it's back to business as usual. If they are able to turn things around and show genuine interest in and dedication to their studies, for me that's ultimately uplifting.
So if you want to take her class at a later date, by all means do so. You might find it helpful to talk with her first: express your regret over the incident, as well as your continued interest in your subject and in completing your degree. I think it's very likely this will help clear the air for both of you. It would be wise for you to be extra diligent about quotations, citing sources, etc, and to consult your professor if you have the slightest question about any such issues.
Maybe she won't invite you to dinner, and she probably won't be the best person to write you a letter of recommendation. (Even if you get to be on better terms, which I hope you will, she might still feel it's her duty to mention the cheating incident in any letter she writes, which is probably not good for you.) But I don't see any reason you can't have the same basic educational experience as any other student.
# Answer
> 9 votes
Adjunct faculty/instructor point of view here. My recommendation to you: **replace your "shame" with work and achievement you can be proud of!**
Put that time you aren't spending with your already-graduated friends to academic use. Attend all your classes (unless you're contagious). Be on time with your attendance and assignments. Pay attention and ask questions. Go to your professors'/instructors' office hours even if you are sure you know what's going on in class -- especially those professors aware of the suspension. Maybe bring along an assignment you're working on to confirm you're on the right track -- and conveniently prove that it's really you who is doing it.
As you're a fourth-year student, you should occasionally (or often) be able to exceed the requirements for an assignment. Just don't make it harder to grade your work... an extra citation or three (that you actually understand and use) in a research paper; really good comments in your computer code should be fine. Even just emailed questions can go a long way to demonstrate your engagement and effort. (There are bad questions: "What is the answer to #7" is probably an example of a bad question.)
I agree with other posters (especially Nate) who say that the professors/instructors will mostly forgive your mistake. Expect that your work will be looked at more carefully, at least for a while.
There are few things I find more annoying than students "sharing" work. I can't let it slide morally and it wastes a lot of my time making sure my suspicion is correct before I more forward with it. So, I don't want to read your letter about the past; that's just more wasted time. Until I see different behavior, it's just more B.S. (*not* meaning Bachelor's of Science) that was quite possibly written by a helicopter parent and shows more effort that was put into the assignment that caused the problem anyway. Actions speak louder than words.
In the end, I don't remember who cheated; I do remember students who excelled in their work. (Edit: Or at least, I try to; I'm actually pretty bad with names and faces :-( )
# Answer
> 3 votes
To err is human. There is no need to condemn yourself. I am glad you understood your mistake and I am sure that you learnt the lesson. I think that you can just directly talk to the professor(and the advisor) explaining that you regret and you understood your mistake (of course this method strongly depends on your professor's personality). Just make the situation clear and leave it behind because what hapened, happened. Act. Concentrate on the future and direct all your energy to prove that you are strong and wise. I am sure the professor will understand and encourage you (they are all wise and mature people and they understand that bad things happen and people might need another chance). Concerning the peers, if you have some friends in your class, this is a good test for them because friends should support you in hardships. If they are just classmates, then don't warry, you will have good classmates again. p.s. Just look at this as a life test you have to overcome. Don't cheat, deal with it.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I am assuming that you've been sent down this year.
To expand a bit on Paul Garrett's comment to aeismail's answer, you should write a letter to the professor. This letter should be contrite, apologetic, and demonstrate that you've learned your lesson. You might discuss how you plan to remedy what caused the problem and how you would handle it differently during your year off.
This contradicts the previous sentence but: Do NOT even refer to the 'extenuating' circumstances. Whatever it was, you should have raised that with the professor or the department before the cheating took place. But you've learned that now, right?
You should write similar letters to the chairman/head of the department (don't send the same letter) and your advisor with the same information. Discuss how you want to start fresh next year and have a stellar year.
Think about how they've been affected as well. They had to deal with a distasteful situation, punish a (hopefully!) promising student, and so on.
For a non-Academia example that might be enlightening, if you read science fiction at all, check out Miles Vorkosigan's apology (via a letter) in Lois McMaster Bujold's *A Civil Campaign*.
# Answer
> 2 votes
Unless the professor is aware of and condones whatever extenuating circumstances led you to cheat in her course, I think that your misconduct has "cut off" that bridge for you. Someone whose class you've cheated in is likely not going to be willing to help you out in any meaningful way—at least not without a sincere attempt at contrition. (Even then, it may be a case of "forgive, but never forget.")
# Answer
> 2 votes
I apologize for sounding a bit non-academic.
You need to forgive yourself, and realize you have become a different person because of this incident. Until you do this for yourself, you cannot expect anyone else to do it for you. People make mistakes. Learn, and move on. You can still make a difference tomorrow - unless you dwell on yesterday.
The Catholic church recognizes that people can turn away from past mistakes and start afresh in what they call "the sacrament of reconciliation". This requires that you a) be sorry (contrition), b) say you are sorry (confession), and c) make up for it (satisfaction). There is simplicity and wisdom in that. Even if you are not religious, it's worth contemplating.
Make peace with yourself. Until you do, you cannot return, even if the University lets you.
As an aside - a year away from your friends is a really big punishment; it can also provide an opportunity. Do make the most of it. If you can't find a job, do some volunteering; maybe join an international aid organization, and go abroad to help people less fortunate than you. Turn this episode into something constructive - so that when you look back on the year, you realize you turned something bad into something good. That will help with the healing.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Show genuine remorse over your mistake, sure, but rather than feeling ashamed of being suspended for a year, be *proud of yourself* for going back after said year and not giving up. A lot of people would use this situation as an excuse (not a reason, it's an excuse) to not return. The fact that you're asking how to deal with the future shame means that you're not even considering the alternative; you're going back. That takes strength, and you should be proud.
# Answer
> 0 votes
Years ago I took a final exam for a student who I was tutoring (we became friends during our tutoring sessions.). I hid in the bathroom; he snuck the exam out to me; I completed it and he turned it in. It was a Calculus test.
He was caught and suspended for a semester. I personally went in to the university to explain our actions, explain why I did it and to lend my support for him and to ask them for lenient punishment on him. The school administrators were appreciative of this and I think it was reflected.
In any case, he was out for the semester. Then, he went back again, finished school, and went on to grad school and his career. All said and done, very little if any harm done.
Life goes on. Sometimes people cheat, sometimes they plagiarize, we all do it to some extent in our lives, not a huge deal as far as I'm concerned if you don't do it often and you learn something about yourself in the process.
# Answer
> 0 votes
It would probably help to reduce your shame if you made a simple apology to those who you feel you owe one. Just say that you are sorry for what happened that year and that you are eager to continue your studies and finish for real this time.
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Tags: university, etiquette, cheating
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thread-5924 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5924 | Is publishing a graduation requirement in many master's programs? | 2012-12-24T12:41:10.220 | # Question
Title: Is publishing a graduation requirement in many master's programs?
I know a student in a linguistics master's program (in East Asia). He told me that in his country, most master's programs require students to publish a certain number of papers in academic journals in order to graduate. I want to study a linguistics-related degree in the US. Is such a requirement common there as well?
* In the US, does "thesis-option" generally imply that one "must publish a thesis to graduate" or does it just mean "must write a thesis"?
* Are such publishing requirements common enough in graduate programs in the US that it should be a question I ask schools when I apply?
# Answer
I've never heard of a publication requirement for a masters degree in the USA or UK. There is not even a novelty requirement for a masters dissertation, that's what makes it different from a PhD. Obviously publishing is a good idea if you want to continue on to a PhD, it makes your CV look much stronger and shows your promise as a researcher. But frankly, in the UK at least there is no time to publish before you finish your dissertation (Masters degrees are very compressed one year degrees) and most publications follow the formal completion of the degree.
> 10 votes
# Answer
It probably depends on the school. I don't remember seeing this as a requirement for any of the US schools I looked at.
At my school in the US, our Master's thesis must be published by the university and presented at a graduate forum held twice a year. We are also encouraged to present at conferences or submit to technical journals, but that is optional.
> 1 votes
# Answer
In my experience it varies by discipline and institution. I know of some MS programs where a student might graduate without publishing, but this would be viewed as a very poor performance. I know of others where publishing or even presenting at a conference would set you apart as a very successful student. If you want to go on for a PhD, then I would encourage you to make publishing at the MS level a goal. It will help in moving on to a HD program.
> 0 votes
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Tags: masters, thesis
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thread-21034 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21034 | Reviewer asked to move every mathematical proof to appendices for an engineering journal | 2014-05-16T05:08:07.240 | # Question
Title: Reviewer asked to move every mathematical proof to appendices for an engineering journal
I do research in an engineering subject and my journal reviewer has asked me to push every mathematical proof to the appendix to improve the readability. While I feel this is true, I also think that some of the proofs can be retained, as they are short and not so much mathematical. What is your opinion regarding this?
Right now, I have written this
> We thank you for your helpful comment. We have moved all the proofs and the lemmas, which even if removed do not directly affect the continuity of reading and is long, to the appendices. Proofs which are not much mathematical in nature and are short are still kept.
Somehow I feel my language is a bit rude. Do you have a better way of putting it? Or should I just move every proof to the appendix? (The journal is almost accepted with only few minor revisions like this)
# Answer
> 23 votes
In all cases I have been involved, together with the revised manuscript a response letter to the editor is submitted, re-iterating the specific comments/issues of the reviewers and explaining the changes made in the manuscript to address these issues.
What you are describing is typically one of those things that can be explained in the response letter. You can formulate a nice response where you can explain to the editor (who essentially has the last word on whether or not the manuscript will be accepted) that ...
*"while we believe that moving some of the mathematical formulas and derivations to the supplementary will improve the readability and flow article, some are indeed essential in order to give the reader a fair chance to understand the assumptions/model/results/..."*
There are two major benefits of addressing the situation in this way:
1. You show that you **do not disagree with the reviewer(s)**. People tend not to complain much when you agree with them.
2. You show the editor that you **take the matter seriously**, have put effort into amending the manuscript in order to **improve the situation** and also put thought into making the paper easier for the reader, while not losing the important bits.
I would **discourage** you to use formulations where *you* decide what does and does not count as long, or what does and does not impair readability. I say this mainly because you are not in an *objective position* to judge these things. You have written the manuscript and to you, at the time of submission, the manuscript (hopefully) is informative and has a good flow. You have been working on the project for months, maybe even years. At the time you pick it up, you have all the necessary background to understand the paper. The reader is **far away** from that position.
Instead consider picking out things that you feel are absolutely critical, in order to understand the essential bits of the work; that is the motivation, the goals, and the conclusions. Everything else could go into the supplementary...
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Lastly, does the journal not have any information on how to handle mathematical calculations/proofs etc, on their guidelines for authors?
Likewise, if you have co-authors what do they think? Your supervisor has some opinions on the matter surely?
# Answer
> 6 votes
My take on this is this: The content should be organized in a way to make it most accessible for the readers. While readers are all different, you have chosen an engineering journal and I would presume that the "journal style" of having proofs in the appendix is a good choice for this audience. So my general answer is: Just follow the suggestion in this case.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Would it not suffice to have just the statements of the results in the paper? The question is whether the audience will be interested in the proofs of the results. For a less mathematical audience, I think moving proofs and calculations into an appendix is Ok, because most of the time they are not so interested in the details. That is what I generally try to do.
If one is not so mathematically inclined, then it can be intimidating to be confronted with lots of mathematical details, and they can interrupt the flow. I suppose that if the proofs are short they don't matter so much, but even then, the question you should ask yourself is how interested your audience would be in reading them.
For a mathematics and statistics paper, I think retaining important calculations and proofs in the body of the paper is standard practice, but even there there is room for moving less important stuff into an appendix.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Following the reviewer's suggestions, unless it's caused by his/her misunderstanding, is the way I would go. The reviewer would most probably know better than you regarding to the culture (style) of that particular journal. But if you are definitely certain about things you can not push; then explain kindly as a response. I would write, "we definitely agree with the reviewer, and per the reviewer comments, we have moved most of the proofs to the appendices."
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Tags: publications, peer-review
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thread-21056 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21056 | Should I tell my advisor that I have an autism spectrum disorder? | 2014-05-16T21:04:04.933 | # Question
Title: Should I tell my advisor that I have an autism spectrum disorder?
I am a graduate student and as the title says, I have an autism spectrum disorder. My advisor is a very nice person, at least, that is the impression I have gotten. The last few months however, I worry that I have made myself misunderstood many times because of my failure of communicating or not following certain social codes. I have not done anything that is inappropriate at all, I just might have come off at times a tiny, tiny bit rude, which I did not mean to be! In social situations I often get nervous and I think it might have shown in some situations. I am considering whether I should tell him about my autism spectrum disorder or not - I don't want to have it as an excuse for any behaviour, just more of an explanation and maybe better understanding in the future.
Are there any general guidelines on what to do in cases like these?
# Answer
As you propose, this has an obvious helpful component.
What's a possible down-side? Well, medical/personal issues are protected information (thinking about the U.S., at least), and in most situations anyone else in whom you've confided is not allowed to disclose anything about it to anyone else. We can see the sense in this. However, it does sometimes create a burden and/or awkwardness, insofar as the people in whom you've confided are prohibited from using what they know to explain any questionable actions on your part to anyone *else*...
The operational point, then, is to pay attention to any close interactions with people outside your immediate group, in whom you've confided, that might generate a need for explanation.
> 6 votes
# Answer
I see no reason not to tell him, or anyone else you work closely with. telling your co-workers about this condition will eliminate these concerns about coming off as rude.
> 5 votes
# Answer
A disability is something you can take pride in overcoming. The Deaf people in my office certainly do. Others, such as amputees and the learning disabled, can choose to conceal their disability or they can freely admit to it. You get different benefits either way.
I've chosen to trust that people will regard my dyslexia and ADD the way I do: as just two of thousands of challenges I deal with every day. You should watch me try to finger spell. It's pathetic. :) Still I try. If you worked with me I'd rather know what your deal is then wonder.
> 2 votes
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Tags: advisor
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thread-21045 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21045 | How do I talk about methodology mistakes In a scientific project report? | 2014-05-16T15:47:20.313 | # Question
Title: How do I talk about methodology mistakes In a scientific project report?
I'm writing up my 3rd year engineering project (The equivalent of a dissertation in other subjects), and I'm struggling to write the chapter in which my method failed I couldn't get any results.
My project is on Neural Networks, and when I started my project I tried to program my own Neural Network from scratch, however this did not work properly (The feed forward part worked, but because of the convoluted way I had programmed it I couldn't implement the back propagation part). After I realized this I used an off-the-shelf program to create my neural network, which worked much better.
The problem is that I must have spent about a quarter of the year programming my own Neural Network from scratch, so I want to include it as a chapter in my report to show the marker that I have put over the recommended 300 hours work into my project, and that I understand the inner working of Neural Networks.
How should I write this chapter? So far I have started the chapter as if it is going to work, then I wrote about exactly what I have done and how it works, and then at the end where the results should be I want to explain that the custom implementation of the neural network meant that I couldn't implement back propagation, and therefore couldn't get results. But I can't do this without it looking like I have lazily given up on that chapter, and abruptly given an excuse to move on to the next chapter (The working version of the neural network).
# Answer
> 15 votes
You wrote:
> I want to include it as a chapter in my report to show the marker that I have put over the recommended 300 hours work into my project
Nooooooooo.
Don't do that. This is a postgraduate degree, and you're expected to take the research seriously. It's not a 9-5 grunt job or prison sentence where you turn up, serve your time, and get the reward at the end of your allotted time.
Show what you've learnt. That's what the markers are interested in. You say that you've learnt the inner workings of neural networks. That's great. So demonstrate and document what you've learnt.
And don't document the tortuous process you used. Don't describe how you went from A to B via C,D,E,...X,Y.
Just report that you started at A, ended at B, you've found that the shortest route between those points is {whatever it is}, and briefly document the dead ends and traps that future researchers should avoid.
# Answer
> 10 votes
> to show the marker that I have put over the recommended 300 hours work into my project
So what? It's a thesis, not prison time. Your task in your thesis (or project) is to solve a given problem, not serve a given amount of time. To be brutally honest, the time that you spent on what was presumably a rather bad idea in the first place (re-implementing something for which apparently suitable standard software exists) does not make your thesis better in any way. Detailing your failed labouring will not make your project seem better. Rather the contrary.
To answer your title question:
> How do I talk about methodology mistakes In a scientific project report?
You don't, unless:
* The methodology mistakes are somehow common in your field, i.e., you would assume if another researcher would start the same project, he would likely make the same mistake (in that case there is a lesson learned to take away from the failed attempt, i.e., that the standard approach does not work in this case).
* The methodology mistakes have, inadvertently, led to a different interesting result / observation that you did not expect.
Arguably, both is not true in your case. As such, I would consider this quarter of a year as sunk costs in terms of thesis time.
# Answer
> 6 votes
I'm afraid I disagree with the comments above.
The purpose of a 3rd-year project is not simply to solve a problem - it is to train the student. Learning from doing and learning from making mistakes is an integral element of this. For exactly this reason, the report is not just a scientific report of results, but also a report on the process, and I would say that there is no problem in reflecting some of the 'tortuous path' in the report.
Of course, it would be wise not to dwell *too* long on the mistakes. I would briefly describe how the 'wrong' path started, how you found out that it was wrong, and - especially - describe how you now understand *why* it is wrong, and why the later method is better. If this is done briefly and honestly, I would very much appreciate reading it, and it would score points with me as a reviewer.
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Tags: writing, thesis, university, engineering, methodology
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thread-21079 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21079 | No answer from Editor | 2014-05-17T13:04:24.587 | # Question
Title: No answer from Editor
I submitted a paper to an editor of well-known journal via email. It has been almost a month I did not hear anything, even not an acknowledgement from the editor, though I sent them 2 follow up emails.
What should I do?
# Answer
> 7 votes
Before doing anything else, I would recommend doing the following:
* Check that the answers haven't accidentally made their way into your spam folder (if your email client has one).
* Check that you sent the emails to the correct address. (If you get the domain name wrong, you might not get a response back at all!)
If neither of these are the cause of the problem, then I would recommend that you contact the publisher, rather than the editor—something has clearly gone amiss. At the very least, you should have received an email acknowledging that the submission is complete.
If, on the other hand, you are waiting for the reviews to be returned, that can certainly take much longer than a month, and a little patience is in order.
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Tags: publications
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thread-21073 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21073 | After 3 Years of PhD - problems with University registration - Fight or apply for another PhD | 2014-05-17T08:45:02.083 | # Question
Title: After 3 Years of PhD - problems with University registration - Fight or apply for another PhD
The Main problem is university registration as the process is vital to enroll as a PhD student, so that I can submit my thesis and defend it. Administrative issues here in Germany have prevented me from completing the registration process because I am an overseas student and some issues to do with deadlines.
Some good news are have published three papers as first author in leading journals and written the thesis work as well.
Is it a good idea to dump this registration process and take another PhD or should I apply for industry jobs? Note that I am not committed to staying in academia.
# Answer
> 18 votes
For the benefit of the wider audience, a little background into the German PhD system is in order.
* Researchers after the master's level are hired as *Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter* (researchers, literally "academic personnel"), and work for the individual research groups as half- or full-time employees, with the commensurate salary and benefits.
* In parallel, students are expected to register as doctoral students (*Zulassung*). Such a process will typically involve some classwork for international students, particularly those studying in engineering fields (and those with degrees other than the area they're now studying). One of the forms to be filled out in this process is the *Betreuungsbestätigung*, which is a commitment by the signer to be the candidate's advisor.
Normally, deadlines are deadlines; however, if there are mitigating circumstances, many departments will allow the advisor to petition for exceptions to be made. Given that you've made good research progress, it would seem reasonable that your advisor would want to ensure that you get your PhD. So, before doing anything else, **talk to your advisor.**
# Answer
> 2 votes
If possible try to stick with finishing the PhD. You are almost there.
Try to find some legal advisor to help you with the issues. Some universities may even offer free legal help and have persons acting as ombudsman.
Finding good job opportunities will not be an issue in any case.
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Tags: phd, university, deadlines
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thread-21070 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21070 | Signed up for conference, having second thoughts | 2014-05-17T07:45:30.700 | # Question
Title: Signed up for conference, having second thoughts
My advisor suggested that I should sign up for a conference, which I did - I now have to give a 15 minute talk.
However, the conference is taking place very far from me (+20 hour flight), and I am having second thoughts on whether I should go or not. Here are my thoughts:
**Pro**
* Meet new people/socialize
* Present my work at a talk, instead of merely a poster session
**Con**
* Conference is only 4 days, two ~20 hours flights are **very exhausting**
* The audience are not completely aligned with my field, so I have to make my presentation simpler than what the work actually is
* Will not learn things that I directly need for my research because of the audience (they are in geology and engineering, I'm in math)
Honestly, I don't feel like going because of the above list. But I am worried that
* My advisor will think I'm being annoying by "backing" out
* I can't say no now, since I have been given a talk
I would be very happy to hear your opinions on this matter. Maybe I am putting too much thought into this.
# Answer
I'd like to add several items to your list of pros:
* **Dissemination.** You will make your work known to a whole new field of possibly interested people. If you're going there, I presume there is an interesting application in sight. Possible follow-ups. Lots of opportunities. Interdisciplinary collaboration. To be avid and down-to-earth, lots of *citations* might await. :)
* **Presenting experience.** The best way to improve your presentation skills is giving talks. This is a good opportunity.
* **Connections** It's always good to get to know people in academia. You might need to send them a quick e-mail with a question on their area of expertise. You might one day be looking for a post-doc job and they might be offering one (even if it's a position for an applied mathematician in a geology department). You might find a good idea for an interdisciplinary research project and apply for a grant.
* **Learning new things** Yes, you will learn new things listening to the other talks, even if it's a different field. You might find a new related problem that you can solve. You might learn more about the applicative background of the problem that you are studying. You might find an example that looks great in the introduction of your next paper.
* **Tourism.** When will you be able to visit again that far-away country? True, you won't see much if you are stuck in a university or a conference center, but that's still a great life experience in my view. One of the parts I enjoy the most of the academic career is being able to travel and see the world.
* **Money availability**. Your advisor says that there is money for the trip, this time. My advice is **go for it**. More troubled times might come in future.
* **Trust your advisor**. (S)he suggested you to sign up, so he thinks it's a good idea for you to go. You should trust him, it's the person who best knows the conference, your work and your situation.
I've been doing some interdisciplinary research lately. It's hard at first, but fascinating and productive once you enter it. There is a big entry barrier in getting to know each other's field and learning to use the same language, but there are lots of interesting results to gather just by putting together the ideas and methods of two different fields.
EDIT: added "trust your advisor"
> 32 votes
# Answer
> * My advisor will think I'm being annoying by "backing" out
> * I can't say no now, since I have been given a talk
This. You should have stated your objections before. Now, it is probably too late. Perhaps your airline tickets, conference registration, hotel reservation are already paid and usually these costs are not refundable. It is not right for your institution to lose money, because you simply changed your mind. If you back out now, it will be very hard for your advisor to provide money for another trip later, when you will WANT or need to go. It also makes you look bad if you back out from a conference and (possibly) your supervisor as well.
On the other hand, look at the bright side. Although I understand your thoughts about the 20-hour flights and possibly jet-lag, understand that similar trips are some times necessary for conferences. Minimize the ugly effects by taking yourself with you (on the trip) your favourite headache medication (Tylenol, paracetamol), some pillow for the shoulder during flight etc.. Also, keep in mind that AFTER the trip you will not have to go your work directly (this is normal after such long trips), so the effects of the flight back home will be easier to handle.
Also, think that it is hard to pay those airline tickets yourself. So, you will get to see a new place (you would not see otherwise) for only 15 minutes of work (and 40 hours of flight). It is a wonderful experience and you should probably not miss it. For additional benefits see Federico's answer
Bottom Line: You should probably do the trip now. You might actually enjoy it. And next time, be extra careful on what you sign up for.
> 15 votes
# Answer
I speak at conferences a lot and sometimes, after I say yes, I have a little "buyers remorse" and I feel nervous about it and I just want to back out of the whole thing. I never have backed out though, and I have rarely regretted going.
In addition to the pros listed in other answers, being able to list a conference where you gave a talk has value on your CV even if you gained nothing from the conference itself. And your con (my supervisor will be upset if I cancel) is also a pro: I will please my supervisor by going. That said, you can and will get a LOT from a conference, any conference, if you decide to.
Grasp firmly onto a positive attitude. You have three weeks. In that time, don't just prepare your 15 minute talk, prepare your plan for the conference. This includes your plan for the travel and minimizing your jetlag. (You might be interested in a sister site for tips on sleeping on the plane and avoiding jetlag.) This also includes a list of goals. Say I was going to a conference of geologists in Paris and speaking on how the name of your cat affects your income. I might make a list like:
* go up the Eiffel Tower
* meet a geologist who lives and works near me
* visit the Louvre
* find 3 other cat-related or income-related sessions at the conference, attend them, and introduce myself to the speaker
* achieve an attendance of at least 50 people at my session
* record my "speaker rating" and ranking and report it back to my sponsors
* buy two bottles of wine to bring home
* discover at least one aspect of geology that is relevant to my cat-naming research and learn enough about it to summarize it to my colleagues when I return
* eat warm croissants in a park
* write up a one page summary of who I met, what I learned, who now knows about us and our research, and some opportunities I will pursue when I get back, and give this summary to my sponsors within a week of my return
Then I would keep this list of goals handy and push myself to make the necessary plans in advance and take the necessary actions during the week to meet the goals. This includes looking over the session lists as soon as they're available, planning what talks to attend (and when you are likely to have a free morning or afternoon for sightseeing and croissant eating), emailing other people who are attending to arrange to meet them there, and so on.
Making the best of a conference trip is a lot of work, but the rewards can be substantial. So many people have to beg and plead to even attend, and here you're being flown 20 hours away in exchange for only 15 minutes of talking! You must be doing something darn interesting.
> 11 votes
# Answer
Two things haven't been addressed in your question, and I think both of them would influence how I might advise you to proceed.
1) **Why this conference?** Surely there are other venues closer to home. If your advisor selected this conference because it is a prestigious international conference well-attended by the top names in your field, then I would urge you to go. However, if it's a relatively unrecognized conference that your advisor selected mostly because of its exotic location, then you might want to listen to your second thoughts, and pick somewhere more practical to share your research.
2) **How far along into this are you?** If the conference is next month, and the conference organizers are already under the impression that you are attending and presenting, then you should probably bite the bullet and go. It's not fair to them if you drop out simply because of a last-minute change of heart, and you won't come out of it looking good. 11th-hour cancellations should be reserved for true emergencies, not cold feet.
In short, if it's not a prestigious conference, and you just got an acceptance notification, then I'd recommend a heart-to-heart with your advisor, asking if there isn't a conference in your hemisphere that might accomplish the same research objectives. If either of those conditions aren't the case, though, then remember to pack a good book for the long flight.
> 7 votes
# Answer
I tend to agree with your concerns. Conferences take time. Not only the journey, as you have noted, but also the preparation for the talk itself. It is nice to visit new places, but this should only be a bonus. If you intend to pursue an academic career, there will surely be plenty of opportunities to visit these places in the future. Visiting new places should not be the primary motivation to attend conferences.
So the question is whether the conference suits you. From my personal experience, conferences that benefit me most are those that are within my subject area and are small in scope and attendance, especially those attended by well-known experts in the field. Then the chances are higher that the audience is interested in what you present, as they are familiar with it. They also tend to ask relevant and useful questions, whereas in the bigger conferences or those that are not closely related to your subject area, people tend to ask questions which are not helpful to your study because they are not familiar with what you are presenting.
Unless the tickets have been booked, the conference registration fee has been paid, and the conference program has been finalized, it should be safe to withdraw. In speaking to your adviser, you could suggest alternative venues to present your research, or you could instead publish your work in a journal.
> 1 votes
# Answer
To weary researcher/student, I think you have to look at the plus side and try to calm your fear of a 20 hour trip. The up side is that you don't have to feel intimidated by the audience because, after all, they probably have no prior knowledge of what you are talking about. Anything you say will be interesting to them. Once your 15 minute presentation is over you will be grateful that you chose to go. Even if your presentation isn't great you will probably never see these people in your life again. Everyone has butterflies before a presentation. Just be well prepared and try to tie your specialty in with the current events of the day. Good Luck.
> 1 votes
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Tags: conference, advisor, presentation
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thread-21066 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21066 | Citing an accepted but not yet published paper | 2014-05-17T02:42:42.257 | # Question
Title: Citing an accepted but not yet published paper
Do math journals consider a paper in which most of the content referred to another accepted but not yet published paper? In a case in which this is allowed, do one need to give a copy of the accepted paper to the editor of the target journal?
# Answer
> 16 votes
You can cite anything you want, regardless of whether it has been accepted for publication or even submitted. Of course citing preprints can make life more difficult for the referee, but there's no issue with accepted papers. They are considered just as reliable as published papers, since they've already gone through the refereeing process.
If you rely on a paper that is not yet publicly available, then you should provide a copy for the referee. However, if it's your own paper, then it's much better to post it online, for example through the arXiv. (If you supply a copy for the referee without posting it online, then it gives the impression that you are deliberately restricting access to the paper.)
# Answer
> 2 votes
This is definitely allowed in Computer Science. One way to cite the soon-to-be-published paper is, "To appear in ".
Here is an example. The authors develop a technique, write two papers, one on its theory and the other on the application, and submit the papers to suitable venues. The linked paper is the application paper. It often cites the theory paper which is the first entry in the bibliography at the end.
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thread-21094 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21094 | Is a co-advisor a good solution if my advisor is not very familiar with part of my research area? | 2014-05-18T07:13:50.053 | # Question
Title: Is a co-advisor a good solution if my advisor is not very familiar with part of my research area?
I am currently a 4th year PhD student and have no publication so far. I switched project after 1.5 years after realizing I don't want to have a PhD in that topic.
The new project is really interesting for me. I feel much more motivated and believe I have the analytical skills to solve it. The project is composed of two parts: image analysis (A) and machine learning (B). Eventhough my advisor is very knowledgable about the first part, he is not familiar with the other part, which is actually the most important cue to solve the problem.
That results in lacking of general research guidance from him. He would points me to unfruitful direction, and when I present literature's approaches he is not interested in. A metaphor is that like doing programming big project without the knowledge of data structures. Would a co-advisor be the best solution?
# Answer
> 4 votes
It sounds like there are two related issues:
* convincing your advisor about the directions you want to take
* finding someone to talk to about your research directions.
For the first one, I'm not sure what you mean by "he's not interested". Does that mean that your advisor doesn't *want* you to pursue directions even though he's not familiar with them, or that he's not giving you rousing encouragement ? If you have a direction you think might bear fruit for your problem based on your literature scan, why not try it out and show him the results ? Since you imply that your advisor is an expert in the application domain (image analysis), you should be able to demonstrate the quality of the results even if he doesn't fully understand the methods being used. Or is it that he is requiring you to follow certain directions and does not want you to follow other directions ?
For the second, a co-advisor is one possible outcome, but even a colleague in the relevant area (another professor who could be on your committee, or even a fellow student you can brainstorm with) might suffice. You didn't indicate whether your advisor is aware of his shortcomings in the techniques area (ML): if he is, then he might even be able to introduce you to the right people, thus opening doors that might be difficult for you to open yourself.
as always, talking to the advisor would help. You can approach it as "I'm looking for some extra help in topic XYZ: do you know who I could talk with ?". Of course, how you approach this precisely depends hugely on the interactions you currently have with your advisor.
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thread-21097 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21097 | Why does the APA/MLA format suggest the use of double-spacing? | 2014-05-18T07:54:30.097 | # Question
Title: Why does the APA/MLA format suggest the use of double-spacing?
