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<p><a href="http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/process/long.html" rel="noreferrer">This</a> might help or <a href="http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/long/visa1.html" rel="noreferrer">this.</a> Here is the crux of the information:</p>
<p>The period of stay is quoted as 3 years/1 year with the following documents needed:</p>
<pre><code>Passport
One visa application form (nationals of Russia or NIS countries need to submit two visa application forms)
One photograph (nationals of Russia or NIS countries need to submit two photographs)
Certificate of Eligibility (Note) - the original and one copy
</code></pre>
<p>This visa applied for <strong>Long-term stay</strong> for the following occupations:</p>
<p>Working visa: professor, artist, religious activities, journalist, investor/business manager, legal/accounting services, medical services, researcher, instructor, engineer, specialist in humanities/International Services</p>
<p>The algorithm for obtaining the visa is given on <a href="http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/process/long.html" rel="noreferrer">the first link I added</a>.
<img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/31niR.gif" alt="Algorithm"></p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1 |
<p>One of the best resources for jobs in computational chemistry (not limited to PhD level positions) is the job section of the <a href="http://www.ccl.net/chemistry/a/jobs/index.shtml" rel="nofollow">Computational Chemistry List</a>.</p>
<p>Another place where I've regularly seen relevant postings is the <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Computational-Chemists-94648" rel="nofollow">"Computational Chemists" group on LinkedIn</a>.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2 |
<p>If your institution has a subscription to Journal Citation Reports (JCR), you can check it there. Try this URL:</p>
<p><a href="https://jcr.clarivate.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://jcr.clarivate.com</a></p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3 |
<p>There are 2 major theories about credentials: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital">human capital theory</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory">signaling theory</a>. Under HCT, a license (such as a PE) shows that you have accumulated a credible amount of knowledge (you must graduate from an accredited engineering school) and experience (you need to have worked for 4 years after your bachelors to sit for the PE exam). Under signalling theory, the PE shows that you have done what it takes to legally call yourself an engineer. One interesting comparison of the differences of HCT and ST is <a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/the_career_cons.html">The Career Consequences of Failing versus Forgetting</a>. You may know just as much as another person, but the one of you that passes some hurdle signals to prospective employers that the hurdle passer is the better candidate. This is because hiring a person is trying to predict future behavior/success with limited information, and many people use signals as heuristics. </p>
<p>You will also find out that universities hire people who have degrees. A cynical view is that they have a vested interest in maintaining the supply of people who get degrees. A signalling theory viewpoint is that universities think degrees are important enough that they only hire teachers who have them. </p>
<p>In many fields of engineering, your working career will be very short if you do not pass your PE. Civil is one such. Other engineering fields, such as Electrical (which is mine), typically have state exemptions for manufacturing, so very few EEs take their PE. When I was younger, I was quite opposed to licensure. Now, I see it as a way to distinguish myself from other candidates. One interesting blog post that inspired me to sit for my PE exam is <a href="http://brucefwebster.com/2008/11/18/is-it-work-true-engineering-or-just-plumbing/">this one</a>. Another is a <a href="http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera_lauren.aspx">dissertation</a> (which is not online) titled <em>"Hiring and Inequality in Elite Professional Service Firms".</em></p>
<p>My advice is to take your EIT and PE exams as soon as practical. Some US universities require you to take your EIT exam during your senior year (as in they won't issue your diploma without passing it). </p>
<p>Disclaimer: I am registered to take the PE exam this April. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4 |
<p>You are generally allowed to publish even in a non-open access journal even if a pre-print is on the arXiv. Most journal copyright agreements explicitly allow the authors to post the article online. Here's an example of a fairly generous one:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ASL hereby grants to the Author the non-exclusive right to reproduce the Article, to create
derivative works based upon the Article, and to distribute and display the Article and any such derivative
work by any means and in any media, provided the provisions of clause (3) below are met. The Author may
sub-license any publisher or other third party to exercise those rights.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and a less generous one which still allows the author to post a copy online:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I understand that I retain or am hereby granted (without the need to obtain further permission) rights to use certain versions of the Article for certain
scholarly purposes, as described and defined below (“Retained Rights”), and that no rights in patents, trademarks or other intellectual property rights
are transferred to the journal. </p>
<p>The Retained Rights include the right to use the Pre-print or Accepted Authors Manuscript for Personal Use, Internal Institutional Use and for
Scholarly Posting; and the Published Journal Article for Personal Use and Internal Institutional Use.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I've seen examples where the journal actually did some genuine copyediting beyond what the referee did where the author wasn't allowed to post the version that benefited from the copyediting, but could still post the earlier version.</p>
<p>So, for most journals, the answer is that you're allowed to post the article online because it's specifically allowed by the document they ask you to sign. But it is possible that posting on the arxiv will rule out particular journals that have more restrictive policies.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/7 |
<p><a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/10/12">This answer to a related question</a> points to <a href="http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/</a>, which allows you to look up the policy of specific journals.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8 |
<p>Johan Bollen and Herbert van de Sompels are two researchers to follow in this area. Bollen did an <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/research/principal-component-analysis-39-scientific-impact-measures/">analysis of 39 different citation-based metrics</a> which is a good place to start. However, it's crucial to note that there are serious errors in trying to use citation-counting methods as some sort of ground truth. Citation counting is problematic because:</p>
<ul>
<li>Different fields have different citation practices. In biology it's common to have 10 or more authors on one paper, whereas in math you often have only one or two.</li>
<li>Citations take a long time to accumulate, penalizing early-stage researchers.</li>
<li>Citations only tell part of the story, leaving out the useful contributions made by researchers in the form of code written and datasets released.</li>
<li>Citations often <a href="http://classic.the-scientist.com/news/display/57689/">mutate</a> over time.</li>
</ul>
<p>It's now possible to get more information about a paper than just who cited it, and it's possible to get this information before several years have passed and before the information about the impact of the paper becomes old and less useful. The <a href="http://alm.plos.org">Public Library of Science</a> makes detailed article-level metrics available and <a href="http://dev.mendeley.com">Mendeley</a> has an API from which you can collect real-time data about how many readers a paper has, as well as social metadata such as tags and annotations and reader demographics. These metrics are being consumed by services such as <a href="http://total-impact.org">Total Impact</a> and combined with data from Github, Twitter, and traditional citation metrics. My bet is that if you're looking for a meaningful set of measures, you're going to find it in these richer sets of aggregated data.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13 |
<p>You will find details on the evaluation process in the Guide for Applicants. The evaluators are experts (=researchers) in the field. They will be matched to the proposal according to their profile and to the abstract and keywords. They will for sure be in the general research area, but might not be in the exact same field of the proposal. It is (at least, officially) not possible to find out who evaluated the proposal afterwards, but you can find a list of former evaluators here:</p>
<p><a href="http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/experts_en.html">http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/experts_en.html</a></p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14 |
<p>May I ask why you chose an MSc instead of a PhD? What is your career goal? I don't mean to imply one is better than the other. If you are going to spend a lot of money and time, it should be well-spent. </p>
<p>In some places, like the UK, not much more time is needed to get a PhD beyond an MSc. In the U.S., PhD's in the sciences are usually completely funded. Per badp this seems not to be the case in Italy. </p>
<p>For either an MSc or PHD I suggest looking at the career paths of former graduates of that lab. This is something I wish someone had told me when I entered <em>my</em> lab. <strong>The charisma of the lab boss or excellence of the equipment are meaningless if, after 2-3 years, you can't move on as you hoped.</strong> Trace the career path of the last few graduates - from MSc all the way to how many wanted to and got faculty positions and how long it took them. In my experience what you do is much less important that who you know, which comes from getting into the right environment.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18 |
<p>In general, no. (This is based on my experience in the US.) One's employing institution does not have any claim on royalties from books written while a student or faculty member. However, it's possible that there might be exceptions: for example, sometimes a university may help financially in the publication of a book, and this might be reflected in the publication contract. Of course, in such circumstances the book is not expected to make any money, which is why the university is helping out in the first place. </p>
<p>A related and very common phenomenon is for the publisher to hold the copyright on an academic title. My own book is like this. I am entitled to royalties, but the press holds the copyright for some defined period. Again, this is due to the terrible economics of publishing academic monographs. </p>
<p>There have been cases where universities have tried to assert very broad rights over the intellectual property of their faculty employees (e.g., lecture notes as well as books, etc), but I think these have generally failed. It does still happen: <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Cry-Foul-Over/130800/?key=HG13cFRsbXIVN35gZGlFZzkBbHM/NUp6ZHdOY30ibl1WEA==">here's an example</a> where the University of Louisiana is trying to broadly claim rights to scholarly output, including royalties from books. These sweeping assertions of rights have sometimes been motivated by the desire of administrators to claim a share of some of the genuinely lucrative things now produced by some university researchers, such as patentable biotechnologies, with books caught up in the net but not really directly targeted. Patents are an area with real money at stake, where the university's investment (in laboratory space and so on) is much higher, and where university claims on income from work done while employed are strongly and successfully asserted. Books, not so much.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21 |
<p>I have no idea how you'd find hard data on the program itself and its results, but as an idle musing I checked how many full time faculty members in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health's Dept. of Epidemiology held an MD/PhD or DrPH. The department was chosen as a very good department in a very good school with a strong medical school that I'm not affiliated with.</p>
<p>Ten of the 94 listed faculty members were MD/PhD or DrPH's. Little under 11% of the faculty. And that's not including other possible "physician scientists" like MD/MPH degree holders...if you do that the number rises to 23 faculty members with an MD degree in a related, but non-clinical research department. Nearly a quarter of the faculty total.</p>
<p>Of course, this is only a very crude proxy for how many physician-scientists pursue academic tracks, and even the representation of clinician-scientists in research departments will likely vary wildly by said department. That being said, I've met a considerable number of them in my graduate school career, either entirely in academic settings, or balancing research with practice. It's absolutely a viable path, though not an easy one.</p>
<p>As another data point, here is the list of alumni for the UNC School of Medicine's MD/PhD program: <a href="http://www.med.unc.edu/mdphd/fps/alumni-1" rel="noreferrer">http://www.med.unc.edu/mdphd/fps/alumni-1</a> . That should give you a decent glimpse at where those particular graduates go - it looks like a fair number ended up in research or hybrid positions.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23 |
<p>I think <a href="http://www.eui.eu/ProgrammesAndFellowships/AcademicCareersObservatory/CareerComparisons/SalaryComparisons.aspx">this page</a> has what you are looking for. As far as I can tell (e.g. for France) the numbers are fine.</p>
<p>However, we should keep in mind that the comparison can be made difficult. For instance, "full professor" is not an actual rank in french academia. You are either a "maitre de conférences" (roughly equivalent to assistant prof. position to "junior" associate prof.), then "professeur des universités" (roughly from more senior associate prof. to full prof.).</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/28 |
<p>As far as I know, the translation is up to the universities who do the conversion. I think that it is unlikely that there are is one set of guidelines as even within a country not all universities have necessarily the same ranking systems.</p>
<p>I have found <a href="http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.sowi.rub.de/mam/images/auslandsstudium/umrechnungstabelle_noten.pdf&rct=j&sa=U&ei=lQM8T82XBOnJ0QW7neVs&ved=0CCQQFjAE&q=erasmus+grade+translation&usg=AFQjCNF1ed-eRBTDXIhteYRf-tD1dSnkIw" rel="noreferrer">this table</a> on Google though that gives some idea on what grades are roughly equivalent.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/30 |
<p>From what I've heard, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOEFL">TOEFL</a> is well recognised. </p>
