Is it reasonable for a professor to ask students to stay 30-45 minutes past scheduled class time every week? I'm currently in a class in my major that meets for 50 minutes 3 times a week. Meanwhile, I'm a member of a campus club, unrelated to my major, which meets right after this class one day.

My professor has decided that he should have the students stay an extra 30-45 minutes after class on the day of the meetings so that he can continue to teach.

I'm the only one in the class who has voted against this, which makes me uncomfortable, because I'm what's forcing the class to have a faster pace.

Am I right in being outraged? Is it not the professor's job to teach the necessary course material in the time allotted, as opposed to having students stay late for no credit? Should I cave in and just not go to the club meetings? They're not important for my major, and I'm not an officer, but I immensely enjoy them.

Edit: I've been asked in the comments why my professor is doing this.  It has to do with the pacing of the course--if we had to stick to 50 minutes 3 times a week, then the pace would have to be much faster.

I guess I'm going to be the contrary opinion here. I don't think your professor's request is reasonable at all. Class time is scheduled the way it is so that people can plan the rest of their lives around the schedule. In this case, nobody but you seems to have anything from 12:50 on, but that shouldn't encourage the prof to monopolize that time.

Some may think your extracurricular activity is trivial or that you should skip it, but that math club could easily have been another class or your job. The professor is in a position of power, and he should respect his position by not trying to compel you to work outside the system because it's convenient to him. Several of your peers may actually appreciate that you're the lone hold out even if they won't ever admit it.

I would have no problem with the prof offering extra sessions where no required material was covered. This could be extra practice working example problems or a Q&A session to clear up anything confusing from class. That being said, I think professors should be held to teaching the required stuff in the allotted time.

Nobody's forcing you to stay in your seat. This is a university class, not prison. You are free to quietly pack up you material and walk out to attend to your other commitments.

You are responsible to cover the material you are missing. You can:

talk to other students in your class to go over the material (this is actually a great way for the other student to reinforce their learning)
see the professor during his regular office hours to go over the material
see if you can schedule time with your prof outside of his office hours.
learn it from the textbook on your own.

You don't have to make a big deal out of this situation. Just assert your rights to your professor's published time (office hours).


How to stand out in mathematics PhD admissions as a student from an online school, with no research or opportunities to get strong recommendations? After reading some the posts here about graduate admissions for PhD/masters in mathematics in different countries, it seems like the requirements are quite a lot higher than what I have in my country. Just for clarification, in my university (the Open University of Israel), there's no undergraduate research besides one undergraduate seminar. I've never heard of anyone from my university writing a paper in mathematics while attending the Open University of Israel. I've already read the ways to stand out in admissions on this site, and for me, research cannot be one of them.

In addition, since my school is an online school, none of my recommendations will be personal, and none of my teachers writing the recommendations are well known in their field, since they all only teach and don't do any research. I suppose that in this sense my university is the equivalent of an American community college.

Therefore, based on my readings here, the best ways for me to stand out for graduate admissions are on the Cover Letter (which I need to write), GPA (currently around 88% average, when the average for mathematics in my university is around 65%), and TOEFL/GRE (TOEFL, I may not need to do, since I'm a native English speaker, and the GRE's I still need to decide if I want to do, since I'm not yet sure that I want to apply in the United States). In addition, I'm graduating in a year and a half, so until then, I'm planning to fly to different universities around the world once every six months to meet with the graduate math program coordinators (I've already met with the coordinator for the math program at Bonn University and I've set up a meeting at Trinity College Dublin already) to get information and to also start making connections.