For someone used to reading the typical single-spaced double-column ACM-styled papers, this format seems odd. At first, I thought it's maybe because some people read better with it. However, I haven't found any evidence that suggests so.
In fact, afaict, the benefits in doing otherwise are; less paper to print, thus saving trees. less paper to shuffle around. less time spent flipping pages to and fro to see math definitions because, for instance, some linear program took half a page. faster identification of paragraphs (since double-spaces would be used only to demarcate paragraphs).
One might say that it promotes consistency. Even though I would disagree to that notion, I still don't get why they would even choose such an unwieldy format in the first place. Is this just one of those rules people don't question because "it's the way it's always been done" or am I missing something here?
# Answer
> 9 votes
You need to separate authoring the manuscript from the finished type-set layout of the journal. For manuscripts more loosely spaced single column format has been the norm. This is because before the digital age, manuscripts were handed in written on a type writer. There was no means for an author to produce sophisticated layouts. In addition, one would add comments manually in the manuscript which is why some journals also specify fiarly wide margins. The marked-up manuscript would then be sent by regular post to the editor and passed on to the author. The one column loosely spaced format has stayed although it is not necessary. That said, reading a loosely spaced single column manuscript is easier than a densely set double column format. The latter is of course more cost effective to print.
Many journals use (or at least allow) LaTeX templates for their submission. These commonly include settings for a "manuscript mode" which end up as single column, loosely spaced text but also a "layout mode" where the author can try the final format of the journal to assess the length of the finished paper. This also allows the journal to more or less automatically type set the final paper once it is accepted.
So the recommendation for manuscripts to be typed loosely spaced and single column, is partly tradition but also because that format is easier to read for the reviewer.
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Tags: publications, writing
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thread-20938 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20938 | Is providing a slow response to journal reviews a common/good strategy for minimizing the number of review requests? | 2014-05-14T13:29:05.417 | # Question
Title: Is providing a slow response to journal reviews a common/good strategy for minimizing the number of review requests?
It is well known that in mathematics the process of reviewing submitted papers is quite long. There are good reasons for that; intrinsically, reviewing a math paper involves checking and understanding thouroughly the proposed proof, which typically requires a significant time investment. Also, a lot of academics are always very busy and reviewing may not be the most urgent thing they have to do, so it tends to be pushed back.
But it seems that there are other, maybe not so commendable reasons. Apparently, the common wisdom around me is that you should be careful not to turn in your reviews too soon, or you will be flooded with requests by editors (who are all too happy to find someone gullible enough to hurry doing their reviews) and reviews will take up all your time. This is an advice I've often heard given to young researchers, including by people who can honestly not be accused of neglecting the community service aspects of their work. A lot of people I have talked to have a policy of *never* doing the review before the deadline or the k-th reminder from the editor. I even heard of a person who would do the review almost immediately after accepting it (when time allowed), but only send it after the deadline or later.
In an imperfect world where doing your task sooner than anyone else will mark you as candidate for exploitation, I understand the need for such strategies. But I wanted to check:
* Is the risk so big?
* Is this practice really generalized (also in other fields than mathematics)?
* Do you have alternative strategies to avoid having too many review *requests* (of course, one can always refuse reviews, but since it can be delicate to do so too often, one may try and avoid requests themselves)?
# Answer
I can imagine someone purposefully delaying reviews, but in my experience it's not a widespread or standard part of mathematical practice, and I haven't heard it offered as common advice. I don't think referees have an obligation to inconvenience themselves to finish a review as quickly as they can, but it seems bizarre to deliberately delay when it would have been convenient to complete the review earlier (or, worse yet, when it was already done but not yet sent).
I don't see a real risk here, or a need to avoid review requests. There's nothing wrong with turning them down, and you can use a vague excuse like that you are already busy with other refereeing and don't want to cause unnecessary delays for this submission. In fact, a prompt reply will be appreciated; it already puts you ahead of the people who require reminders to reply to referee requests. (When a referee declines quickly, there's almost no cost, while it's annoying if I send several e-mails over a period of weeks but never hear back.) From my perspective as an editor, I'm not looking for people who will complete a review as quickly as possible. Instead, my ideal referee is someone who is responsive and reliable, who promptly lets me know what they can reasonably do and then does it within the timeframe they estimated. If they do that, they can turn down as many requests as they like.
> 29 votes
# Answer
I'm honestly puzzled by this tactics. No one will make you write more reviews than you want to. I write my reviews very promptly (at least the editors of the journals I have reviewed for tend to point that out to me when I submit my reviews), but I have a self-imposed threshold for how many reviews I will do within a given amount of time. If I get requests that exceed that threshold, I politely decline and explain why. I don't understand what's so "delicate" about that. It's surely better to be a diligent reviewer who occasionally declines invitations than to be a notoriously late reviewer (on purpose!).
> 3 votes
# Answer
This is a response to the answer by Anonymous Mathematician and the comment to that answer by Nate Eldredge. I just want to point out that there are ways in which the community benefits from there being some lag built into the refereeing process. If there were no such lag then an author would have every incentive to submit every paper to the very best journal in the field, expecting a quick rejection, after which the author can submit to the second-best journal, and so on. In this way, an author could expect his/her papers to wind up in better journals than they otherwise would, since once there are enough low-probability events then there's a good chance that one of them will occur. So it is to the author's benefit to do this, but on the flip side this would cause lots of extra work by the editors and referees of various journals. The main thing I see which discourages authors from doing this is that they don't expect an immediate response from the referees. So that is one reason why it isn't necessarily a bad thing for a reviewer to wait a couple months (say) before sending in his/her review.
> 1 votes
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Tags: peer-review, editors
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thread-21107 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21107 | Is it formal to inform readers that a point will be discussed later in the chapter? | 2014-05-18T15:21:30.797 | # Question
Title: Is it formal to inform readers that a point will be discussed later in the chapter?
I mentioned an important idea in a section without developing it.
Is it formal to inform readers that the point will be discussed later in the chapter?
For example: This idea will be discussed in detail in a subsequent section.
If yes, should it be presented just like any sentence, maybe next to the idea? Or Does it require special treatment?
Thank you
# Answer
> 25 votes
There is nothing wrong with doing so. if you would not, the reader might start wondering. In cases where no other alternatives apply then signalling to the reader that more details will follow allows the reader to continue concentrating on the details at hand. If you end up with a situation like this, you should of course make sure that following such a structure is the best way forward. If it is not then restructuring the text is necessary. After all the goal of writing is to provide the reader with the easiest way to understand your writing (the way you want them to). If you find yourself using this form of signalling often, you should probably take a critical look at your writing and ask yourself why this happens. It might be that you are not structuring the text in a good way.
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Tags: research-process, publications, writing
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thread-21116 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21116 | Can I write my whole SOP about machine learning for graduate school admissions? | 2014-05-18T19:45:23.840 | # Question
Title: Can I write my whole SOP about machine learning for graduate school admissions?
I am a computer science engineer and I am starting to write my SOP's for grad school admissions.
I am very interested in machine learning but most of the schools I apply to offer ML as a track like something to major in. Can I write my whole SOP about ML ? I have few achievements in CSE and few in ML.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Writing statements of purpose (SOP's) can be challenging. If you make the statement too general, it may come across like you don't have a solid reason for attending a graduate program. On the other hand, if your SOP is too specific, you may unnecessarily restrict your chances of admission—for instance, if you only talk about working with one or two professors, and they're not taking new students, you may not be admitted.
That said, you are free to write your statement of purpose however you choose. Just keep in mind that in formal application processes, you are generally writing to an entire *department*, not just one or two professors.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, statement-of-purpose
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thread-21106 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21106 | Are contributions to a open source project helpful for graduate admissions? | 2014-05-18T15:03:44.573 | # Question
Title: Are contributions to a open source project helpful for graduate admissions?
I have about 400 ~ 500 lines of what I would call average open source code contribution. Does open source code contribution matter for graduate admissions? I am interested in applying to a MS in computer science and am interested in machine learning. I have a great plan for an awesome feature for Libsvm (and open-source implementation of the popular support vector machine technique for machine learning). Will implementing it help my application ?
# Answer
> 7 votes
> Does open source code contribution matter for graduate admissions?
## Yes.
Admission to graduate school is based primarily on your potential for research. Independent, creative, intellectual work of any kind strongly correlates with potential for research, *especially* if that work is directly related to the interests described in your research statement. Contributing to open-source software projects is independent, creative, intellectual work.
Of course, your contribution would matter more if it were merged into the main branch of the project, but something is better than nothing.
# Answer
> 5 votes
There are a bunch of questions in one here. I'll answer the one that seems central:
> I have a great plan for an awesome feature for Libsvm, will implementing it help my application ?
Yes, I would consider that contributing to a well-known machine learning (ML) toolkit will significantly strengthen your case for an application in ML. It shows that you know the fundamentals of support vector machines already, and that you are genuinely interested in the field. Plus, it is presumably something that distinguishes you from all other candidates.
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Tags: graduate-admissions
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thread-21089 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21089 | Thinking about leaving a master's program | 2014-05-18T03:32:33.797 | # Question
Title: Thinking about leaving a master's program
I'm at the end of my first year in a food science master's program, with full funding at a good university and I'm seriously considering dropping out.
I completed my undergrad in biochemistry and my research project is more focused in yet another field, which I have no experience in. When I applied for grad school, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do within the field, but figured I could build interests along the way. I only received the one offer from a new professor that would be starting at the same time as me. I didn't want to let the opportunity slip by and I genuinely thought the project was something I could get interested in. So I packed up my life and left behind most of my support group. This was extremely difficult, as I have a very close relationship with my family and my mother has recently been very ill. Not long after beginning school, I began seeing a therapist as my anxiety (which has always been manageable) started worsening. The majority of my coursework has been undergraduate classes that I find completely uninteresting. We are only required to take 4 graduate credits and I wasn't thrilled with my choices (there are only 2 classes available). The department itself is small, obviously favors the undergraduate population, is extremely unorganized, and most of the lab groups are cliquish (seem nice enough, but not entirely welcoming). Since my lab is new, I'm the only student and the only other researcher is a recent PhD graduate from another lab. I was unable to start much work on my project the first semester because I didn't have what I needed. Now, I've experienced numerous setbacks with contamination and other problems. Not to mention, since the beginning of the new semester, my anxiety has become borderline debilitating and accompanied by moderate depression. In a recent conversation, my advisor expressed concern about my lack of work (which I take to mean, lack of results, because it's not like I've been lazy and unproductive), even though he is aware of the problems I've faced. As far as advisors go, he is just out of his post-doc and is relatively nice, but is extremely forgetful (never remember anything he tells me/I tell him), unfamiliar with the program requirements even after a year in (meaning, I have to get help from anyone but him when it comes to courses), and occasionally makes backhanded comments to me that I find insulting. Overall, I just find myself extremely unhappy. And the prospect of moving on and getting a job just seems freeing to me.
However, I'm not sure how I would go about doing this. There is no formal policy on a leave of absence, so if I wanted to make the leave less permanent in case I change my mind, I don't know how this would work. I'm also not sure when would be the best time to drop out. Regarding withdrawals, the grad school website says that any students receiving tuition remission (which I do) are "responsible for their entire tuition assessment." I'm not sure who, if anyone, I can talk to in the department. I have yet to begin my thesis, 2 courses left to take, and likely have 2 years left because of setbacks. Does anyone who has left grad school or considered doing so have any advice?
# Answer
> 1 votes
You don't find the field you're in all that interesting. That may be because it's not the right field for you. However, depression can make everything seem uninteresting, even activities you used to love. Maybe you just need a break. Your therapist is probably the person to help you figure out what's best for you at this time.
If you decide to take a break, I'm sure your university has some sort of student ombudsman or student services office that can guide you through the process of getting a leave of absence. Look on your university's website, or ask the registrar's office, student health, or the student union.
The setbacks you've experienced in your research don't sound that bad. A few false starts in research are quite normal. One year into my own master's, nothing was working and I was sure I wouldn't have any useful results. My advisor helped to calm me down, and all turned out well. It sounds like you and your advisor just don't "gel".
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Tags: graduate-school, masters
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thread-21161 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21161 | A working paper or a discussion paper or something else? | 2014-05-19T18:49:58.520 | # Question
Title: A working paper or a discussion paper or something else?
I have some papers from google which I don't know to what type they belong: a working paper or a discussion paper or something else? I need this for my bibliography
Below are some examples of such cases.
The first one has an abbreviation JEL Classifications, but is this enough to refer this to Journal of Economic Literature?
The second one has nothing at all.
Can someone give me a hint? Any help would be appreciated!
# Answer
> 5 votes
JEL classifications are just that: classifications. Anyone can put such a classification on his paper, and it doesn't have anything to do with publishing in the JEL - it's more like a keyword.
To your question: I don't think there really is such a big difference between a working paper (which is work in progress, typically distributed to be discussed) and a discussion paper (which is work in progress, typically distributed to be discussed). All of these are essentially manuscripts under preparation for submission to a refereed journal (in CS, a conference). So I would file all of these under "non-reviewed papers".
# Answer
> 0 votes
Very rarely you will find the full reference in the paper. To retrieve complete references use google scholar (which provides even different versions of the same paper) and double check in doubt. You can also try indexer services provided by your university such as worldcat or summon.
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Tags: citations
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thread-21166 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21166 | What are the important factors to consider when choosing a Master topic? | 2014-05-19T21:22:11.093 | # Question
Title: What are the important factors to consider when choosing a Master topic?
I am a computer science, master student. As I am nearing the end of my studies, I am starting to weight my options for the final "thing", the Master thesis. I already had 2-3 meetings with some Professors offering master topics. The more I think on this topic, the more I get confused.
One of the topics is not really within the area of my interests, or close to something that I would like to work in the future, but the Professor is really nice and quality, I have had good cooperation with him earlier before. And I think that I can further learn from him.
One of the other options, is much interesting, however I feel as if I am afraid of it. I don't have much experience in the exact field which the master thesis covers. The professor just arrived in out university and I have not taken any of his lectures.
The final option, is one that I feel more comfortable. It might be from a topic that I have worked on for the last 12 months, so I can get into it really fast.
Considering these information and the fact that in the future I want to have the possibility of continuing Phd studies, maybe not directly after the master studies, but sometimes eventually, which one of the thesis should I choose?
Should I go for the most worldly-renown professor, or for one of the others. Which parameters should I bear in mind when making the decision? I have thought about the quality of the professor, the effort that the topic requires, the potential of having a good adviser (on whom I can rely) etc.
I am sure, here are people much experienced than me who can tell what are the important things to consider when making such a choice.
It seems seems that deep inside, I am being influenced by the grading as well. Is the grade of a thesis more important than the topic itself?
I know the question might feel as offtopic, but I really need help.
Thanks
**EDIT 1:** Just wanted to add a couple of questions in here; To what extent the grades influence future job & Phd applications?
# Answer
> 5 votes
One thing to keep uppermost in your mind - the topic of your Master's thesis is not necessarily the one that you have to pursue in later research, such as part of a PhD.
The point of a Master's thesis is to demonstrate your ability to do research. Opinions might vary on whether it is a reasonable expectation that the research that you do for a Master's thesis has to be world-class and leads to one or more publications. In my view, it would be nice, but it isn't a requirement.
What you need to get out of your Master's thesis is a strong demonstration that you are capable of academic research. You decision on which supervisor and topic to choose should be guided by this driver.
Pursuing a research topic merely because the professor is world-renown may be misguided. What happens if you don't strike up a good working relationship and your research falters because of it? Will your professor's reputation outweigh a mediocre research effort?
Your drive and interest in a research topic are strong factors of whether you will succeed. The motivation should come from you - most of the time - to address your research topic. Again, if you aren't particularly interested in the topic, you are going to find it hard to keep going at it when - and it is a matter of when - the going gets tough.
I reiterate that at the end of your Master's thesis, you want to demonstrate your research ability. You are still learning the skills and craft of research, and for that reason, you want to seek teachers who are skilled at teaching how to research. Is it necessarily true that the best practitioners of science research are the best teachers of how to do research? Sometimes true, sometimes not.
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Tags: phd, masters, thesis, computer-science
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thread-19431 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19431 | Opinion on accepting a grad school offer after having already accepted another offer | 2014-04-17T00:30:40.807 | # Question
Title: Opinion on accepting a grad school offer after having already accepted another offer
I applied to graduate schools this year, and at the tail end of February, my first pick school sent me an email that to me, sounded like they had filled all the available TA positions. So naturally I chose my second pick school (that did offer me a TAship).
Today (April 16th), I receive an email from my first choice school saying they would like to offer me a TAship (apparently somebody declined their offer).
The graduate adviser at my second choice school had told me before that sometime she made offers to candidates in the summer, so I am thinking if I were to contact her and ask to be released from my agreement, she might be OK with that. (I realize there are formal rules that apply)
Would it be such a bad thing to ask my second choice school to release me (if they say no it will be somewhat awkward for me and if I just walk out on them, I am not sure what they can do).
TIA, GB
# Answer
You have to know what you want to do. If you want to go to your 1st choice school, perhaps you can come to an agreement to have the 2nd professor as your copromotor? Or didn't you pin down your supervisor and your topic yet. In that case, just go for the first school definately.
Take a look at your contract or contact the administration. They will be able to help you with the more technical details of resigning.
But do what you feel you want to spend the next 4 years doing!
> 2 votes
# Answer
Something to consider is that certain academic disciplines are quite small. Pulling out after the April 15 deadline may burn bridges, which might impact future collaborations with individuals at your 2nd choice school. Or, it's possible you could still collaborate with individuals from your 1st choice school while attending your 2nd choice school, and resigning may not be necessary. It's something to keep in mind, in order to be as professional as possible while navigating your potential resignation.
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, graduate-school, career-path
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thread-21054 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21054 | Will an internship in biology benefit me when my major is not biology? | 2014-05-16T19:24:33.597 | # Question
Title: Will an internship in biology benefit me when my major is not biology?
I'm an undergraduate majoring in chemistry. But I'm very much interested in the field of biology too.
Will an internship in biology benefit me, say when I apply for graduate school? I don't yet know what I'll be specialising in later on. If I decide to specialise in biology, then all's good. But what if I stick with something primarily chemistry? Then will it look like I don't have enough experience in chemistry?
Also, can I ask my department's HOD or any other chemistry professor for a recommendation letter while applying for the internship in biology? Since he's a chemistry professor, even if I did ask and he did write me one, will that count for much? After all, it's going to talk about my skills, etc. in chemistry, and not biology.
On the other hand, if I didn't ask him for a recommendation letter and I asked only some of the Life Sciences professors for it, will it be unethical, or would he take offence? ( I have no idea about etiquette regarding these things) I don't want to do something that's going to get me in his bad books.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I completed undergraduate summer internships in biology although I ultimately wound up applying (and attending) graduate school in psychology. Although the internship did not directly align with my current career path, at the time it helped me narrow down my professional interests. In applying for jobs and graduate school, my internships, regardless of discipline, were seen as evidence that I was motivated, organized, and had some experience in professional settings.
At the undergraduate level many skills (including solid record keeping, attention to detail, and proper lab technique) are transferable across scientific disciplines. Further, completing one internship outside your discipline shouldn't significantly stunt your ability to prepare for graduate school in chemistry.
Having a letter of support from any professor should be acceptable, provided it is a strong letter. In all likelihood, your advisor will know you the best and be able to write the most supportive letter. However, if a life sciences professor knows you well, a second letter or co-written letter might be helpful.
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Tags: etiquette, recommendation-letter, internship
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thread-19613 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19613 | Specific Weakness in GRE Quantitative Section - Looking for Advice | 2014-04-21T17:54:54.907 | # Question
Title: Specific Weakness in GRE Quantitative Section - Looking for Advice
I took the GRE about a year ago (for an MA program). I did very well on Verbal, but only so-so on Quantitative. I'd like to retake the GRE for applying to PhD programs.
My issue with the Quantitative section was simply time management. I understood all of the questions, but I guess I just didn't have an effective strategy for how to tackle them.
Does anyone have any specific recommendations for time management strategies on the Quantitative section? I'd be interested in books, online tutorials, and even tutors in the New York City area.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I struggled with the GRE Quantitative section several years ago; my first attempt was over 100 points less than the required score for my graduate program. I found the GRE test-prep books (Kaplan, Princeton Review, Barrons, GRE for Dummies) to be very helpful. I picked up a handful at second-hand bookstores, and then spent a few weeks drilling math problems, which helped me answer questions more quickly. Even though I knew how to do the problems before, they became more automatic with practice, which did make things easier and faster the second time around. Those books also offered time management strategies for taking the test, though you may need to purchase (or rent from the library) newer books which will describe the revised test (books prior to 2012 won't have guides for the new GRE). It was very boring working math problems 1-2 hours a night for a few weeks, but on my second attempt I achieved the score I needed. Best of luck!
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Tags: graduate-admissions, gre
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thread-18525 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18525 | Comma before end quote in bibliography | 2014-03-25T17:04:29.690 | # Question
Title: Comma before end quote in bibliography
Why is it correct to use comma after paper title and before end quote?
For example: \[X\] A. Author, "Paper title **,"** Journal, vol. X, no. XX, pp. XXX-XXX, Year XXXX.
It seems natural to use it after end quote.
# Answer
As others have indicated, style guidelines have to be followed, regardless of whether the reasoning behind the rules is clear. However, this particular example often varies by geographic region. American English grammar always places periods and commas inside quotation marks, while British English grammar is "conditional" - that is, they include periods and commas inside quotes only if it is part of the quotation, not the larger sentence. This site has an example and a more detailed explanation.
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/quotation-marks-with-periods-and-commas
Thus, it's possible that the style guide is based on American English grammar, while you have a different frame of reference and convention.
> 3 votes
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Tags: citations
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thread-18369 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18369 | Job portal of US universities: when is the application status updated? | 2014-03-20T18:22:11.083 | # Question
Title: Job portal of US universities: when is the application status updated?
I recently submitted applications for tenure track positions to several US universities via their online job systems (https://jobs.xxx.edu/).
Last week I got a feedback from one of the schools that my application would no longer be considered. However, a week later, the status of my application on the portal is still "under review".
This raises a question for me: after the department has decided to reject the application, how soon is the status in the online system updated?
I want to know that because I have not received a feedback from the other schools I applied, and am wondering if it's possible that the department has already decided to reject but the portal was not updated?
# Answer
Academic jobs are a nightmare from the HR perspective. While the posting might be on the jobs portal, the files themselves initially go to the hiring department which comes up with a long and then medium list that they then do some preliminary screening before ending up with a short list for on-site interviews. This can take several months.
The search committee then comes up with a ranked list with some candidates "above the line" and some "below the line" that the department votes on. This list -- which may have one, two, or three people that the department thinks are hireable (or in some cases, none, if the search fails). This list then goes to the provost, equal opportunity, and numerous other sundry university committees before getting approved (or not) and sent back down the line. This can take several more months.
So we are now 4-6 (or 6-8) months into the search. The search can have several results:
1. A single finalist who is contacted. Maybe they dawdle for a couple of weeks in giving a reply. If they decide not to take the job, then the search is failed. The department may or may not be authorized to search again next year and if they are, the search remains open.
2. Two finalists. The first accepts (or not). If the first doesn't, the second is given a chance. If both decline, then it's a failed search.
3. No finalists. Failed search and the slot goes back to the provost's office. It may or may not be returned to the department.
4. The provost hates all of the finalists and either cancels the slot or forces the department to re-run the search.
In other words, there are many reasons why a job posting might still remain open even one or two years after the initial posting. Departments are hesitant to finally close files unless they are absolutely positive that they are never, ever getting that slot back again -- or that the person who accepted the offer really is going to show up on August 1st.
> 3 votes
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Tags: application
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thread-13661 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13661 | Will the bad grade in a proposed studied subject be a red flag in my application? | 2013-10-26T08:21:43.990 | # Question
Title: Will the bad grade in a proposed studied subject be a red flag in my application?
I am currently doing final year project on a subject which I did not have a very good grade(I took three courses in this subject with grade A-, A and B+, only top 5-10% can earn a grade of A and A+). I am quite interested in it and plan to continue in this subject in graduate school. Will this grade have bad effect for my application? Can I indicate my interest clearly in my PS given that my grade is not perfect?
# Answer
> 5 votes
I don't believe there is a serious stigma associated with an undergraduate getting a B+ in a graduate-level course. It is generally understood that undergraduates taking true graduate-level work (with graduate-level course numbers, etc.) are taking exceptionally advanced subjects, relative to their own preparation. Therefore, it is entirely understandable that you might have an A-, B+, or even a B in a graduate-level subject without it having a strong impact on your chances for graduate-school admissions. Exceptionally weak performance (corresponding to "failing" grades—usually C+ or lower) would be an exception to this, but I see no reason here why you should worry too much.
# Answer
> 0 votes
One solution to this would be to ask the instructor of the course to write one of your letters of recommendation. If you were indeed performing at a graduate-level while still an undergrad, then he or she should note this in his/her letter.
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Tags: application
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thread-21176 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21176 | Phd application procedure in European universities, specifically in Scandinavia and the Netherlands | 2014-05-20T02:00:24.907 | # Question
Title: Phd application procedure in European universities, specifically in Scandinavia and the Netherlands
For Phd application in Europe, we often directly apply to the interested group, a little bit like application to a job. I would like to know in general, will they send you a email if they reject you? or only the successful candidate will receive email? (Just like job application) How long does it take for their consideration? I would like to hear some of the experience or general cases because I cannot find enough information on this. (No reply from HR etc)
# Answer
> 7 votes
I have some issues with the formulation of this question; first of there is a contradiction between the question title and the first sentence. The OP first asks for the application procedure in the question title, then goes on to describe it in the first sentence as if to answer his/her own question...
Then there is the issue of seeing Europe as one big consistent body. Anyone who has dealt with academic bureaucracy in Europe would likely laugh at the notion. I would personally give the ECTS system as a beautiful example of how little collaboration and consistency there is in higher education system in Europe.
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According to the Swedish "Law of Higher Education" (Högskoleförordningen) Ch. 12 par 2 employment on a PhD position can not be appealed by other applicants. Text in "\[\]" is a attempt to translate the Swedish text.
> 12 kap. Överklagande \[Appeal\]
>
> ...
>
> 2 § Till Överklagandenämnden för högskolan får följande beslut av en högskola överklagas: \[The following decisions made at a University/College may be appealed to the appeals board\]
>
> 1. beslut om anställning vid en högskola, med undantag av anställning som doktorand, \[Decisions on employment ata university/college, with the exception of PhD positions\]
Since this is the law that dictates higher education in Sweden it matters not whether the University(/College) is state or private.
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I have a couple of additions and clarifications:
* there are two schools that are not state-owned, Chalmers University and Jönköping Business School. These schools have their own regulations which I suspect is very similar to all the other universities but slight differences might exist.
* the statement that you apply directly to research groups (i.e. group leaders) is simply not true. It is praxis (and actually good manners) to get in contact with the group leader prior to application but it is in no way compulsory, neither does it have any formal meaning.
* Like all other state-owned organisations, the universities in Sweden have to have a transparent recruitment process that is open for general public. Universities have HR departments and centralised recruitment applications (typically on the university homepage) where positions (for instance PhD or post-doc positions) are posted.
* At Lund University (and I am pretty confident this applies to other major universities in Sweden) applications are then collected and directed to the person responsible for recruitment of that particular position in question (often the group leader) who then does an assessment of the applicants based on the job description and qualifications. If necessary one or more steps of filtering is done, and top *N* candidates are typically invited to some sort of interview (in person or via skype).
* Once a single candidate is chosen out of all applicants the group leader then needs to write a formal letter where the decision is motivated; i.e. why was the chosen applicant better than the other ones.
* The applicants are then informed whether they are accepted or not.
* I cannot swear for all Danish universities, but I know that DTU has a similar procedure to the one described possibly differing in, if anything, being even more formal and controlled.
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Tags: graduate-admissions
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thread-21193 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21193 | Publishing work in areas you're no longer interested in | 2014-05-20T10:28:32.893 | # Question
Title: Publishing work in areas you're no longer interested in
If one obtains results in one area of a field (say during an MSc thesis) before deciding that one is not interested in making a career in that area, should one take the time (as a PhD student) to get make those results publishable, or is it better to focus on the new area?
# Answer
**It depends**.
Some questions might help guide you to an answer:
* how important is the work you've done ? If it's not yet publishable does this mean it's not complete yet ?
* Since you're not in the area, do you even know if the topic/solutions are still relevant ?
* Are you proud of this work, to the point where you'd be annoyed if someone else came up with the same ideas and published them ?
* How much effort will it take to make the work publishable, and how does this interfere with current work that you're doing ? I.e are you in the initial stages of a Ph.D and can spend time on this, or are you deep into your own research where the context switching might prove distracting ?
> 16 votes
# Answer
It's all about marginal utility, in other words cost/utility ratio. How much time/money/effort/coffee/.. will it take to get the stuff published vs how much you think it will benefit you? It's generally hard to estimate how much different investments will pay off in the future, but it can't really hurt you to have published articles in multiple fields. On the contrary it's generally good to show diversity in intellectual capacity and output.
Now that said, you should also consider whether or not you *can* work on something else during your phD. I mean maybe your supervisor is not OK with you "wasting time" on something that will not be a part of your thesis. It is actually very likely that s/he will not be very positive towards the idea. After all you are burning his/her grant money ;)
> 4 votes
# Answer
In my opinion, during a PhD it is equally important to stay focused on the main track as it is to prove, you as a student can be multidisciplinary.
Being multidisciplinary will make you sometimes more attractive on job markets. That is not always true, though, as some employers will look for more goal oriented individuals.
If however you your major is biology and your interesting findings are in physics, maybe you should let it go.
> 0 votes
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Tags: publications, career-path
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thread-21200 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21200 | How to obtain a percentile ranking for a journal? (i.e., top 30%; 30% to 50%) | 2014-05-20T12:26:39.373 | # Question
Title: How to obtain a percentile ranking for a journal? (i.e., top 30%; 30% to 50%)
My institution ranks scientific achievement according to some criteria when evaluating promotions, positions, etc. for its subjects (students, grad students, personnel, etc.) This is done by a rule book that is specified in the form of a bylaw and is administered by the ministry of science, therefore it is not local to my institution, but applied nationwide. The passage about SCI journal publications states that journals are divided into three groups:
1. eminent international journals - a journal that in its subject ranks in the top 30% journals in ISI list publications
2. outstanding international journals - the same but for \<30% and \>50%
3. international journals - the same for \<50%
The difference in "points" awarded for publications in each of the categories is rather large. I was wondering how I could determine which journals fall into a criterium from above?
I talked to the administrative service, but got no satisfying answer, i.e. there is no list of journals (which is understandable, as there are far too many subjects). They told me something along the lines: "These things will be evaluated when the time comes", which is, of course, not at least satisfactory to me. I talked also briefly with the head of the department and he told me that he never really gave it much thought, I should publish in journals that suit me, the higher the impact factor and prestige the better of course, but in the end it isn't that much of an imperative, and that I should let the "politicians" and administrators worry about those tiny matters. I would, however, still like to know which journals I should favorite.
PS: the rule book naturally specifies similar criteria for various scientific publications (conferences, patents, books, etc.), but since I'm working on my first article to be submitted to a journal and I still haven't decided which journal, I would like to take things like this into account
# Answer
> 6 votes
Likely this is not the answer you want to hear, but I assume the administrative service you talked to is correct. If nobody really knows which journals fall under which of these (rather subjective) categories, it will not be feasible to in advance establish for sure way how much any paper you write will *count* in the end, when you are evaluated.