<p>That being said, once you get your PhD, I don't think people ask for some English certifications (at least, I've never been asked to, and I'm not a native speaker). I guess your publications and the interview in English should be enough to see if you're able to communicate in English. </p>
<p>EDIT List of <a href="http://www.ets.org/toefl/ibt/about/who_accepts_scores">who accepts the TOEFL</a>.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38 |
<p>I would say that you should always go to seminar, unless you have some very compelling reason not to go (you are away, you are working on an experiment, you are trying to finish writing your thesis, etc.). </p>
<p>There are four reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>Scientific courtesy. To travel somewhere and give a talk to the 10 people who show up (5 of whom you already knew) is really irritating. </li>
<li>Good or bad -- you learn something about presentation. Even if you say "wow, I should never do that in a talk" your hour has been well spent.</li>
<li>You get perspective. You never know when something that someone says will make you see your own work in a different context. </li>
<li>The speaker may someday be interviewing you for a job. It's better to be able to say "I heard your seminar" than "Oh, sorry, I missed your seminar when you visited."</li>
</ol>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/39 |
<p>The h-index is common (and the g-index, which corrects for self-citation), as is the Journal Impact Factor. Johan Bollen has a <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/research/principal-component-analysis-39-scientific-impact-measures/">good review of the various metrics</a>.</p>
<p>However, it's important to point out that all those measures are just different ways of counting citations. They don't account for things like code you've written or talks you've given and they can't address systematic bias in citation practices such as coercive citation or citation mutation. Also, any citation-counting metric will penalize younger researchers simply due to the time it takes to publish one paper and for other papers to get published citing yours. In order to keep academics from having to publish a paper just to describe some code they've written or a dataset they've accumulated, aggregators have been built to pull in these various metrics and consolidate them. <a href="http://total-impact.org">Total Impact</a> is a good example of such a system. The general field of study looking at incorporating these broader metrics is called #altmetrics, and you can find a collection of research on the topic <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/groups/586171/altmetrics/">here</a>.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/42 |
<p>There are quite a few journals where you can publish theoretical work in this area. Here are a few suggestions (the distinction is based on my perception and knowledge of what they've published, I'll let others chip in if they disagree):</p>
<p>For more theoretical work:</p>
<ul>
<li>The <a href="http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tcbb" rel="nofollow">IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB)</a>.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.liebertpub.com/CMB" rel="nofollow">Journal of Computational Biology</a>.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.springer.com/new+%26+forthcoming+titles+%28default%29/journal/285" rel="nofollow">Journal of Mathematical Biology</a>.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.springer.com/new+%26+forthcoming+titles+%28default%29/journal/11538" rel="nofollow">Bulletin of Mathematical Biology</a></li>
</ul>
<p>For more applied work:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/" rel="nofollow">Bioinformatics</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbioinformatics/" rel="nofollow">BMC Bioinformatics</a>. (open access)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.almob.org/" rel="nofollow">Algorithms for Molecular Biology</a>. (open access)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/home.action" rel="nofollow">PLoS Computational Biology</a>. (open access)</li>
</ul>
<p>This is not exhaustive of course, and I suggest you discuss these "candidates" with your collaborators.</p>
<p>EDIT: I marked some of them "open access" because they advertise(d) so. This does not mean that the others do not offer that option, you'll have to check.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/47 |
<p><em>My experience is almost exclusively with mathematics papers, and applies little or not at all to other fields.</em></p>
<p>Much of eykanal's post applies to math as well, but one big difference is that math papers are much more varied in their structure, not having an actual experiment to tie them together. A good paper will generally explain its organization in the introduction, however.</p>
<p>One point worth emphasizing is that reading a paper from front to back, trying to understand everything at each step, is usually inefficient. The most common instance is that a paper often starts with definitions which may be hard to make sense of without understanding the theorems they're used in. It's generally more effective to skim the paper several times, trying to understand more and more with each pass.</p>
<p>Relatedly, you'll eventually pick up the skill of picking out the most interesting ideas from a paper without reading the whole thing. Early on, though, it's probably better to read things carefully; it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you've understood something.</p>
<p>As to your main question, about breadth versus depth, your first priority has to be depth, because that's what you'll ultimately need to be able to do your own research and get your degree. But if you're learning enough to do that, you want as much breadth as possible. It actually gets harder and harder to learn completely new things as you get on in your career, even when there may be direct benefits to your research to do doing so. Laying the foundations of a broad understanding of your field while in graduate school will pay off later.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/50 |
<ol>
<li><p>According to the <a href="http://publicationethics.org/static/1999/1999pdf13.pdf">Committee on Publication Ethics Guidelines on Good Publication Practice</a>, the term "redundant publication" is defined this way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Redundant publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross reference, share the same hypothesis, data, discussion points, or conclusions." In addition, it states: "(1) Published studies do not need to be repeated unless further confirmation is required. (2) Previous publication of an abstract during the proceedings of meetings does not preclude subsequent submission for publication, but full disclosure should be made at the time of submission. (3) Re-publication of a paper in another language is acceptable, provided that there is full and prominent disclosure of its original source at the time of submission. (4) At the time of submission, authors should disclose details of related papers, even if in a different language, and similar papers in press." Note that (2) states that it is generally acceptable to present a paper in a conference and then later publish exactly the same paper in a journal, as long
as you mention to the editor that the paper has been publicly presented.</p>
</blockquote></li>
<li><p>According to the paper <a href="http://jme.bmj.com/content/35/6/348.full.pdf">Science journal editors’ views on publication ethics:
Results of an international survey</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Breaches of publication ethics such as plagiarism, data fabrication and redundant publication are recognised as forms of research misconduct that can undermine the scientific literature." It also stated that redundant publication is an unethical practice. Of 16 ethical issues studied, redundant publication had the highest severity (that is, it caused editors the most concern---more than plagiarism or data fabrication).</p>
</blockquote></li>
</ol>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/51 |
<blockquote>
<p>Do you have to be extraordinary for a department to hire you over an equally qualified citizen?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That really depends on the search criteria. If the criteria specifically calls for international experience—and many jobs around the world now do exactly that—you might not be disadvantaged at all, and in some cases even have the upper hand. </p>
<p>That said, it <em>is</em> true that hiring a citizen is generally easier than hiring a non-citizen, and in the EU, it's easier to hire a non-citizen who lives in the EU than a non-citizen who lives outside the EU. The result will be a lot more bureaucracy. Whether or not the hiring unit wants to go through the extra trouble will make a lot of the difference, and it's not something you have much control over. (The same principle applies in the US for non-citizens!)</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/52 |
<p>I don't think a "definitive" answer is possible, but the following is based on personal experience and observation of many other students.</p>
<p>If your advisor is okay with it, take as many courses as you can in things that interest you and are in the realm of your discipline. As an applied math grad student, one of the best things I did was to take a graduate course in optimization from the CS department, even though I thought it had nothing to do with my thesis (in numerical discretization of PDEs). It ended up being crucial and allowing me to publish at least one paper that I never would have written if I hadn't taken that course. I also took courses in things like astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and turbulence; I don't use those things much but I can converse with scientists in those fields, which is often useful.</p>
<p>Of course, I didn't take, say, philosophy or Italian or business management courses -- stick to courses related to your field. And make sure that whoever is paying you is okay with it.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/53 |
<p>I suppose it depends on the factors that are causing you to spend more time teaching than you think you should. You should talk to (1) the other TAs and (2) the course leader/director. Find out what is expected and what others are doing.</p>
<p>If you are a relatively new graduate student, then I think it's normal to spend more time teaching and preparing for your teaching. As you start teaching the same courses repeatedly, the time you have to spend in preparation will decrease.</p>
<p>If you think of the time you are teaching as working on a craft that you will use for the rest of your career, then it is time well spent.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/58 |
<p>Those volunteer positions may help boost your chances of getting a major award. For example, one of the most prestigious graduate scholarships you can get in Canada is the Vanier Scholarship and the selection board uses your <a href="http://www.vanier.gc.ca/eng/selection_criteria-criteres_de_selection.aspx">leadership experience</a> as criteria for the award. </p>
<p>In addition to scholarships, it's always nice to have additional things to add to your CV to make you stand out. These skills can show a number of traits that employers may look for.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/69 |
<p>In general, no, it won't. Having teaching experience might weigh in your favor in exceptional circumstances (a graduate department that needs a lot of teaching assistants, and you're "on the bubble"; you're going into an education program or something similar; or the application specifically asks for teaching experience).</p>
<p>However, most graduate schools don't expect that students have prior teaching experience, and provide training to smooth the transition. </p>
<p>Teaching load also varies widely from program to program: some science and engineering students TA for one semester over a five-year program, while humanities graduate students may have to TA every semester to pay for their studies.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/70 |
<p>You should keep a <a href="http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/labnotebooks" rel="nofollow noreferrer">research notebook</a>, regardless of whatever other system you have for notes. The format of the notebook is up to you; it can even be public (see <a href="http://www.carlboettiger.info/research/lab-notebook/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Carl Boettiger's</a> as an example of an electronic lab notebook). it can be created in programs such as an iPython or Jupyter notebook, or even a more specialized program such as <a href="https://findingsapp.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Findings</a>.</p>
<p>If you choose the pen-and-paper route for your research notes, and want to have the added flexibility/security of taking your notes with you (and also because it's good practice to do so), you should consider getting a scanner and making regular backups. You can then import these into a product like Evernote, Onenote, or <a href="https://marinersoftware.com/macjournal" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MacJournal</a>,
If you are using LaTeX, your options are somewhat limited, as most of the major tools for notebooking really don't support "live" LaTeX. Then you'd be better off using something like <a href="http://aquamacs.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Aquamacs</a> as a holder for your "notebooks" (LaTeX documents), and then using one of the above packages (or something like <a href="http://www.mekentosj.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Papers</a> or <a href="https://www.marinersoftware.com/products/paperless/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Paperless</a> to organize the resulting PDFs.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/83 |
<p><strong>It seems that neither option presented below are taking new submissions. I keep the answer here for historical interest.</strong></p>
<p>One option is:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong><a href="http://www.philica.com/faq.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Philica</a></strong> which occupies a bit of a strange place. It is a free, open-access journal that publishes immediately and in any discipline. The website comes with a non-traditional review system. It is in between what one may call a pre-print server and what one would call an electronic open access journal. </li>
</ul>
<p>Nature Precedings used to take submissions, but no longer does:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong><a href="http://precedings.nature.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Nature Precedings</a></strong>: a pre-print repository run by Nature Publishing Group that focuses on chemistry, biological sciences, and earth sciences. <em>Edit: As bobthejoe noted below in the comments, Nature Precedings is no longer taking new submissions; though it will for the foreseeable future remain a repository for the pre-prints already submitted.</em></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/84 |
<p>Let me answer as a theoretical computer scientist with former PhD students in tenure-track academic positions and many years of experience on faculty hiring committees. (However, my understanding is that the selection process at industrial research labs like IBM T.J. Watson, Microsoft Research, Google Research, AT&T Research, etc., is really not that different from academic recruiting.) As always, take my advice with a grain of salt; I'm as guilty of confirmation bias as any other human being.</p>
<p>Nobody in theoretical computer science cares where you got your degree. Really. We. Do. Not. Care. We only care about the quality and visibility of your results. Publish strong papers and give brilliant talks at top conferences. Convince well-known active researchers to write letters raving about your work. Make a good product and get superstars to sell it for you. Do all that, and we'll definitely want to hire you, no matter where you got your degree. On the other hand, without a strong and visible research record, <em>independent from your advisor</em>, you are much less likely to get a good academic job, no matter where you got your degree.</p>
<p>(This is less true in more applied areas of CS, in my experience, mostly because it's significantly harder for PhD students in those areas to work independently from their advisors.)</p>
<p><strong>But.</strong> Faculty candidates are necessarily judged by people who are not experts in their field. Without the expertise to judge whether your work is really good, those people <em>must</em> look at secondary data that correlate strongly with successful researchers. One of those secondary characteristics is "pedigree". Did you get your degree at MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, another top-10 department, or somewhere else? (What's an "Ivy League"?) How good/famous is your advisor? If they're really paying attention: Where did your advisor's other PhD students get jobs, and how well are they doing now?</p>
<p>Fortunately, most <em>good</em> departments do make a serious effort to understand the quality and impact of applicants' results, instead of relying <em>only</em> on secondary data. Also, secondary data matters considerably less once you actually have an interview. </p>
<p><strong>And.</strong> In my experience, where you get your degree is strongly correlated with successful research. I got my Master's degree at UC Irvine in 1992 and my PhD at UC Berkeley in 1996. The biggest difference I saw between the two departments was the graduate-student research culture. <strong>Every</strong> theory student at Berkeley regularly produced good results and published them at top conferences. When the FOCS deadline rolled around each year, the question I heard in the hallways <em>from other students</em> was not "You know the deadline is coming up?" or "Are you submitting anything?" but "What are you submitting?", because "nothing" was the <em>least</em> likely answer. Everyone simply assumed that if you were there, you were ready and able to do publishable research. Publishing a paper wasn't exceptional, it was just what you did. That cloud of free-floating confidence/arrogance had a <em>huge</em> impact on my own development as a researcher. I've seen similar research cultures at a few other top CS departments, especially MIT, Stanford, and CMU. (Caveat: This is an incomplete list, and there are <em>many</em> departments that I've never visited.)</p>
<p>tl;dr: <strong>Yes, getting a PhD from a top department definitely helps, but more by helping you become a better researcher than by making you look better on paper.</strong></p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/90 |
<p><a href="http://www.research.att.com/misc/search.jsp?q=%22Algorithms%22&fbid=OgMv-Nx-vPx#">AT&T</a>, <a href="http://research.google.com/pubs/AlgorithmsandTheory.html">Google</a>, <a href="http://researcher.ibm.com/view_pic.php?id=134">IBM</a>, and <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/theory/">Microsoft</a> all have thriving basic research labs that regularly hire PhDs in theoretical computer science, and whose members regularly publish in theoretical computer science conferences and journals. Yes, research at those labs is colored by the needs of their parent companies, but not as much as you might think. All four companies (and several others) have thriving internship programs.</p>
<p>As with any other research job, your best bet in finding opportunities is to talk personally with people at the labs. Go to FOCS/STOC/SODA, sit at the same lunch table as David Johnson or Muthu or Ken Clarkson or Yuval Peres, and just talk to them. (It obviously helps if you have some research results that they care about.) Ask your advisor to introduce you if you don't feel comfortable just introducing yourself.</p>
<p>(I'm about to get some angry emails from David, Muthu, Ken, and Yuval, aren't I?)</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96 |
<p>The way I usually choose journals is by looking at where people I trust/follow publish, and where previous work was published. It is usually not too hard to compare the quality your work to the quality of the work you are citing, and chose a target based on that. Unless your field is highly mutli-disciplinary, you will see the same journals/conferences popping up again and again in your references; submit to one of those.</p>
<p>Before submitting, however, it is always important to look at a few articles from previous issues. This will give you a second gauge of quality for the journal and also let you pick up on any formatting and presentations quirks that might be present in the publication.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/101 |
<p>There's an online <a href="http://astrojournalclub.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">Astronomy Journal Club</a> hosted on Wordpress.</p>
<p>Here's my main advice: make the process as <strong>frictionless</strong> as possible. Grad students tend to have very busy lives, and journal clubs will inevitably have high dropout rates unless they have some motivation (even through guilt) to stay in and to continue participating. Keep them updated through some service that they'll constantly check even if they aren't doing science (emails end up annoying people, but Facebook, Reddit, and Google Plus might work). </p>
<p>It's also probably easier to convince people to set an online journal club when the journal club is about some specialized subject that only a small number of people at any particular university know about (and if they have a strong urge to talk about the subject with people from other universities).</p>
<p>Finally, if there's an academic conference for grad students (for my area, for example, it would be <a href="http://abgradcon.org/" rel="nofollow">AbGradCon</a>), discuss it with people there! Journal clubs are an excellent way to keep in touch with grad students at other universities.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/103 |
<p>For non-linear note-taking and also collaboration I use <a href="http://www.tiddlywiki.com/">TiddlyWiki</a>. It is one file that stores all your notes as an interactive wiki. Through a plug-in it support LaTeX-math. If you throw it on a shared <a href="http://www.dropbox.com/">dropbox</a> then it can even be a quick way to share ideas with colleagues. If you want something more formal than dropbox, then there are hosted options like <a href="http://tiddlyspace.com/">TiddlySpace</a>.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/109 |
<ol>
<li>Jot down your interests.</li>
<li>Future goals (long term and short term). Doesn't have to be accurate but just to give you the "big picture".</li>
<li>Speak with your PhD advisor (if you already have one).</li>
<li>Align his/her interests with yours and see if you have common ground (you may need to lean towards his interests or find another advisor)</li>
<li>Once you have a list of topics that you could explore, do a literature review and figure out for what topics you'd have a taste.</li>
</ol>
<p>Each person has his own formula on what to choose as their PhD proposal. This was the way I went about it.</p>
<p>PhD (Mechanical Engineering Expected Fall 2012)</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/117 |
<p>As someone who sits on an admissions committee, this isn't idle speculation, but it is a personal perspective. I agree with the other responders that industrial experience probably isn't of much interest to an admissions committee, unless you get a strong letter of recommendation from a supervisor who can make a convincing case for admission to the graduate program. </p>
<p>The issue is that while you are in industry, unless you're in a position where your actively doing things related to your graduate school education, your knowledge of the "basics" is atrophying, so it will actually be somewhat more difficult to get back up to speed for the coursework typically required for a PhD program. The longer you're in industry, the harder it typically is to play catchup.</p>
<p>That said, industrial experience may be of interest to an individual professor within a department, and would certainly help with employment following the PhD program.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/120 |
<p>I applied to six graduate schools in my field, and was accepted at all of them. The criteria I used to whittle down the choices were:</p>
<ul>
<li>Did I like the people in the department I was visiting? (This surprisingly <em>did</em> eliminate one school.)</li>
<li>Did I want to go to live in the city where the school was for five or so years? (One more down, four left.)</li>
<li>Could I find <em>enough</em> people I was interested in working for, so that if I didn't get my top choice, I'd still be happy with the projects I'd be taking?</li>
<li>Can I financially afford to live in the city? (One more down, two left.)</li>
</ul>
<p>At that point, however, the remaining criteria were all competing with one another: one school offered me <em>a lot</em> more money, the other had <em>a lot</em> better location. Both offered plenty of research, and both had excellent reputations in their field. Ultimately, for me, the location, combined with the slightly higher general profile of the school I attended, swayed the balance for me.</p>
<p>Remember that you're looking for individual groups or faculty members as well as entire departments. Students and faculty will both be considerations for you.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/124 |
<p>PhD studentships are quite often advertised like "normal" jobs, i.e. on general job boards/recruting websites. If you have contacts, by all means use them. As for evaluating the candidates, similar guidelines as for evaluating applicants for any jobs apply. I don't think there's a one-fits-all answer. Note that the hiring process may also depend on what institution you'd be working for. They might have an HR department that screens/selects the candidates.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/128 |
<p>I think the answer lies in what your PI thinks you should be doing and how well you can, at least, appear to be doing it while doing things other than research. Even if your PI doesn't enforce a certain allocation it's in your interest to do as much research and little else as possible. <strong>You won't get a PhD by teaching or taking classes.</strong> An overload, in my experience, is unavoidable first year. Is is possible to take electives that your PI teaches? That's about the only coursework he or she won't begrudge you.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/143 |
<p>It seems to me that there are several advantages; none of these are suitable for every student. It's up to you whether enough of them apply to you, to make it worth doing a taught PhD:</p>
<ol>
<li>A PhD with a bit of coursework in the first year will help those who
are crossing over into a discipline that they're not already deeply
embedded in: it will give you some hand-holding through the things
you'll need to know but don't yet;</li>
<li>it should (if taught well) also teach you some extra research skills;</li>
<li>it will give you some indication as you progress as to how well you're doing, compared to how well you should be doing if you're going to finish</li>
<li>it will allow you to explore different aspects of the field, to help you finalise your thesis topic</li>
<li>it may, depending on the country and institution, give you an intermediate degree at the end of the taught section, such as an MRes, which will count for something even if you then don't go on to do the full PhD</li>
<li>it lessens the culture-shock for those going straight from fully-taught study to a research degree.</li>
</ol>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148 |
<p>I believe that a sandwich thesis (sometimes called an integrated thesis / stapler thesis) consists of a collection of published or in-press articles (some schools also allow submitted articles). These articles are included in the thesis verbatim. The publications are usually preceded by an elaborate introduction that sets the context for the thesis.</p>
<p>EDIT:</p>
<p>As Willie Wong pointed out, there is also usually a final discussion / conclusion after the integrated papers.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/149 |
<p>There are a few things I would generally look at in a potential advisor beyond just their research/publications:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Who were the co-authors on their papers?</strong> Are they actively collaborating with people in your field - people who could be potentially useful for post-doc posts, etc.? Do their students often show up as primary authors on publications, or are they invariably buried in the middle of a long list of authors?</li>
<li><strong>Personality.</strong> This goes beyond just do you like the person. Do they prefer frequent updates, meetings and the like, or is the occasional check-in enough? Are they a morning person and you prefer working nights, or the other way around? If you send a long email, would it get answered, or do they not often fail to answer emails? I've had some professors who I'm very fond of nevertheless would make poor advisors because of wildly disparate working styles.</li>
<li><strong>How are their students funded?</strong> Your funding stream can have serious impact on your completion time and productivity. If every semester, its a desperate Pick-N-Mix of funded side projects, TAships, etc. you're going to have a lot on your plate that, while potentially an interesting experience, will slow down your progress.</li>
<li><strong>Where do their students end up?</strong> Do they have decent career trajectories? Are they supportive of alternative paths like industry or government?</li>
<li><strong>Rank and age.</strong> A young professor might be more aggressive and eager, on the other hand they're less established, don't necessarily have the same level of institutional support, and if they're not yet tenured, its possible they'll disappear. An older professor may be more established and stable, but might not use "cutting edge" techniques, or feel less of an internal drive to publish.</li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/158 |
<p>The department where you are going to submit the thesis probably has a document of <strong>PhD/thesis regulations</strong> that specify if such a thesis is allowed. For example, <a href="http://www.et-inf.uni-hannover.de/fileadmin/institut/promotion/englisch/Promo_DrRerNat_Engl.pdf">my department's regulations</a> have the following statement:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] Scientific publications may form a part of a doctoral thesis. If the doctoral thesis consists of several scientific papers, a presentation of the guidelines of the papers submitted has to be added in an appropriate extent. [...]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>i.e. a sandwich thesis is possible here. So you should find out if your favored departments have similar regulations and have a look in there.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/159 |
<ol>
<li><p>I agree with you and shan23, it doesn't really matter, but the newer is probably better. </p></li>