This is not nearly as strange as it sounds. Formal rules for promotion and the evaluation of research tend to live in the ugly grey area between bureaucrats who like things orderly, well-defined and, most importantly, *written down*, and the reality of science, where basically no two scientists will ever be able to agree on an absolutely consistent quality ranking of publication outlets. What usually happens is that some sort of nebulous rankings are defined *without specifically ranking concrete venues*,and then leave it to a commission of academics to decide ad hoc which publications fall into which category.
At my current university, we have similar nebulous requirements for PhD graduation. Essentially, it is required that students need at least one *A-ranked* publication. However, what is considered A-ranked varies considerably between different faculty, and is basically negotiated when graduation time is near. I assume requirements for tenure etc. are handled similarly.
Note that there *are* some initiatives that are trying to rank publication venues more formally, for instance CORE for computer science. However, these rankings are also far from perfect (or, for some fields, they are apparently downright terrible).
# Answer
> 1 votes
As you mentioned the first factor is the impact factor, so, it would be better to be published in high impact factor peer reviewed journals. As I am into optics, I may say that, for physics, Science, all Nature journals (Nature Photonics, Nature Communication, etc), Physics Review Letters, Advanced Materials, etc. may be included in the first category. The second category may include Applied Physics Letters, Optics Express, Optics Letters. etc. The third category are probably not well known international journals with low impact factors and maybe conference proceedings. If you are really into your field, I guess you know all important journals there. If you don't just do a simple search of the list of impact factors.
The second factor(which is more important for me) is the quality and novelty of the research, i.e. number of citations. Sometimes it is really hard for grad students, post docs or researchers to be published in the articles of the first category, because it is complicated and sometimes 'politicized'. So, don't think much about that but rather put an emphasize on the quality of the research without forgetting to try to publish in a journal with an impact factor as high as possible. If your publication has a lot of citations it means that it is a state-of-the-art research and you really have something to say in that area.
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Tags: publications
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thread-21117 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21117 | Is it normal to preferentially invite female speakers when there would otherwise be few female speakers? | 2014-05-18T20:28:50.533 | # Question
Title: Is it normal to preferentially invite female speakers when there would otherwise be few female speakers?
My institute is creating an annual list of invited speakers and solicited suggestions from staff. It was at pains to point out that although only "n" 18% of suggestions received were female, they made up "n+1" 31% of the speakers selected to talk. As a female student, this makes me feel uncomfortable that women seem to be getting preferential treatment - is this normal practice in academia, in the UK or elsewhere?
Edit: I didn't mean my question to sound insulting, I'm sorry if it sounded that way. Everyone invited is perfectly qualified and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. It just seemed a little strange all the women on the shortlist made it through whilst quite a few men didn't. And that the email took on an apologetic tone and emphasized this so heavily. I was just interested in whether this is common as it makes me feel a little uneasy that gender plays such a prominent role in the organizers' thinking. Thanks.
# Answer
> 45 votes
First of all: if the women who were invited to speak are in fact highly qualified for this invitation, they are not getting a "free pass". A "free pass" implies that they are invited only because they are women, and are not otherwise qualified. Qualified women are at best getting a "priority pass" to make up for being often overlooked (especially when the organizing committee is all male), and possibly not getting any kind of special pass.
It is a bit insulting (although I am sure this is not your intent) to suggest that these women were invited to speak because they are women, and not because they are doing quality, competitive work. I can see why you were uneasy when the organizers sent an email emphasizing the gender of the speakers, instead of their contributions to research; I would also be.
Second: depending on the sample size, it may not be entirely significant that 31% of invited speakers were women when they made up 18% of the list of suggestions.
In answer to
> Is this normal practice in academia:
Yes, sometimes a conference or workshop organizer will look at the list of invited speakers, see that women are heavily underrepresented, and think carefully about whether there is a qualified female researcher doing excellent work who could be added to the roster.
This is done as a deliberate response to counter a known bias. We know that we (as humans) are very bad at evaluating people based on merit alone; we tend to let our cognitive biases get in the way. (See, for example: Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students.) Deliberate attempts to increase the representation of women in underrepresented fields exist to counter this known bias.
# Answer
> 17 votes
This sort of positive discrimination is fairly common, in a number of areas, not just academia. For example All-women shortlists and for a less severe but more academic example women only scholarships.
The ethics of positive discrimination is a complex issue. Personally I agree with you that I find it a bit distasteful, mainly as it encourages the incorrect stereotype of women being less valuable researchers. Although, in this particular case I suspect if it hadn't been explicitly pointed out no one would have noticed or cared.
# Answer
> 9 votes
Even though suggestions were solicited, that by no means binds the department to selecting only women who were suggested—the organizers who choose the speakers are free to augment that list however they choose, or completely ignore it, if they feel the choices are inappropriate or inadequate.
The real question to ask is:
> **Are the speakers who were chosen qualified?**
So long as the speakers merit inclusion in the seminar series, it shouldn't really matter what the gender balance is (particularly in the small sample size of a single year!).
The *only* way you could argue that women were getting a "free pass" to speak is if *unqualified* women were being given an opportunity to speak.
# Answer
> 1 votes
About 10 years ago, I was on the organizing committee of a fairly large conference in the US. At one point, a society that was providing us with some funding told us that we didn't have enough women among the keynote speakers, and that we ought to go get some more. The society is a well-known one with a good reputation -- it's not ACM or IEEE, but some group like that. We told them to go pound sand. Several prominent members said they would resign from the organising committee if we had to follow this decree. The society eventually backed down, but not without a bit of a fight.
So, in this case we did not give preferential treatment to women, but we were certainly encouraged to do so.
# Answer
> -9 votes
The only thing that matters is qualification based off of merit. Unfortunately, in school and infesting its way into corporate culture, it's more about filling quotas than worrying about who is most qualified or who deserves it the most.
"Free pass" may not be the correct term for all 31% of those women, but it's more than likely the case for at least some of them. The organizer is sexist, plain and simple. People can bat words around and pretend that any particular group of people "have it harder," but in the end, it's just sexism and discrimination. Who's to say whose upbringing was worse and why that entire group of people should have more rights than another group? You don't see any of those same groups of people complaining about the lack of males in nursing or the lack of females in hard manual labor jobs.
If you feel uneasy about it, that's good. It means you have a fair mind and don't like one group having preferential treatment over another.
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Tags: gender
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thread-20620 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20620 | Method and content in selecting a social science dissertation project | 2014-05-10T17:25:26.963 | # Question
Title: Method and content in selecting a social science dissertation project
**General question**: When working in an area of social science where *method* matters just as much as *content* (i.e., theory, question), how does one choose which should be the starting point for a dissertation? In other words, should one (option 1) choose a question that is of great theoretical interest/relevance and then try to find compelling methods or (option 2) choose a question that can be answered using cutting-edge methods and then frame it in the literature as well as possible?
This question matters because, although a project will need some of both *in the end*, the starting point of a dissertation will determine which one of the two goals above is more feasible. I recognize that it takes years of hard work to achieve just one of those two goals. Also, the answer cannot simply be "both," since that just means waiting to find a methodologically great project that has theoretical relevance. As I can see it, that's just a very successful execution of option 2.
**Personal specifics**: I'm a PhD student in political science in the US exploring potential dissertation topics. (I applied with a research topic but, because I'm in the US, I'm free to change it in the first few years of the program.) I work in a niche of political science that places a lot of value on "causal identification" using a certain set of statistical strategies. This means that most books and articles celebrated by my advisors use some statistical strategy to estimate the effect of an intervention on an outcome. This usually requires that the researcher find some intervention that was randomly assigned (e.g., by nature, or a government, or an NGO, etc.).
Despite the general emphasis on method, my advisors say that I should pick a question/puzzle/topic first. Also, I have spoken with the authors of some of the aforementioned books, some of which grew from dissertations. The authors mostly state that they picked the question first and later luckily happened across their identification strategies. Part of me wonders if they are just saying that because it is the way that one "should" start a research project. (Unfortunately, I'm not friends with these authors so I cannot have a totally frank conversation them.)
In general, it seems more *intellectually honest* to select a question or topic first and then find good methods for studying it. But it generally seems more *feasible* to select a question that I expect I can answer with a cutting-edge technique first, and figure out how to frame the question later. How does one manage this tension at the beginning of a dissertation project or (I suppose) any long-term research project?
# Answer
> 2 votes
If I understand your question, it sounds like you would prefer to identify a topic or research question of interest, but feel pressure to ensure that question fits with a specific statistical technique.
Your dissertation project is about showing that you are capable of conducting research, but it is still under the guidance of your adviser. If they want you to use a certain technique, then that's part of the training process. Once you're an independent researcher you may decide to approach the issue differently, but I'm not sure there's anything inherently dishonest in this process.
One option is to identify the key components needed to use that technique (x number of variables, access to a large population database, etc.), pick a broad topic or research question you want to answer, and then look for datasets that will allow you to address some aspect of that question. This way, you can identify the topic and theoretical justification for why it is worth studying, while leaving room to narrow your eventual research question based on the available data which matches this technique.
Keep in mind that as a student you are still learning these techniques and how to integrate them with your research questions. Also, the authors you mentioned likely have years of experience in their field. It's possible they've reached a point where they think of/tailor their research questions to fit within a specific statistical framework, even if they aren't aware of it. (Imagine if the statistical technique you used for every study was regression; eventually, you would probably begin thinking of research questions in terms of regression). Perhaps by working with these methods and then identifying the specific question, you'll gain the flexibility to "reverse-engineer" the process when you have more experience.
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Tags: phd, thesis, methodology, social-science, political-science
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thread-21182 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21182 | What query language is most common for e-journal searches? | 2014-05-20T04:39:31.910 | # Question
Title: What query language is most common for e-journal searches?
I need to teach a quick lesson on e-journal searching, e.g. to search for one item, excluding certain terms, or another item.
What is the most common query language that students will most likely encounter?
# Answer
**Academic databases are built for people who have no idea what a 'query language' is.** I agree that the world would be a much better place if everyone knew a little bit of SQL, but it's not like that.
The only exception that I know is Zentralblatt, an academic database specialized to mathematics which includes a sort of text-based query language.
Every other academic database that I have worked with uses **custom-made input masks** where you can select manually fields to search on and logical operators; they look like this example, again from Zentralblatt.
> 6 votes
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Tags: literature-search, online-publication
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thread-21216 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21216 | How common is it for graduate schools to allow admission to be deferred for a year | 2014-05-20T17:11:44.623 | # Question
Title: How common is it for graduate schools to allow admission to be deferred for a year
I have a number of Arabic friends applying to graduate school and due to their situation, they tell me they intend to apply and then get a deferment for the next year. I am curious how common it is for grad schools to allow this.
I ask this because I am considering applying to PhD program in statistics and I'm starting a Master's program this fall. My GRE scores will expire at the end of the year and so I am considering applying to PhD programs this fall (with the expectation of deferring acceptance for the following year, which will be right after I get my Masters).
Most of the schools I look at seem to discourage deferment, and the only reason why I can think maybe the Arabic students don't run into difficulties is b/c they don't require any funding (they tend to be on the KSA scholarships).
Just curious if anyone can give me a realistic idea of how grad schools generally deal with deferments?
TIA, Matt
# Answer
> 2 votes
I think the general trend for deferrals is to make them available, but not automatic—usually, you have to explain exactly *why* you want the deferral, and what you plan to do in the intervening time. For example, doing a volunteer year (for example, for a Peace Corps-like organization) or accepting a prestigious international fellowship are usually acceptable reasons for a deferral. On the other hand, accepting a job offer for a year would normally not be considered grounds for a deferral. However, I think this is a policy that differs from department to department and institution to institution, so definitely check with them first!
The reason for this is that deferrals impact *two* admission classes: the current one, as well as the following one. You can't admit extra students, because you have the deferring students from the present year, plus you're now "short" a student for the new incoming class.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, graduate-school, career-path
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thread-17010 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17010 | Are there widely accepted rules related to union officers being on faculty senate? | 2014-02-16T04:02:11.700 | # Question
Title: Are there widely accepted rules related to union officers being on faculty senate?
The faculty senate at my school recently took a position on a professional issue that was highly confrontational toward the administration. After union negotiations resulted in a pay raise, the senate reversed itself on this issue. It was later revealed that the original position had been advocated by the union as a way of applying pressure in contract negotiations. Some but not all members of the faculty senate knew about the union's advocacy of the action. There was no direct or logical connection between the professional matter (the hiring of a vice chancellor) and the contract negotiations. A large number of union officers are also on the senate.
Do other schools have rules or standards of ethical conduct that cover this type of conflict of interest? Is it considered normal for there to be so much overlap between the union leadership and the senate, or for the senate to act so closely in concert with the union as part of labor negotiations?
# Answer
> 2 votes
Many faculty senates agree to be governed by Robert's Rules of Order. Buried in it is this clause:
> No member should vote on a question in which he has a direct personal or pecuniary interest not common to other members of the organization. For example, if a motion proposes that the organization enter into a contract with a commercial firm of which a member of the organization is an officer and from which contract he would derive personal pecuniary profit, the members should abstain from voting on the motion. However, no member can be compelled to refrain from voting in such circumstances.
>
> Citation: http://www.cityethics.org/content/roberts-rules-has-conflict-interest-rule-local-governments-no-conflict-provisions
Note that it says that members **cannot be compelled to abstain** and so there was no violation per se. So in your case, I think the best thing to do would either to work within the Senate to all for an inquiry possibly leading to an impeachment or vote of no-confidence in the leadership.
If you want to avoid direct confrontation, you could leak this to the administration which would be happy to do the inquiry for you, but this would be seen as highly uncollegial and quickly make you unpopular.
How about asking the Chronicle of Higher Ed to look into this as a third alternative?
Edits: Clarifications and obfuscations.
# Answer
> 2 votes
In short: no. However, there is one rule that most higher education I've encountered seems to stick to: they really like constitutions and written rules.
A quick google of my own university found a faculty senate constitution of over 30 pages with a great degree of detail and rules, and absolutely no mention of conflict of interest.
From further review, I might propose an idea of why: interest is assumed. Rather than being an organization who seeks impartiality, there is actually a deeply vested interest assumed that all senators - and the senate as a whole - try to forward the goals of the university and the interests of the faculty itself. Using my own reference constitution, early on this line states the purpose of the Senate: "The Senate shall be the representative body of the faculty." In other words, they are out for what is best for the faculty.
As such, in the situation you briefly outline, there isn't a conflict of interest, but it sounds like a case instead of "vested interest" - the faculty, and thus the senate, want pay raises and oppose administration that seeks to oppose or refuse it, and so they do what they can to help achieve this mission. In short, this isn't unethical - it's the definition of politics and the reason why the senate exists.
Much of this is determined, at least in the US, by state law and mandate for public universities. In Wisconsin: The faculty derives its authority from 36.09(4) Wisconsin Statutes, which reads as follows:
> FACULTY. The faculty of each institution, subject to the responsibilities and powers of the board, the president, and the chancellor of such institution, shall be vested with responsibility for the immediate governance of such institution and shall actively participate in institutional policy development. As such, the faculty shall have the primary responsibility for academic and educational activities and faculty personnel matters. The faculty of each institution shall have the right to determine their (sic) own faculty organizational structure and to select representatives to participate in institutional governance.
As with all good representative systems, it is assumed that there are checks and balances. There are usually student government wings, faculty senates, administrative positions, committees, etc - all designed to, hopefully, ensure an outcome that is the best for the whole community.
But in the case of a faculty senate being in favor of pay raises and also being pro-union? Yes, yes I would imagine they are. Whether or not they get a raise is usually not solely determined by a faculty senate, though, or that would be a pretty naive system.
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Tags: ethics, conflict-of-interest, governance, labor-union
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thread-1363 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1363 | What books, biographies or survival guides are helpful for women in engineering in academia? | 2012-05-02T07:09:41.247 | # Question
Title: What books, biographies or survival guides are helpful for women in engineering in academia?
Recently, I was giving a small informal talk in a local college. The audience comprised of engineers and my talk was based on current research in engineering. One of the girls asked about the position of women in academia. I answered that stating that academia was like just another field for women but now that I think of it, it might not be entirely true.
I thought that perhaps I could refer interested female student to resources explaining any gender specific aspects of academic life. I've read 2 books *"Surviving your Stupid Stupid Decision"* and *"What you came for."* Both were books to read before PhD to discuss common problems and their solutions presented as a preparatory handbook or survival guide. I am looking for something similar, but specifically addressing the aspect of gender in academia. I don't have a specific question in mind. A cursory Amazon search failed to yield any fruitful results.
I'd like to find resources applicable to female students:
1. Engineering in North America but maybe even Europe. These students showed some statistics of bias within academia.
2. Interested in joining faculty positions or industrial labs.
*Are there books, biographies, or survival guides for women in academia?*
# Answer
> 25 votes
About a month ago, MIT published their most recent *Report on the Status of Women Faculty in Science and Engineering*, following up on previous reports from 1999 and 2002. It's not exactly a "survival guide"—it's written for existing faculty and administrators more than for prospective academics—but it does clearly describe several barriers to gender inequality, both past and present. The National Academies published a similar report in 2006.
Even more recently, Nancy Hopkins (one of the authors of the MIT reports) gave a fascinating talk about MIT's efforts to attract and retain female faculty.
(Hopefully someone else will suggest something more useful for prospective academics.)
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**Update:** One of my female colleagues sent me the following reply, which I'm posting with her permission. (I'll delete this update if she decides to post an answer herself.)
> My more recent reading has focused more on survival with children in academia, which is not quite the same thing. However, some of the issues might be the same. Two good books are *Mama, PhD* and *Motherhood: the Elephant in the Library*, both of which are essay-based, with women sharing their stories. Both are available on Amazon, and are quite good.
>
> Some of the best survival guides these days are the blogs - there are a bunch of good ones which provided sanity and good advice along the way. My two favorite aren't active anymore, but their archives are nice, and there are plenty of good ones still active:
>
> There are tons of research papers on the issue, but to be honest, at least for me, those tend to be more depressing than helpful. For example, an interesting (but outdated) one: http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/EKNU.html There was a recent article that retention is going better among faculty (except in math, which surprised me): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6070/864.abstract
# Answer
> 14 votes
Here are two blogs that academics might enjoy:
* Female Computer Scientist \- Especially, read the archives, starting from the beginning and moving forward, for a perspective from a graduate student who later went on to a professor position. Lots of great advice for men and women alike.
* Female Science Professor \- Worth reading, and with a sense of humor. Written from the perspective of a mid-career science professor. Probably more likely to be of interest to faculty than grad students, but for faculty, you may find some of her writing spot-on.
I certainly found some of the stuff there helpful. I don't know if it will help women in the position you mentioned, except perhaps to feel a sense that others have gone through this and that it is possible to remain a sane, productive person despite the hurdles.
# Answer
> -13 votes
What advice would you give men wanting to do the same things?
That advice that you would give them, you give to women.
It'd be quite foolish to give women different advice and expect them to have realistic expectations and not set them up to fail, unless you feel that women aren't as competent and need to have their hands held, which would be wildly sexist.
Chances are high that if you direct them to a source that's "for women," it will more than likely ensure a negative outlook about their future coworkers and employment.
Engineering is engineering. Gender need not apply.
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Tags: phd, career-path, gender
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thread-21208 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21208 | Methods for figuring out the best schools for a particular field of study | 2014-05-20T14:33:23.323 | # Question
Title: Methods for figuring out the best schools for a particular field of study
I am about to graduate in Electrical Engineering and I wanted to pursue graduate studies in a field such as coding theory or software defined and cognitive radio.
But I'm not sure where to find the information needed to decide which school to choose. University rankings won't be specific enough to point out the quality of the research groups of my interest. I was looking for something that would point out volume and relevance of papers and articles published by the Universities' research groups.
I don't need answers on which school is best, but tools to figure this out by myself.
# Answer
Research groups that are active in a particular field will publish often in those fields.
So, identify conferences\* in your field of interest. Look at the technical programs for the last couple of years, and check out the groups that seem to be contributing a lot.
Also, ask professors at your undergrad university who work in related fields.
* Also workshops, large conferences with a few on-topic sessions, journals, etc.
> 5 votes
# Answer
This is not a direct answer to your question.
But if you are targeting a specific field of research, it might be better if you go with a well-known supervisor than a high-ranked school. I know that the name of the school and hence its ranking is important when you graduate from there, but the importance of the supervisor is something you should not overlook at all.
Just my two cents.
> 2 votes
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Tags: research-process, graduate-school, research-group
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thread-21122 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21122 | Is it dishonest to guess on multiple choice exams? | 2014-05-18T21:57:49.377 | # Question
Title: Is it dishonest to guess on multiple choice exams?
I have never seen a thing, until recently, like someone not marking a cross on a multiple choice test just because he didn't know the answer.
I wonder whether this is a East Asian right-thing-to-do mentality, or just a quirk of some student.
Should maybe we ask all students to do this? Indeed, on a multiple choice with 5 choices per question, the expectancy of a student employing pure guessing would be a 20% score. But is it cheating to mark something when you don't know the answer? At least, you are getting sometimes some point for nothing.
# Answer
> 73 votes
> Should maybe we ask all students to do this \[*refrain from guessing on multiple choice exams*\]?
Some multiple-choice exams use negative scoring, where points are deducted for wrong answers. This discourages guessing, but introduces other problems.
One problem is that students who know the material vary a great deal in their *confidence* in that knowledge. If students are actively discouraged from answering questions unless they are sure they know the answer, students who lack confidence in their knowledge will be at a disadvantage. (I'm assuming you want the exam to measure student's knowledge, and not their confidence in that knowledge.)
> But is it cheating to mark something when you don't know the answer?
Not unless you're told "Don't mark something if you don't know the answer." Cheating implies deceit - there is nothing dishonest about guessing, unless it's forbidden and you do it anyways.
# Answer
> 47 votes
My (european) students would probably be either very perplexed or laughing at me when I told them that they are not allowed to "guess" if they do not know the answer. This is not only impossible to enforce, but also much less well-defined than you seem to think (as ff524 already indicates). If I have a good idea what the answer is but I am not sure, am I *allowed* to answer? If I have in principle no clue, but from the way the question is phrased I can guess that the answer will be (c), am I *allowed* to answer?
More importantly, if there is such an obvious flaw in your testing system (guessing being generally +EV, positive expected value, in multiple choice tests with no point subtractions for wrong answers), it seems lazy to shift the burden of not exploiting this hole to the student versus designing your test in a smarter way (or living with the fact that even a random selector will get X% of all points on your test, which may be ok for you).
> But is it cheating to mark something when you don't know the answer? At least, you are getting sometimes some point for nothing.
In any exam a student can get points for getting lucky. Assume a student has learned only 30% of a given chapter, and the question deals with the part that he learned. Is it cheating to answer in this case?
Moreover, and maybe more controversially, I think you'll need a rather wide definition of cheating so that guessing a random answer falls into it, *even if you told them before not to do it*. Sure, if the rules are that you cannot do it, and you do it anyway, you are breaking the rules. However, if you know there is a pretty big hole in your system and you do not take even easy steps to fix it, I feel you can hardly fault a student for exploiting the hole.
# Answer
> 16 votes
> Is it dishonest to guess on multiple choice exams?
**No.** The next step of logic might be to not write an answer to *anything* unless it is not falsifiable, for fear of being proven wrong. Which defeats the purpose of science. In most every multiple choice question, there are some answers that are clearly more probable than others - most guesses will still be educated.
It's not dishonest to be wrong. It's only dishonest to *know* you're wrong but tell people that you're right.
# Answer
> 15 votes
In some sense, I do not understand the context. Many kids, myself included, have the dubious capacity to infer from the wording of the question and the answers what a reasonable answer would be, thus quite successfully gaming the system.
Indeed, a rational person would exclude implausible answers, and look at the plausible, and if those can easily be distinguished, we're done.
That is, a multiple-choice test cannot possibly compel the examinees to really "work the problems out".
(I've done some experiments in which by-me-designed multiple-choice quizzes on sophisticated material were better done by smart English major friends of the (smart-enough, for sure) math grad students, due to reading nuances of questions and answers.
That convinced me ... not so much to not do multiple-choice, but that the constraints of the multiple-choice "pipe" are too narrow, and do not address what we want. The same is surely true at more elementary levels.
(The pseudo-economy of machine-grading and so on is somewhat of a false economy if one wants to avoid rewarding clever-gaming-of-system... duh.)
# Answer
> 11 votes
My innovative solution: allow students to "bet" on their answers.
1. Add two options to each question. "I am very sure this is the right answer." and "I am very unsure this is the right answer."
2. Students can mark either value or none at all for any question.
3. Double the value of all questions marked extremely sure.
4. Halve the value of all questions marked unsure.
And then curve accordingly.
**Pros**
* Provides a lot of great feedback about what your students are learning and not learning.
* Allows students to self-assess for follow up work.
* Reduces the value of guessing.
Since the ultimate goal of all this testing is to see what your students are learning, and guessing muddies the water, so to speak, you might as well let the students tell you when they're guessing.
# Answer
> 10 votes
On my university on some exams it is solved by giving negative points for the wrong answer, but only after giving some number of wrong answers.
For example, every wrong answer is -0.5 points, but you won't get negative points before you give 3 wrong answers, after third wrong answer, you will get -1.5 points, and for every next wrong answer additional -0.5.
This way, students are discouraged from total random answers, but also students who aren't too confident in their knowledge have some "space" for wrong answers, so they don't have to fear negative points so much.
# Answer
> 8 votes
Here's a tough one: German driving license theory test http://fahrschule.freenet.de
The rules: It's multiple choice. You are not given the number of correct answers (there can be multiple correct ones, or no correct ones, or one correct answer). You get points for each incorrect choice. Checking one wrong answer instead of the correct one is two incorrect answers. Checking only one of two correct answers is one incorrect choice. So there is no guessing "what's the best answer". And you are allowed two or three incorrect answers out of forty questions. They don't bother counting correct answers because you must have almost all correct.
Basically, if you haven't learned your questions and know at least 95% of the answers, there's no chance. On the positive side, you can *officially* buy all the possible questions and answers and practice as much as you like.
# Answer
> 4 votes
In the university I've studied, the expected value of choosing randomly is almost ever 0, by decreasing your result if you make a wrong choice. If for some reason there's no penalty for missing, I'd assume it is intended to give you value for "guesses" or the test itself is not that important. I don't know what should be the emotional approach, but I'm pretty sure the logical approach is that you should mark every question if the expected value is above 0, unless you know you already have enough points and don't want to risk overall failure.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I suppose on some level if you were purely guessing at an answer, then it would be a form of cheating in that you would get credit for something you did not legitimately know. However, if you are able to work out an educated guess, then you certainly deserve credit because it demonstrates an ability to deduce an answer that you did not know upon reading the question. That demonstrates critical thinking and logic skills above simply knowing the right formula off hand.
# Answer
> 2 votes
> Indeed, on a multiple choice with 5 choices per question, it is a given that any student, no matter whether he is as thick as brick, would at least get a 20% grade
Not, he will get not, except when very lucky.
You can get 20% points on 5-choices per question test by guessing (on average) on **single-choice test** (one answer correct).
Assuming the correct answer on multiple choice is only then, when you have selected **all** and **only** correct answers, guessing is an extremally ineffective strategy on such tests. Multiple choice tests **are already designed** to prevent guessing!
And even 20% is **much below** typical exam passing range. In my country it's typical to set the threshold to 50%. Everything below that means a failed exam.
If your exam criteria allow passing on 20% of correct answers, you have a problem in completely other place.
# Answer
> 1 votes
I had a bit of a different situation during my Uni education than any mentioned here... I'm not sure if it is the best solution to evaluating the students, but it is definitely *implemented* and has been used for several generations (in Croatia, Computer Science).
The utterly strange this is, we had multiple choice exams for *mathematical* problems and in general, other types of subjects that require you to solve *exercises*, *tasks* or *problems* and get a *number* as an answer.
The main points of how it worked:
* for each question, you had N different answers (where N would be the same for the whole exam). (N ~ 4 or 5, typically)
* the answers offered were usually:
+ 1 correct answer
+ 1 correct answer * 10^x (e.g. if the right answer was 23.5 you might have 2.35 offered)
+ 2 answers you could get by making a low-level calculus mistake in the typical solution-process (1 direct and 1 with a \*10^x shift, as with the correct answer)
(e.g. if there's a standardized procedure for solving the problem, it is the answer you would get if you flip a sign somewhere by accident)
+ 1 completely wrong answer
* the marks were distributed as:
+ +1 for the correct answer
+ 0 for unanswered
+ a bit more than -1/N for wrong answer (e.g. if N = 5, then the wrong answer might be -0.25 instead of -0.20)
* additionally, for the **correct answer to be accepted**, you had to enclose a paper with your full solution to that question (where you did your calculations).
They weren't checking this very diligently for every answer, but you were always aware that they *could*.
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This tried to encourage the *educated* guesses (as you have your calculations, and maybe you're unsure between two answers because you're unsure if you used the right procedure). On the other hand, the penalty also discouraged complete guesses, as the potential negative marks were higher than the potential gain.
Of course, such a system still has plenty shortcomings. A typical problem situation was the student would having the right solution in his calculation, but *transferred the wrong answer* to the multiple choice answer sheet. The policies varied with different courses, although commonly, such an answer was not accepted, to prevent students for *purposefully* offering two answers and having a better chance of scoring.
---
I just realized I haven't actually offered my direct answer to the question. Here it goes:
In the system I describe, I would say **it is unethical to try and guess** in multiple choice exams. But, unlike all the other multiple choice setups, the one described here has a **way to verify weather you guessed or not** (if you have not submitted the full procedure for your answer, you must have guessed) and because of that, it stops depending solely on the students "honor"
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Tags: teaching, exams, cheating
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thread-20049 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20049 | Hard data on students using W's to enhance their GPAs? | 2014-04-30T19:34:54.923 | # Question
Title: Hard data on students using W's to enhance their GPAs?
I teach at a community college in California, where students can drop a course with a grade of "W" up until the 12th week of the semester. Within the last year or so, I seem to be seeing an increase in the number of students who find themselves passing the course at the 12th week, but who decide to drop because they want a better grade and are willing to take the course again later. However, I'm not sure that this increase is real, since my sample size is small. And if it is real, I don't know how widespread the phenomenon is or how to probe for possible causes for the change, since a number of different variables have changed in this time frame (including changes in state law and school policy).
Is there any source of hard data or method for getting data on this? I think there's a pretty big literature on student success and persistence, but the impression I get is that a lot of the literature takes it as a matter of definition that if the student doesn't pass the course with a C, it's because the student didn't "succeed," i.e., the student's academic performance wasn't passing. It seems like it would be difficult to gather statistically robust data to measure the phenomenon of drops due to grade dissatisfaction, since instructors aren't systematically asked to submit or retain the grade records of students who are no longer enrolled at the end of the term.
# Answer
> 9 votes
I've just done 15 minutes of moderately focused research, and found nothing. It looks like in most exit surveys students claim to have dropped because of family or work conflicts, which may be true but is not the acute reason for the drop for your students.
A Google search for "drop and retake" finds dozens of recommendations like this for pre-med and other highly grade-motivated students.
I'm rather intrigued, actually. If these students could be motivated to stay and get the grade, it would save the state a lot of money. And if they couldn't drop after Week 2, they might work much harder much earlier.
I sense a possible research project...
# Answer
> 4 votes
As far as method goes, it surely could make for an interesting study! In my recent literature review of factors predicting student success I didn't find anything about this phenomenon - but I wasn't looking for it directly, so that doesn't prove there aren't good studies about it!
But as a data point, I've regularly had professors explicitly tell students before a withdraw deadline to review their grade and if you aren't doing well or just unhappy with your performance so far, they strongly suggest you consider withdrawing from the class! I myself did it for a comm class where I unavoidably missed a few early days that guaranteed I couldn't do better than a B+ even with perfect performance, so I retook it later once I had a more stable schedule.