<li><p>Well, to be bluntly honest, I tend to have a negative a-priori when I see an author of a paper with a gmail address (especially when I review it, when it's not double-blind). I know it's stupid, because it should only be about the quality of the work, but I can't really help it. Mostly because I know that there is no authentication with gmail address (I potentially could get an alan.turing@gmail.com address). I think it's ok to give an address that will change, after all, few people spend their entire career in the same institution. </p></li>
</ol>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/164 |
<p>There are certain (informal) nuances I believe:</p>
<ol>
<li><p><strong>Symposium</strong> - Prestigious conferences, generally leading venues in their respective fields. Example: <a href="http://www.siam.org/meetings/da12/">Symposium on Discrete Algorithms</a>, <a href="http://ets2012.imag.fr/">European Test Symposium</a>, <a href="http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/FOCS11/">Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS)</a> etc</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Conference</strong> - Regular venues for publications, may range from established venues to the archaic. I understand the bulk of publications of most researchers are in one conference or other, as symposiums tend to have a very low acceptance rate.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Meeting</strong> - I'm not so sure there are many of these, but I understand that it is more of a forum for interaction/surveys/posters than for publication of full papers. (I based my answer on the description for <a href="http://www.siam.org/meetings/an12/">SIAM Annual Meeting 2012</a>, which describes itself as providing "a broad view of the state of the art in applied mathematics, computational science, and their applications through invited presentation, prize lectures, minisymposia, and contributed papers and posters".)</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Congress</strong> - This would typically be held once a year per discipline, highlighting the achievements, notable results in that field. These are typically attended by leaders in that field, and feature a series of invited talks (for example, look at <a href="http://www.siam.org/meetings/calendar.php?id=1065">Mathematical Congress of the Americas 2013</a>).</p></li>
</ol>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/165 |
<p>As far as your research stature is concerned, grades would matter <em>least</em> of all, below other non-academic stuff as your soft-skills, your personality etc. There are a number of reasons for this:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>No one cares about your GPA once you are a researcher! While it certainly looks nice to have a stellar GPA, it's the work that you do and where you publish that would matter. Look up some resumes of notable faculty in your field - how many even list their MS/BS grades?</p></li>
<li><p>I might even say that your adviser would not be too happy if you have a 4.0 GPA - as it means you are spending time on perfecting your grades which is more profitably spent on research! I actually have read this on a faculty/university webpage - would post the link once I dig it up. <strong>EDIT</strong>: Haven't found the faculty website link yet, but <a href="http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=469" rel="noreferrer">here</a>'s a <a href="http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=470" rel="noreferrer">couple</a> from an established source, phdcomics - enjoy!</p></li>
</ol>
<p>PS: I'm actually waiting for <a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65/jeffe">JeffE</a> to comment on this: His credentials are such that I'm not even qualified to state them, and he himself claims that <a href="http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/" rel="noreferrer">he had the lowest undergraduate GPA</a> amongst any professor he's ever met! </p>
<p>EDIT: I'm talking about grades in subjects that you <em>have</em> to take as part of requirements of grad school - you would be expected to master the subjects that are directly required in your Ph.D research thesis, so your adviser would expect great grades in them naturally!</p>
<p><strong>tl;dr</strong> - They don't matter (as long as you clear all your subjects!)</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/173 |
<p>My answer depends on how far along you are in your research and whether you are in PhD or MD?PhD program. </p>
<p>If you are in a PhD program and you are less than a year in leave the lab. If you are more than a year in at you next Thesis Committee meeting, if it's scientifically reasonable, try to either set a date for graduating or ask for a co-PI.</p>
<p>If you are in the MD/PhD program, you will have to consider your PI's position and whether a lukewarm letter from someone in his position is worth your staying in the lab. If you plan to go into a competitive surgicial or medical subspecialty, it just might be. </p>
<p>I, sadly, think that checked-out PIs- even those without the excuse of having to go see patients- are increasingly the norm. Getting to be a professor is a great way to age rapidly and burn out, especially in the biomedical sciences. Also, professors aren't selected for their mentoring skills so much as scientific productivity. Often scientific productivity means exploitation or disregard because of self-involvement rather than nurturing.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/174 |
<p>Short answer: Yes. Absolutely. You are already doing mathematics.</p>
<p>A few bits of advice:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Ask your advisor and other references to specifically address your mathematical depth and maturity in their recommendation letters.</p></li>
<li><p>Include a <em>technical</em> summary of your past research, including pointers to ArXiv preprints if possible, in your statement of purpose.</p></li>
<li><p>Apply to math departments that employ computational algebraic geometers. Three that come to mind immediately are Saugatu Basu at Purdue, Frank Sottile at Texas A&M, and Bernd Sturmfels at Berkeley. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>(I know at least half a dozen former CS grad students who successfully switched into mathematics.)</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/177 |
<p>It seems likely that there's some nonzero correlation. Certainly, there are factors that should lead to positive correlation; for example, some personality traits (like conscientiousness) should lead to both better research and better teaching. There are also factors that should lead to negative correlation; for example, teaching and research are activities that are competing for a limited amount of time. It would be strange if all these factors nearly cancelled each other out, so we should expect some net correlation. Here's an argument for positive:</p>
<p>Let's distinguish between two aspects of teaching, namely exposition and psychology. Exposition means finding simple explanations, coming up with illuminating examples and analogies, mapping out the most important topics and the relationships between them, etc. Psychology means understanding where students are coming from and what they do or don't understand, empathizing and bonding with them, arousing their interest and inspiring them to achieve great things, etc. Both of these are important factors in good teaching, although neither is absolutely essential. A master of exposition without a good understanding of psychology may be clear but dull, and someone who understands psychology but isn't good at exposition may have to follow a textbook closely, but either one will be much better than some teachers.</p>
<p>Expository ability is almost certainly correlated with research ability, since they both rely on a deep, creative understanding of the subject matter. In mathematics, the standard example is Jean-Pierre Serre, who is both a brilliant mathematician and the author of several amazing graduate textbooks, and one can see similar characteristics in his research papers and textbooks.</p>
<p>However, the psychology side of teaching is probably not closely connected with research ability. There may be some correlation, just because smart people tend to be better than average at all kinds of thinking, but I'd bet the correlation is small. Certainly, there are wonderful researchers who have a terrible understanding of psychology, and vice versa, in a far more dramatic way than for exposition.</p>
<p>I see this split as perhaps explaining why there's so much debate about whether good research and good teaching are correlated, with some people saying obviously yes and others obviously no. The answer depends on which aspects of teaching you view as most important.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/183 |
<p>I haven't seen any statistics on how many tenure professors have been fired, but most articles on the topic treat tenure as though it's a lifetime position (e.g., <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1147.summary?sid=a7d9043f-a59f-499d-b610-d4092920493c">this Science article, "Tenure and the Future of the University"</a>). Anecdotally, you will likely never meet someone who <em>knows someone else</em> who was fired from a tenure position; it simply doesn't happen.</p>
<p>Note, however, that the number of tenure track positions made available over the past decade been trending downward fairly significantly (see the same article, and simply do a <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+tenure+positions">google search on the topic</a> to see more).</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/185 |
<p>The following is condensed from advice for academic job hunts that I've read <a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/oleary/gradstudy/node12.html#SECTION000124000000000000000">here</a> and <a href="http://matt.might.net/articles/advice-for-academic-job-hunt/#timing">here</a> - I imagine it should be somewhat applicable for jobs in industry as well:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>If you would be applying for a position at Fall, begin applying from summer the previous year - applications tend to be sorted during committee meets, and the earlier you apply, the fewer applications are there, so there are higher chances of getting your application noticed. Hence, you'll want to draft your research statement, teaching statement and curriculum vitæ (CV) the summer before your search. If you are applying for industrial as well as academic positions, you probably want more than one resume, since achievement, skills, and goal-oriented resumes can be more effective in the industrial setting. </p></li>
<li><p>The middle of January is when most schools stop accepting applications. Even then, keep submitting to any position you find through February, particularly if someone there recommends you apply. You will probably hear back with invitations for interviews in January and February, but sometimes even March and April. </p></li>
<li><p>Get your letter writers primed as early as possible. You'll need at most six letter writers, but no less than three, and you'll want to ask them at least a month in advance with all your documents.</p></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/187 |
<p>I would say that one of the best online resources for Software Engineering is <a href="http://www.sigsoft.org/seworld/" rel="nofollow">SEWORLD</a>. You can browse their archives and look for summer schools there. </p>
<p>Note that their search engine is a bit weird, if you go through "search the archive", put Summer school in the subject and "2010-1-1" in the starting date (when I leave it blank, I don't get recent results). For future references, here is the result of this query: </p>
<ul>
<li>ISSSE 2012 - 9th International Summer School on Software Engineering</li>
<li>Summer School Marktoberdorf 2012] <em>Call for Application</em></li>
<li>LASER Summer School 2012: Innovative Languages for Software Engineering</li>
<li>CALL FOR PARTICIPATION - 4th RiSE International Summer School (RISS) - Next Generation of Software Product Lines</li>
<li>summer school VTSA 2011</li>
<li>Summer School on Technologies for Realizing Social Networks and Applications</li>
<li>CFP: 1st Insubria International Summer School on Open Source Software (IISSOSS 2011)</li>
<li>Summer School on Mechanized Logic for High Assurance Software</li>
<li>Canadian Summer School on Practical Analyses of Software Engineering Data</li>
<li>UPCRC Illinois Offers Summer School on Multicore Programming</li>
<li>3rd International CASE Summer School on Practical Experimentation in Software Engineering - July 11-15, 2011 - Free University of Bolzano-Bozen</li>
<li>Summer School on Programming Languages for Concurrent and Parallel Computing</li>
<li>8th International Summer School on Software Engineering (ISSSE 2011)</li>
<li>[Summer School Marktoberdorf 2011] <em>Call for Application</em></li>
<li>LASER Summer School 2011: Tools for Practical Software Verification</li>
<li>[CFA] Summer School on Programming Languages PL2010</li>
<li>CALL FOR PARTICIPATION - 3rd RiSE International Summer School (RiSS) - Generative Reuse</li>
<li>Call for participation to the 3rd International Summer School on Adaptive Socio-Technical Pervasive Systems</li>
<li>CfP ADAPT Summer School</li>
<li>DSM-TP 2010: 1st International Summer School on Domain Specific Modeling - Theory and Practice - Call for participation</li>
<li>Call for participation: VTSA 2010 Summer School on Verification Technology, Systems & Applications</li>
<li>6th REASONING WEB Summer School "Semantic Technologies for Software Engineering"</li>
<li>Summer School on Mining Software Repositories - June 2010, Kingston, Canada</li>
<li>CfP: UPCRC Illinois Summer School on Multicore Programming</li>
<li>LASER Summer School on Software Engineering</li>
<li>TiC'10: Third International Summer School on Trends in Concurrency</li>
<li>Call for Part: CASE Summer School, Bolzano, Italy, 19-23 July 2010</li>
<li>CfPart: 6th TAROT Summer School on Software Testing</li>
<li>7th International Summer School on Software Engineering </li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/199 |
<p>This is a partial representation of the truth. On the one hand, departments are always looking to retain masters students as PhD students; it's better for the department (better numbers), it's better for the professors (more research from PhD relative to masters), and it's better for the university. On the other hand, simply looking at the numbers you'll see that most masters students do not go on to become a PhD student <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_009.asp">[1]</a>. I think it's safe to say that most students who go through masters programs enter with a goal in mind (academia or industry) and finish with that same goal in mind.</p>
<p>I don't know how it works in other countries, so I can't compare that. Also, regarding whether they put more emphasis on PhD <em>preparation</em> than in other countries, I don't know how to quantify that.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/206 |
<p>As Willie Wong says, it depends on your school and your advisor. As an obvious general rule, departments and advisors with more research funding are more willing to spend it. (As a reference point, my department does <em>not</em> offer such funding, because individual faculty generally have enough money to support their students' travel.)</p>