Now as for systematic gaining of data, you are quite right that it is difficult. A number of factors make this hard, even if we assume that the withdraw deadline is half-way through the course:
* Is the first-half of material, and performance on it, an accurate reflection of the rest of the material?
* Do later projects/papers/tests disproportionally skew one's final grade for a class, such as having the final project be worth more than the entire first half of the semester?
* Are "worst-grade drop" provisions available in the course, as when some professors give five exames but only count your four highest?
* Is the class cumulative or "increasingly difficult" in nature, where if you can not master early material you are sure to do even worse on later material? (Math classes are often this way, in my experience)
* Since students are dropping the class, by definition you don't know how they would have done had they stayed in the course!
* Can missed/failed early work be made up for, without major penalty?
Most studies I've seen simply consider those who drop or withdraw as experiment mortality and ignore it completely. On drop and/or withdraw forms at institutions I've attended they also generally don't even ask you why you are dropping, so this data might not yet be retained in any way and would have to be done as part of the experiment.
One could certainly conduct studies where simply drop/add forms are given options to indicate reason for dropping, and then use that data to try to determine if the problem is reported widely enough to merit further research?
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Tags: united-states, teaching, grades
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thread-21225 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21225 | How to think while comparing approaches | 2014-05-20T18:43:58.543 | # Question
Title: How to think while comparing approaches
I'm a CS master student. Now I'm doing my masters thesis and the contribution of my thesis is to compare different approaches/methods of one topic (e.g. clustering of text documents). What I have done so far is look at the state of the art on the topic and read the papers. However, now I need to think of what to compare. Of course there is the obvious comparison question: which method gives the best results? But that is so obvious. My supervisor once suggested to see how those methods compare their results and see if maybe there is a better way to compare the results of the methods. It was helpful to me to think about questions like this. But still I'm so stuck and I can only think of obvious stuff. This is the first time I am doing something like that.
I'm sure some of you went through something like this, so I was wondering if you can even tell me some /basic/ stuff and questions that people address when they compare methods in computer science. My main questions to you are:
1- When I read the papers of the methods to compare, in which way I should read it? Critically? Questionable? What exactly to look for in them?
2- Is there a general scheme for comparing methods in academia?
3- As for a masters thesis, what stuff is a must-do for comparisons?
4- Any great references/papers related to comparisons that could help me?
# Answer
> 3 votes
Not knowing the details of your project, I'll offer some general suggestions. In a sense, it seems to me you're asking two problems:one question is how to read papers, the other question is how to compare methodologies.
As far as comparing methodologies, the key concept in my mind is that of a "metric" or some means of judging/ranking methods. In CS, for example there are many such metrics: computational complexity, run time, stability, theoretical results regarding convergence, etc. Metrics often are often context dependent, meaning that different classes of users may have different ways to rate/rank a method. An algorithm may give an exact answer, which to a theoretician may be great, but if the algorithm can't function in real-time, another use may prefer another method that gives an approximate answer but quickly. So know who is going to use the methodology often helps you understand what metrics are really significant. So two thoughts to keep in mind are the methods you learned in class for judging how good an algorithm was and also who is going to use the algorithm (what are their concerns/needs and which methods best addresses them).
**A suggestion in this regard that will also help you with your paper reading is to look at what the authors of each paper say are the advantages of their method. In the introduction every author will give a reason why their method is "better" than the other (existing) methods.**
# Answer
> 2 votes
One way to approach the problem is to ask: what can method A do better than method B? What can B do better than A? Can we devise a test to measure it quantitatively?
Then you may find that A beats B at everything all the time, or that A only beats B in cases that seem relatively unimportant. In any case, you'll then have something interesting to say regarding A vs. B.
Now consider C. Does it do anything better than A and B? Maybe you can use an existing test, or maybe you need a new one. And so on for C and D.
Now, that said, very often you have standard metrics that you should use instead (e.g. look at a ROC curve or % errors or execution time or whatever). But when you're unsure how to form a comparison, inventing one that demonstrates a difference in some aspect of behavior (correctness, speed, memory usage, etc.) is often a good place to start.
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Tags: masters, thesis
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thread-21221 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21221 | Putting the cart before the horse: to state a claim without proof then prove it later or use a worse method? | 2014-05-20T17:48:53.877 | # Question
Title: Putting the cart before the horse: to state a claim without proof then prove it later or use a worse method?
I am a statistician working as an applied analyst on a paper. As I went through a set of analyses, I decided upon a detailed and thorough data analysis method using a regression model. Traditionally, that regression model is presented alongside a set of assumptions that one should check in the model approach. I had a gut feeling those assumptions didn't matter in a broad sense. I performed some simulation studies to show that that was the case. The results are interesting and we will attempt to publish a paper about those as well.
However, turning to the present analysis, should I present without proof the results of the "robust" interpretation where assumption checking is eschewed. Does it make sense to await a reviewer to raise a flag about this issue? There is a lot of pressure to publish this quickly... which is not unusual or surprising. Would it make more sense to include a sentence saying, "The authors will show in later work that the assumptions of the modeling approach can be relaxed when (blah blah blah)"?
# Answer
(I have turned my comments into an answer).
Whether or not to discuss statistical assumptions depends largely on the nature of your work. Many authors of statistical textbooks and manuals discuss assumptions in great depth. They also highlight the importance of reporting the results of assumptions testing in your manuscripts. In my experience, this is very rarely done for several reasons. For example, results are often the same regardless of assumptions (this is not always the case), if you are reporting statistically significant results and effect sizes then perhaps the need to discuss assumptions is less important, word limits often restrict the ability to discussion assumptions, and it is often very rare these days to find discussion of statistical assumptions. Note that these points relate to applied journals and papers. If the paper is statistical in nature, or you have non-significant results and need to highlight that your statistics were appropriate, then perhaps discussion of assumptions is warranted. I very rarely run across discussion of assumptions for statistics ranging from t-tests to survival analyses and latent growth modelling etc. In statistics papers though its often important to highlight what assumptions are needed and such.
I have published in the pre-eminent journals on pain and you certainly do not need to discuss assumptions in them most of the time. If you review recent papers you will see that these assumptions are very rarely discussed. A simple "we did regression" and "here are results of regression" will suffice (with more elaboration, of course!).
> 3 votes
# Answer
I wouldn't claim that you're going to do anything. If you think the assumptions are really problematic for the result and want to indicate that they can be relaxed, you could say something like "preliminary investigations of alternate models which do not assume such-and-so are consistent with these results (data not shown)".
If the reviewers insist, you can then decide whether it's worth it to put a minimal amount of that analysis in the paper.
> 1 votes
# Answer
There is one issue with publishing the proof in a subsequent: if the proof is too simple, you will probably have difficulties to publish it. In addition, if experts of your field find the proof is obvious (without reading your "later work"), your current paper may lose some credibility.
I would wait a bit (say 2 weeks) before publishing in order to have time to work seriously on the proof and check it is really an interesting work. Alternatively, I would send the paper to the journal after organizing it in such a way that I can add the proof without changing the structure (adding the proof in the appendix plus a quick comment in the main body - it is suitable for a non-math paper). Reorganizing the paper after submission is inappropriate since it does not respect the work the referee already did.
> 0 votes
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Tags: publications, statistics
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thread-21224 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21224 | Can I ask for co-authorship if I share code and am willing to help applying code to the problem? | 2014-05-20T18:35:11.487 | # Question
Title: Can I ask for co-authorship if I share code and am willing to help applying code to the problem?
Recently I have been asked to share some source code I have written with another PhD student. I have developed and used the methods in that source code for the purposes of my own research. The code will save her approximately 2 months of development/testing. I'm prepared also to offer additional help with data pre/post-processing & writing.
Given the above, am I entitled to ask for co-authorship?
# Answer
You can *discuss* with her and her advisor whether your help warrants authorship, but it would be rather unhelpful to refuse her even if she or her advisor declines. I would say, if this is true, (1) Sure! I'd love for more good research to come from my work! and (2) Since my project isn't published yet, we'll need to include a good description in the methods and it probably makes sense for me to be a coauthor.
If the target journal particularly advocates open-data and open-access, you might have to release your work in order for them to get it published. It's important to talk through first to make sure everyone's okay with that. In general it's a fantastic idea since it means that work is not so difficult to replicate, and if you have a valuable tool maybe others will benefit from it. But when you're laboring to finish your own work in time and worried about its perceived novelty, it can seem a little less appealing.
Just have the discussion (in a friendly manner) now so there aren't any unpleasant surprises later.
> 15 votes
# Answer
So, you are giving your colleague some of your research code to use on her own problem. If she ends up using, or trying to use it, then I predict two things.
(a) You will end up having to help her understand the code well enough to use it. This is very likely, amounting to practically a certainty.
(b) You will have to adapt the code to work on her problem. This is still very likely, but not quite as certain.
I'd say (b) definitely entitles you to co-authorship. (a) is not quite so clear. If you just give her the code and don't do anything else (in which case she is unlikely to be able to use the code) then you definitely aren't entitled to co-authorship.
Whatever you do, you could still be denied co-authorship. However, bear in mind that you cannot (in my opinion) reasonably withhold the code (that seems to me contrary to what research is about) but you are not *required* to work with your colleague on her problem for nothing. Therefore, if you *do* end up spending significant amounts of time working with your colleague on her problem, then bring up the issue of co-authorship early. If your colleague or her mentors don't want to give you co-authorship, then ask yourself why you would spend time working on this project.
You also say:
> I'm prepared also to offer additional help with data pre/post-processing & writing.
This is a separate issue which I'm not addressing here. I have just focused on the involvement which will naturally stem from you providing your source code. If I understand your quote above correctly, this refers to optional assistance you are prepared to provide.
> 5 votes
# Answer
Code is (hopefully) now considered as part of the regular research work. Thus, it can:
* be requested by reviewers,
* providing it will raise the chances of the paper to get accepted.
But more important, it can be **cited**, especially when the authors of a paper relied on someone else's code.
**What does it mean for you?**
In your case, you have several options:
* you should make your code publicly available. This way, it can be cited (at least under the form of an URL in the paper). If you make it available through Github, it can even by cited like any research work;
* a nice complement to the first item would be to have a publication, even a short one, that presents the results of your code, or the way it was designed if it is very specific and worth sharing. That way, you can ask the users of your code to cite this paper when they use your code;
* eventually, your co-authorship status will depend on your contribution to your paper.
I put a friend of mine (whose code saved me a few days, I would say around 1 week) in the acknowledgements section of a paper of mine. He told me it was already too much, but I didn't want him to go unnoticed/uncited. It was just a matter of being *polite* and *thankful* for me...
> 5 votes
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Tags: publications
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thread-14312 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14312 | Are women overrepresented in the field of child development studies? | 2013-11-23T01:45:51.433 | # Question
Title: Are women overrepresented in the field of child development studies?
I have the impression that many female scientists, especially after they gave birth to a child, start to develop a research interest in the learning, growing, and developmental behaviors of babies. I got this impression because over time I heard about a couple of female university professors and industry scientists doing research about babies. I personally know **0** male scientist whose research interest is in this area.
I'm wondering whether this trend I see around me is real, and thus wondering: **are women more represented in the subfield of child development (or developmental psychology) than in the broader field of psychology?**
I'm concerned, and intuitively don't like this (possibly imagined) "trend". I think it may encourage some people to think that female scientists just pick up certain research topics and don't want to touch others. I also see this "trend" as a destruction of many years of effort encouraging women in the "hard-core" science and technology.
# Answer
Males have historically outnumbered their female counterparts in the field of psychology, but this has changed in recent years. According to the American Psychological Association
> Psychology, once a man's profession, now attracts mostly women. Data from the 1986 APA report, "The Changing Face of American Psychology," and the National Science Foundation show that the percentage of psychology PhDs awarded to men has fallen from nearly 70 percent in 1975 to less than 30 percent in 2008. (The data do not include PsyD degrees.)
Not only are females over-represented in psychology as a whole, they appear to be even more over-represented in the sub-fields of developmental and child psychology. This article from the APA states
> In developmental and child psychology...female PhD recipients outnumber men by more than five to one.
> 18 votes
# Answer
> Are women overrepresented in the field of child development studies?
No. They have more than 50% representation, yes, but that doesn't equate to overrepresentation in the sense that it should be 50%. Men and women are different. Women are drawn naturally towards certain things that interest them, just as men are.
> I think it may encourage some people to think that female scientists just pick up certain research topics and don't want to touch others.
They do, just as men do. Why are you so concerned about what other adults willfully choose to do with their lives?
> 1 votes
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Tags: statistics, psychology, gender
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thread-21250 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21250 | Should the title be changed when converting a conference article into a journal article? | 2014-05-21T12:15:10.433 | # Question
Title: Should the title be changed when converting a conference article into a journal article?
Recently, a (Springer) journal invited me to extend a (Springer) conference paper. The conference paper was published in April. After the extensions, I can submit the journal article as post-conference publication.
Regarding my question, should / must I keep the name of the conference article (when writing the journal article)? Or should I modify the name of the journal article?
# Answer
> 16 votes
According to the conference website:
> The conference proceedings are to be published in the Springer's LNAI (indexed by DBLP, EI, Scopus, and Thomson ISI).
In other words, your conference paper is already published. The journal paper will therefore be a new publication, and as such, you could use a different title, to avoid any confusion (and it will be a different paper, since you have to expand it).
**EDIT** However, there are precedents, for at least one previous edition of the conference you're mentioning, of authors having the same title in the conference and in a journal edition (taken from DBLP):
* Peerasak Intarapaiboon, Ekawit Nantajeewarawat, Thanaruk Theeramunkong: Extracting Chemical Reactions from Thai Text for Semantics-Based Information Retrieval. IEICE Transactions 94-D(3): 479-486 (2011)
* Peerasak Intarapaiboon, Ekawit Nantajeewarawat, Thanaruk Theeramunkong: Extracting Chemical Reactions from Thai Text for Semantics-Based Information Retrieval. ACIIDS (1) 2010: 271-281
* Yongli Wang, Dongxiao Niu, Ling Ji: Power load forecasting using data mining and knowledge discovery technology. IJIIDS 5(5): 452-467 (2011)
* Yongli Wang, Dongxiao Niu, Yakun Wang: Power Load Forecasting Using Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Technology. ACIIDS (1) 2010: 319-328
* Moamin Ahmed, Mohd Sharifuddin Ahmad, Mohd Zaliman M. Yusoff: A Collaborative Framework for Multiagent Systems. IJATS 3(4): 1-18 (2011)
* Moamin Ahmed, Mohd Sharifuddin Ahmad, Mohd Zaliman M. Yusoff: A Collaborative Framework for Multiagent Systems. ACIIDS (1) 2010: 329-338
Looking at random references from the journals in question, it seems quite frequent to have the same name for a journal paper and a conference publication the previous year. In other words, I stand corrected, and **you might want to keep the same name for the journal version**.
As pointed out by DavidRicherby and Mangara, it's likely to be field dependent. Hence, the best approach is probably to **look at previous editions of the journals in question, and check if there are matching conference papers.**
# Answer
> 7 votes
If the content of the paper is not drastically different from the conference version (same main results, but more details / data), it is perfectly acceptable to use the same title. This is the usual approach in theoretical computer science. Of course, you are free to change the title if you want to.
Examples:
Oswin Aichholzer, Greg Aloupis, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Sándor P. Fekete, Michael Hoffmann, Anna Lubiw, Jack Snoeyink, and Andrew Winslow, “**Covering Folded Shapes**”, in *Proceedings of the 25th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2013)*, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, August 8–10, 2013.
Oswin Aichholzer, Greg Aloupis, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Sándor P. Fekete, Michael Hoffmann, Anna Lubiw, Jack Snoeyink, and Andrew Winslow, “**Covering Folded Shapes**”, *Journal of Computational Geometry*, volume 5, number 1, 2014.
Jeff Erickson, and Amir Nayyeri. "**Tracing compressed curves in triangulated surfaces**." *Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on Computational Geometry*. ACM, 2012.
Jeff Erickson, and Amir Nayyeri. "**Tracing compressed curves in triangulated surfaces**." *Discrete & Computational Geometry* 49.4 (2013): 823-863.
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Tags: journals, conference, computer-science, publications
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thread-21149 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21149 | Why do US flagship state universities vary so much in quality? | 2014-05-19T13:29:28.427 | # Question
Title: Why do US flagship state universities vary so much in quality?
In the United States, it is typical for each state to have one or more flagship state universities. All of them are reasonably good institutions, but some are absolutely top-notch, such as in Michigan, California, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Typically, tuition at these universities is extremely expensive for out-of-state students and much cheaper for in-state students. So, at least in principle, these universities principally serve the best students from their respective states who choose to study at public schools.
How is it then that some schools became absolutely top-notch and others less so? To my mind there is no obvious factor explaining which of the state schools became top-notch; for example, Wisconsin is not, and never has been, an unusually populous or wealthy state.
# Answer
> 17 votes
Different states have very different political attitudes towards their flagship schools as well. This makes a difference with funding levels of course. It also makes a difference in terms of how money is to be used. A governor/executive, combined with a university president, that wants to grow a flagship institution can help earmark funds to attract top-notch researchers, link business activity and academic areas to grow in, and so on. It takes planning and vision as well as money, and that varies a lot from state to state.
# Answer
> 4 votes
The one thing that has to be remembered is that classes at Universities are run by humans... and they aren't all of the same caliber.
If a University has decided to focus on a particular school, Civil Engineering for example, then they will expend the funds necessary to attract highly competent and well known professors *in that area*. This might mean that funds aren't available to attract similar talent in another college at that University, such as English Literature. However it also means that the university will get a reputation for turning out better candidates in those areas.
Next, Universities are funded through a variety of ways. Only one is the actual cost of tuition. Private funding, such as provided by various businesses or alumni, is a big part of this. If a particular college within the University graduates a large number of high dollar workers then those private donations are likely to be largely earmarked for that same college.
Point is: Quality is determined by your professors and tools available and these are generally determined by the Money a University has or is willing to spend.
# Answer
> 2 votes
State population, and proximity to a large city likely also plays a role. Its not a perfect correlation, but UCB, UCLA, Georgia Tech, UT-Austin, and several other "big name" state schools are either in or near major citys in high population states.
I'm guessing states like the Dakotas don't have enough students to build larger campuses, and hire as many profs. Looks like neither Dakota has even 1 million people. I'm guessing there just isn't very much real demand for education in these states, since fewer students are getting degrees the universities have less money for big ticket items like stadiums, rec facilities and "star" faculty.
# Answer
> 2 votes
There are a variety of factors, and the sample is too diverse to come up with a simple answer. For starters, here's a list of all the State-run universities in the USA. This answer is basically an outline, based on my impressions, and I invite others to elaborate on these points with historical documents (this answer is a wiki) or maybe even a statistical analysis if we're lucky.
1) The need for a state school. Some regions already had several private universities that could serve their population. Others (California?) did not, so the state set one up.
2) The political commitment to the University system. Some state schools (CA) are written into the state's constitution. Other's are not (PA). Some were established with land-grants.
3) In a less formal sense, some states have a strong public commitment to public education, while others value it less. The rankings of high schools has some correlation to my perception of flagship university quality.
4) As implied in the question, the total resources available to the state is an issue, though not the only one. Still, overall, larger and wealthier (and more urban) states tend to have more prestigious flagship universities.
5) And then there's randomness (as described by Chris Lively) -- all the stuff that is not a characteristic of the state per se. AKA, historical contingencies, personnel decisions, strategic decisions, and the general legacy of the University's infrastructure..
It would be interesting to see how all these factors contribute to predicting the prestige of the flagship university (a PCA or logistic regression, perhaps)-- but that analysis is outside of my expertise.
# Answer
> 2 votes
The other answers have pointed out a number of important factors, but an additional one is lack of competition. Most of the best state universities are in states and even regions with few large private universities of similar caliber (and especially, where there weren't many when the universities developed). It's notable that the northeast, which is wealthy, populous, and tends to have politics that support higher education still doesn't have any public schools in that caliber---in large part because it has the highest concentration of private schools which fill that niche.
There's a belief that having research institutions brings benefits to a state by creating jobs indirectly. That benefit is a lot of the reason a state would want to put the extra resources into a school to make it a top tier research institution rather that a good school primarily for educating its own students. Private institutions can provide the same benefit, and so reduce the motivation.
(Compare Texas, which has openly discussed that it has too few top research universities relative to its population and wealth and is running a competition among its lower tier research universities to become the states third public R1.)
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thread-21223 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21223 | Is it advisable to attend a conference in Germany with talks by German presenters in English if you don't speak German? | 2014-05-20T18:27:08.343 | # Question
Title: Is it advisable to attend a conference in Germany with talks by German presenters in English if you don't speak German?
There is an upcoming conference in Germany, all the talks will be in English, however all the listed participants are also German. Only speaking English I'm wondering if it would be inadvisable to go, as everyone will speak German during non-talk times?
Is this true or am I being too paranoid?
# Answer
> 46 votes
Here are some claims that I think you will agree are true:
* Anyone who attends a conference where all the talks are in English can understand spoken English reasonably well
* You don't live in Germany and are considering attending. You are probably not the only person considering it
* Anyone willing to give a technical presentation in English can probably both understand and produce spoken English reasonably well
I believe these add up to you being able to find people for "hallway conversations" in English pretty easily. You might have some lonely lunches if you find yourself at a table with people who all speak German and exclude you. I have this problem with people who all discuss (in English) something I don't understand at all and don't want to learn (eg how to install Exchange on a server.) I generally try to prevent this by striking up a conversation with a fellow attendee at the end of the session that is right before lunch, and suggesting we go to the lunch line together.
# Answer
> 10 votes
Don't worry, Germans are usually polite. Being polite is to include all people in a conversation. So if the common language of a group is English, they'll switch to English to accommodate you. Furthermore, Germans attending the conference will expect to have attendants not speaking German and that conversations in the hallways will be in English too.
# Answer
> 5 votes
I assume that the conference attendees will be at a higher educational level, which probably means they can not only listen to talks in English, but probably are also able to communicate in English.
So yes, I thank it's safe to go to the conference and you will be able to talk to people in English with no big problem.
I guess from your reservations that you are aware that it is not always easy to get along with English in Germany. Don't expect sales agents or bus/taxi drivers to talk English. And even if people speak English, they might not be very fluent.
And I must admit that all other participants being German is strange - whatever reason there is that talks are in English, it is surprising that participants do not come from outside Germany. I'd propose to call the organizers just to make sure that talks are in English.
I don't think you're paranoid here. E.g. Universities will have lectures announced in English, but hold them in German (as long as nobody objects).
And if there are so many German speaking people, groups often will talk in German. Then you shouldn't be shy - just throw in a remark and make clear you only speak English. I'm pretty sure they will switch language then.
Note: I'm saying this as a German living in Germany, with some experience with conferences at different national levels, sometimes visiting conferences where most participants are locals not speaking German. In the last case, it's really important to not be too shy - when you try to join a discussion, make clear you do not understand what they say as soon as you get the chance - maybe a simple "hello, how are you" is already enough to achieve awareness.
I guess you will get to know some nice colleagues.
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Tags: conference, germany
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thread-21238 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21238 | How should I prepare e-prints (pre-prints and post-prints) of already published papers? | 2014-05-21T03:07:01.883 | # Question
Title: How should I prepare e-prints (pre-prints and post-prints) of already published papers?
I am about to embark on the publication of pre-prints or post-prints of about a dozen papers that have already been published in peer-reviewed journals. I plan to use the SHERPA/RoMEO database to decide whether to publish a pre-print or post-print, and when it is appropriate. I have backed up the published papers at both the pre-peer review and post-peer review stages.
These documents will be lodged primarily with my institutions repository, but also on a personal website and perhaps academia.edu. Due to my field of research, arvix is not appropriate.
I am aware that I may need to make some modifications to the manuscripts before lodging them as a pre-post print. For example, it seems appropriate to link to the canonical, published version of the paper on the cover sheet. But I am unaware of what other changes I may need to make to the manuscript. A checklist of modifications to make would ease this process and help me to avoid missing things.
**What steps should I go through to prepare a manuscript for publication as a pre-print or post-print?**
**UPDATE**: I've made an example post-print here. Are there any concrete improvements I could make on this, or important things I'm missing?
# Answer
> 6 votes
Based on my experience, this is my checklist
1. See the relevant journal entry on http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ (or http://rchive.it). I *always* read of the publisher's copyright transfer agreement, as well. You never know.
2. Decide whether I can self-archive only the *preprint* or the *postprint* or both. The second one is usually defined as the one after peer-review but before the publisher's typesetting and proofreading (if any is performed). Of course, self-archiving the postprint is more desirable, as its content is *almost* the same one as the published paper.
3. Take the appropriate version of the paper from my files. That is, I take the .doc, .tex or whatever the source file is. I either create a cover page or a footnote after the title/last author name. In the footnote, I put the following text:
> This is an author generated preprint (or postprint) of the article:
>
> //full citation here
>
> Copyright XXXX The Publisher (if required).
>
> The final publication is available on http://dx.doi.org/DOI-HERE (or the publisher's digital library entry)
Never had any problem doing like that. Just make sure to clearly state what the publisher asks you to state.
Your example looks fine to me. I would rewrite the "This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published" to clearly state either preprint (before peer-review) or postprint (after peer review).
As stated in another answer, never self-archive the publisher's PDF anywhere (unless it is an open access journal, but you do not really need to self-archive then). I am re-writing it because authors typically do not understand this.
# Answer
> 6 votes
One thing I suggest is **do not put up the paper in submitted-manuscript form**. You are free to change from double-spaced (if that is the case) back to single spaced (or as appropriate); you can put figures and tables where they belong; you can use a nice typeface; you can even change the referencing style to a one you like better.
Use the version that incorporates changes suggested by the referee *if at all possible*. My guess is you didn't sign away rights until after you made said changes and sent it back to the journal -- or this may have happened, and it may be that the original submission came with agreeing to terms that include all rights in various versions of the paper in the case of acceptance - I hate these types of journals. In any case, knowing your field would help regarding advice here.
This website can help you find out if you are allowed the post-referee-comments version: http://rchive.it/ (it uses Sherpa/Romeo data), but the ultimate answer will come from the journal website.
This will make your paper more pleasant to read, and help dispel the myth that preprints are ugly.
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Tags: publications, copyright, preprint, online-publication, formatting
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thread-21296 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21296 | Citing terse works, or wordy comprehensible works? | 2014-05-22T10:40:28.880 | # Question
Title: Citing terse works, or wordy comprehensible works?
I am in a position where I am writing both more professional articles, and supplementary articles to undergraduates. The supplementary works is meant to prepare the students for the graduate courses. This is in mathematics, and analysis in particular. I want the notes to be self contained, and therefore I cite, or refer to proofs and further discussions on the lemmas and corollaries that are used. This should also be used for further references, "if you want to know more about metric spaces, please look at Kreyszig \[4\]".
I have a wide variety of books I can cite, I can pick any of the big books used in Calculus. Calculus by Adams etc Calculus: Early Transcendentals by James Stewart. On the other hand I could refer to the more classical works by Apostol or Rudin (Principles of mathematical analysis)
Choosing the more classical works is good for preping the stundents, but for a first touch these can be a bit terse. Also the proofs in for an example Rudin are a bit on the short side, whilst Adams is very wordy Would citing both, for every lemma and theorem, make the citations too daunting?
*Long story short:*
**When should one cite the terse material, and when to choose the lengthier comprehensible works. How does one choose the appropriate level to cite from when writing an article, paper or notes ?**
# Answer
> 7 votes
I'd give both, explaining briefly what is to be expected of which reference, something along the lines:
> A brief introduction can be found in \[1\] while \[2\] gives a terse summary and \[3\] develops proof 42 in detail.
(substitute whatever citation style you use for \[1\] etc.)
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Tags: citations, mathematics
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thread-21301 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21301 | Can I get a letter of recommendation from a professor who didn't teach me BUT I did research with? | 2014-05-22T11:42:26.747 | # Question
Title: Can I get a letter of recommendation from a professor who didn't teach me BUT I did research with?
I am an undergraduate student wanting to transfer to another institution for undergraduate studies. I am a research assistant for a professor at an institution that I do not attend.
Would the university which I which to transfer to, accept the recommendation letter from this professor? Again, I have not taken any courses with this professor, nor go to the institution where he teaches.
Related (except for Graduate Admissions): Copied Letter of Recommendation?
# Answer
> 27 votes
The point of a letter of recommendation is for the receiving party to obtain third-party verification that you are, indeed, awesome. Generally speaking, people like to receive letters from individuals who know you well professionally. In most cases, teachers cannot write good letters, as they only know you as a face in the class, and never really got to know your work ethic, personality, and capabilities. A research advisor would be able to comment on all those things, and would be able to write a much stronger letter.
# Answer
> 10 votes
In general. the criterion for a letter of recommendation is **not** "someone whose course you've taken.\__ In general, the letter of recommendation is supposed to be written by someone who knows you well, and can testify to your strengths and weaknesses.
Unless there's a specific demand for a letter from someone who has taught you, you should not worry about the fact that your research advisor hasn't taught you. In principle, because a research advisor has worked more closely with you than a typical instructor would, your should expect to get a more useful letter from the research advisor, as OBu indicates.
# Answer
> 3 votes
The general answer is: "It depends on their rules regarding the admission process".
If they accept (or require) letters of recommendation, and they don't explicitely relate it to teaching relationships, they will take such recommendation letters into acount (and I personally would rate them even higher than a standard "this guy has great grades"-letter).
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Tags: undergraduate, recommendation-letter
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thread-19065 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19065 | How to answer question about funding a project | 2014-04-08T07:27:48.203 | # Question
Title: How to answer question about funding a project
On some project grant applications, one gets a question on something along the lines of: "If you are unsuccessful in your application for this funding round, how do you plan on funding this project?"
How should I answer this? Seems like some kind of catch-out question.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Some organizations require applicants to list alternate sources of potential funding in order to determine whether the applicant has sufficiently explored funding options and is expending effort to obtain funding. If other options are less likely to be funded (due to poorer fit) or are unavailable, you can highlight that to emphasize the importance of applying for this particular grant.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I would say there are two aspects in this question:
* **Do you have a personal contingency plan?** A funder might like to see that you have thought about the possible problems that can arise in your project, including not getting it funded. Showing that you have explored different options shows that you take into account the global context of this project, which is a mindset very useful to be successful in leading a project.
* **How specific is your proposal to the call?** In general, a proposal might not be eligible as is to many funding agencies. For instance, your initial proposal could include only partners from the UK, which makes it ineligible for most EU calls. Answering that you believe the proposed consortium is the best possible one for that particular project, and as such, is not eligible for other agencies, shows that, again, you've thought about the global context of your project.
So the actual answer might depend on your project, whether it is tailored for that specific call or not , whether there are other places it can be eligible or not, whether you would include feedback or not, etc. Answering properly this question demonstrates that you have a vision for your project in a global context, rather than simply answering to the current call.
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Tags: funding
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thread-21295 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21295 | Is it common to cite the numbers of results a search engine yields as evidence for the prevalence of something online? | 2014-05-22T10:07:11.140 | # Question
Title: Is it common to cite the numbers of results a search engine yields as evidence for the prevalence of something online?
Is it common in academia to include the number of results a Google search on a keyword yields as an evidence for the prevalence of something online?
I'm not intending to base my research paper on this evidence; it is just a supporting point in a paragraph.
For example, I'm writing a research paper on Stack Exchange; one of the paragraphs is about how popular Stack Exchange is in the internet.
In one of the paragraph, I would mention that a Google search on the keyword 'Stack Exchange' yielded about 49,600,000 results, which shows how popular it is among netizens.
# Answer
Do *not* do this. The "approximate" number of hits Google reports is *completely* worthless. To see why, look at this number on both the first and the tenth page of Google hits:
First results page
Tenth results page
When I just did this, I got "approximately 9,010,000 hits" reported on the first results page... but only "approximately 48 hits" on the tenth page.
Your results will probably vary, depending on your search engine bubble (another reason why this number is useless).
> 11 votes
# Answer
I honestly haven't seen something like this in any publication. But I guess you could use it as some by-point, I would in that case provide the number of result of other popular search engines, something like: "xyz is highly sought after in the world wide webs, a simple key search 'xyz' using the most popular search engines yields impressive number of results (google: 49,600,000, bing: ..., yahoo: ..., etc.)"
Consider, however, that the search results also include ambiguous results for the provided key word(s). In your example, it is likely that that result of about 49,600,000 will include hits that contain "Stack" and "Overflow", but not the semantics that bind them into your intention. Please bear in mind that I'm aware that you are able to narrow your search down to a particular key word by using google tools, tweaks and skill, I'm merely providing an example, as depending on the "commonness" of the key word(s), the explicit narrowing down can be complex.
> 1 votes
# Answer
I don't think such numbers would be accurate at all, altough they could probably be used as a rough, theoretical estimate. 2 reasons I can think of for why this would not be accurate at all:
* Typos. Have you ever tried googling for 2 different spellings in order to figure out which is most likely the correct spelling? Unfortunately, the most used(popular) spelling is not always the correct one. What this means is that the number of google hits is not a picture of reality, but a picture of what is in people's thoughts.
* A phenomenon\activity\product being written about on the web is not equivalent to actually being used alot. What's being written on the web is primarily a picture of what's going on in people's heads, rather than what's actually around them. A new invention could be ground-breaking and get mentioned alot, even though only scientists would use it.
> 1 votes
# Answer
The popularity of a web site is only very loosely related to the number of search engine results. A better approach is to use traffic statistics, such as the web site's Alexa ranking:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com
This places StackOverflow at rank 53, which means that only 52 sites are visited more frequently.
Either way, StackOverflow is so ubiquitous within the programming community that you probably don't need to qualify your claims of its popularity unless your paper is intended for non-programmers.
> -1 votes
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Tags: research-process, citations, writing
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thread-21326 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21326 | How would you decide to publish (or not) in F1000Research or other journals with alternative peer-review methods? | 2014-05-22T19:16:37.653 | # Question
Title: How would you decide to publish (or not) in F1000Research or other journals with alternative peer-review methods?
As pointed out by altmetrics, “Peer-review has served scholarship well, but is beginning to show its age. It is slow, encourages conventionality, and fails to hold reviewers accountable.”
Not all publications are created equal. Neither are the statuses of their authors. However, senior authors in life sciences rarely publish in isolation, so some junior researcher’s neck is always on the line (one of the many catch 22’s in academic publishing, and one I hadn’t really thought about much before).
I realize this makes the question somewhat subjective, and I hope that a variety of answers can be supplied - but if your answer is similar to an existing one, perhaps a comment will serve - thank you!
Here is some more background on my question:
An excellent article by Zen Faulkes, which doesn’t mention F1000Research but does mention Proceedings of Peerage of Science , suggests that the post-publication peer-review is unstandardized. It seems that F1000Research is trying to standardize the process within their journal, rather than relying on altmetrics. I think this is a reasonable approach: as a scientist whose job is partly to network with others, you can very likely get interested parties to review your paper (if not, then try one of the many journals supporting the traditional review method). Additionally, this publisher-centric peer review will probably attract more serious reviews; who wants to post a review on some random social networking site that few people will likely read?
If someone has strong negative feelings about your paper, then they can say so. Of course, there is a lack of anonymity on F1000Research. Oh dear, now we need to be polite (Faulkes also discusses this). I know it is a very difficult thing to be polite sometimes after multiple grants or papers have been rejected, but perhaps this is a step in the right direction.
Perhaps more importantly, the reviewers may have to defend their assertions without the editor making a summary decision about whether or not the authors can reasonably address the reviewers concerns. I think this form of review removes much more bias than it introduces by keeping the conversation open. And I don’t think this means the review process will go on indefinitely; the authors no longer need satisfy every whim of the reviewers, but only those they deem important enough so that their colleagues will respect the merit and credibility of the study.
Turning to other forms of review: I also think it is unlikely that any single review model with always be best for all people and all publications.
For instance, one type of review process that would necessarily need to be pre-publication peer review is the double blind scheme, where neither reviewers nor authors are given any direct evidence of the other party’s identity. It seems that this would not only make things more fair, but also open up the reviewer pool to highly cited authors whose input is no doubt frequently valued but difficult to obtain in the traditional peer review process. Unfortunately it does not seem to be at all prevalent in the sciences, and I know of no journals supporting it.
# Answer
How would I decide?
Funding, Readership and Tenure.
* Does the journal cost money to submit to, and if so, do I have any funding for said submission? Is there a means of waiving that fee if I don't have funding?
* Is the journal read by the people I want to read my paper? This I'd gauge by talking to my colleagues - for example, if no one in (hypothetically) infection control reads F1000Research, then I'm not publishing there, because the point of my paper is to be read and advance the field, and it can't do that if it isn't where relevant eyes will see it, whether or not the journal gets an ideological checkmark.
* Similar to readership, when this journal is looked at by a promotion committee etc., will it matter?
The latter two are, in my mind, not yet settled, and that makes me a little hesitant - bold ideological stands are for people who aren't on the job market. Beyond that, I think the primary problem with post-pub peer review is that I'm not convinced it will be at all uniformly distributed. My suspicion is that a few prominent papers will be heavily reviewed, and then the rest will have either middling, or no reviews beyond what is mandated by the journal. I'm also not convinced it's a terribly fair system - it's relatively easy to attack a post-doc or doctoral student's work, while you might hesitate to do so for Important Person In Your Field, and similarly, said Important Person may be able to be fairly rude with impunity, especially if the journals aren't terribly well known.
For what it's worth, several major journals in my field are double-blinded. I have no idea who the authors are, there are actually instructions to remove clearly identifiable information (change "Brigham-Women's Hospital" to "A major regional hospital in the Northeast United States", etc.) in the manuscript, and the reviews are anonymous unless signed.
> 10 votes
# Answer
Subjectively, I'd say that there are two main criteria on deciding where (and if) to publish some piece of research.
**1. Does that publication "count"?**
There tend to be specific criteria set by funding agencies, promotion committees or other organizations that separate 'proper' publications from worthless ones. Clearly, there must be some criteria, as the world is full of places that would publish anything, and counting everything equally is a worse option than most completely arbitrary criteria. For some areas the split might be journals vs conferences/etc; for some places the criteria might be \[lack of\] peer review; for my purposes the criteria is indexing in Web of science or SCOPUS.
**2. Would that publication be read by the people I want?**
When academic goals involve 'advertising' a particular approach and influencing the subfield, it doesn't matter how if it's reviewed (if at all), but it matters on how well it reaches the target audience. For that purposes the best option might be, say, a short talk at some seminar which is well attended by the relevant group; which could have more impact than an article at a prestigious journal, and has the benefit of being quicker than the traditional review process.
Depending on ones particular goals, either of those goals may strongly dominate the other; however, if none of them are well met, it makes no sense to publish (at that venue) at all.
For me, it seems that any new or alternative approach is very unlikely to be useful for publishing. Alternative approaches by definition don't match the classic, estabilished ways of publishing (goal #1); and any new publication, unless estabilished by scientists in my particular narrow research area for their own needs, is unlikely to reach them (goal #2) better as any other venue , even the trivial option on simply putting it up on your own or organization webpage.
> 4 votes
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Tags: publications, peer-review, open-science
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thread-21349 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21349 | What is a senior research fellow? | 2014-05-23T13:09:01.653 | # Question
Title: What is a senior research fellow?
How is a senior research fellow different from a lecturer and a professor? I suppose it has small teaching responsibilities? Would it then be a suitable academic career option for someone who chooses research over teaching?
I do not have a specific interest in a particular country, since I am not sure if the practice would differ between countries, but let us say it is UK.
# Answer
> 6 votes
It depends on the university. At most of the universities in the UK I know, a position is usually called research fellow if it either is a temporary position or a position with less teaching obligations. However, there is no general rule about what one calls a research fellow. It may even be different from department to department (Oxford is an interesting example, there it can mean pretty much everything). If it is a suitable academic career option depends therefore more on the university itself and the conditions of the position (how much teaching, is it a permanent position?), than on the name of the position.
About the difference between the countries: There are large differences between countries, not only in the names (which differ of course, due to different languages). For example in Germany most positions are only temporary positions without tenure track.
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Tags: career-path
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thread-21320 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21320 | Aftermath of rightfully submitting a solo paper without my advisor's name | 2014-05-22T16:52:48.853 | # Question
Title: Aftermath of rightfully submitting a solo paper without my advisor's name
After reading this question and this I haven't find my answer.
My advisor hasn't contributed to my work and I know that my work isn't significant and it won't publish in top journals. But I want to publish it without my advisor's name in a conference.
So my question is not about *automatically coauthor my advisor* or *having high hopes on my individual work*.
The Problem arise from here. We have to enroll in some seminar classes before starting to work on our thesis. In one of those classes our teacher said:
1. "*No matter what you do, you have to enlist your advisor's name in your papers because unless it would considered as a work with no supervisor and it can not be trusted.*"
2. "*In interview we have for PhD students, if the person who is applying hasn't written the name of his suprevisor we doubt him. Either he is a genius or he is hiding something or he is **too** active in his field.*"
3. "*In some companies and research labs everyone add the name of their fundraiser to show him their gratitude, so should we.*".
So based on what I heard I'm going to face serious problems if I publish my work individually as a student. The question is:
1. Apart from being unethical including a name of person who didn't contribute to work as a coauthor, does it have any academic weight? I mean, does it **value** my work if I say I did it alone or it does not have any different until coauthor isn't a student.
2. Is it true that I am going to be accused as a not genuine person if I don't add my advisor's name? Because our teacher told us that he and his colleagues don't consider these kind of submitted papers trustworthy and genuine, so don't look at them carefully and mostly reject them on sight.
**Edit:**
**Conclusion**: Thank you all. I think my vision is more clear now. The right way is not the opposite of the wrong way. It means despite "spoon-fed" "a very distorted view", the right thing to do is not doing the opposite.
I decided to do my best to play as a team, because of its mentioned benefits, especially for my first paper. But if working as a team doesn't go well, there is no harm in solo publishing or getting some new advisers.
# Answer
> 54 votes
I don't think your problem is with your advisor. Your real problem is with teachers in classes who say things like:
> * No matter what you do, you have to enlist your advisor's name in your papers because unless it would considered as a work with no supervisor and it can not be trusted."
> * "In interview we have for PhD students, if the person who is applying hasn't written the name of his suprevisor we doubt him. Either he is a genius or he is hiding something or he is too active in his field."
> * "In some companies and research labs everyone add the name of their fundraiser to show him their gratitude, so should we.".
In light of all the recent debate about whether we are too idealized and rosy in our views of academia, let me at least say this:
Whether or not this is common practice in the areas you work in, the problem here is the rationale being used to justify author inclusion. In no way is the decision being made based on some notion of contribution by the advisor (either financial or moral, or in any form). It's being based purely on a notion of patronage or bias.
The person making these claims has either a very distorted view of how authorship works, or is misleading new students in a terrible way.
# Answer
> 19 votes
> Apart from being unethical including a name of person who didn't contribute to work as a coauthor, does it have any academic weight?
You use very strong words, but things are not black and white. You are a student and most likely you do not know how to write a good paper. Why not involve your supervisor in the writing process? You can write the original manuscript and he will make the final version, since he is more experienced than you. In that setting you are still first author, he does contribute and he is co-author, your paper has more chances to be published and everyone is happy.
> Is it true that I am going to be accused as a not genuine person if I don't add my advisor's name?
You are exaggerating again. If your paper will be rejected it will most likely be because it is not good enough and not because of your name. There is always the possibility that someone with no previous experience is easier to get his paper rejected (I believe many reviewers do a Google search on the person they are reviewing) but that mostly applies to big conferences. For smaller conferences or workshops criteria are not that strict.
But you have not thought the most critical factor. What if your paper gets accepted? Who will then pay for your conference registration and trip? Usually it is the advisor that provides such funding. If you submit it solo, you must do the entire process with the university bureaucracy alone and without support from some faculty member it will be much harder for the university to actually cover your expenses.
So, although I disagree with some of the comments your seminar tried to spoon-feed you, in the long run it will be better to play as a team member. So, involve your supervisor, make him actually contribute on the notion that you will still be first author. This cooperation might even vastly improve your paper and then it might get accepted even in a top conference or journal. In this setting, you will have more to win than to lose.
# Answer
> 14 votes
In scientific publications, at least, "author contribution" statements are becoming more and more common. These statements list the exact contributions that each author on the paper made. A number of excellent examples are provided on this Nature blog post: http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/11/post\_12.html
If you included your supervisor as an author on the paper, providing such a statement would allow you to clarify the nature of your roles.
# Answer
> 7 votes
First of all, pretty much all the justifications your teacher gave to you are lies. This person is trying to encourage you to put your supervisors' names on your papers, but avoiding telling you that you have to do so because it is the rule.
Secondly, there are roughly three ways a paper can be written as a grad student.
* The student does some work and publishes it, but the supervisor is responsible for lots of guidance, planning, editing, making sure the work gets done, suggesting the original question, helping to place the paper, etc. This is how almost everyone's first paper gets written. The supervisor will almost always be an author, and everyone accepts that this is fair. (However, I have known some generous supervisors who decline an author credit in such cases, since they regard what they did as part of supervising, and not a specific contribution to authoring the paper).
* The student and supervisor collaborate, similarly to how to colleagues would collaborate (but perhaps with the student doing more of the 'grunt work' and the supervisor making more of the decisions). Both are authors.
* The student does work independently, perhaps asking for some limited advice or proofreading. The supervisor should not be an author, but often is in practice.
Most people except the very gifted start off with the first type, and everyone except those who don't progress very far should have some of the latter two types by the end of a PhD.
So if someone has only publications with their supervisor, it could be taken as meaning that they didn't do much independent work, but it could also be that they had to 'give credit' to their supervisor, or that they work in an area where most papers are collaborative.
If someone has only publications without their supervisor, it might be seen as positive, but it could also be assumed that their supervisor was generous in not taking credit, therefore neutral. If you are known to be a genius, the fact that your early publications were on your own will be mentioned, but it won't prove that you are a genius if this isn't already accepted.
The implied lack of credibility 'that your supervisor didn't approve of your work' would be a very strange reaction. It's only something you should worry about if there's some other reason you might come across as a maverick - for example all your papers are serious work about some topic beloved of conspiracy theorists, or you went straight into grad school from high school, etc. In these cases, you might want to make sure that some form of reflected legitimacy is evident.
If some has a combination of supervisor-included and -not-included work, it would be seem as normal.
In other words, no case is really a strong indicator of your strength.
Your last problem is what you should do. Your teachers are behaving unethically, but your best option is probably to go along with it. Just make sure that you can justify your authorship of the papers you consider yours, if asked in an interview. If so, anyone who takes the time to do so will probably figure out what your supervisor's contribution was, and won't assume that you were playing the same game.
# Answer
> 7 votes
It might be worth pointing out the existence of the Vancouver Protocol (first described by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, this is becoming more widely accepted). This protocol states
> Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to
> 1) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and to
> 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on
> 3) final approval of the version to be published.
> Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. **General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship.** Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author.
This is quite restrictive, and clearly discourages some of the attributions that your teachers appear to encourage.
That said, it is important for a scientist at the start of his/her career to be very aware of the value of collaboration - working closely with your advisor (to the point where their contribution warrants co-authorship) is *quite likely* to improve the quality of your paper. If you believe it would not, then maybe you need to question your choice of advisor.
It is no doubt true that a person with a good publications record carries more weight in their chosen field, and that their papers will be read more carefully and cited more frequently. Because of this it is often considered a good idea to start out in this mode.
Personal note: in the 80s when I did my PhD, email wasn't yet a thing. My advisor was abroad for almost an entire year, and I did in fact independently write and publish a paper. The work in this paper was very good (I can say so in retrospect after more than 20 years), but I was a complete unknown - and it had incredibly narrow applicability. To this date, it has received just one citation. I still believe I was correct (given the circumstance) not to include my advisor's name on the paper, but it did nothing for my career (or the field). It would have been better if I had waited until he returned, discussed and improved the paper, and published jointly.
There is a lot that an experienced person can do merit co-authorship - but you have to create the opportunity for them to do so.
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Tags: publications, advisor, authorship
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thread-21350 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21350 | Responding to different requests to contribute a book chapter | 2014-05-23T13:32:28.877 | # Question
Title: Responding to different requests to contribute a book chapter
I received a request to contribute a book chapter about a month ago, which I turned down. This was from a university in another country, and from someone I have personally met.
Today, my own supervisor asked me to contribute a similar chapter to a book which she has been asked to be an editor of.
Given that the two requests happened in a relatively short time, and the reason I gave for declining the former request might still stand, would there be a problem if I accept the latter request, when I have declined the former?
# Answer
As xLeitix said, you are free to contribute to whichever project(s) you choose. Declining once does not obligate you to decline twice.
You commented that you have chosen to decline the first offer because of not having enough time. This second offer is coming from your supervisor, who presumably knows your work better, and should have a sense of what you may already have written which will need relatively little revising to become a book chapter. If this is the case, then even if the issue should somehow come up with the individuals involved in the first offer, it will easily be understood that the situation is different.
> 2 votes
# Answer
This is not an ethical issue at all. You are free to contribute to whatever book / project you like. There is no obligation that you can't join a different book project just because you turned somebody else down before.
> 4 votes
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Tags: etiquette
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thread-19146 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19146 | Is it easier to obtain H1B / green card as academics in the US? | 2014-04-10T00:26:16.330 | # Question
Title: Is it easier to obtain H1B / green card as academics in the US?
I am a social science PhD student (with a quantitative bent) at a U.S. research university. If paperwork is not a concern, I would be equivalently interested in working as an academic and in private industries. However, one of my goal is to be able to stay in the U.S., thus to craft my plan I hope to know whether it is indeed easier to obtain H1B / green card as an academic than as a PhD-holding employee? My industry-relevant skill-set is statistical training and programming.
While this question has far-reaching relevance for any typical international PhD students, I would also be willing to give more details regarding my training, my school reputation, etc. if it helps answering the question.
P/S: This is throwaway account for anonymity. I have been an avid user of StackExchange and would love your input.
# Answer
> 7 votes
First of all, IANAL.
The H1B process requires a declaration from the employer that the skill set provided by the candidate cannot be found within the US. This is typically not too hard to satisfy, and is required regardless of whether you're in academia or in private industry.
The Green card process can change dramatically depending on which process you use. Academics will typically go through what is execrably called the 'Outstanding Researcher' process, which awards a green card based on scholarly excellence. But Ph.Ds in private industry also go through this process (I did!). It really depends on the willingness of the employer (because of the legal processing involved).
The alternative is to go through the "regular" advanced degree process, which has different qualification requirements and has a different queue/wait time. Arguably, this could take longer, and I don't think academics ever go through this.
So the bottom line is: it depends on the employer, but there's a technical sense in which being an academic can help slightly.
# Answer
> 5 votes
My understanding is that Universities and other academic insitutions (for example, the research hospital in which I work) are not subjected to caps on the H1B that companies are so it should be easier to get one if you follow the academic route.
# Answer
> 5 votes
The Green Card is a different matter, but for an H-1B: It is indeed easier.
There is a cap for the number of H-1Bs awarded every year. The cap for 2013 was 85,000, and 124,000 people applied. When too many applications are eligible, assignment is made by lottery.
However, non-profits are not subject to caps, and universities count as non-profits. See: http://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/h-1b\_faqs#10
It is probably not easier in the sense that the employer follows the same procedure and pays the same fees. However, there is no risk of not receiving an H-1B that you are perfectly well qualified for due to the cap. Also, universities are more likely to have access to people who know the process, unlike small companies which may be overwhelmed by the paperwork and byzantine regulations (especially if you are their first international employee).
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Tags: united-states, industry, international-students, visa
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thread-21366 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21366 | Can a journal withhold referee reports from the authors of a rejected paper? | 2014-05-24T03:10:48.223 | # Question
Title: Can a journal withhold referee reports from the authors of a rejected paper?
We submitted a paper to a journal published by Cambridge Press. The paper was submitted last year (2013). After five months we got the decision yesterday. We don't mind the decision, however, we are shocked by the editorial comments that although they have the reports they don't relay the reports to the author/s for papers which are not proceeding further. Is this approach common in journals? We feel this is very unethical from any author's point of view.
# Answer
I consider that not giving authors the ground on which the decision was taken to be both unethical and bad for science. How should the authors improve the paper if they don't even know why they have been rejected? How can they get a sense of what the community expects from them?
I am not alone in this: the International Mathematical Union issued ethical guidelines for journals, including that the default policy should be that referee's reports are forwarded to author. However many journals give the referees the opportunity to give comments solely for the editors, and some editors prefer not to forward some reports to avoid pissing off the authors. I never heard of a journal with a policy of never forwarding reports of rejected papers before; this sounds absurd or really cowardly.
> 30 votes
# Answer
The reports are the property of the editor of the journal as they are the commissioning body. They do have the ability to share parts of the reports to the ms authors but they are under no **legal** obligation to. In some cases (especially with negative reports), the referees may ask that the editor to not share the comments.
There are really no grounds for effective mechanism to appeal this type of policy.
The best suggestion would be to go to another journal -- perhaps one with a faster turnaround time. And ask some of your colleagues to read your ms and see why it might not be getting the positive results you had hoped for.
Followup: The journal has no legal obligation to tell you why they denied your paper. They might have a moral one (such as the disciplinary association urging them to), but no legal one. If they have it written in their bylaws that they will, then of course they will, but there is no legal requirement to.
This is similar to universities not having a **legal** (as opposed to moral) requirement to tell you why they didn't hire you or private granting agencies not having a legal requirement to tell you why they didn't give you funding. Again, if their policies (or if there is a federal/state/local requirement, etc. then they will) dictate they they must, then they will but this is rare to non-existent for private institutions (including non-profits).
Source: I've sat on the editorial board of the flagship journal of my discipline (in the social sciences).
> 12 votes
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Tags: peer-review
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thread-21382 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21382 | Can I do a thesis project in an area if I haven't taken a course on it? | 2014-05-24T14:49:37.107 | # Question
Title: Can I do a thesis project in an area if I haven't taken a course on it?
To provide a background, I am currently a Physics major and along the way I ended up getting really interested in Mathematics, so much that I'm now planning to do pure math in graduate school. Now, the problem is that, we are required to do a senior's thesis before we graduate, and I still don't have a topic in mind.
I actually worked a little bit with a professor in Theoretical Physics, I did bits of grunt work under him. I got exposed in Asymptotic methods when I was in his lab, and I got the idea that maybe I could do an undergraduate thesis about/using asymptotics. During the time I was working there, I was under the impression that he'll eventually talk about my thesis topic but he never even mentioned it (to be fair though, I never talked about it to him either), so now I'm kinda panicking that I might end up going solo in my research.
Now, in the case that he'll not accept to advice me on this , my question is, is it naive to even think about doing an undergraduate research that mainly involves Asymptotic Analysis/Methods when I've never even taken a formal course in it? To make the odds worse, it seems it's a graduate level topic, I am willing self study it though.
I want to know just how far I can go with doing research in a topic I haven't formally studied in a classroom setting, it doesn't really need to be Asymptotics or anything, I just wanted to do something that's theoretical, and that's borderline math, just so I'd be forced to learn as much math as I can during my last year in undergrad. I figured doing research in applied math is the best area to do work on since I'm still a Physics major.
# Answer
> 3 votes
To answer your question: it depends on the department and if you can find a supervisor.
It being a graduate level course or topic just means it may involve more work and the same is true for not having taken a formal course in it. If you do not mind the extra work (you shouldn't imho) it is no problem at all. However, there are two questions left: Is someone willing and able to be the advisor for that topic? Is the research question suitable for your undergrad thesis?
So, talk to your (potential) supervisor about it.
# Answer
> 13 votes
**Of course you can!** (I did. My advisor did. Most of my students did.)
Someone will have to agree to supervise your research, but that's true even if you *have* taken a course in your proposed research area.
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Tags: research-process, undergraduate
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thread-21380 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21380 | Is a postdoctoral scholar expected to work during the summer? | 2014-05-24T14:30:42.333 | # Question
Title: Is a postdoctoral scholar expected to work during the summer?
I am considering applying for postdoctoral positions in the US. However, I would like to find more information about how it is like to be a postdoctoral scholar.
**Question 1:** Is a postdoctoral position a full-year position (12 months) or an academic-year position (9 months)?
**Question 2:** How should I interpret postdoctoral salaries? For example, an MIT postdoctoral information page (see link) lists the minimum postdoctoral salary for a person with 0 years of experience at $42,000. Is this salary for 12 months, or for 9 months?
# Answer
> 19 votes
In general, postdoctoral positions—unlike faculty positions (in the US)—are considered to be 12-month positions, with the salaries determined accordingly. You are not normally expected to provide your own funding for the summer months, nor are you expected to find outside employment.
If this is *not* the case, then it should be **explicitly** mentioned in the advertisement for the position. However, this is so rarely encountered that it would be very much outside the norm for postdocs.
# Answer
> -1 votes
Post-docs come under staff category not faculty, so it's always 12 months. More than 50% places expect you even too work in weekends.
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Tags: postdocs, united-states
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thread-21376 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21376 | Academic 'rehabilitation' after poor undergraduate results | 2014-05-24T11:47:12.970 | # Question
Title: Academic 'rehabilitation' after poor undergraduate results
I'm an undergraduate studying Mathematics & Philosophy in the UK, about to sit my third-year exams. My course is structured as a three-year self-contained BA and a fourth year 'integrated masters' with its own exams, which I automatically progress to as long as I get a 2.i classification from my combined second- and third-year results.
I've not been a good student. My tutors consistently report that I'm clever and engaged but I've suffered real motivation and work ethic problems. My results in second year were poor, and while I'm reasonably confident I can get a 2.i in these exams I'm unlikely to achieve stellar results this year.
I'd like to have a shot at going on to further study. Obviously I would need to do well in my fourth year, and as well as is possible this year; that's a given. I'd like to know if anyone has any advice on other things I could do to 'rehabilitate' a potential application, both from the perspective of being a better candidate and with a view to getting reasonable references from tutors.
While I'd welcome general answers as well, for specificity the most likely further study I'd be applying to would be a masters programme (combination taught/research) in philosophy.
# Answer
> 6 votes
I can't speak to Philosophy programs so this may not be terribly useful to you, but in general, if your grades/marks are not stellar, and you exams are not either, then you should probably rely more on the power of recommendations from people who know your good traits well.
There are probably several ways to do this, and though I'm not sure about philosophy, in the sciences for example, a couple of years of volunteering in laboratory with one or two different researchers and making yourself invaluable to them can garner you major points.
I didn't do wonderfully in my studies either, and my exams were not fabulous, but I spent three years after graduating my undergraduate university volunteering in two different labs, and enrolling in evening courses to (a) try and do better in essential courses pertinent to my area and (b) demonstrate that I was serious about graduate studies because of my initiative in taking all these courses.
I ended up with three great letters and job opportunities, and later grad school (PhD) through working with these professors.
However, a word of caution: If your weaknesses really include motivation and work ethic, then post graduate study is not going to be fun for you. It's completely different than undergrad as there is way less structure, and you have to be very self-motivated, make your own deadlines, work all the time without people asking you to, and complete projects on your own. It's really hard. If you do decide that you can do it though, I suggest finding an advisor who will be more hands on.
Hope this helps a little!
# Answer
> 3 votes
I don't know the details about Phylosophy (the large majority of the population of this site seems to be STEM, unfortunately), so I will speak from my experience (first and second hand) in Physics and related fields.
Universities in the UK thrive to be fair and objective. Admissions are regulated by committees that put high weight in objective measurements: that is, your transcript mostly. Even if you had a brilliant last year in your master's, your bachelor record may hinder you to get a position, at least in the better universities. Spain is a more extreme case, where a score function of your academic record and, to a lesser degree, proven research experience (ie, publications, that very few undegrads ever get) is the sole parameter considered for a grant.
In other countries the system allows for a more flexible and subjective evaluation. Good memory and analytic skills may get you high undergraduate marks, but if you lack creativity and good thinking you will not be good at research.
In Sweden, the PhD student is normally chosen by the PI based on whatever criteria he decides. I believe the majority of them put high weight in the projects you have done as an undergrad or master, and how well they think you will be able to work together. Grades are not so important for many because until some time ago, most universities only have "pass" or "fail" marks. I know of cases of PhD students that were hired without their supervisors even looking at the transcripts, but had a very good masters project.
Bottom line: *if you were in STEM* (as I cannot know if this is extrapolable to you), if you apply yourself in the last year, you could have options in a lower tier (but perfectly reputable) university in the UK; but you would probably have better chances in other academic cultures. Improving your grades will always help (don't let them fall); but the best you can do now to make you show apart from the other candidates is to excel at your thesis.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I can say something about philosophy Postgraduate study in the UK. If you have a 2.1 By, you ought to be welcome onto a whole load of decent MA courses, though to be prepared for a major step up in expectations. Bristol and Edinburgh both have MAs in Philosophy and Mathematics, for instance. If this is where you want to go I'd email their PG contact in Philosophy, say you're on an exit velocity for a 2.1, though nothing spectacular, and would anything stop you applying?
# Answer
> 0 votes
Going straight from undergraduate work to graduate is not the only path (not sure what the alternative paths would be in philosophy exactly - but I can imagine they are many and varied). The years between undergrad and grad can certainly be used for reform. Recommendations can weigh very strongly.
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Tags: application, undergraduate
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thread-21403 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21403 | Retroactively turning down an accepted offer to a professional program from one school in favour of an offer from another school? | 2014-05-25T03:06:26.407 | # Question
Title: Retroactively turning down an accepted offer to a professional program from one school in favour of an offer from another school?
If I accept an offer to a professional program from one school (e.g., law, medicine, pharmacy, etc.) and then later get an offer to a better program from a different school, can I retroactively turn down the first offer to accept the second?
Both schools are in Canada, but answers relevant for US schools may also be useful.
I'm actually asking for my brother. The problem in his situation is that the acceptance deadline for one school is after the offer date for another ("better") school. The first school has refused to extend the deadline and the second school has refused to give early notification that an offer is pending.
I am hesitant to say the exact type of program because I don't want to expose his identity to anyone making a decision regarding his admission.
The following question is about grad school, not professional programs, so I'm unsure if the answers apply. Is it legal to withdraw a signed offer letter from grad school?
# Answer
The first school won't like it, but there would be nothing to stop your brother from backing out of the first offer and accepting the second offer, unless the schools work closely together to prevent this from occurring, which seems highly unlikely, especially because their notification dates differ so greatly.
If your brother is accepted to the second program, the most courteous way to inform the first program would be:
* as quickly as possible, so they can accept someone from their waiting list or otherwise make use of the information.
* without insulting the first program.
For example, he might write something like:
> I realize that, as grateful as I am for admission into your program, pursuing it would not be the right thing for me to do at this time and that I should not have accepted your offer. I am very sorry that I have to withdraw my acceptance. I hope it is not too late for you to offer the place to a student who is a better fit for your program.