<p>A significant number of CS theory conferences have external support for student travel; see, for example, <a href="http://www.siam.org/meetings/da12/tsupport.php">SODA 2012</a> and <a href="http://cs.nyu.edu/~stoc2012/travel-support.htm">STOC 2012</a>. These grants usually require a letter of support from your advisor, so you at least need an advisor. (In many PhD programs, including mine, PhD students do not necessarily have formal advisors for the first year; students are admitted to the PhD program, not to any particular research group.)</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/213 |
<p>Well, clearly, it depends on many factors (my answer is probably strongly influenced by the Computer Science field). </p>
<ul>
<li><p>If you want to apply for a non-research industry position, then clearly, the postdoc might not appear as a strong point, unless you can travel, attend conferences, manage a budget, develop an application/software/experiment, apply for patents, etc, in general any transversal skill that you can justify. But if the postdoc is just sitting in an office writing theoretical papers for a couple of years, then it's probably not the best choice. </p></li>
<li><p>If you want to apply for a research industry position, then a postdoc can be a good point, although of course, the closer you can be connected to industry, the better it will be. </p></li>
<li><p>Ideally, you could do a postdoc in industry (in CS, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP, and many others offer this possibility). </p></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/217 |
<p>Read <a href="http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-to-network-at-conferences">this</a> and <a href="http://www.wikihow.com/Network-at-a-Conference">this</a>.</p>
<p>My professor put forth 3 simple rules for networking:</p>
<ul>
<li>Talk to the guy beside you</li>
<li>Talk to top 3 (sort by relevance or whatever you prefer) presenters</li>
<li>Mail them 5 days after the conference with some follow up content (questions/comments/invites for talks etc.)</li>
</ul>
<p>Just to make this post "dead-link" proof, I present a gist of the content in the above links.</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>Start Early.</strong> You should begin preparing before the conference starts. Start reading on who will be there, emailing people you want to meet, and determining which events you will attend. You may want to contact the speakers whose talks you will be attending before the conference; try to set up a meeting, or if they are too busy, at least meet them and give them your business card.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Bring Business Cards</strong>. Make sure they're up-to-date and details your preferred mode of communication.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Research people and get involved in their networks.</strong> If a certain professor is giving a talk; read his previous research papers, frame interesting questions and get an excuse to meet him. If you do meet him, exploit the opportunity to interact with his peers and try to enter their network. Sometimes, this is the only way of getting to network with someone. I know of professors who refuse to take students for PhD or internships or Postdocs without a recommendation from someone in his network. A good impression might just get you that recommendation.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Note people with similar interests to yours.</strong> These people will be attending all the same presentations as you, talking to the same people, discussing similar topics. They are the potential spots for networking.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Prepare the elevator speech</strong>. A common question will be "So, what is your research about?" Make sure you have an answer for every audience. For e.g. If you are in Computational Science, the answer may vary depending on who you are talking with. Plus, make it interesting and digestible. </p></li>
<li><p><strong>Organize an event of your own.</strong> This is especially useful is forming "lower" networks i.e. networks of people who lag in terms of age or experience such as graduate students. If not more, they could notify you of openings or interesting papers or whatever. They could be useful. (Plus it helps us :P )</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Read "<a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0385512058">Never Eat Alone</a>".</strong></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Follow Up</strong>. Prepare for this even before you leave for the conference. Have different modes of follow up ready. Will you have anything to say that is worth writing an email for? If not, think of something which will. If nothing works, make sure you click a photo of yourself with him and send it to him a few days after the conference.</p></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/223 |
<p><strong>Pros</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>If you stay at the same school (this applies even more when you join grad school immediately out of your undergrads), it'll be a matter of remaining in your comfort zone - same department, a faculty who know you, even the same apartment/neighborhood! This can be a major factor, depending on the person concerned - the pros of staying at your Alma mater are all about convenience IMO.</li>
<li>If your UG department has an influential professor with whom you've worked before and are planning to continue as well, that can be very advantageous - as having such a faculty get to know a student's work as an undergraduate can lead to a very strong recommendation (since he has accepted you in the grad program, it is reasonable to assume your work had impressed him during your undergrads).</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Cons</strong></p>
<p>An important advantage of going to another school is that you will be exposed to a completely different department, with faculty who may have diverse research ideas for you to work on. The department, in turn, will benefit as well as a new student from another school will cross-pollinate their department with fresh ideas. This is so important that some top universities have a strong bias against accepting their own undergraduate students into their graduate programs.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/224 |
<p>As per the definition given on the webpage of <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/caps/students/graduate-studies/references/">McGill University</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A "<strong>letter of recommendation</strong>" is one that is specifically requested by someone for a determined/defined employment position, academic program or award application. Generally, these letters are sent directly to the requester and not seen by the student. They can be categorized as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Employment Related</li>
<li>Academic Admission</li>
<li>Commendation or Recognition</li>
<li>Performance Evaluation</li>
</ul>
<p>A "<strong>letter of reference</strong>" is normally more general in nature and not addressed to a specific requestor. Often you will see these letters addressed as "To Whom it may Concern" or "Dear Sir/Madam". These letters are most often given directly to the student and kept for future use. Situations where they are used tend to be:</p>
<ul>
<li>Character Assessment</li>
<li>Academic Related</li>
<li>Employment Related</li>
<li>General Purpose</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>As <a href="http://examplereferenceletter.com/what-is-the-difference-between-recommendation-letters-and-reference-letters/">this site</a> also explains, a recommendation letter is more specifically related to skills and qualifications of a person with respect to a definite position/program, whereas a reference letter is usually more general in nature and refers more to the overall character of a person. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/241 |
<p>Funding for non-research positions comes from either direct or indirect sources. </p>
<p>Direct sources means writing a proposal that includes funding for personnel such as a lab technician or an administrator for a research center. In this case, the funding is obtained directly through grants. </p>
<p>Most of the time, however, the funding is <em>indirect</em>: the salary is paid by the department, rather than an individual research group. This funding is paid for through the "overhead" charges that are included in research grants. (In some cases, such as public universities in Germany, this funding is also indirect, coming from a grant by the state or federal government given to each professorship.)</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/248 |
<p>I have a list of things you should do from my seniors (Some might disagree):</p>
<ol>
<li>Try not to over-sell yourself. There is a fine line between stating facts about yourself and boasting. Stay on the former side.</li>
<li>Try not to mention things and leave them abruptly or incompletely. For e.g., Don't say "I was involved with a project in the University of X where we studied Cancer Treatment." (Thats it). What did you do? Where did it lead? What is the status now? Thats the crux of the information and sadly, that is left out.</li>
<li>Have an interesting question or comment in the mail. Merely stating that you read a paper or attended his talk is not enough. Billions of other students will be stating the same. What made you like it? Why was it relevant to you?
<em>Side note: Surprisingly, many professors who I mailed have been interested on <strong>how</strong> I stumbled on his paper.</em></li>
<li>Never ask direct questions that the professor wouldn't like answering (At least in the first mail). Asking him about his funding status isn't the best idea in the first mail. This is true for many reasons: For one, most profs wouldn't like telling you such details without you proving you are worth it (Why would they?). Secondly, your intentions are getting obfuscated. Are you really interested in the professor ( & his research) or his money? If his research was interesting but he couldn't fund you for X years, would you still go?</li>
<li>If this wasn't obvious, don't mass mail/mail merge. </li>
<li>Be honest about what you say. This includes no exaggeration.</li>
<li>Make it short. No one likes reading a billion lines to find out who you are.</li>
<li>Emphasize your work and what differentiates you from the rest rather than your grades and scores. Grades and scores (GRE/AGRE) are bonuses (or deal breakers) but they are secondary.</li>
</ol>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/252 |
<p>Your job, as an academic, is twofold:</p>
<ol>
<li>Do amazing research.</li>
<li>Write it up and convey your results to other people.</li>
</ol>
<p>It sounds like you view (2) to apply only to others who are already in your field and are completely familiar with everything you've done. You will find that, in the entirety of your field, there are probably just a few dozen people who are intimately familiar with every details of your field, and only a few hundred who are really familiar with what you do. Everyone else — academic, layperson, village idiot — will require an explanation, and you should do them the favor of explaining it to them.</p>
<p>To more directly answer your question, you should always have two answers ready to the question "what do you do?":</p>
<ol>
<li>An elevator pitch, as described elsewhere. This should take ~15-30 seconds to say and would give a very high-level overview of your work.</li>
<li>A more in-depth explanation, which would take about 3-5 minutes, which conveys what you do in more detail. Generally speaking, less time than that and you can't convey any useful information, more time than that and you're giving too many details. After your in-depth explanation, either the person will say, "oh", and move on, or they'll ask questions and you can have an intellectual discussion.</li>
</ol>
<p><em>(Note: the following point is somewhat debatable.)</em> I've found for myself that it helps to visualize the person you're talking to as paying your salary; if you're on a publicly-funded research grant (i.e., any governmental grant), their taxes are funding your research. It gives some perspective.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/257 |
<p>I think it's true that the time-sharing between grants is quite normal within the research world, at least, I've observed it a lot, and in any case, you shouldn't have to worry about that, because it's under the responsibility of your advisor. </p>
<p>Actually, one of the problems when it comes to funding is that in order to make a grant proposal, you somehow need to know precisely enough where you're going, otherwise you have the risk not to be able to achieve what you promised. Hence, I know that it's quite normal that when applying for a grant, some parts of the results promised at the end of the grant are already done, although maybe not finalized. So, you can use the time you would have spent doing the research you promised (but already done) to do some other research on another topic, so that you can apply for another grant on this topic. </p>
<p>That's why in the end, the main question is whether it benefits you, as a first-year student, to work on the other project. Clearly, working on a different topic is always a good experience, especially when there is a potential publication at the end. I don't know how long is your grant, but if it's 3 years, then spending a few months on working on something different will not really impact it. Of course, if you have a grant of only 6 months, then maybe you can't really spend half of it working on something different. </p>
<p>So, to summarize: don't feel guilty about it, I believe this kind of things is pretty common, and just consider whether it can be good/interesting for you or not. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/260 |
<p>While shan23's answer is good, it is also somewhat incomplete. There are a few things to watch out for when you're coming in to a field from another department:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>You will need to keep in mind the qualifying procedures for your new department. Will they expect you to pass exams in undergraduate coursework in the new discipline? If so, then you'll need to do a lot more "catch-up" work early on to make up for the potential shortfall.</p></li>
<li><p>Unless the new area is an interdisciplinary one—such as biomedical engineering—they're probably going to want to see some track record in the area. You're going to find it a lot easier to move into biomedical engineering from mechanical engineering than from economics.</p></li>
<li><p>You may find it helpful to try to find a position as a lab assistant or something similar to this in the new field before you try to start the graduate coursework. However, this is by no means required. (But it would help to prove the "dedication" aspect, which is what you'd need to convince a graduate school admissions committee about in order to have a successful application).</p></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/262 |
<p>The question is subjective in nature, but the answer is almost certainly <strong>no</strong>. Academicians are always applying for funding, looking into collaborations, reading research articles in different fields, and generally taking an interest in new research venues. It's expected that you'll occasionally (maybe even regularly) expand your research interests, and it's the nature of the game that some of your attempts will not pan out.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, my graduate research advisor completed a whopping 10 grants a year for a very wide variety of research projects. Each grant entailed a good deal of preparatory research, in which we would explore a new field and try to find some preliminary results strong enough to drive the grant through. Some of my (and my colleagues) most interesting work (medical ontologies, intelligent systems, lung-powered electricity generators) came from these failed grant attempts.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/263 |
<p>This wil vary significantly according to advisor, but I'd say a typical plan is:</p>
<ul>
<li>Years 1-2: coursework, begin research</li>
<li>Summer of year 2: Small research publications (in my field, 2-4 page conference proceedings, small steps)</li>
<li>Year 3: Get some real research done, more small papers</li>
<li>Year 4+: ~1/2 paper a year, ish</li>
</ul>
<p>However, the variance may be too great for this to be meaningful. I have a friend who published 17 papers during his 6 year graduate student tenure, and I have a number of friends who published zero peer-reviewed papers during my grad school tenure. Take the numbers with a grain of salt.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/264 |
<p>In my experience, starting a collaboration is incredibly easy: you use your network of contacts to identify someone who'd be willing and interested in solving a problem. You talk at a conference or meeting, or arrange a visit to their laboratory. </p>
<p><em>Maintaining</em> a collaboration, however, is next to impossible. It only works if you have a history of successful results early on, or if you have already had a long history of acquaintance with one another before the collaboration began. (In other words, were you friends or colleagues before the work started?)</p>
<p>Otherwise, I would recommend making sure that you start off with "low-hanging fruit": problems that can be solved mutually within the framework of existing funding on both of your parts, with value for both of you. This is important because one of the challenges of getting grants is that reviewers for funding agencies typically want to see an existing record of collaboration—mutual publications and effort—before they're ready to award money to a new collaborative proposal. There are exceptions to this, but they're by no means common.</p>
<p>After that, you have a track record of working together which will let you grow the collaboration into something further.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/271 |
<p>This is based on my experience being in some highly unsuccessful journals clubs, and some very successful ones - at least in my mind.</p>
<ol>
<li>You <em>must</em> have faculty involvement. I've seen more than one journal club that either didn't have faculty members, or had a faculty member or two who just kind of sat back and didn't say anything. That's bad. Faculty members who can contribute, answer questions, and generally provide some context for papers are excellent. They're good for pointed questions we might have missed - I've had faculty members ask a question about a figure that got into an interesting discussion of research ethics, one that led insight into some politics ("The reason that commentary appeared in this journal is Y"), etc.</li>
<li>I prefer to have them separate from lab meetings, and drawing from a wider audience than my specific research group. I find the breadth of experience, diversity of papers, and keeping up with things taking place beyond my narrow little laser-like focus to be both refreshing and more useful than going over a paper half of us already read.</li>
<li>Giving the journal club a greater context. Yes, keeping track of the literature is important. But its importance seems to slide if you know your analysis should be done soon, or something needs to come out of the water bath, or midterms need to be graded. One semester we framed ours as qualifying exam preparation, and another as professional development - the people presenting wrote their critiques like responses to requests for peer review.</li>
</ol>
<p>Overall, I've found journal clubs to be most useful for mid-level graduate students - they need enough experience to have thoughts, insights and feelings about the paper, but if a JC succeeds, eventually they should need it less and less.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/278 |
<p>If certain fields of academia do in fact frown upon "popularizing" science, then they are shooting themselves in the foot.</p>
<p>One of the most important ways of securing funding in different disciplines is through getting support by the federal governments in which they are working. Convincing politician X that you should fund research on doohickey X and widget Y to solve problem Z rather than funding their new shopping mall or football stadium requires convincing them that your research is important and worthwhile. The key to doing this is having a message to sell—something that the lobbyists and staff persons working for the government officials can take to them and say "this is what you need to know about why this is important."</p>
<p>An excellent way of doing this is to take part in writing columns, producing features for television, and other "popular" methods of outreach. You'll have to figure out how to distill your message in a way that's exciting for the viewer or reader, and that will help no only you but your peers as well.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/285 |
<p>Tagging is only useful if you use it with discipline. Look at Wikipedia or Stackexchange, most articles can be determined by 5-6 categories (science - math - geometry - euclidean geometry - metric). Stackexchange has a max. of 5 tags, often you only see 1-2 on questions, which is often pointless, as those tags will appear often in the question/paper title and abstract too. Wasted time.</p>
<p>So, if you decide to create a tagging system, <strong>use at least 4-6 tags</strong> depending on how interdisciplinary and specialized your paper/link collection is. </p>
<p>Also consider to <strong>not only tag by topic but also kind</strong> (review, letter, peer-reviewed, experimental results, theoretical analysis, explanation of new measurement method, meta-discussion...), <strong>year, personal rating</strong> (very interesting article you learned a lot from and should read again from time to time), <strong>rarely/often/top cited, new theory/model, strongly discussed in the research community</strong> </p>
<p>A last note. I use myself <strong>Copernic Desktop Search as a supplementary tool</strong>, I download all papers of possible interest (disk space is cheap ;) ), papers I read, will read or maybe will never take a look at. The point is that <strong>Desktop Search software often has more powerful search operators and sorting mechanisms than Google Scholar & Co</strong>. If you know how to use them, you can save a lot reading and tagging time or tagging at all. You know, if you are smart in using Google & search operators and have a good vocabulary, you don't have to ask a lot questions on internet boards.</p>
<p>Conclusion:</p>
<p><strong>Don't use tagging for creating a pure thematic and linear directory structure</strong>, if finding again your papers or bits of information can be done by learning a good Desktop Search software. Use your tags in a personal way and remember, the point is not to structure your bibliography like a folder directory for categorized files, the point is to find again the bits of knowledge and most memorable papers, which will rather look like a strongly interconnected nonlinear tag cloud. If you look how people tag sites on del.ic.ious, often only 2 or 3 tags, sometimes using up to 10 pure thematic redundant tags, they are doing it imho wrong and waste a lot of time. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/288 |
<p>This may be useful for someone considering a career at a teaching-first school, but I've never seen such portfolios asked for or even considered at research universities in the US and the larger European countries. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/290 |
<p>I've seen it work both ways: some people realize that they have a limited amount of time to work as a result of their external commitments, and therefore make themselves super-productive during the hours they are able to do research. I think, to some extent, that most of the people with severe external obligations fall into this class.</p>
<p>For a sizable minority, however, the balancing act proves too difficult—although this is often a function of a mismatch in expectations between the advisor and the graduate student. If you believe this could be a problem for you, you should definitely talk with your advisor; if the outcome is unsatisfactory, you should also consider speaking with your thesis committee and the "graduate officer" of your department. </p>
<p>In general, I think that if you are a productive graduate student, your advisor would be willing to work out suitable accommodations for your schedule. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/300 |
<p>I've found that the secret is (1) good tools to create equations, plus (2) liberal use of arrows and text, plus (3) animations linking the two.</p>
<p>I've found the following two programs to be indispensable for writing talks:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.chachatelier.fr/latexit/">LateXiT</a> for the Mac</li>
<li><a href="http://klatexformula.sourceforge.net/download/">KLaTeXFormula</a> for a number of OSs, similar to latexit but less functional</li>
</ul>
<p>The goal is to make the math (1) visually distinctive, so that the reader can easily tell when you're discussing an equation, and (2) easy to interpret. Remember, in a paper, you have text such as "...where n is the number of..." after the equation is shown. This typically isn't done in research talks, and even worse, once you're off the slide, the reader has to simply remember what the equation was; they can't flip back a page.</p>
<p>My technique (you can see it in action in <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eykanal/meg-preprocessing">this presentation</a>) is to put equations in a <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eykanal/meg-preprocessing/73">unique font</a> (I use Times New Roman, with bolding and italics), and using the above tools to <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eykanal/meg-preprocessing/25">typeset equations in latex</a> and insert them as images as necessary. As you introduce each equation, explain all the variables using <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eykanal/meg-preprocessing/29">text and arrows</a>. Every variable should be explained... yes, this is slow, but learning is slow. If you're going to re-use the same equation multiple times, put it in the <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eykanal/meg-preprocessing/85">top-right corner of the slide</a> - with arrows and text sometimes included - so that (1) they remember what you're talking about, and (2) so you can <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eykanal/meg-preprocessing/90">refer back to those equations</a>.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/301 |
<p>It's certainly possible, though admittedly somewhat harder outside the framework of a university. Some potential avenues, answering generally - not all of them might apply to your particular circumstance.</p>
<ol>
<li>Academic/Business partnerships. These are a new hot topic, and in some fields quite active. Universities love them because they're a revenue stream. Businesses like them because its harder to get closer to the cutting edge than at a major university. Look for companies that do this as potential employers? They're good for both dabbling in research, and also as a springboard into the research side of things - I've met several "private sector refugees" in my time.</li>
<li>Research-oriented companies. Quintiles, RTI, Westat, RAND, etc. all come to mind. There are <em>tons</em> of these companies, and many of them both pay quite well and actively publish. Are there any that serve your particular field?</li>
<li>Consulting. Research groups occasionally have funding for outside contractors of one sort or another - and if someone really wants to work with you, they may write such a position into a grant with you in mind. For example, I have some grant support for a freelance programmer. I've known other people hired for a particular expertise, or just "a warm body who isn't a student". This is probably the path you'd end up going down if you both contact your ex-professors and want to get paid.</li>
<li>Volunteering. Academics are cheap. It never hurts to ask if they've got some side project you might be suited for collecting dust in the back.</li>
</ol>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/306 |
<p>This is not meant to be an official opinion, since obviously the rules depend on the local labor laws.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>We should distinguish school holidays—days on which classes are cancelled—from official holidays, on which the university offices are closed.</p></li>
<li><p>A graduate student not working on a school holiday would be counted as taking leave; however, when the university is closed, that is not normally expected to be a working day for anyone, and thus students would not use a vacation day in such a case.</p></li>
<li><p>Advisors should not have policies in place that <em>expect</em> students to be regularly working six days a week, particularly since that would mean that they are potentially in violation of a whole bunch of labor rules.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Given that information, my personal opinion is that research cannot be done according to a timecard. There will be days when you go into the office and figuratively spin your wheels all day, and there are days where you are firing on all cylinders and getting tons done. In my own group, so long as someone:</p>
<ul>
<li>is prompt in answering requests, </li>
<li>attends group functions, </li>
<li>lets me know if he or she will be out of the office for extended periods, and </li>
<li>is getting his or her work done,</li>
</ul>
<p>then I will let that person work in whatever manner is most conducive to getting the job done. That's more important to me than knowing they clocked in 8 hours per workday.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/317 |
<p>I'll give you my own opinion, as something of an interdisciplinary scientist in a nearby field (I work in mathematical epidemiology) with publications in both places (the conference paper frankly by accident):</p>
<p>First, your impression is indeed correct. CS and related fields very heavily weight conference presentations and proceedings papers in ways the life sciences really don't.</p>
<p>In my mind, there's two things you should be considering:</p>
<ol>
<li>The opportunity to double-dip a bit. We had a question about this recently, but I think it applies to you as well. If your project has "Life science spin-offs" and "Computational science spin-offs", you can submit to both places. For example, I have a project that will end up living in both applied math journals and clinical journals. There's no reason you can't do both.</li>
<li><em>This part is purely my opinion</em>. When in doubt, I'd go for journal publications, for a few reasons. I've found most CS and technical people recognize that outside their field, its papers or nothing, better than the other way around. Journal papers are also more likely to get on the radar of people you want seeing your work, get indexed in PubMed (LNCS for example is not indexed in PubMed) etc. Those departments will also probably recognize your technical chops either via talking to you, the technical bent of your publications, or a few conference presentations.</li>
</ol>