> 5 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, medicine, law
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thread-21338 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21338 | H-1B Visa Sponsorship by Universities | 2014-05-23T05:12:44.797 | # Question
Title: H-1B Visa Sponsorship by Universities
The statements of
> "Applicants who are invited to campus for interviews must be able to show proof that they will be eligible and qualified to work in the United States by the time of hire."
is almost associated with every open academic positions in US and I am wondering what does this statement clearly mean?
As far as I know, academic positions in US are opened to the scientifically eligible candidates worldwide, but receiving US work permit requires a sponsor (employer) inside US who should initiate visa application.
**My 1st question:** Does this sentence show unwillingness of the employer (university in this case) to support applicants' visa application? Does this position only open to those residing in US? or work permit holders?
From the immigration website, I learnt that there are some costs for the employer who is offering job to an outsider. But, universities are exempted from paying the biggest chunk ($1500).
**My 2nd question:** Considering low visa petition cost, what else is the problem that US-based universities are hesitant to hire such candidates.
**My 3rd question:** Is faculty selection in US-based universities based on candidate's merit or there are other parameters when selecting them.
**Edit:** I think the email received from UW can be of help to get better idea of the situation.
> Dear XYZ,
>
> When completing your application for employment at the University of Washington you were asked to complete the US Work Authorization Assessment. The second question asked was:
>
> To legally work in the United States, will you require University of Washington sponsorship for an H1-B, other UW sponsored visa, or UW sponsored green card now or in the future?
>
> You responded yes, that you would need sponsorship, either now or in the future. **As a result you are not eligible for employment in staff positions at the University**.
I emailed to HR of UW for clarification with this note:
> Does UW consider only those foreigners for staff position who are currently having work permit in US? Those who are willing to obtain work permit based on the UW job offer are ineligible to work in UW?
**UW Reply** (Though I think the reply is by a robot):
> Unfortunately, the UW does not provide sponsorship for Green Cards( or HB-1 visas, or any other type of work authorization requiring sponsorship.) for staff positions.
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**EDIT 2:** Though my question is about academic staff position, about university of washington, I applied for research scientist. Here is the link to the job opening.
# Answer
My suspicion is that this phrase is primarily to cover the university legally in case the person hired in fact does **not** have the eligibility to work in the US. In such a case, without this clause, the person could make the argument that the university is in breach of contract for not hiring them and doing whatever is necessary in order to make them eligible. **But IANAL** !
In general I'd imagine only very small universities or places with limited resources would have trouble sponsoring a candidate for an H1-B. Certainly not a university like UW. Most universities are quite willing and able to sponsor new applicants for H1Bs and green cards.
The correct interpretation here is I think as is mentioned in the comments: the candidate should be **eligible** to work in that they **can** get an H1B visa.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Preamble: What they are trying to do here is protect themselves from a lawsuit later on. In the application for an H1B, the employer must prove that there was no American citizen who was qualified for the position that is being sponsored (c.f. http://www.immihelp.com/gc/employment/labor/).
1. Perhaps. Most employers will sponsor the H1B at the very least -- and the larger universities and colleges will even pay for the legal and application fees if they want you. But they have to advertise the positions for Americans (and legal residents first) and if the search results in only one person (YOU!) who is able to fill the position, then (gee shucks) they will sponsor you for the H1B.
2. The law. See preamble. The cost including the lawyer can go up to around $10,000. If it's just a short-term position why spend the money and do the paperwork (an H1B filing can easily be hundreds of pages of filings)? Also H1Bs are tricky. If you apply late when the pool runs out, you may not get one regardless of how qualified the candidate is. H1B applications have been known to get held up for all sorts of reasons by the State Department or the DoL. So it's often safer to go with a legal candidate.
3. Depends on the location. While it would be nice to think that merit is the only factor, we all know (or at least suspect) that there are other factors including the all amorphous "collegiality". If there are two candidates of equal worth but one candidate will require literally 3 inches of paperwork filed to the Department of Labor and there's uncertainty as to whether he/she can start work in August if the process gets delayed, then what would be the rational choice?
*Edit: H1Bs are not subject to caps (http://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/h-1b\_faqs#10). I'm not sure if this is a new thing as I can vaguely remember caps in the distant past... but at least there aren't any now.*
> 2 votes
# Answer
Based on what you've written so far, here is my interpretation of the situation:
* at some point, the university sets a blanket ban on sponsoring visas for "staff positions" (this is standard terminology for "not faculty positions"). This is not so unreasonable; you can understand why it would seem like a waste of money to sponsor a secretary or a janitor for a visa.
* at some later point, the position you're applying for is created. There are a lot of complicated negotiations that go into creating such a position. This particular one involves 3 universities and 2 private foundations, so I'm sure it was very tricky to set them up. For some reason, the position is classified as "staff." The line between "staff" and "faculty" is not 100% clean-cut (for example, librarians can be on one side or another, depending on the institution). I can only guess at what advantage this had (it seems likely there was one, though you should never completely count out the possibility of a straight-up mistake).
And, voilà! I would bet a reasonable sum of money that the people "on the ground" running this program are unhappy with the situation, and would like nothing more than to make decisions without considering immigration status, but these things can be pretty complicated. Universities are big institutions, and it can often be very hard to change these sorts of things. The money they would spend on lawyers for visas has to come from somewhere, and it's possible it's just not there.
> 2 votes
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Tags: university, computer-science, job, united-states, visa
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thread-21419 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21419 | What does "informal application letter" mean? | 2014-05-25T14:08:25.953 | # Question
Title: What does "informal application letter" mean?
For an application to a Master programme, I am asked to send:
* a description of my study motivation on 2 pages
* an informal application letter
What does "informal application letter" mean? Is it something commonly asked for an application? I really don't understand what they want.
# Answer
> 5 votes
I would interpret that as asking for a short letter that briefly states what you are applying for, your educational background, interests and goals, why you are interested in their program specifically, and mentions anything else you'd like them to consider.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, university, application
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thread-21337 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21337 | How to best leverage resources offered at small undergraduate school to be a competitive applicant to top law or architecture + planning schools | 2014-05-23T02:36:19.620 | # Question
Title: How to best leverage resources offered at small undergraduate school to be a competitive applicant to top law or architecture + planning schools
I am currently a senior in high school, and will be attending Hamilton College in Clinton, New York next year. Though Hamilton does not have 'core curriculum' requirements and is a small liberal arts college, I want to prepare myself so that I have a competitive advantage in applying to top graduate schools. Among the programs I might be interested in are Stanford or Harvard law school -- I'm particularly interested in their respective centers for internet and society.
On a different note, I might be interested in MIT school of architecture + planning. Obviously this early in my career my interests and goals will certainly change, but my question now is how to best leverage the resources offered at my small undergrad school to get into these sort of graduate programs. A general answer for a broad question is suitable.
# Answer
> 3 votes
As you mentioned, your career interests may change, and at the moment seem to be rather varied. However, there are a few things you can do to prepare for a graduate career.
1) Research the programs you are interested in (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) as well as similar programs that you would be willing to apply to. You will likely need to split this into two groups: architecture and law. Once you've identified approximately a 6-12 of each type of program, look at their admissions criteria, recommended coursework, and suggested extracurricular or work experience. Most graduate programs will indicate the grade point averages, standardized test scores, and subject matter experience they desire in applicants. Generate lists of the most frequently mentioned criteria.
2) Examine the offerings at Hamilton College in relation to those lists. If the law schools all request you take Intro to PolySci, be sure to work that, or an equivalent course, into your schedule. If the architecture schools all require you to submit a drawing sample, plan on taking at least one art class so that you can develop a portfolio (and possibly a letter from the professor). If certain specialty courses are unavailable at Hamilton, see if you are able to take the class at a nearby university, or complete it as an independent study.
3) As you narrow your career interests, use the summers (or possibly the school year) to engage in internships or jobs in those fields. Entry level work in a specific field and internships are often seen as markers that students are driven, organized, and mature. You may also consider joining undergraduate student organizations in these areas, such as the American Institute of Architecture Students (https://www.aias.org/website/article.asp?id=8), which can engage you in the field at a national level.
4) Regardless of where you apply, you will eventually need letters of recommendation. Be conscious of this while in school and develop strong relationships with your professors. Speak up in class, volunteer for projects, and seek their advice on your career.
I attended a small, private liberal arts college and used similar steps to prepare myself for possible graduate careers in biology and psychology, and found them to be effective. Although the school may not have been a tier 1 research institution or offer classes in every subject, the flexibility to complete independent projects and faculty support were invaluable.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, graduate-school, advisor
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thread-21407 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21407 | Is it bad practice to submit the entire manuscript for an initial book proposal to a publisher? | 2014-05-25T03:58:16.313 | # Question
Title: Is it bad practice to submit the entire manuscript for an initial book proposal to a publisher?
In a previous book I wrote, I submitted the entire manuscript along with a couple page proposal to a few different publishers. Both editors never responded to me.
In my current book, I sent the entire manuscript with a short description to an editor at Springer, and it has been two weeks, and I have heard nothing, not even an acknowledgement of receipt.
Am I doing something against proper procedure?
Update: I emailed the editor again asking her if she received the manuscript, and she said she did. She was just on vacation. (I guess Europeans take longer ones than those in the U.S. are used to…)
# Answer
> 9 votes
Did you follow the book proposal guidelines for Springer? It does not include sending the entire manuscript but does include items like:
* Author
* Author CV
* Any other contributors (include CVs)?
* Who's the audience including undergraduate or graduate
* What book do you see as the main competitor?
* 3-4 paragraphs describing the contents of the book
* Unique Selling Points (why should someone buy this book)
* etc.
Note: I'm not sure that I've linked to the book proposal guidelines for your area, but they surely exist.
Second Note: Geremia provided a link to the book series webpage. Poking around on the page and tracing links, I did find a general manuscript preparation page, but nothing on what the proposal should look like. I maintain that unless they tell you explicitly to send the entire manuscript, you should send a brief proposal or even a query ("are there guidelines I should follow?") to the editor first.
Based on blogs and articles that I've read by fiction editors and agents, not following published guidelines for a submission is one of the top pet peeves and a quick way for your submission to get deleted or tossed in the recycle bin.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I am pretty sure the author meant different Springer:) if there is no reply, try calling the editor you find via contacts listed for each discipline at springer.com
In any case, do always mention that the proposal was also sent to xxx, so as to avoid more editors arranging reviews for the same proposal
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Tags: publications, books, editors, publishers
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thread-21422 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21422 | Referencing others' ideas in introductions and conclusions? | 2014-05-25T15:12:08.563 | # Question
Title: Referencing others' ideas in introductions and conclusions?
Should citations be used in introductions and conclusions if they just introduce and summarize the body of the essay where all others' ideas are referenced in details?
Ideas that are not discussed in the body of the essay but belongs to others are excluded from this question.
# Answer
> 6 votes
If I understand your question, you're asking whether statements in an introduction or conclusion which summarise fully-referenced, more detailed statements in the body of your writing should be referenced too.
The answer is the same as for anything, regardless of where it's found in something you write:
If a statement is *your own conclusion* based on information you have drawn from outside sources, then as long as you note what information you got from which sources by referencing correctly within the body of the document where you explain how you came to your conclusion, you don't need to reference this conclusive or interpretive statement; it's the result of your own mental process.
On the other hand, if the statement *is* information from another source, you **must** reference it. Whether or not it's heavily summarised or you intend to expand on the statement, with references, later, the simple rule of referencing everything that did not originate with your own work still applies.
As a rule, though, I'd advise you to check with your teacher, tutor, student advisor, TA, lecturer, or whomever else applies. What I explained above is technically the right way to do it, but it wouldn't surprise me if some institutions at least aren't quite that strict.
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Tags: citations, writing
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thread-21412 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21412 | Referencing assignments from past students | 2014-05-25T05:56:29.633 | # Question
Title: Referencing assignments from past students
When working on an assignment (e.g. essay, report), is it allowable or ethical to reference (as in both "read" and "cite") previous students' submissions for that assignment? For example, the student may have a friend or relative that sat the subject previously and is happy to share their assignments.
From my understanding, unless the teaching institution has an explicit policy, this should be allowable assuming the referencing is done correctly. So saying, it may not be the best educational experience, as the student may not undertake the critical thinking and research the assignment expects.
To be clear, I am not talking about referencing assignments of students currently studying that subject. That is clearly collusion.
I also assume the student attained previous submissions with consent from all the authors. However, I do not assume that all students currently working on the assignment have access to all past submissions.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I think it is both ethical and within the rules (or at least it is within the rules at my university) as long as the reference is clearly cited.
Furthermore, it should also be fine with current students as long as the work is cited too.
For example for undergraduate experimental lab course I took during my 3rd year, I worked on an experiment with 2 other students working on the same experiment independently. We each had to write a project report on the results we obtained during the experiment.
Only one of us managed to get a particular dataset for a part of the experiment that was sensitive to conditions and difficult to get results on. In that situation we were able to used that student's data so we could discuss their result in our report (as long as we cited the person who actually obtained the dataset, of course).
In a seperate experiment I let someone use a java code I wrote for the analysis. This was also fine, because the person cited me when they used my code in their report.
I think if the handin were supposed to be completely independently written (e.g. a math problem sheet) it would be collusion to reference older (or current) work but that is generally acceptable to cite anything (past student work or otherwise) in work which you would normally expect to see citation (e.g. essay or report).
If you have assessment regulations, there is probably a clear indication of what your university expect in there. That would not be able to tell you the answer to ethics part of this question but otherwise might be able to tell you the rule at your College or University.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I agree with Magpie's answer as far as it goes; I don't think it's *unethical* to reference work done by past students in your own work.
However, my worry would be that, except perhaps in certain specific environments, "work done by past students" is hardly authoritative. Courses for my degree, at least, only accept certain types of sources, mostly published books, certifiably authoritative websites, and of course journal articles.
In other words, I don't see a problem with reading past work, and of course mentioning that you have read it, but I personally wouldn't be comfortable with *citing* that work as a source.
Of course, this becomes less applicable the further up the education system you go; if you're writing a dissertation, you'll almost certainly be referencing past dissertations.
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That said, the important question here, on a practical level, is whether or not *your instructor* thinks that reading or citing past students' work is ethical, not whether it actually is.
I'd advise caution; an email to whoever assigned the work, or a trip to their office, is more than worth the effort, considering the possible consequences if they eventually do decide that this is collusion.
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Tags: citations, ethics, plagiarism, homework
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thread-21300 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21300 | How to get cited and how to boost the impact of one's work? | 2014-05-22T11:38:17.973 | # Question
Title: How to get cited and how to boost the impact of one's work?
Six years ago while I was working in a company outside academia, I had been involved in improving a process which was hot in academia. I have developed a new method which, among other notable advantages, improved all previous methods by deriving better results. Although some time passed, today it can still be considered as state of the art.
Despite I was not in academia, because of the quality of the results, I have managed to publish a paper about it in a top journal in that field. I hoped that the paper would get popular, and it would get cited many times, but today, after 4-5 years of being available, to my surprise, the work is still not cited. I see that new papers that come out and that are related, still refer to (lesser) methods, as though mine doesn't exist at all. As I am following the papers in that field, and despite a large number of related papers, I still don't see much improvement over my work, so it's pretty much current.
The paper uses proper keywords and wording (so it's easy to find), the journal is a good one (so people must have seen it), and it cites all other related papers (so I guess that relevant people in the field who have Google Scholar would be aware of it existence if they get notified of new citations). And still the paper didn't take off. The only reason I could think of is networking. Since at that time I was not in academia, I did not go to conferences to get the work (and my name) "advertised". But I refuse to believe that this was the critical factor.
The questions are: How to get cited and how to boost the impact of one's work? And did I do anything wrong?
I am now in my PhD, and I would like to learn how to boost the popularity of my upcoming papers.
# Answer
> 52 votes
I can see a few reasons why your paper was not cited as much as you hoped it to be:
* Networking indeed *does* go a long way towards being cited. In my experience this is especially true for areas where many competing approaches are being published (which, by the sound of it, is true in your case). Even if your paper is published in a good venue, this alone does not guarantee that you will find a critical mass of readers to kickstart the process. Citations are in my experience somewhat viral. Google Scholar, which for better or for worse, is used by *many* researchers for searching for literature, returns results ordered more or less by citation count. Hence, papers with a few citations on them are **much** easier to find on Google Scholar than those with 0 citations. Hence, you need to "bootstrap" a bit before citations start coming in more or less by themselves. The best (ethical) way to do this is to network - tell other researchers that might be interested in your paper about it
* You should not per se exclude the possibility that you overestimate the value of your contribution. Maybe the things your approach was good at are not valued as highly by the other researchers. Maybe you underestimate the qualities of some papers that are cited over yours.
* Even if your paper *was* really good, maybe this was to hard to see at first glance. In an ideal world, every researcher would strive to fully grok each related paper. However, in the real world (especially in busy fields), you have to assume that a reader will at first only casually browse over your paper (and only really read it if it seems very strong to him at first glance). If your paper does not seem strong at first glance, people will not cite it.
* Maybe you are overestimating the value of the venue you published in. In many busy fields, papers published in a "good" venue (as opposed to "the best there is") already have a hard time getting cited. Further, check whether your paper is available with the standard subscriptions that most universities have (e.g., for CS that would be IEEE, Springer, ACM, ... depending on your field of course). There are some non-predatory publishers out there that are simply not available in the subscriptions of many libraries.
# Answer
> 32 votes
The first person who should cite your work is actually YOU. If you simply abandoned your work and you expected others to pick up on it, it mostly does not work this way, unless your work is really ground-breaking. When I search for something on a area I am interested in, it is easy to pick up papers with more citations (which you do not yet have) or authors who are more prolific in this area (which you are now not, since you only published this one paper). Also, people tend to be suspicious when they see "amazing" results, when they are not followed by further work on this area, since that might be some indication that those results were a bit "fishy" to begin with. In this sense, you are the one (at least initially) who should pick up your previous work, improve on it, compare with the newest methods and promote it.
If you asked some years ago, I would not believe in networking either. But the fact is that it works. If you go to some conferences and talk to some of your 'favorite' authors (who are also your main competitors) ask about their published work, talk about your published work (but DO NOT reveal unpublished work), perhaps ask to share methods, do a polite follow-up email soon, you will see that most people respond positively, not because you are sucking up to them but because they see that their work has actual impact. In most of the cases, they also want to improve their methods and see "the polite competition of today as the possible cooperator of tomorrow". So, understand that networking is not just PR but as appreciation to what others and you can offer to the scientific community.
# Answer
> 21 votes
In many fields, the literature moves faster than most people can follow. A journal article can easily be missed. The chance of it being seen now that 5 years have passed is virtually none.
The best way to get your work known in many fields is to get out there and personally evangelize it. Give talks at conferences, talk it up to colleagues, etc. Getting someone else to start using your method is key.
# Answer
> 12 votes
I'd just like to add, even if your methods and results were real game-changers, you don't necessarily have a *good* paper. Writing skills are critical for increasing your citation count. You might consider looking closely at highly cited papers, and see what the authors did differently. As others have noted, networking has a big role too..
*Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded* is a good resource.
# Answer
> 4 votes
If it is software related and there are no available source codes (or even executables at times!), or the code is very poor in ease of use, I will usually not cite it given an alternative.
Another way to put this in more general terms: to what extent have you made it easy to reproduce your research?
# Answer
> 2 votes
Go to conferences, give talks on your work, highlight unexplored questions, extensions and applications. Work gets cited when you convince other people there's something interesting to do, and they then write follow up papers.
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Tags: publications, citations, career-path, bibliometrics
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thread-21432 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21432 | Why do we cite books with publisher and city? | 2014-05-25T22:54:46.683 | # Question
Title: Why do we cite books with publisher and city?
Or just city in some formats? I mean, I could maybe guess why it was marginally helpful a century ago, but why now? What use is it for my reader to know that a book I'm citing was published in Berlin, Boston, and Fresno, or more to the point, that the nearest city to me where a certain book was printed years ago happens to be Fresno? If the point is to look up the book, wouldn't the ISBN be far more useful?
# Answer
Versions published in different countries can differ - it's not uncommon for books to be published in one version in the US/Canada, and slightly differently elsewhere. Even a minor difference like binding could conceivably affect page references, so it's important to be clear in that sense. There's also a wider principle of redundancy; if the author does get some part of the citation wrong (say, misspells the author's surname) the more information included in the rest of the citation the better the reader has a chance of recovering the actual item.
With regard to why we use human-meaningful information rather than details like an ISBN, I would venture that dense information like an ISBN is actually quite difficult to read for a human; it's easy for the author to mistype the number when producing the bibliography, and then easy for the reader to mistype it when looking up the reference. It's comparatively harder to get details like publisher name and city wrong. If I'm looking through a bibliography or list of references I much prefer to see information I understand than a collection of opaque numbers.
Having said the above, I'm sure to a large extent it's an historical tradition that has persisted. Certainly before the development of international reference standards like the ISBN system the above arguments held even more weight, and in the days of much less extreme globalisation the various global offices of major publishing houses were much more autonomous. It might conceivably have been quite a different undertaking to be published by, say, Oxford University Press in Oxford rather than Oxford University Press in New York.
> 8 votes
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Tags: citations
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thread-21365 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21365 | Being the right kind of demanding as a college instructor | 2014-05-24T02:24:54.237 | # Question
Title: Being the right kind of demanding as a college instructor
As part of my work as a graduate student in maths I currently teach a basic second semester calculus course. It seems like every semester I teach, one or two students want some sort of special privilege to turn in homework late for a month or take a test a week after they are supposed to. Many times they have somewhat legitimate reasons (documented depression, getting a divorce, wife having surgery.....). How should I handle these cases? I am not big into putting up with lots of late homework or late tests, but then again I would want someone to be lenient with me if things such as the parenthetical reasons above arose in my life.
How should I handle students with such situations? Should I write them off and just feed them to the dogs or should I allow them to catch up at their own pace? My honest opinion is that school is a sort of competitive game (Bad, yes, I know) and if they lose they lose. We do not shorten the football pitch because some club's striker is not a good runner. However, I think students should be allowed to have a chance to make things right.
# Answer
> 12 votes
If people have a legitimate reason for wanting an extension of the deadline, I would simply give them the extension. If they cannot provide a good reason, i.e. they simply procrastinated too much, they have to take responsibility for their behavior, and they do not get the extension.
This has nothing to do with being a hard-ass, but being fair. Other people have done the work, and giving people that procrastinated an extension is not fair to them. In addition, getting work done that you where assigned (even if it is hard or boring) is a valuable lesson to teach a student. Their future boss will also not be sensitive to a missed deadline because of procrastination.
# Answer
> 5 votes
This is really up to you. You can be very strict and demanding or a total pushover. It's best to calibrate yourself against others in your department (or college) as there is usually some sort of rough standard / aka departmental culture.
Personally I have better things to do than to police students but other colleagues seem to relish this task.
What you shouldn't do is ever view your own "Rate My Professor" webpage \[as you will despair for the minds and souls of your students\].
# Answer
> 4 votes
I penalize late work **very** strongly: 2 marks out of 10 for each day late. This is to prevent a cascade of lateness from assignment to assignment. However that is for folks with no reason who just didn't get it done on time. When someone wants an extension, to write the midterm or final on a different day, or to have the marking scheme changed, and proffers me some reason for it like the ones you mentioned, **I send them to Special Needs** aka Student Services aka Disability Services etc.
Why? They are trained on this stuff. They know when to ask for a doctor's note and how to evaluate one. They can think of more creative solutions than just having more time. They know when someone is "playing you" and when they need help. That's their job and they're way better at it than I am. **When they direct me to accommodate, I do** with no qualms at all. I have been so directed for both physical and mental or emotional reasons.
We have a fair number of students ask to write a final early to accommodate a plane ticket they bought long in advance. I defer these to the departmental secretary, who knows all the students and their history. If she's willing to supervise you writing it, I'll compose a special one for you. If not, too bad.
This helps me, as an adjunct, because I don't know the students super well. I believe it also results in decisions that are fairer both to the student with a problem and the rest of the class. I have never had a complaint about this approach in the 12 years or so I've been doing it.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I usually create a few safeguards like telling everyone from the beginning that only the best 10 out of the 13 quizzes will count towards the grade (so you can just miss 3 and still get the full score), that I will average 2 other midterms if one midterm exam was missed for a good reason, and that everybody who aces the final (\>95%) gets a decent grade even if he has performed poorly during the semester (this can be implemented in many ways). After that I allow no make-ups except for the time conflict on the final exam (this is out of my hands anyway and is governed by the general university policies).
The point is that I allow the students to take some time off without any effect on the grade, so if they encounter some temporary problem during the semester, they can easily compensate for it by doing well the rest of the time without any special arrangements or (sometimes awkward) explanations. On the other hand, if somebody tells me that his grandmother died on the date of the first midterm, his girlfriend left him on the date of the second, and he was hit by a car when coming to take the third, then I just suggest that he sort out his personal life before enrolling into the course.
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Tags: teaching, mathematics, grades
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thread-21423 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21423 | Is it a good academic practice to tell the reader in the introduction what the essay is about directly? | 2014-05-25T15:23:11.457 | # Question
Title: Is it a good academic practice to tell the reader in the introduction what the essay is about directly?
Is it academic to tell the reader in the introduction what the essay is about directly?
For example, after some introductory ideas, you tell the the reader this essay or section discusses so and so.
Or should the writer end the introduction with the thesis statement that indirectly tells the reader what the essay is about?
# Answer
> 27 votes
I'm not sure what you mean by "essay", but for an academic paper in general, the reader should be told a minimum of four times what the paper is about and what your contribution is. This should be stated in (1) the title, (2) the abstract, (3) the introduction, and (4) the conclusion.
That is a typical North American style. In some academic cultures, such as Northern Europe where I'm sitting, it's common to not do any of that. In a typical paper here, you can read all of the four parts mentioned above and still have no idea what the author is bringing to the table. You're guaranteed to annoy many readers that way.
So my answer to your question is: Tell the reader as soon as possible what the point and punchline of your paper is. The reader doesn't want a mystery novel, he wants to know as soon as possible whether your paper is worth reading.
# Answer
> 5 votes
There are many ways to structure an introduction. However, in the context of psychology I am familiar with the two broad approaches you mention to writing an introduction.
In psychology, students are often taught to write lab reports using an **hour glass structure** where they start broad and then narrow in gradually into stating aims and hypotheses at the end of the introduction. This structure can really annoying to read, because the purpose of the paper is not immediately clear.
Personally, I prefer the **opening-body-currentstudy** structure for an introduction. Specifically, the opening section of the introduction contains around three paragraphs that cover the importance of the work, a little context, a little bit of the gap, and importantly **the aims of the paper**. The introduction then reviews relevant literature, and culminates in a statement of a brief description of the current study (see here for a little more discussion). Thus, in the opening few paragraphs, you might have a paragraph that begins: "The purpose of this paper is..."
The general principle is: Make it easy for the reviewer/reader to see what is the novel contribution of the paper.
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Tags: writing, writing-style
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thread-21446 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21446 | Is it appropriate to send a gift to a professor for an online course? | 2014-05-26T10:38:12.467 | # Question
Title: Is it appropriate to send a gift to a professor for an online course?
I'm immensely grateful for the online courses on theoretical physics provided by the Perimeter Institute for free. A particular professor stands out for me, as the lectures were excellent, and the course was structured very well. Would it be appropriate or acceptable to send a small token of appreciation to the professor via (physical) mail?
# Answer
I deliver a significant number of online courses, though not for university credit. I appreciate emails, tweets, and other expressions of gratitude from those who enjoyed them. I am not sure how I would feel if a gift basket or a box of chocolates arrived at my office. Sure, everyone likes gifts, but it might feel a little creepy to be honest.
I provide my courses to the organizations, and they're the ones who decide to make them free (Channel9 or MVA) or very cheap (Pluralsight), not me. So they are the ones who probably should be the target of the gratitude. Since PI wants donations, why not make one, then email the lecturer saying thank you and letting them know you've made a donation because of how helpful they were. (You could also repeat the statement in public such as tweeting it or writing it on the institute's wall, so that PI are aware of the lecturer's contribution to their coffers.) I would appreciate that more than chocolate, myself - and I like chocolate a lot :-)
> 35 votes
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Tags: ethics, etiquette
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thread-21348 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21348 | Programming Interview for PhD Admission in Computer Science | 2014-05-23T12:52:50.657 | # Question
Title: Programming Interview for PhD Admission in Computer Science
A prospective supervisor is interested in me, and has asked me for programming interview. As I have been told, his research group does a lot of system programming, and he is seeking a good programmer.
I have no industry experience in programming, though I have programmed for assignments, projects, and a Master's thesis. I know that, as a computer scientist, it is essential to have good programming skills. I tried to search for some tips about programming interviews for prospective PhDs, but could not find anything.
Does it differ from industrial interview? Did anyone have similar experience? Any references or tips?
# Answer
I had the interview yesterday. I would like to share the experience as it might be useful for anybody who might go through similar kind of interviews in the future.
The interview was via Skype with an outsourced software engineer **(not the prospective supervisor)**, and we used shared .doc file to solve two programming problems about *strings*. By the way, most of programming interviews I had (mostly industrial and this academic one) pretty much involve strings manipulation and sometimes data structure.
The interview lasted for an hour whereby I was given 20 minutes to solve each problem and 10 minutes to discuss. The general impression was positive. The concept was always known, yet I needed some practicing to make my code works. I was given the choice to choose the programming language I like to write in.
I would say, bachelor level of programming is enough. You will just need to revise and practice a little bit your information. You might need to focus on the logic you follow more than the small details that differ from language to another.
> 8 votes
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Tags: phd, graduate-admissions, computer-science
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thread-21453 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21453 | Do all US schools provide the same access to e-journal resources? | 2014-05-26T14:22:24.187 | # Question
Title: Do all US schools provide the same access to e-journal resources?
I recently took courses from several different schools, with different semesters in different parts of the US. When visiting the schools' library Web sites, I noticed that each offered a similar "search all resources link" with a login, eventually leading to EBSCO. I expected the significantly larger and more expensive university to offer more "premium" access. I could not find any difference in the available results and down-loadable articles from one institution or the other. Do nearly all schools pay for nearly the same access? Can I expect nearly all schools to use EBSCO and the search results for electronic resources to be identical at each institution?
# Answer
> 17 votes
Short answer is no.
Although EBSCO appears to be ubiquitous, the level of access you can find across ALL schools definitely varies. As undergrads at a community college, my classmates and I would occasionally visit nearby university libraries just to access their larger online databases. Not only did they subscribe to more databases, they also had greater levels of access than my home institution.
Community colleges may be somewhat of an outlier in this respect because of their typically limited funding/resources. Across other institutions-of-higher-learning, you can expect greater similarity in the databases provided at the general level. However, many institutions, or colleges within them, will have a specialty focus and will provide access to journals specific to that specialty. Those specialty journals are not available across all institutions, especially those with limited funding.
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Tags: journals, literature-search, library, digital-libraries
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thread-21456 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21456 | Getting into grad school with a low gpa | 2014-05-26T14:52:09.327 | # Question
Title: Getting into grad school with a low gpa
I'm new to these forums, but I thought I'd take a stab at asking about my situation. I have two BS degrees, one in electrical engineering and the other in physics. I'm wanting to go to grad school in either physics, engineering, or something in between. My problem is that I have a 2.3 cumulative gpa, however I do have a slew of other things going for me that I was wanting to get opinions on how much they would help with admissions.
I've done research in plasma physics for over 2 years. It was due to that project that I was place into the McNair Scholars program and was given the opportunity to travel overseas to perform research at a European fusion energy lab last year. I've graduated, but was hired by the same research group to perform data analysis work for the project. I learned alot about experimental physics: solid state particle detectors, vacuum chambers, spectrum analysis, linux operation systems, and so on.