<p>I sympathize with your problem - it's sadly familiar. Generally, I'd try to figure out which audience you want to sell yourself to <em>more</em>, and do as they do.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/331 |
<p>The answer depends very much on the journal. Some expect UK spellings; others will permit either American or British spellings. You should check with the journal in question.</p>
<p>Of course, the other option that you have is the following. Since you know what the major differences between the two sets of spellings are, and you have a sense of which one's won't be caught by your spell checker, you could always do a final search-and-replace after you've completed work on the paper to make sure you've switched everything over. (Or at least, everything you know should be switched over.)</p>
<p>That should satisfy most journals, and as shan23 said, I don't think a journal will reject your paper for writing "meters" instead of "metres"; the most you'll get is a referee report telling you to switch spellings.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/332 |
<p>I believe the limitation is more on the software that you are using, rather than the tablet itself. So, if you are using an iPad, you can use <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/upad/id401643317?mt=8">UPad</a>, whereas android tablets users should be looking at something like <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.cerience.reader.app">Repligo</a> or <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=udk.android.reader">ezPdf Reader</a>.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/351 |
<p>You'll want to get a sense of their feelings for:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The graduate program</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Easy to work with regarding customizing the program to their specific needs (i.e., taking courses outside their specific area if necessary)?</p></li>
<li><p>How easy/difficult was the process for joining a lab?</p></li>
<li><p>Have they found the staff easy/hard to work with?</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The advisor</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Attitude towards students (respectful/distant/slavedriver)</p></li>
<li><p>Presence in the lab (micromanager/occasional presence/absentee)</p></li>
<li><p>How organized is the research?</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The university as a research institution</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Easy collaboration between departments (in their opinion)?</p></li>
<li><p>Availability of course offerings (from their experience)?</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The city as a place to live</p></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/353 |
<p>There is no magic when it comes to asking for presentations. And there is nothing wrong with being <em>the person who asks people for their powerpoint slides</em> (at least you show that are interested and it may result in them being cited; and it shows that they got their job done - though a presentation they interested others in their idea).</p>
<p>If they don't reply (or don't sent it), it is usually of one of the following reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>They are busy and missed your mail,</li>
<li>It would take their time to find the presentation and send it (it may be big so it is not just sending an e-mail),</li>
<li>They would prefer not to make it public as:
<ul>
<li>It is not polished enough for anything but a presentation,</li>
<li>It may contain things that they would prefer not to share publicly (e.g. plots form other papers, preliminary data which may later proven to be wrong or incomplete, pictures or video they don't have right to share further, etc).</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>If they don't want to share it - they have right to it. However, usually they have nothing against (and actually are happy to do so) as long as you make it quick and easy for them.</p>
<p>So it is a good idea to ask for slides just after their talk - they may have it on their computer (so you can copy it to your stick) or on a stick (o you can copy it to your computer) or send it right away.</p>
<p>Also:</p>
<ul>
<li>Send your e-mail at most a week after the presentation,</li>
<li>Be short and concise (what exactly you want, what do you want with do with it),</li>
<li>If there is no response try writing the same e-mail a week later.</li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/354 |
<p>In general I would counsel against further study. I have seen many people finish an undergraduate degree, look for a job they like/a job, and when they have no luck go back to study. This has almost always ended badly. In most cases they have no understanding of how a further degree will allow them to get the jobs they are interested in, and are merely spending a lot of money to prolong (or make worse) the problem. </p>
<p>If you are incredibly passionate in an area go for it. However the fact that you are posting this/reading this suggests that you are not. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/363 |
<p>Yes, Mendeley does offer export - BibTex, RIS, and EndNote XML.</p>
<p>The search is pretty decent, though I often find I use Acrobat search instead - its word-stemming seems better.</p>
<p>Batch replacement is very weak - the only way to do it is to go into the database yourself and tweak it. Very unsatisfactory. There is some batch update, in that you can select several papers, and add the same metadata to all in one go: but that's not the same as a batch search & replace. The one batch search & replace it does do very well is that when you get two versions of an author's name, you can drag one name onto the other, and all the papers will get updated accordingly.</p>
<p>I've also found the technical support to be very slow, and often unsatisfactory.</p>
<p>The auto-grab of references from the web is patchy, and you may find you're often correcting it. Often, its guesses seem utterly bonkers, like it's just grabbed a few general words from the title, and gone off to find the closest match for those, in some subject that's completely alien to me.</p>
<p>The interface is klutzy, though I've yet to find a reference manager that had an interface I <strong>did</strong> like.</p>
<p>Earlier versions of Mendeley did occasionally corrupt the metadata, doing things like swapping round the lead and second author - unbelievably frustrating. This may have stopped now - I don't use Mendeley so much any more, because of this and other problems.</p>
<p>Mendeley does have its evangelists, and it seems to have been very slick at cultivating its fanbase - more resources seem to have been spent there than on the software. The <a href="http://feedback.mendeley.com/f">feedback forum</a> has now become pretty much unusable - there are plenty of important things in there that have been "planned" or awaiting assessment for 2 or 3 years.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/365 |
<p>Bad idea. If you turn down an award (or an acceptance to a univeristy, etc), you don't get to reap the benefits of that award. </p>
<p>No one cares about the universities you <em>could have gone to</em> or the fellowship programs you <em>could have worked for</em>, they care about what you have actually done and that is all you should include on your CV/resume. Period. </p>
<p>To me, the resume linked to above reads "I had no one else edit or evaluate my resume before I posted it online."</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/368 |
<p>I'm not sure how much of your issue is related to the specific field—mathematicians are known for being somewhat more independent than graduate students in, say, engineering.</p>
<p>That said, your advisor should at least show signs of being interested in your research. If you feel like you need help, and aren't getting any, then you need to make arrangements to get it. At first, I'd recommend talking to other graduate students and postdocs under your advisor. Next, I'd talk to other students outside the group; finally, I'd move on to other faculty.</p>
<p>It really depends on how easy or difficult it is to change advisors. If it's relatively easy, then in the end, it might be necessary as a last resort. If not, you'll need to make do with a rather unfortunate situation.</p>
<p>Ultimately, this is a case-by-case kind of situation: you'll need to talk to more people in your department and find out how widespread this is. Some advisors are completely hands-off, and expect their students to be self-motivating. Others are hands-on to the point of micromanagement. In math, my impression from conversations with colleagues is that the tendency is towards being hands-off, but it's impossible to say what will be the case in your specific department.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/375 |
<p>Some journals implement a double-blind reviewing process, meaning that the reviewers are not aware that the authors are from academia or not, and only the scientific content is judged. That being said, it's worth mentioning that it would be hard for someone without a proper "paper-writing" training (such as the one one can acquire in academia), to produce a paper that would be accepted by reviewers. Some general structure is expected, such as related Works, critical discussion, rigorous methodology, and I would say that without that, it would be hard to get the paper published (I have myself rejected papers from graduate students, not because the idea itself was bad, but because the structure and the presentation were not meeting the standards one could expect for a scientific publication). </p>
<p>EDIT: After reformulation of the question, assuming that the quality of the paper makes it indistinguishable from any other paper, then, no, as far as I know, there is no general policy regarding the official affiliation of the author(s). For instance, in Computer Science, it's not rare to see papers published by people working in a "normal" company (i.e. not a research company), typically on some concrete problems/solutions they have found. Some people even keep publishing after starting their own startup, and therefore the affiliation is something like "MyCompanyWeb2.0". </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/385 |
<p>The policies vary entirely from journal to journal about what is considered acceptable. APS journals, for instance, will accept both MS Word-based documents as well as documents formatted with RevTeX, their modified template system. ACS journals and a number of other publishers also offer their own LaTeX- and Word-specific templates for authors to use. Whether the use of the template is required or merely recommended is also a function of the journal. So, as a general rule, you should <em>always</em> check the homepage of a journal <em>before</em> you start preparing an article for submission to that journal. </p>
<p>To some extent, I prefer working with LaTeX in preparing manuscripts, for the simple reason that their plain-text document format makes it a lot less painful to switch back and forth between different templates, compared to a word-processing format like Word or LibreOffice or Pages. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/389 |
<p>I am currently employed in the biotech industry. Hopefully this is helpful but it may all just be obvious:</p>
<p>Concerning <strong>research industry positions</strong>, jobs are generally classified as PhD (scientist) or non-PhD (research assistant/associate). For scientists positions, sometimes someone without a PhD will be considered if they have significant experience - e.g. Masters plus 5-8 years, Bachelors plus 10+ years. However, PhDs are generally favored over non-PhDs for outside hires. For research asst/assoc positions, non-PhDs are favored over PhD holders, and many companies have policies that prohibit hiring PhDs. </p>
<p>Concerning <strong>non-research industry positions</strong>, holding a PhD will give you an edge over BS/MS holders, but you have to compete with other specialized degrees. For business developement and upper management positions, you'd have to compete with MBA holders (along with internal hires from research/scientific management). For legal positions, you'd compete with JDs and certified patent agents. For project management, there are certifications as well. </p>
<p>If you were to hold MBA/JD/additional certification AND a PhD, you would be extremely marketable for these types of positions. It's a lot of work to add something like that on after finishing a PhD program, but companies often love to have PhDs on staff in those types of positions - but generally you need to have the other qualifications as well. </p>
<p>Edit: Also, the best people to talk to are professors from your current/old department who are on any company's board of directors. They will know exactly what kind of people a company wants to hire, and will be able to tell you how to target your job search, or what kind of experience/credentials matter most. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/394 |
<p>I underwent an interview recently from a prospective adviser, and I found the questions he asked of me to be pretty insightful - hence I'm sharing them here.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Why do you want to pursue research in this specific area?</p>
<p>This would highlight the candidate's motivation in wanting to do research in a particular field - and would also tell the professor more about the candidate's exposure to this area.</p></li>
<li><p>What made you apply to this lab/university, as a continuation of the previous question?</p>
<p>The answer would tell you whether the applicant had simply browsed the rankings list of universities, or did he/she actually go through the research publications of the lab - and the application was done due to an intersection of the two!</p></li>
<li><p>What would you like to be doing post Ph.D.?</p>
<p>There is no "right" answer to this, but it also tells a lot about the candidate's motivation in pursuing a PhD.</p></li>
<li><p>Finally, you can ask the candidate to discuss any problem that he is familiar with in that field - doesn't have to be anything fancy/complicated, but that would serve to highlight the clarity of the applicant's reasoning, communication skills, and level of exposure to the field. </p></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/397 |
<p>As I posted in answer to another comment, more often than not, schools want to avoid the dramas associated with plagiarism scandals. That is why schools like Harvard will prompt researchers accused of fraudulent behavior, such as <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/9/9/professor-faculty-misconduct-tenure/">Marc Hauser</a>, to resign, rather than go through tenure revocation procedures.</p>
<p>But losing one's job is fairly likely, and an unofficial blacklisting is almost certain to result.</p>
<p>One other consequence, though, is often forgotten: the peripheral damage of academic fraud cases. Sensationalized results, such as those in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n">Jan Hendrik Schön</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk">Hwang Woo-Suk</a> cases, led many graduate students to embark on projects in those disciplines trying to reproduce and expand upon the promises implied by those projects. When those projects collapsed, a lot of graduate students were left in the lurch.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/398 |
<p>As I posted in answer to another comment, more often than not, schools want to avoid the dramas associated with plagiarism scandals. That is why schools like Harvard will prompt researchers accused of fraudulent behavior, such as <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/9/9/professor-faculty-misconduct-tenure/">Marc Hauser</a>, to resign, rather than go through tenure revocation procedures.</p>
<p>But losing one's job is fairly likely, and an unofficial blacklisting is almost certain to result.</p>
<p>One other consequence, though, is often forgotten: the peripheral damage of academic fraud cases. Sensationalized results, such as those in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n">Jan Hendrik Schön</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk">Hwang Woo-Suk</a> cases, led many graduate students to embark on projects in those disciplines trying to reproduce and expand upon the promises implied by those projects. When those projects collapsed, a lot of graduate students were left in the lurch.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/399 |
<p>Your best source of such information would be to look for electronic repositories that are at least partially "open." The <a href="http://www.openthesis.org/" rel="nofollow"><em>openThesis</em> repository</a> offers one such source, and you might find some information on sites like <a href="http://academia.edu" rel="nofollow">academia.edu</a>. </p>
<p>An alternate source would be to look at individual school's repositories. For instance, MIT's <a href="http://dspace.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">DSpace</a> offers copies of many recent MIT thesis and dissertations, which can be previewed by anyone, although you need to be a member of the MIT community in order to be able to download and print documents from the site.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/409 |
<p>Usually, in an academic CV, you can distinguish between "Research Activities", which consist of all the research you've done in the past, and "Research Interest", which consist of all the research you want to do in the future. So, someone who would include a topic that you don't list in your research activities without asking you first would be a bit rude. </p>
<p>However, in order to avoid this kind of cases, and not to be too explicit (that is, not saying "I don't to work on Computational Chemistry"), you can try, in your cover letter or your research interests to put a sentence like "Although I have a good background in Computational Chemistry, my research interests rather lie in ..." or "My background in Computational Chemistry taught me to [...], and I'm now interested in broadening/focusing my interest on [...]". That's a bit more subtle, but I guess the message should pass. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/412 |
<ul>
<li><p>Reward to ratio of the application. If you already have some funding, and the additional funding is small compared to the time required to apply for it. For example, you have an NSF fellowship at ~$30k/yr, so it might not be worth applying to $2k scholarships which take a week or two of time.</p></li>
<li><p>Reward to ratio of the work. You don't want to take on a new project.</p></li>
<li><p>The project isn't relevant to your line of work.</p></li>
<li><p>You aren't qualified (GPA, citizenship, or status limitations)</p></li>
</ul>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/417 |
<ol>
<li><p>I don't think you can expect to get the opinion of a professor about another institute/lab. You can probably get some facts (like this other institute has more/less money, they are more/less active in this area), but nothing subjective. Academia is pretty small world, and people try as much as possible not to say anything negative publicly (and since everything said is positive, it can be hard to distinguish the real positive from the fake one). </p></li>
<li><p>You need to have a real interest in their work. As mentioned <a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/271/how-to-achieve-successful-collaborations">here</a>, it's already pretty hard to maintain collaboration between people interested, so if there is no clear interest, it will very hard to be on email terms. But, the question is: why do you want to be on email terms? </p></li>
<li><p>See the previous point. You need to <em>really</em> interested, meaning you've read and understood their papers, and are able to ask questions that go beyond "what are the possible usage of your approach?". </p></li>
</ol>
<p>As a general remark, professors are usually already very busy dealing with their own research/teaching/students. Of course, they usually are open to new collaborations, but they might lack the time to work with a student who is not theirs. A good solution could to try to visit them, academically speaking, for a month or so, to work on a very specific topic. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/422 |
<p>In general, the answer is negative.</p>
<p>Not only there are different systems in different countries (and same-spelled degrees may have different requirements), but even if a degree seems to be the same, it is not necessary considered equivalent.</p>
<p>Often universities and institutes have some freedom in the interpretation of degrees earned in other countries. Common sense can be a good guide but in case of doubt you need to check if university (or institute) X accepts a foreign academic title Y instead of their Z. </p>
<p>For example, when I obtained degrees <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licentiate#Poland">licencjat</a> (3 years undergraduate, 180ECTS) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magister_%28degree%29#Central_Europe_and_Eastern_Europe">magister</a> (5 years undergraduate, 300ECTS) from a Polish university, they refused to translate it into anything else (stating explicitly that it is not equivalent to anything else). However, some other Polish universities do translate it into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Science">Bachelor of Science</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Science">Master of Science</a>, respectively. Nevertheless, my new institute didn't have problem to find them qualifying me for their PhD program.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/428 |
<p>I'm told for your field that the answer might be yes, because you're slightly less threatened in terms of being scooped than most, with physics (apparently) going largely by who submits first.</p>
<p><em>I</em> would be extremely cautious publishing the source of my thesis in its entirety on a public repository. I'm all for repeatable science and open access, but the public should only have access to your code when this condition is met:</p>
<p><em>You have no further use of the exclusive access to your code. All the questions you've programmed have been answered, the papers and presentations that emerge from them are in press, and at this point, it is a question of reproducible research.</em></p>
<p>Once that's true, sure. Until that point? You're running the profound risk of your research being stolen.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/435 |
<p>They don't require you to send a cover letter to five referees, but just to indicate in your cover letter the names and contact info of 5 potential reviewers. It's just to help them finding reviewers for your paper (as they say, they might not use those you provided). But I don't think you need to contact the reviewers first. </p>
<p>As far as I know, it's a pretty common procedure, I've seen it for several other journals. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/443 |
<p>Well, I find <a href="https://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&tbo=1&prmdo=1&q=eyetrack%2a+infant+%7C+baby+research+%7C+forschung++inurl%3Aedu+%7C+inurl%3Auni+-filetype%3Apdf+-filetype%3Adoc+-filetype%3Appt+-filetype%3Aps+2011..2012&oq=eyetrack%2a+infant+%7C+baby+research+%7C+forschung++inurl%3Aedu+%7C+inurl%3Auni+-filetype%3Apdf+-filetype%3Adoc+-filetype%3Appt+-filetype%3Aps+2011..2012&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=12&gs_upl=21080l24324l0l29693l12l10l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0">reasonable numbers for research groups</a> focusing on <em>eyetracking</em> by using Google and search operators. Of course, you should add some redundant similar terms (eye-movement, baby,...)</p>
<p>Notice, there are some patterns:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>american universities nearly always have <strong>edu</strong> (actually it's even a domain) in their URL, german univ. <strong>uni</strong>. So using <code>inurl:edu</code> in google filters out a lot. Non-university institutes like german Max-Planck often have URL patterns too. </p></li>
<li><p>further add <code>-filetype:pdf -filetype:doc -filetype:ppt -filetype:ps</code> to filter out more useless results</p></li>
<li><p>add <code>2010..2012</code> to be sure the site/group is still active and the topic on their agenda.</p></li>
<li><p>add <code>research | forschung</code> (latter being german translation, but afaik nowadays most natural sciences groups in Germany have a english (& german) page)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Some research branches also have a online directory, there exist also internet directories like dmoz (not sure if this stuff is up to date, probably some dead links):</p>
<p><a href="http://www.eurosys.org/directory/">http://www.eurosys.org/directory/</a> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Biology/Neurobiology/Research_Groups_and_Centers/">http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Biology/Neurobiology/Research_Groups_and_Centers/</a> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/colloq/groups.html">http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/colloq/groups.html</a> </p>
<p>At least I can say that most research groups in Germany will have a english home page and short summary/research topics/open positions on it. So there should be no general problem to find them by some "serious" googling. But <strong>don't use too specific keywords</strong>, "eyetracking on infants", "dualistic view" is too special imho, use keywords being specific rather to the topic than the exact methodology. They are probably mainly interested in how the visual recognition system adapts and learns over time, this is the bigger thematic picture. You attract master and phd students not by naming a special experimental method, so you will not find these type of keywords often on a group page, where they often try to put in a minimum of time.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/449 |
<p>Check out the <a href="http://report.nih.gov/success_rates/index.aspx">NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools</a>. It may take you some time to find exactly what you're looking for, but there are numerous reports available, with a good deal of detail.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/458 |
<p>Sadly, there is not a strict correlation between doing good science and being financially successful. It is entirely possible to do "creative, important work" and still not be well rewarded for it. For instance, one could have published these results in an obscure journal that very few people will read. Or, as another example, the researcher might be a poor "salesman," unable to convince readers and fellow scientists of the merit of his work. </p>
<p>In general, you need a combination of both networking and technical skills to forge a successful career as a researcher: the contacts will help you get interviews for jobs; your technical knowledge will get you the job.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/461 |
<p>I can only speak for my (computer science) department. Students who apply to our PhD program with MS degrees are held to a higher standard than applicants who apply as undergraduates. What we look for in PhD applicants is <em>strong evidence of research potential</em>. Most undergraduates don't have an opportunity to undertake a real research project, but MS students do have that opportunity, <em>by definition</em>. It's <em>much</em> harder for MS applicants without publishable results to be admitted than an undergraduate in the same situation, all else being equal. Grades are much less important (unless they suck, which yours don't).</p>
<p>On the other hand, the fact that your already decent grades improved when you started taking graduate classes is a <em>huge</em> point in your favor. Be sure to get recommendation letters from your instructors in those courses, and hit them up for research opportunities. I recommend applying to <em>both</em> MS <em>and</em> PhD programs; some departments will even let you apply for both simultaneously.</p>
<p>There's a similar effect in NSF's evaluations of graduate fellowship applications. NSF splits the applicant pool into three piles based on the number of years of graduate education: still an undergrad, less than 12 months, and more than 12 months. Expectations are higher for applicants in later piles. In particular, publications are a <em>de facto</em> requirement for students in the more-than-one-year pile, <em>even if their one year of graduate education was in a non-research masters program</em>. </p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/464 |
<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/" rel="nofollow">LinkedIn</a> is a fine resource for this sort of thing, especially for keeping track of alums' careers and contact data. I encourage my students to link to me for exactly this reason.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/468 |
<p>The official answer depends on where you are located, and the applicable laws in your jurisdiction. For instance, in Germany, graduate students are almost always employees of the government, and are therefore accorded vacation benefits commensurate to that (between 23 and 29 days per year, depending upon age). In contrast, the United States technically does not have any requirements on annual paid leave, so the answer in principle could be as little as zero, but normally is two weeks per year.</p>
<p>Unofficially, that's a matter to be worked out between you and your advisor. Some advisors will be willing to let you take days off here and there as needed, so long as they don't interfere with either your long-term progress or meeting your day-to-day responsibilities. Most advisors will be rightfully displeased if you ask to take two months of leave all at once, but most will not mind a three-day weekend here and there as needed.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/474 |
<p>The reason why you're not seeing scholarships for study at the master's level <em>in Europe</em> is that the master's degree is <em>not</em> viewed as the prerequisite for PhD study, but instead as the direct continuation of the bachelor's degree. As a result, you're expected to move on to the master's program, and usually at the same location you did your bachelor's degree. That means there really isn't a call for a lot of scholarship to fund master's study. However, it is possible to finance one's stay in a European university, as many schools offer part-time positions for master's students working in a research group for some number of hours per week. </p>
<p>However, in the US and several other countries, gaining admission to a PhD program is a good way to get your master's studies funded, as the funding is normally provided for the entirety of your graduate tenure, rather than just the PhD portion.</p>
<p>To get in to most programs in English-speaking countries, you will need to show evidence of a good scholastic record as well as good English skills, as evidenced by the IELTS or TOEFL. If those aren't in place, it's going to be very difficult for you to be competitive, and almost impossible to be competitive for a scholarship or fellowship.</p>
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/481 |
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