In my engineering major I become involved with a team that built, tested, programmed and will be launching an amateur radio satellite. I worked on the power systems of the craft, and learned alot about surface mount soldering, solar cells and battery charging power circuits, etc. I'm also planning the building and programming of a rotating machinery for our ground antennas. Out of this might come the chance to work with a mechanical engineering group launching their own satellite.
I also work in the power industry, currently as an intern, where I've done a few projects related to internet monitoring of devices attached to power lines, learned pcb design skills here. My job also had me write a paper (so I'd be first author there) related to cyber security that will be going to a conference later this year. Not sure if this will help specifically since that work isn't necessarily what I want to do graduate research in.
I'm currently taking a year off to work, pay off debts, and study for good scores on the general and subject GRE's. I was also plannig on taking 1 or 2 grad courses and planning to ace them. My bad grades came from my first year courses, not from my junior and senior in-major courses. Come application time I can get plenty of good recommendation letters from various sources (not just in my university). I know my gpa is going to hurt me, but I was wondering if anyone has any experience about how much things I've done outside the classroom would offset that. Thanks for any opinions that might be helpful. Sorry for the wall of text.
# Answer
It sounds to me as if you definitely have a chance, though the GPA is somewhat low.
The fact that you became better over time with regard to GPA is a very good sign. You may want to calculate your GPA by year so you can cite some figures if asked. Be prepared to explain why your GPA was low, or at least what you did to improve it. While interviewing, do not be late for an interview with faculty - study the campus maps and be sure to let any prior meetings to end soon enough to give you ample time to get to your next meeting! Being late may give professors time to look at your transcript and possibly ask some awkward questions that you otherwise likely need not worry much about if you have already gotten to this stage in the application process. Not to mention being late is not a good thing in general.
Make sure you can secure some good letters of recommendation from your research projects. This is absolutely critical.
Hopefully, the job you get over the next year is also somewhat research related. If it is not too late, I would try to find such a job. Also, I don't know if it will suit you, but if you can find such a job, then you may even want to keep it longer than a year depending on how things go. If you can finish a good project, that will boost your chances even more.
Finally, I think your plan for the subject GREs may be alright, if it does not interfere too much with my suggestions above. Taking tests is not a big part of most PhD programs, and even those where it is, only a few of the most selective programs require the subject GREs last I checked (which was a while ago).
> 1 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, engineering, physics, gpa
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thread-21396 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21396 | Secondary citation MS Word 2013 (APA Style) | 2014-05-24T21:53:38.120 | # Question
Title: Secondary citation MS Word 2013 (APA Style)
I can't believe I can't find an answer in Google for this. I need to insert a secondary citation like this
> AuthorX 2013 (as quoted in AuthorY, 2010)
The closest answer I could find was editing the field and referencing the secondary author by tag with an '\m' switch but that cuts the whole thing too short.
# Answer
googled switch codes and used the '\s' suffix tag. Problem solved
> 1 votes
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Tags: citations
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thread-21460 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21460 | How can code be classified in a Thesis(Figure, Table, Listing, etc) | 2014-05-26T15:39:36.720 | # Question
Title: How can code be classified in a Thesis(Figure, Table, Listing, etc)
I am writing a Thesis and there are sections that require me to add fragments of code or a complete code. Should this be classified as a figure, table,listing or snippet ?
# Answer
Insert it as a listing. The convention is to print code verbatim in monospace font. If you're writing in LaTeX, the `listings` package exists for this purpose.
> 14 votes
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Tags: thesis, formatting
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thread-21393 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21393 | How should I write the last sentence in my email to a professor? | 2014-05-24T20:36:52.513 | # Question
Title: How should I write the last sentence in my email to a professor?
I have to write an official letter to a professor to explain my research interests and my research plan to him, so that he could evaluate my eligibility for support through a research assistantship.
would you please say which of the following sentences is better in order to finish my letter:
*I hope this helps. If you need further information, Please feel free to contact me at: My email*
*I hope this helps you evaluate my eligibility for financial aid better.*
*I hope this helps, please let me know if you need more information.*
# Answer
> 8 votes
As user11192 says, the closing sentence does not matter much. I'd advise you to focus on proofreading your entire letter. Not to be unkind, but there are typographical mistakes in two of your three closings:
> I hope this helps. If you need further information, Please feel free to contact me at: My email
The first letter in "Please" should not be capitalized.
> I hope this helps you evaluate my eligibility for financial aid better.
This is fine, except, as aeismail points out, financial aid is need-based, while you are applying for a job, which is presumably merit-based.
> I hope this helps, please let me know if you need more information.
This is a comma splice.
In a closing, I would also thank the professor for his/her time:
> Please let me know if any further information would be helpful. Thank you for your time.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I think this is not important as long as he think you are eligible for his RA. The important thing is to show him that you have the ability to do research.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I would just say"Thank you in advance for your time and consideration. Should you need additional information, do not hesitate to contact me at ... (phone, e-mail, whatever). Yours, (your name)". "I hope this helps" sounds like it is you, who are doing him a favor by sending him all that stuff to read, which is hardly the case. On the other hand, I'm not a native English speaker, so take all I said with a grain of salt. And yeah, the outcome depends much more on what is in your explanation than on how the ending passage is constructed.
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Tags: professorship, email
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thread-21481 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21481 | Can I ask a professor (via e-mail) for a citation for a result presented in lecture notes? | 2014-05-27T07:14:54.173 | # Question
Title: Can I ask a professor (via e-mail) for a citation for a result presented in lecture notes?
A mathematical result is presented in a set of lecture notes by a professor, and I have not been able to locate any journal papers which include the result. Would it be appropriate to ask the professor, via e-mail, for a citation to a journal paper?
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Note: I am not a student of the lecturer.
# Answer
> 12 votes
Sure, it can't hurt to send a brief, polite email. Just make **sure** that the reference isn't already given somewhere in the notes, or the professor's course website, or his/her list of suggested reading.
Of course, you should prepare for the possibility that your email will go unanswered. Professors tend to be busy. There is little-to-no benefit to them (other than the pleasure of helping out another human being, that is) in tracking down a reference for someone who isn't a colleague, student, or potential collaborator. There's also the possibility that this professor didn't prepare his/her own lecture notes, and the grad student who *did* is long gone, etc.
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Tags: professorship, etiquette
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thread-21478 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21478 | Is it appropriate to ask an author for an English translation of a paper? | 2014-05-27T05:50:13.577 | # Question
Title: Is it appropriate to ask an author for an English translation of a paper?
I have found an interesting paper which is very relevant to my research. After reading the abstract in English, I would like to continue to read through the methodology and its discussions. However, only the abstract is available in English, and the content is in another language which I don't know.
I really want to read through the content as some of the figures are very interesting to me. I have tried to translate it using Google Translate, but it is very difficult to understand.
**Is it appropriate to send a polite email to the author, asking for a translation of your paper in English? Does the author have the obligation to do so?**
# Answer
As far as I'm aware there is no obligation to provide a translation of a published paper from one language to another.
I think it would be rude **to ask** for a translation of a paper. However, it would generally be fine to **enquire** as to whether such a translation exists, or whether similar work has been published in English.
More broadly, it may be in the author's interests to provide an English translation in order to increase the impact of his or her work. If the work is really important to you, you could always pay for a translation. At the extreme end, perhaps where there are a large number of important works in a particular language, you may even want to learn the language.
> 48 votes
# Answer
> Is it appropriate to send a polite email to the author, asking for a translation of your paper in English?
The answer to almost any question that starts with "Is it appropriate to send a polite email" is yes. You are of course allowed to ask.
That being said, if there is no English translation of the paper already available, to which the author can just point you, I am pretty certain that the answer will be "no". It seems very unlikely that the author translates an entire paper on your request into your language, basically so that you don't have to.
> Does the author have the obligation to do so?
**Of course not** (and I strongly suggest not indicating anything along that line in the polite mail you are writing).
Let's assume for a second the paper is actually written in English, but you are a native speaker of a not very common language (Swedish, for instance). Assume further that your English is not very good and you cannot understand the paper well. You wouldn't feel entitled to having the author produce a Swedish version of the paper for you, would you?
> 17 votes
# Answer
It is in an author's interest for his/her work to be read and cited; this is the reason most authors will be happy to hear from someone who is interested in their work (it is, after all, a potential citation-in-waiting…).
With a bit of luck, one of two things happens:
1. She already has a translation of the work (or something close to it) which she happily shares
2. She is willing to work with you on coming up with a good translation. This will involve some work on your part - she provides a "poor English" version which is sufficient for you (who are an expert in this field) to grasp; and in return for her help, you edit the document into a "good English" paper which you send her to say thanks for the help (so the next person gets option 1). You might even collaborate on improving the work and turn it into a joint publication in an English language journal.
An outcome such as the above would be a win-win. The only way to find out is to send a polite email.
There is NO OBLIGATION on the part of the author to respond or provide a translation - but assuming that she takes her role as an academic seriously, she ought to be happy to help you come to an understanding of her work.
> 5 votes
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Tags: publications, etiquette, translations
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thread-21499 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21499 | Citing different web pages by the same author in APA | 2014-05-27T13:27:06.810 | # Question
Title: Citing different web pages by the same author in APA
I have been looking through the APA handbook and I can't seem to find a binding advise on this.
I have a couple of web pages in my reference list by the same author (a company), all without a date:
```
Nederbooms. (n.d.). *CGN core corpus | Nederbooms*. Retrieved on April 13, 2014,
from http://nederbooms.ccl.kuleuven.be/eng/cgntb
Nederbooms. (n.d.). *Lassy small | Nederbooms*. Retrieved on April 13, 2014,
from http://nederbooms.ccl.kuleuven.be/eng/lassytb
```
The problem is referring to these sources inline. How would I go about doing so? Let's say I refer to the first source. This is how I would do it - but I can't be sure.
> Most bananas are yellow, but some are green and some are even brown (Nederbooms, n.d., "CGN core corpus").
# Answer
The issue is that in APA style the author and year are used in the in text citation keys and these keys need to be unambiguous. When you have the same authors, in the same order, and the same date of publication, you add a letter to the publication date. You do the same thing even when the publication date is unknown. According to the APA blog
> Also remember that if you have two or more “in press” or “no date” references with the same authors in the same order, you should use lowercase letters—a, b, c, and so forth ... The only difference between these types of references and references with publication years is that “in press” and “no date” references contain a hyphen before the a, b, and so forth:
>
> American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.-a). The knowledge ...
>
> American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.-b). A strategy to ...
>
> Schafer, G., & Plunkett, K. (2011a). The power ...
>
> Schafer, G., & Plunkett, K. (2011b). Task complexity ...
>
> Schafer, G., & Plunkett, K. (in press-a). The rapid learning ...
>
> Schafer, G., & Plunkett, K. (in press-b). Sometimes a child ...
> 3 votes
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Tags: citations
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thread-21401 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21401 | Should I chase up confidential feedback not being "sanitised" | 2014-05-25T02:36:39.150 | # Question
Title: Should I chase up confidential feedback not being "sanitised"
I'm not sure how to phrase the question exactly in the title, but the issue is essentially this. I gave some feedback for a subject I did, which I was told was confidential. The lecturer found out I gave the feedback and approached me about it. From what she said, they were able to piece together who I was from the examples I gave of my concerns.
I realised from their statements that the feedback was given directly to them, but with no names attached (I assume). I don't feel that this was adequately stated in the survey. Now while I no doubt they will be a professional moving forward in this situation, I cannot know for certain that they now hold a vendetta against me. Conversely, they could also inflate my marks to appease me as well. Either circumstance I think we can agree is not favourable.
I have already emailed the university about this some time ago, but never received a reply. The thing I am most concerned about is the lack of clarity about the feedback, I would not have included "incriminating" evidence had I known this was given to the lecturer's directly - though I am unsure if that was an incorrect assumption on my part.
Anyways, my question is: **should I chase this up or should I let it go?**
# Answer
At most institutions in the United States, instructors are given their course evaluations in toto, only stripped of names. It's up to students to not write anything which would lead to deductive disclosure. But there's plausible deniability, so you could have feigned ignorance when she approached you (which was an entirely unprofessional thing to do).
If you are worried about retribution then speak to your chair or at the very least send an email note so that you have a paper record of your concerns.
> 6 votes
# Answer
If it appears that the lecturer is not being impartial when it comes to assessing your work, you should follow that up. As for "following up" how the feedback was obtained and provided to the lecturer, there really is nothing to follow up. In many cases the policies are set by the university. You could attempt to rally a student movement to institute a different policy, but you would really have to demonstrate that the new policy provides better learning outcomes or really upsets your fellow students. It is not uncommon for universities to solicit open comment feedback from students and then distribute those comments unfiltered to the lecturers. Many universities only provide the feedback after the exams, put it is equally common to provide the feedback to the lecturer immediately.
> 1 votes
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Tags: anonymity, feedback
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thread-21468 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21468 | How do I convince my professor to let me retake an exam? | 2014-05-26T20:38:18.570 | # Question
Title: How do I convince my professor to let me retake an exam?
I have missed my makeup exam this semester. We are given 3 chances at my university to pass a course, 1 regular, a retake and a third exam for those who failed the previous 2 ones. I missed the third exam because of work, and because I almost never able to keep up any schedule.
I wrote an email to my professor to let me retake it, but because I wrote my email at the same time as the exam was, my professor deems it unfair to give me another chance in this.
If I was not a problem student I would agree with his decision, but I spent half a year in a psychiatric ward because I was unable to visit any kind of community, and in this very semester with the help of tranquilizers I almost attended all of my lectures.
# Answer
From what I can gather from the question and comments is that you missed the first exam, the resit, and the resit-resit due to some serious psychological issues and you have asked the Professor for a 4th shot and he said no. At this point there is no reason for you to try and convince the Professor to change his mind. Your university likely has a clear policy on missed exams (especially when you miss all three standard opportunities). You will either qualify for a 4th shot or not under the policy. You "student services" office will be able to help you file the proper paperwork.
> 13 votes
# Answer
You should ask Disabled Students Services at your university for help. They can help with even recalcitrant faculty.
> 12 votes
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Tags: exams
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thread-16350 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16350 | Undergraduate in Computer science and now graduate in Bioinformatics | 2014-01-30T06:26:42.657 | # Question
Title: Undergraduate in Computer science and now graduate in Bioinformatics
I am a computer engineering undergrad (from Asia) and now trying to pursue my graduate studies in bioinformatics (in US). I have quite a strong programming skills and now more than one year of experience too. Since I do not have a strong background of biology, is it good to choose that field? Also, I have been doing some research to get any assistantship (have applied to few colleges) but could not start a communication with the professors. How should I approach?
Any help would be great to me.
# Answer
There are a number of bioinformatics programs that do not require you to have experience in both programming and biology. For example, the program at BU
> What if I don’t have experience in both computational and experimental fields?
>
> Applicants are not required to be well versed in both fields. Even if you do not have the academic background in both the computational and experimental fields, we are looking for highly motivated students
So only having a programming background should not be too much of a problem. You will probably want to have picked up and had a look at some undergraduate biology texts so that you are not completely clueless about the field.
As for approaching professors, it really is no different from other fields. Applicants to graduate school, whether for a PhD or a Masters, don't have all the skills to carry our independent research in the field. To get a research assistantship you need to find professors who are doing research that is interesting to you and send them your CV along with a well written email expressing why you want to work with them, what skills you bring with you, and what you want to learn. There are a number of related question on AC.SE that can help you in this regard.
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, professorship, computer-science
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thread-15911 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15911 | How should I start my own private post-doc research project? | 2014-01-17T22:21:41.023 | # Question
Title: How should I start my own private post-doc research project?
I am interested in pursuing my own part-time postdoctoral research in computer science, with a view to getting one or two publications over the next two to three years. My motivations are personal interest, and also to keep my options open in case I decide to apply for an academic or research post in 2016.
I am not sure where I should start looking for a project. Should I read academic papers until I get ideas? Should I just try and brainstorm my own ideas? Should I go back to my current university supervisor, or my previous PhD supervisor?
*My Background*
I am nearly 41 and married with two children (aged 10 and 13). I gained my bachelor's in computing in 2006. In 2012 I submitted a thesis in artificial intelligence (case-based reasoning) and the PhD was awarded in 2013. My family are not keen on moving and we live in an area with very few high-tech or academic employment opportunities.
I can't see a way to extend my PhD research. I have never worked as a post-doc; before the PhD I was a database administrator and immediately afterwards I was a software developer.
Fortunately, late in 2013 I found a position on a UK government scheme known as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. I am employed by a Scottish university to work within an English manufacturing company, to use AI techniques to solve a particular engineering problem. I am based at the manufacturing company and I see my university supervisor very rarely. I am not allowed to publish anything from this employment. The contract ends in August 2016.
The KTP project will probably use standard AI methods; I won't be inventing any new techniques. If the manufacturing company consented (and they will not!) it would be possible to publish, but it would only be as an interesting application of AI, not a new way of doing AI.
I have a substantial training budget (GBP £2000 a year) which—with the approval of my employer—I can spend going to conferences, buying books etc.
I have discussed the idea of doing research with my university supervisor, either performing experiments myself, or a literature review paper. She made some nice noises but she was not overly enthusiastic. I think she is worried that it will divert me from the KTP project (for which her university gets paid a lot of consultancy money) and possibly upset the construction company who I am based with.
My interests and skills lie in artificial intelligence (neural networks, case-based reasoning), computer-aided design and software engineering.
I still have my PhD supervisor on my LinkedIn page and I could approach her. However, I worry that she will think it is strange if I ask to collaborate with her, given that I am currently employed by a different university.
I can commute to my current workplace (it's about an hour away) and there are 2 good universities (and another two not-so-good ones) about 60-90 minutes' commute from our family home, so location is the biggest restriction for me, I can't force my wife and children to move.
# Answer
Partial answer: **start reading!**
Read for both breadth and depth, and be sure to occasionally step outside the boundaries of what you are familiar with, even exploring fields that seem only tangentially related. In the process, you will almost certainly discover an area that is begging to be explored further. Indulge yourself, dive into the literature, buy books and attend conferences (for which you say you have a budget), and keep excellent notes while doing so.
You may discover that you can write a literature review fairly easily, and will probably also find that you have identified exactly what you wish to pursue for your research project. At worst, you will have spent many enjoyable hours increasing your knowledge; at best, you will be well on the way to completing your research.
> 11 votes
# Answer
Doing "unsponsored" research would be tricky, but at least it's more feasible in artificial intelligence than in other fields (such as experimental particle physics or cell biology).
In general, however, working with your PhD advisor on new projects after you have finished your doctoral research is considered a very bad thing. The reason is that this suggests that you are still dependent on your graduate advisor, and are effectively still "riding her coattails." Consequently, it suggest you're not ready to stand on your own, which makes you much less desirable to hiring committees. Furthermore, in places like Germany, if you have only published papers with your graduate advisor, one can argue that you're not actually yet qualified to be an independent principal investigator, which can reduce your ability to apply for and receive grants.
Note that this does **not** mean that you can't finish up papers that are part of your graduate thesis work after you graduate. It just means that you shouldn't start up anything new.
> 6 votes
# Answer
What do you want to achieve by doing research "on the side"? Is it purely for intellectual stimulation? Do you want to maintain/raise your profile in the field? Are you hoping to create something that leads directly to your next job (through a research grant or similar)? Thinking about these questions may help you work out where to go.
First, you need to consider whether your current (KTP) employer is likely to raise any conflict of interest issues, and ensure you steer clear of any potential difficulties. Then, think about your PhD work: are there any outstanding issues that you could investigate? Projects that never got written up? In your situation, anything where you have a head start on the research is valuable. I'd definitely get back in contact with your original supervisor - they may have ideas, or contacts, or simply advice. Whilst it's true that in an ideal world, you'd expand your pool of collaborators, anything is better than nothing.
Are there any research groups active in your field in the local universities? Make contact, find an excuse to visit - it can't hurt. Even better, are there any researchers from other fields attempting to apply AI to their own problems, or trying to solve problems that are suited to AI? (Almost certainly!) By bringing your knowledge to another field, you may be able to achieve much greater impact for a given amount of effort! And if you offer something that most people in that field don't have, you'll find people are much more keen to collaborate. If you make yourself sufficiently useful to a large and well-funded research group, you may find a job offer down the line. So, spend some time investigating what your local universities are good at, find something that interests you and you think you can contribute to, and make contact. They might not be interested, but it doesn't hurt to try (and you may find postdocs/junior faculty more receptive to developing a side-project than senior professors).
I guess the bottom line is: be pragmatic. Unless you're only interested in the intellectual stimulation, in your present situation, you need to focus on maximising the cost:benefit ratio. This might mean not working on the things that most interest you, for the time being.
Good luck!
> 3 votes
# Answer
The best way to start a project **that will get funded** is to read funding announcements (FOA, PA, RFA, RFP, etc.) in your areas of expertise and/or areas that really interest you. Funding announcements are availible directly from the funding agency, or through online database such as Community of Science and Grants.gov. Reading funding announcements is an easy way to see the current state of knowledge as well as the gaps that exist (and available funding!).
I disagree with some of the other comments, collaborating with your PhD supervisor is very common (in my field). Furthermore, cross institutional collaboration is encouraged as pointed out by Luke M. I see no downside to this.
> 1 votes
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Tags: research-process, computer-science, postdocs
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thread-21519 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21519 | What are the consequences of withdrawing an abstract from a conference? | 2014-05-27T19:31:06.020 | # Question
Title: What are the consequences of withdrawing an abstract from a conference?
I have submitted an abstract for a conference using some preliminary results. I read all the advice about how to write an abstract with no results and I didn't lie in my abstract—I just presented the results I had in hand and discussed the value of the data that I would acquire in the future without making any specific claims about the conclusions I would draw. The abstract deadline was about 6 months before the paper deadline, so I had anticipated acquiring more data that I could write about in the paper and make it a strong contribution. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances (lab caught on fire, experiment exploded, computer with all my data was wiped by an EMP and velociraptors ate my backups, or some other more mundane reason) the data that I anticipated having is not available and I won't be able to write the full paper.
Many conferences have a "No paper, no podium" and "No podium, no paper" policy, so in those cases one of the consequences of not submitting the paper is that it will not be published in the conference's proceedings and I won't get to present it at the conference. For other conferences, this may vary.
But what are the other consequences (to my career, to future publication of the paper) of withdrawing the paper at this stage, either by not submitting anything or by contacting the program chair and withdrawing?
# Answer
First, I should mention that the "no paper, no podium" (and vice versa) only applies to conferences where proceedings are published. For many conferences, this is not the case—including many conferences in physics, chemistry, engineering, and applied mathematics that I regularly attend.
In general, if you have to withdraw a paper because of whatever reason—visa issues, experiments not working, or kidnapped by aliens (etc.)—it will not have *that* much impact on your career. The effect will increase, however, the more papers you withdraw, and the more trouble that you cause the conference organizers as a result. If you let them know well in advance that you're not going to be there, they can try to organize some sort of replacement for you, which, although suboptimal, is better than having a "hole" in the schedule. On the other hand, if you wait until the morning of your talk to withdraw your talk, you will *definitely* tick off the organizers, which may have an effect on your ability to present in the future (at least at that conference, or others the organizers work on later).
> 16 votes
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Tags: publications, conference, abstract, withdraw
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thread-21488 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21488 | Can you do paid external work under a PhD contract in France? | 2014-05-27T10:30:33.613 | # Question
Title: Can you do paid external work under a PhD contract in France?
If someone has a PhD contract in France and wants to work during summer for instance, is it fine if that person receives any external support during that time, outside the PhD contract support?
# Answer
> 3 votes
It depends on the work you plan to do (see here, paragraph IX).
* You are NOT allowed to do extra activities of the kind that could be part of your PhD contract (teaching, diffusing scientific information, expertise...). If you want to do this kind of work, it needs to be under your PhD contract.
* For the other cases, you need to obtain an authorization from your employer. If your employer is the university, they will ask your advisor's opinion and evaluate whether the extra work risks compromizing your PhD before making a decision. I don't know if such authorizations are commonplace.
# Answer
> 0 votes
You most likely signed a contract for your research grant and/or a teaching assistant position. The conditions for a job during vacations should be listed in the part of the contract about vacations. Since there are many possible grants with their own conditions, it is difficult to be more precise. For example, as state workers, elementary schools teachers can have another work during their vacations, but with a lot of restrictions; I guess that state-funded grant have similar restrictions.
In any case, the first thing to do is to ask your PhD advisor, your doctoral school or the person in charge of contracts in your university administration.
# Answer
> -1 votes
I am not familiar with the French law, but if you are an employee and don't have an exclusivity contract, it should be fine. If you are funded by grants, they may require the student to not have other sources of income, in which case it will be stated on the conditions. I don't see any reasonable reason for this to be limited, but law works in mysterious ways.
If the person in this situation is already employed, the safest option is to contact the legal services of the university. If they are not easily available, a careful reading of the contract should do the trick.
If the person is thinking about applying for this, the eligibility conditions should state if the successful candidate cannot be working at the time of hiring.
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Tags: phd, salary, france
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thread-21530 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21530 | What are the most important factors evaluated when applying for Phd position? | 2014-05-27T22:18:49.810 | # Question
Title: What are the most important factors evaluated when applying for Phd position?
I am sure this question has been posted somewhere in SE forums before. If not here is my contribution, otherwise please show me the pointers to similar well-voted questions.
Here is the actual question: In case someone is interested to apply for a Phd degree, what would be the parameters that head of the research group (i.e. professor) will consider when comparing different candidates?
Some of the factors that come to my mind are the following:
Grades, Reference letters, Publications, Closeness of previous studies to the actual research taking place in that research group, Quality of final thesis (Master/Bachelor), Thesis adviser etc.
How would a professor prioritize these factors. I am sure here in the forums we have some experienced members who might have participated in acceptance committees, which can provide useful insights.
Thanks.
# Answer
> 5 votes
The answer is, as usual, "it depends". JeffE provides a perspective for a top US research university (*Research, research, research, recommendation letters, research, baked beans, and research.*). In my lab (small-but-good swiss university) PhD admission certainly works a bit differently.
First a bit of context: our lab usually consists of less than ten members, 2 of which are professors and one to two more being postdocs. We select our PhD students ourselves (there is no department or faculty-level hiring). Hence, PhD student selection is not something we do all the time.
Generally, the single most important factor for hiring for us is whether we already know the candidate. Broadly, potential students come in four tiers:
* **Tier 1: students that we personally know to be good**, for instance because they have done courses or their thesis with us. This means that we *mostly hire from our own university*, but as I only moved recently from a different university, we currently also like to hire from my old institution. Generally, if you know *somebody* in the lab (even other PhD students) and the other person vouches for your qualities, you are almost certainly in.
* **Tier 2: students that people that we know know**. If we need a position filled but don't have a strong internal candidate at the ready, we reach out to our personal networks. Usually, we don't cast the net particularly wide -- the recommendation of a professor that I met once at a conference likely isn't enough. We mostly contact personal friends and close collaborators here.
* **Tier 3: students that applied because of a job announcement we put out**. We generally only do that (putting out job announcements) if we *really* need a position filled and we could not find somebody in our network. In most cases, my lab head is more ready to leave a position unfilled than hire somebody that does not come with a strong recommendation.
* **Tier 4: students that applied with a cold email**. As far as I know, we have literally never hired somebody that applied *cold*.
Which of those "tiers" you fall in is the single most important factor that leads to whether you will be hired or not. In the rare case that we have multiple students that come with strong personal recommendations, and we cannot hire all, we usually select roughly following these criteria (roughly in order of importance):
* **Research experience.** A master is a prerequisite for PhD studies in my current country. However, most master students don't publish. If you did, it is certainly perceived very positively *as long as the paper is at least ok*. (publishing in predatory journals or other *really bad* venues might be perceived negatively actually)
* **Relevant industrial experience.** We do research on software engineering, so if you worked *as a software engineer* before, this will be perceived positively. However, note the "relevant" here. Standard internships or jobs may not help much (most have done those at some point) -- it needs to be something that we think will clearly give you better insight into our area of research.
* **Technical skills.** We don't expect future students to know how to do research yet, but we expect a strong programming background and fluency in standard tooling.
* **Perceived compatibility with the team.** Finally, we also typically consider whether a student is a good fit for our lab culture.
The last two bullets are typically assessed in interviews. We generally interview candidates via Skype beforehand, and (when we are almost certain we are going to hire a student), we also fly her/him in to give a talk in our group and spend some time with us beforehand. *(both things we only do for Tier 2 - 4 candidates)*
We don't ask for letters of recommendation (of people we do not know), research statements, statements of motivation, or anything like that. Neither do we look at previous grades (except maybe in a corner case, but to the best of my knowledge it has not happened yet).
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Tags: phd, graduate-admissions, computer-science
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thread-21477 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21477 | Double major in Physics and engineering for career safety | 2014-05-27T05:39:03.797 | # Question
Title: Double major in Physics and engineering for career safety
I am an Indian undergraduate student completing my BTech in Industrial Engineering in one of top three universities in India. I am planning to move on to physics for graduate school and I have a proper profile for it with research projects and internships in physics. I am confident I would get accepted to a good graduate program for physics, probably in the United States.
After browsing through the forums I found, it appears that a masters or PhD in physics is not a very lucrative option in terms of career. I in fact read that people are still in search of jobs after their PhD for three or four years. I also heard engineers have significantly greater career security after their graduation. So I am considering a double major in Physics as well as in Engineering to increase my future job prospects. I am determined focus on Physics in my masters program so it seems I should either to major in Physics and minor in Engineering or major in both. My primary job preference would be in the field of Physics academia, but wouldn't mind shifting to other areas.
*What is the best choice of undergraduate major/minors to provide me the best career prospects?*
# Answer
> 3 votes
At least in Europe, and probably in the US too, physicists are highly considered in industry, the unemployment rate is almost a technical zero. Doing research is another different beast: there are not so many positions, and you have to fight for them. Also, Academia not a very lucrative career path: a first job for a physicist or an engineer in industry may grant them 3-4 times more than in grad school (depending on the conditions), and it continues onwards.
I see you are eager to study both degrees, which is commendable, knowledge never hurts. What you need to consider is the costs, both economical (can you afford the university?) and in effort (can you really do both degrees at the same time?). Both degrees are difficult, and will take a great emotional toll.
Some universities offer double degrees, where you end having both titles, and the subjects are (hopefully) sorted and arranged in the most convenient way for the student. For example, in Physics and Maths you need linear algebra; in a double degree you would only take the courses from Maths, as the ones in Physics are a subset. If the university does not have this arrangement, you may find yourself doing the same subjects twice, that may lead to added frustration.
Another cost are the grades: doing two things means you cannot do them both so well. Some admission put hard thresholds on the grades, and they may or may not consider your second degree as a sufficient merit to lower it. On the other hand, and provided the grades are not very damaged, almost any employer will see it as a great CV boost and will make it easier to get an industrial job.
As a last advice: if you go for it, be aware of your limits and ready to drop one of them if things get difficult before it brings you down. A degree and a half is a merit, two three-quarter degrees are two failures.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I have heard that it is challenging to find academia jobs in physics in the US. However, industry may be very different. Financial firms, scientific modeling, consulting, and tech companies are very open to hiring physics grads. Having the degree shows that you're intelligent and can think critically, though you wouldn't necessarily be working on physics projects. Having another degree in engineering or cs would only help.
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Tags: job, career-path, engineering, physics
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thread-21577 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21577 | Is it appropriate to e-mail a researcher asking about progress on a follow-up paper? | 2014-05-28T11:09:01.367 | # Question
Title: Is it appropriate to e-mail a researcher asking about progress on a follow-up paper?
Recently, I saw an online presentation by a researcher and professor regarding a series of recently published papers. At the end, she mentioned she was working on a follow-up paper, regarding such and such... I have checked for it, and it has still not been published.
Perhaps it was a dead-end, and abandoned. Would it be appropriate to ask the professor about the progess made, and whether it has been abandoned, or when it will be published?
# Answer
> 28 votes
Certainly this is appropriate, especially if you indicate who you are and why you are interested. Researchers are interested in spreading their results far and wide to get citations.
The worst that can happen is that the research is not yet quite publication-ready, and the author prefers not to share it yet, to avoid academic claim-jumping. If so, you may get exactly this explanation, or no answer at all.
The best, conversely, would be that this could actually lead to a fruitful discussion and/or even collaboration.
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Tags: professorship, etiquette
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thread-21576 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21576 | Which licence choose for a new academic computing language? | 2014-05-28T11:04:06.523 | # Question
Title: Which licence choose for a new academic computing language?
> Disclaimer: I am not sure this is the right place to ask the question, but since it is directly related to academic work, I though I'll give it a try. If it is not, please feel free to redirect
Together with colleagues from different institutions (all academic), we have been developing a new information language (more precisely a format), based on XML, to store a specific type of information. This format is primarily directed to the academic world and will be open source
My question is: do we need to **attach a licence** to this new format and, if yes, what **type of licence** is suitable for that?
# Answer
> 5 votes
Oh, no, yet another format!
Now seriously, you can legally register a format, but I don't see a big benefit from doing it. For what I see, licensing is essentially a copyright of the actual text. In most practical purposes, having a public, freely available document explaining it, should suffice.
To support my feeling, I have been digging in some academic examples I am familiar with and they don't specify any.
If you want to be sure, you could see what other people have done, for example, OpenDocument format.
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Tags: open-science, license
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thread-21561 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21561 | What steps should I follow in order to be able to start conducting research if there's no sign of support within my department? | 2014-05-28T03:58:39.580 | # Question
Title: What steps should I follow in order to be able to start conducting research if there's no sign of support within my department?
My understanding of research is that it's a way to find solutions/answers to questions/problems in a certain subfield of a bigger discipline, which in my case would be Computer Science (honestly, it'd be more like Computer Engineering).
I think I know, however, that if these problems and solutions are too simple or banal, the whole process of doing research is irrelevant because
1. surely somebody else has already worked in that, and
2. there's no sense in working in something that won't contribute a significant amount of knowledge to the discipline.
This means that in order to get *worthy* (or at least relevant) problems to research, you must be at the cutting edge of the field so that you have an idea of what's not yet known and you can start working on it. Am I right?
If I am, that sounds kind of *complicated*. I have heard that I should read lots of papers in an area of my interest and work from there, but I'm sincerely not sure about how to start doing even this. I have access to the ACM Digital Library, for example, but I don't know what to search for, what to read, or in what order to do so.
I am alone in this, for my university is weak in research and no professors seem to be interested in it. Do you have any tips, or any specific set of steps that you followed to get into research?
# Answer
It'll certainly be easier if you can find a professor willing to supervise you, so I strongly suggest that you keep trying on that front. But even if you can't, all is not lost! Here are the steps I recommend. Note that this may not be the *only* way to get started, but it's a way that works for many of my students:
### Step 1: Start by identifying an area of interest
A good way to start is to identify a topic in class that interests you. Approach the professor for that class and ask him/her to suggest some related papers for further reading.
### Step 2: Get a better view of this area
Thoroughly reading those papers may take a while, since this is new to you. Don't be discouraged by this! After you have a reasonable understanding of the papers suggested by your professor, start to branch out: look up the papers cited by/citing those papers to get a broader view.
### Step 3: Reproduce some existing results
Somewhere in all this reading, you'll come across something that *really* interests you: a proof, a design of a system, a software implementation of an idea. See if you can reproduce this result (by going through the steps of the proof, writing your own software, running a simulation, etc.) Again, this may be more difficult than you expect; don't get discouraged.
### Step 4: Do something new
Now that you've reproduced someone else's results, can you extend them? Is there a small variation on the system design that could improve the results, an interesting application in another domain, a stronger result you can prove? Get to work.
### Step 5: Communicate your results
Congrats, you are now *almost* a bona fide researcher! Go show the professor who recommended the papers what you've been working on. A big part of doing research is communicating the results, once you have something to show. (And to get into a good grad school, you'll need to impress some potential letter writers.)
You should also consider writing a draft of a paper and soliciting feedback on it.
> 13 votes
# Answer
If the main goal here is to learn to "think like a researcher", then you only need to work on a problem that's new to you; it doesn't necessarily need to be at the cutting edge of the field. Indeed, there may be pedagogical value in having the ability to compare your solutions with those found by more experienced researchers. Of course, your results may not be publishable, unless you find something interesting - but at your career stage, that doesn't necessarily matter. You still will have something to discuss/write about in applications for grad school, and you will have learnt a lot!
> 1 votes
# Answer
How to get to know what to research, possible approaches:
1. Find supervisors that do things you consider interesting, ask them what could you do for them.
2. Find research groups that do things you consider interesting, ask them what could you do for them.
3. Find a research project that is interesting, work in that project.
4. Find a problem that is interesting and not solved yet, work on that problem. Generally problems are either new or hard, sometimes both. Sometimes (often? always?) solving an easy problem in a proper way turns to be very hard. Proving it's the right way to solve that problem is very often much harder.
5. Find what is interesting for you, then find problems in that area and find funding to solve those problems.
6. Find a business model, if you are not certain about what is interesting for you, then consider what is interesting for everybody else, so interesting that they would be willing to pay for it.
7. Find what are you good at and it may become your passion.
8. Find current trends in research, hot topics, there should be problems, money and success there.
In the end it doesn't really matter what you find first, you have to find everything else (a supervisor, funding, etc.) however the order in which you find some things will probably determine what you find later, i.e. the information you get and the decisions you make direct your search throughout the process.
How to find things? Searching. It's hard and tedious, there are no shortcuts, AFAIK.
The only advice I can give is: "Don't make the problem, find it", problems should not be "created" or "invented" to do research, some situation may not have been perceived as a problem before, that's fine, you check that situation and change it, hopefully for the better. Research in computer engineering consists in using (sometimes making) computers and/or software to go from point A to point B (as a very naïve description), hopefully point B will be better under some perspective than point A, but what I would like to stress is that point A should be real. It may not be common (that's fine) but it has to be real.
Point A is in the world, not in any book, there may be books (papers, etc.) that describe point A, that reach to point A (from a previous one), etc. but point A is in the real world and this should be never forgotten. The most theoretical part of computer science doesn't care whether A is real or not, that work is important by setting the foundations of things that will be used in the future, when we reach to a point A where that is relevant (if that ever happens), it's a very hard and uncertain type of research, that I don't personally like (for me) and that you don't seem to pursue. Therefore, for us, point A is in the real world, out there.
This is important because that means that we can access point A from the world and from the way it relates with other things. There may be people interested on that, research groups, research projects, papers describing it, business to do in solving it, skills that are relevant for it, trends that involve it, etc. Those are paths to find it, to get to it.
So this is your first research topic, you are in ignorance, point A, you want to find a research topic, point B (that will later become A). How do you do it? I offer you this "relational approach", try to find a better one. After all, we are only talking about information, searching, maybe it's too soon to make a search engine for this, but maybe someone can make a search methodology that will probably involve using conventional search engines.
> 1 votes
# Answer
I would start by seeing if your university has an undergraduate research program or runs summer projects with researchers in any formalised way. If they do this is an excellent way to get started in research as you have an experienced researcher to help guide you and it helps create useful contacts if you are interested in a future in academia.
If your university has no formal program you can email professors in a field you are interested in to see if they any projects you could do over the summer. Keep preserving if the first people you contact have nothing, they are probably busy and if they do not expect a summer student they are unlikely to have a project prepared.
It is probably helpful if you have a vague idea of what you want to research into. Not necessarily a specific project but at least a field or sub-topic. This not only helps you identify academics with similar interests but shows you are keen and helps them formulate a project for you.
If your university is very weak at research one option may be to look at doing a summer project at another university which is more research focused. This is not ideal as knowing how to contact will be harder and there may be extra costs such as accommodation, but it is a possibility.
> 0 votes
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Tags: research-process
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thread-16246 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16246 | Is a professional doctorate beneficial for someone looking for a career as a programmer in industry? | 2014-01-28T07:28:50.297 | # Question
Title: Is a professional doctorate beneficial for someone looking for a career as a programmer in industry?
I am a software developer by profession and was wondering what a professional doctorate (PdEng) would add to my career if I plan to work in the industry.
**EDIT:** I am not talking about a Phd rather a Professional Doctorate program (PDEng).It is a 2 year program and used for getting a job in a very specific sub discipline of a field.
# Answer
> 3 votes
**TLDR:** It trains you in both technical and soft skills (technical writing, meeting management, etc.), and lets you gain experience with small and large industry projects, using different technologies. It essentially compresses multiple years of industry experience into two.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the program actually *is*. The Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng) programs offered at Dutch universities have more in common with industry traineeships than with a traditional academic doctorate. As such, most of the negative effects of a PhD on job propspects (*trouble actually writing code*, *far less job experience*, etc.) simply do not apply.
For example, Eindhoven University of Technology describes their Software Technology PDEng program as follows.
> The Software Technology program is designed to prepare you for an industrial career as a technological designer, and later on as a software or system architect. It starts with 15 months of advanced training and education, including 4 small, industry driven training projects, followed by a major design project of nine months in a company.
The program is specifically designed to teach MSc students with a good grasp of the theory how to efficiently apply that theory to practical applications. It is presented as a way to "fast-track" your career by gaining a lot of cross-disciplinary experience in only two years.
They write the following about their graduates:
> The Software Technology program has been around for more than 25 years and to date trained more than 370 technological designers. Most designers have joined the companies where they carried out their design assignments and many now fulfill a management position.
Their alumni association XOOTIC released a detailed survey (pages 25-28), stating
> Having a job as an XOOTIC is still easy: only 1% of the XOOTIC’s is unemployed. \[...\] By far the most XOOTIC’s have an indefinite contract (82.6%).
>
> The OOTI program is known in the industry according to 80% of the answers and is rewarded according to 44% of the respondents. \[...\] XOOTIC’s, considering what they know now, would still do the OOTI program (96.7%).
# Answer
> 7 votes
You might get different answers for different countries. This answer is for the US.
Speaking as a person who has hired many programmers (both for my own company and for other companies) I feel quite confident that having **a doctorate of any kind will not help you land a job as a programmer**. The simple fact is, people care about what you can produce. What frameworks, models, patterns, languages, etc. are you effective in? This is what people generally care about from a technical perspective. They will care about other things like how committed you are, how many hours you can work, etc. but what you would gain from a doctorate will not be of value to people who hire in industry.
That said, it can be useful for career mobility. For example, I have see people chose one person over another for an IT management position because one had a doctorate. That turned out to be a terrible choice for the company, but I don't think the problems were connected to his doctorate (he simply had no experience managing people). Some people might see the value in the doctorate but only at a higher level (not entry level).
# Answer
> 2 votes
In general, for software engineering (in the UK), it will not help a lot in my experience - PhDs,PDEngs and EngDs will add to your initial salary over a masters. But probably no more than the extra experience that working in industry would get you.
The main exception is start-ups - if your tech guy(s) have post-graduate degrees then it can help with the early sales (proves you are smarter). Plus there is a valid argument that when you are limited in the number of heads you can get, it is worth getting the smartest ones you can.
The other exception is if it is for a *very* specific field and you want to go into that, it may help you beat out candidates with more experience in nearby fields (or satisfy a requirement of having experience in that field).
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Tags: computer-science, industry
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thread-21534 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21534 | Where can one find jobs where companies hire mathematicians where they can do (not necessarily mainstream) research? | 2014-05-28T00:27:18.423 | # Question
Title: Where can one find jobs where companies hire mathematicians where they can do (not necessarily mainstream) research?
Several companies (google, IBM etc.) are known to hire mathematicians with advanced degrees (Ph.D. and so) to work in different sectors. Many such jobs are also research jobs, if not all. But I almost never find any such job advertisements in the standard mathjob sites I know of, including mathjobs.org, euro-math-soc.eu/jobs, nordic math jobs etc. Where can I find these type of job advertisements?
# Answer
> 5 votes
Industrial jobs are announced on different basis than academic ones. Typically, there is no a position to be filled. Rather (larger companies) are hiring on semi-continuous basis, and assign people to groups internally.
Sometimes there are more research-oriented openings, for example Facebook: Data Scientist, Product Science. Just bear in mind it is mostly very applied science, and in fields like Machine Learning, Statistics, maybe some Graph Theory or Cryptography.
So look at big companies (smaller companies may not have such specialized positions or money to invest in long-term development) in technology (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, ...) and their openings. When it comes to direct positions, usually you can choose only *after* interviews (you rarely see research positions being on the front page).
If it is nice research, or building webpages in a disguise, the only way is to ask people working at the company. Or look at CVs of your colleagues in your field who did internships in these companies (especially ones that you know are pure mathematicians or computer scientists).
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Tags: job-search, mathematics, industry
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thread-21600 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21600 | How to go about contacting an author regarding questions on their research? | 2014-05-28T16:39:36.773 | # Question
Title: How to go about contacting an author regarding questions on their research?
There is a scientist I am interested in contacting with expertise in peptidomics. I would like to email them to ask if they had ever explored findings from a related area of research. How do I politely contact them for their input?
# Answer
First of all, check their personal website and any other content they have published which you have access to which may already offer the input you require. It would certainly be in order to personally e-mail the researcher, but be specific as to the type of input or information you require. The scientist is probably very busy, and a broad question is more likely to go unanswered in that case.
If you intend to refer to certain findings from a related field, ensure you provide all the necessary information to answer your question, or at the very least provide links to the related papers or websites for the convenience of the researcher.
> 2 votes
# Answer
Send them a brief, polite email. Brief because nobody has time to read huge walls of text from strangers; polite because you want them to help you.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Virtually every publication will list a corresponding author along with contact information, usually an email address and/or phone number. All authors are listed with their university and department. You can and should use any or all of this information to find these people and get in touch with the authors of any papers about which you have questions.
> 1 votes
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Tags: communication
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thread-21599 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21599 | How to find an alternative international transcript evaluation service? | 2014-05-28T16:24:35.773 | # Question
Title: How to find an alternative international transcript evaluation service?
I need a career evaluation for applying to a U.S. university graduate program in computer science. I have an official transcript of all my exams in Italian.
I've found this site spantran that evaluates the career, converts the votes to GPA and translates them in English. But it costs 400$, and it asks 65$ for every page translated. I'm here to get to know some cheaper alternative.
# Answer
The National Association of Credential Evaluation Services is an association of credentials evaluation services in the United States. Of universities that require an evaluation of foreign transcripts, many will also require that this evaluation be done by an NACES member.
The list of NAECS member services is available **here**; there are currently 19 services on this list. Now it is up to you to find out which offer the kind of evaluation you need, and what is the cost of each service.
(Note that you need only submit an evaluation if the university you are applying to explicitly requires it; most do not. If they do, they may also require that you use a specific service; check with the university about their requirements.)
> 5 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, united-states, international-students, evaluation
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thread-18398 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18398 | Responding to positive grant reviews? | 2014-03-21T17:09:17.817 | # Question
Title: Responding to positive grant reviews?
A common way to handle grant applications seems to be to request external reviews, to which the applicant can then respond. Reviews and response together are discussed at a panel where the proposals are ranked, and the top x% then are funded.
I've found myself in a nice, but perplexing situation: I got back the reviews for my first grant proposal, and all reviewers gave top scores (and very positive comments). Now I'm wondering whether or not to use my right to respond - all information I could find about responses boil down to addressing criticism, but what do you do if there is no criticism?
Edit: The grant agency explicitly discourages using the reply to thank reviewers. The alternative option besides not replying at all could be to attempt to selectively agree with the most praising comments or something like that, but I'm not sure that is a good idea.
# Answer
> 9 votes
While it sounds that there would be no need to rebut against anything (I suggest to read the reports *very* carefully once again - some criticism can be hidden and is sometimes difficult to spot between positive comments) there may be another reason to formulate a response. It may well be that the reports contain valuable suggestions or remarks on specific points of your proposal. You can take the opportunity to pick up these suggestions and present new views or deeper explanations. However, I think that this really only makes sense if you have something new to say in view of the comments of the reviewer. I would suggest to not repeat what is already written in the proposal…
# Answer
> 11 votes
If there's no criticism to rebut, then waive the right to rebut.
If you've already received top marks with no criticisms, then you can only spoil things by saying something at this stage.
Just shut up. And enjoy the moment.
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Tags: peer-review, funding
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thread-21409 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21409 | How to tell my advisor I am leaving the PhD program, when he is the reason I'm leaving? | 2014-05-25T05:01:42.967 | # Question
Title: How to tell my advisor I am leaving the PhD program, when he is the reason I'm leaving?
I want to give up my current PhD program, which I started 5 months ago, because I really do not like my current advisor's personality and working style. He lives a relaxed life and has no enthusiasm for science after getting tenure. He does not have funding and never releases decent papers because he does not work hard.
But I like my current direction. So I want to give up my PhD and switch to the master's program - as I have nearly finished all the coursework, and I do not want a gap in my CV - and then apply to a new school, as there is no other professor in my school doing work in my direction.
My question is: how can I tell him that I want to leave the PhD program? I do not want to tell him the true reason, because I want him to write a recommendation for me, and I think he likes me.
# Answer
> 22 votes
Tell him why you're even more excited about the places to which you're applying.
> At University X, Dr. Y is doing groundbreaking work in Z, and has published three papers in Prestigious Journal With A Latin Title in the last two years alone. Her students are also proving amazing results and speaking all over the world about them, and one of them just got a job at Top-Class University W. Every week they have a seminar where they discuss blah-blah-blah... \[etc., etc.\]
>
> I'm grateful for all the opportunities you've afforded me here, and I think that X,Y, and Z would be an even better fit for me.
# Answer
> 2 votes
It seems that you have been wondering whether you had chosen the right advisor, ever since you started your PhD 5 months ago. You didn't even like your subject then.
Earlier I commented that I was not sure if what you described would be a valid reason to leave your PhD program. Given that you have struggled with this decision for the last 5 months and you have not seen any improvements except that now you like your subject, it could well be the right decision to leave. I must quickly add, though, that many PhD students have had minimum guidance from their advisor, yet they persisted. This is something you need to decide yourself, and it seems that you are determined to leave, and that is fine.
What you must not do, as others have commented, is to lie to your advisor. Do not think about getting a recommendation from him. First, I don't think it is necessary, and second, it will help you be more objective in conveying to him your reason for leaving.
# Answer
> -2 votes
If you want a good reference the only thing you can really try is to tell him the subject does not suit you at all and fit your new found plan to become an x, y or z. Your supervisor may wonder why you are asking for a reference to go do some similar course if you do that after telling him you hate the subject, though...Your supervisor may try to persuade you to stay, in which case you could negotiate he stop doing whatever is annoying you or just keep firm with your decision.
What you must not do is fake family death or personal illness. You will in all likelihood, need to prove those have happened, especially if you want a reference.
Personally, I think not liking your supervisor is a terrible reason to quit your PhD. You will always have to suffer fools in life, that is just part of being an adult.
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Tags: phd, advisor
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thread-18227 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18227 | Graduate training programs from other departments, how helpful are they? | 2014-03-17T05:31:00.107 | # Question
Title: Graduate training programs from other departments, how helpful are they?
I notice that there are quite a number of graduate training programs across departments in my university that encourage multidisciplinary researches. For my case, I am an EECS/ Computational Biology grad student, and I am considering a training program in biophysics/nanotech.
I don't mind taking one more course per semester, and finding co-supervisors from other departments as the program requires. My main concern: will there be any real advantages of getting that certification in term of (academic) career prospects?
In one of his famous blog post, Sean Carroll advised:
> Don’t dabble. Another slightly counter-intuitive one. You might think that, while most of your research work is in area A, the fact that you wrote a couple of papers in area B will be taken as positive evidence of your breadth and intellectual strength. Very wrong. What will actually happen is that your work in area B will be compared to the best people in the world who spend all their time thinking about area B, and you will probably come up wanting. Even worse, it will be taken as evidence that your interests may wander over time — so that, whereas you were hired to be an expert in area A, maybe in a few years you won’t be doing that at all. Kiss of death. Deep down, there is a strongly anti-intellectual strain within academia; you were hired to work in a specialty and that’s what they expect you to do. Once you get tenure, of course, you can do whatever you want; so it’s important that the department be reassured that you don’t want to do anything else.
I wonder if people will look down on me if they deem biophysics/nanotech a discipline too far away from computational biology (even when my thesis are dealing with all of them)?
# Answer
Yes, as @JeffE attests, there is at least a balance to be struck in the diversification of your skills and perspectives versus having a clear focus that will mark out your niche. You can overdo either one. My perspective, as someone who has been involved in inter-disciplinary research for 15 years, and who has had a lot of advice from much more senior folk about this, does err somewhat on the side of Carroll. In particular, your goal *is* to mark out a well defined territory that is not too diffuse. "Trajectory" in your career (mainly your pub record) is a primary consideration for hiring and promotion, and it's difficult to build up a body of work if you dabble in many areas.
My own perspective resonates with Carroll's here: continual, long-term dabbling is **Bad** for getting tenure. It will dilute what others will be able to confidently perceive/predict about your current and future impact in a specific field. But being a "drone" who just followed faithfully in the footsteps of his/her PhD mentor, using the same perspective that might already be "old-fashioned" and not future-proof to the growing inter-disciplinary pressures (you should be able to insert your own field-specific examples here!), is also **Bad**. Either because you find eventually yourself bored or devalued as a "mere follower" rather than innovator, or because your micro-focused view dries up in terms of peer interest or funding.
Remember that institutions *at least* pay lip service to inter-disciplinary work. Some actually really support it in a meaningful way, and look for fresh, innovative thinkers to join them. As a junior academic, now is a good time to explore what's not too far from your area and learn more about how to position yourself with a unique and/or highly desirable set of skills and body of knowledge. So, this can be exactly how you end up being successful in contributing in a clear direction in exactly the way I interpret from Carroll's blog post.
For you, ask your mentors and colleagues how they see the current and future combination of the two disciplines you are talking about, and what the interesting questions are. Then try to see how you could fit into that and do something innovative while remaining feasible and concrete. It's tricky, but finding that sweet spot should get you a long way, and it could be much more rewarding. Just be careful who you work for. Some places or people talk the talk but don't walk the walk. When it comes to decisions involving money, if your institution's administration or your peers don't know how to properly evaluate your highly innovative inter-disciplinary work then you might "fall between the cracks" and be passed over for a more traditional candidate whose work they can, at least, easily understand! Good luck
> 2 votes
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Tags: research-process, graduate-school, training
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thread-19508 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19508 | European fellowships for neuroscience or anatomy? | 2014-04-18T23:21:52.150 | # Question
Title: European fellowships for neuroscience or anatomy?
I'm not sure this kind of question is appropriate here, but if not here, probably nowhere else.
I'm interested to know if there is a) any mailing list for jobs in neuroscience or anatomy (apart from the computer vision and machine learning mailing lists), specially of computational nature. Also, b) is there any agency in Europe/US that supports and grants postdoctoral fellowships in these areas? (like Marie Curie actions or Humboldt Fellowships). I'm a mathematician who is willing to switch to these areas, and with a research team, I'm planning to apply fr this kind of fellowships.
One example I found is European Respiratory Society offering some Marie Curie postdoc fellowships, just to give you an idea what I'm talking about in b).
http://www.ersnet.org/ers-funding/fellowships/post-doc/eu-co-funded-respire-2.html
Thanks in advance!
# Answer
A primary mailing list for computational neuroscience, which includes jobs all around the world (many in Europe) is
http://www.neuroinf.org/mailman/listinfo/comp-neuro
That would also be a better place to ask your more specific question about fellowships, etc. There are many such opportunities in Europe, but your question is not specific enough right now. If you ask on the comp-neuro mailing list, you should say more about your current position, location, and experience. Have you published anything? What research topics have you been studying? At what institution? This will help people focus their answers to help you more. You can also start by looking up the major European institutions that are strong in comp neuro (of which there are many, and there are lists all over the internet) and see if they sponsor any programs directly.
On a related note, as a mathematical neuroscientist myself, I think you will find the neuroscience area much more intellectually stimulating than anatomy. Computational anatomy is, in many ways, a more limited set of topics. A lot of it involves image processing and 3D reconstruction, which are already included as possible sub-areas within neuroscience. So you could always get into that sub-area of anatomy later anyway.
> 2 votes
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Tags: job-search, funding, postdocs, europe
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thread-21618 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21618 | Can individual international scholars apply for US federal funds? | 2014-05-29T00:29:51.783 | # Question
Title: Can individual international scholars apply for US federal funds?
When checking the grants.gov I found that individuals can directly apply for available grants. Since it was not mentioned that individuals should be US citizen, I thought that everyone can apply, and judgement is based on the proposal.
1. Can international people apply?
2. Should the project conducted in the US territory? Or they care about the results no matter where it has been done?
3. If yes to 1 & 2; can an international person apply, and upon success coming to the US to conduct the project?
# Answer
Usually, you can follow links or do a google search to find the original text of the Call for Proposals. The full text of those *almost always* provides clear criteria for who is eligible. Almost always (probably unless otherwise stated), the PI has to be from a US institution, but contrary to the other answer here, I am not familiar with the PI needing to have any particular academic status (especially not *tenured* already as an associate prof, and certainly all the kinds of non-TT research scientist positions), provided they have a position which their institution officially lists as being eligible to be sponsored as a PI. Sometimes, a post-doc, lecturer, or adjunct prof might be eligible. Remember, the grants go to the institution primarily, and the PI merely executes them on their behalf. The granting agencies defer the responsibility for administering who is legally OK to conduct the research to the accredited institution. Policies can vary between institution, so you'll need to ask your local administrators.
Certain kinds of award from private agencies or those who work with sensitive information, e.g. DARPA, DOD, or DOE, might require you to be a US Citizen (not even just a LPR), but that should be clearly listed. I am pretty sure that "unrestricted," in this context, means that there is no such restriction on immigration status.
You are always free to shoot an email or call to the cognizant program officer for a particular grant, to ask for clarification. They will expect you to have read the full, original CfP, unless you want to put them in a bad mood that might bias the review of your prospective application!
> 3 votes
# Answer
You wrote,
> I found that individuals can directly apply for available grants.
This is true only in a few rare cases - generally, grants are awarded to PIs with an organizational affiliation. As per grants.gov's section on Grant Eligibility:
> Although there are many funding opportunities on Grants.gov, few of them are available to individuals
Unless specified for *Individual Eligibility*, funding opportunities on grants.gov are open only to those affiliated with an eligible organization, as further stated:
> Individual applicants may only apply for grant opportunities, on Grants.gov, that indicate individual eligibility within the Synopsis and Full Announcement.
and elsewhere it says:
> The only time it is appropriate to register as an individual with Grants.gov is when you are submitting an application that specifies it is open only to individuals, such as for an individual fellowship or traineeship.
If you click "Browse Eligibilities" on the grants.gov homepage, you can click through directly to the grants for which individuals may apply. (These are basically a handful of fellowships or extremely specialized grants - currently there are ~20 open opportunities. You will have to read the extended details for these to determine if they have any additional eligibility requirements.)
> 3 votes
# Answer
As far as I know for many of the grants, at least for DARPA, NSF, NIH, NASA, you need a PI located in a US institution, you may be located somewhere else, but the main PI should be from a US institution.
For the look of it grants.gov is more like a splash age from where you can search grants in diverse institutions. I can only talk of those(DARPA, NIH, etc..), since are the one I'm familiarized with.
Also, the PI applying for the grant usually needs to hold at least an associate professorship, there might be other grants that do not have this requirement but again, those are the ones I'm familiarized with.
> 2 votes
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Tags: funding, united-states
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thread-21616 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21616 | How to ask PhD advisor to work remotely on thesis for extensive periods? | 2014-05-28T23:33:48.797 | # Question
Title: How to ask PhD advisor to work remotely on thesis for extensive periods?
I am in a PhD program in a top US institution but my SO,family,friends are somewhere else. I am considering a thesis that would require minimal/no field or lab work. This would be a big compromise as I was hoping to do intensive field work but there is no funding for field work. I thought that a compromise would be that I can work on it remotely. I haven't mentioned yet to my advisor that I am home sick as we don't really connect on a personal level, but we have a good connection on a research level.
How do I approach my advisor saying that I would like to work remotely for 6 months out of the year? I have worked remotely before and it has always worked but I don't know how this type of setup is seen at a top tier US institution. How do I approach my advisor about this issue?
# Answer
> 7 votes
I would break this down into two parts. First, discuss your circumstances with your advisor and explain that you want to spend more time "at home", and ask how he feels about you working remotely. Go into the discussion with a concrete proposal for how the practicalities might work: how will you do your work? Do you have access to the resources you'll need? How will you stay in touch with your advisor/colleagues/the research community? Take on board any reservations your advisor might have; don't go into the discussion with too fixed an idea of what the "right" outcome is. Agree to review the arrangements once they've been tested for a while.
Once you have agreement in principle, then you can hash out the dates. I would try and start with relatively short stretches of remote working - a couple of weeks - to allow any teething problems/concerns (on either side) to be resolved. I suspect everyone will be happier if you can spend your six months away in short chunks, rather than in one big block. Also, recognise that your advisor may have reasons to want you present for certain occasions/portions of the year - involve him in your planning.
# Answer
> 12 votes
I think you should aim for a shorter period at first, to show that it doesn't affect your productivity. My wife and I aim to both work remotely 25% of our time, to address the two-body problem. If each of us works remotely for two weeks every two months, that aim is fulfilled. A colleague of mine just returned from a 10-week remote work trip.
Six months, however, is very long to work remotely in one go. It is of course more expensive to work remotely in shorter segments, but if your advisor doesn't know yet whether it will work out, six months is too long. Explain that you are ultimately interested in working remotely up to half of the time. Propose to work remotely for 3-4 weeks first. Be available at any normal local time for your supervisor, even if that might mean inconvenient times on your end. After the remote work trip, return and evaluate how it went. Then propose to plan a longer remote-work trip, perhaps 10 weeks, and return again. If all goes well after a couple of 10-week blocks, you could bring up the idea for an extended six-month period.
The worst that can happen is that they say no, and you may have to find a different way. Perhaps they don't agree with 6 months in one block, but are fine with 3 2-month blocks spread over a year. It will cost more money, but it is safer in many ways too.
Good luck.
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Tags: phd, thesis, advisor, working-time
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thread-21637 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21637 | Do graduate schools consider courses that are exclusive for one country? | 2014-05-29T11:51:58.783 | # Question
Title: Do graduate schools consider courses that are exclusive for one country?
In Norway, it is mandatory to do a course in philosophy named *Examen Philosophicum*. I got a B in this subject, and as such, it hurts my GPA. Do graduate schools (in mathematics) care the least bit about such subjects?
# Answer
This depends on the nature of the subject and the program to which you are applying. Anything that's "on-topic" for your field would of course be considered—so if you're doing a graduate program in something like philosophy, theology, history, or something in that part of the "spectrum," such a course probably would be considered. However, if you're studying something in, for instance, the sciences or engineering, or something in the humanities far removed from this—such as music—such a course would probably receive much less consideration.
Moreover, a grade of B in such a course is almost certainly not going to make a significant enough difference in your GPA that you would have been admitted if you had gotten an "A," but will be rejected because you got a "B."
> 3 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, graduate-school
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