Given these specific circumstances that cannot be changed (graduating without a single paper from an unrated university, with weak recommendations), are there any other creative or unusual ways (which I will really need), besides improving the GPA, getting excellent GRE grades, and working on a great cover letter to stand out in graduate admissions for universities in the United States, Europe, and Canada? If I can't get accepted after graduation to a university abroad, my alternate plan is to do a masters here in Israel, and then do a PhD abroad.

tl;dr
Get a MSc from a top Israeli university first. It will practically ensure that you will get accepted to just about any PhD program that you want to. And a math MSc from a top Israeli uni is a pretty good thing to have. (edit see below)

I'm an Israeli currently studying outside of Israel, so I might give you a more relevant perspective on the issue. Although I'm in earth sciences, and not math, I think you will find this useful.

I am having a hard time understanding some of your circumstances. You claim that you will graduate in a year and a half. Assuming you are studying full-time, you are only halfway through and it may be too early to start thinking about your PhD, let alone fly to institutions in the world and meet with them (unless you happen to be there as a tourist).

You are correct that graduating from the Israeli Open University is hardly beneficial in terms of reputation and prestige. It is also close to impossible to get meaningful and honest recommendation letters. I do not know how much people trust GPA scores from a distance learning institution, and this may also hurt your chances. Unfortunately, as hardly any research is done at OU, I doubt that you will find a research partner to work on a publication. Even if your numbers are right, the fact that you do not study in a university where you have day-to-day interaction with other students and senior stuff is not going to help the admissions committees to choose you over other candidates.

Instead of thinking about PhD research abroad, I suggest you start with a MSc degree back home in Israel. There are several reasons for that:

Math degrees in Israeli universities have excellent reputation (particularly Tel Aviv, HUJI and Technion). This alone might boost your chances.
You are still an undergrad, halfway through. You have not been exposed to research yet. If you were in a physical university, you might be exposed to research around you, which is something. Yet you don't even have that. You do not know if research is what you want to do. Who knows, you might get offered a job and leave academia. Going for MSc will be your "introduction" to research and will give you a chance to get your desired publication, if you wish to pursue this further.
Starting a PhD program with MSc background will make you a much better student. I can sometimes see the difference between PhD students with and without prior MSc experience in the institution I am currently at.
Admission committees, in general, look favourably upon applicants with proved research experience in the form of MSc.

I will give you an example from my own experience. Having graduated my BSc with a research component, I was eligible for PhD studies abroad without having to get MSc. However, I did study for MSc in Israel, mostly for the reasons above. It made getting accepted to my institution of choice much easier, I had more than one publication by the time I applied for the PhD, it gave me a different perspective on what research is and what is it that I want to do, or more importantly, do not want to do.

EDIT

OP mentioned that conducting research in Israel is not possible due to personal reasons. I don't see how this sits with OP's idea of taking MSc research in Israel, but here are two more ideas:

Go for a one year Honours degree in countries that have it (for example, UK or Australia). This is something that's usually done straight after BSc and is one year of research.
Go for MSc in a country where doing this is common as a precursor to PhD research (continental Europe mostly, also Israel btw).

These two are very expensive solutions because you can't usually get funded or a scholarship for this, unlike doing PhD research. I would personally go for number two from the list above.

Again, getting straight to PhD after finishing your BSc in the Open University is almost impossible. If you do get it, it's probably in a low ranked institution and that might not be the best thing for your career. Regardless of whether you are accepted or not, I still think that you should have some kind of research experience before going for a PhD, particularly as you're done your education so far in a research-free environment.

The first task is to figure out why you want to seek/acquire a PhD in math, since the normal point of a PhD is to equip you to do research.  If your answer is that you want to do research, but you haven't had an opportunity then the problem transforms to "How can I do research and communicate that successfully?"  We live in a golden age of information, there is a tremendous amount of problems and work in-progrees that are freely available on the internet.  Pick something you are interested in and start publicly blogging about your ideas, your accomplishments, your dead-ends.  Communicate with other people in the world who are working on similar problems.  As you gain some accomplishments and receive positive feedback solicit suggestions for what Universities and professors are working in that problem area.


What should we do when an abstract gets accepted for a conference, but the material is not ready? Recently, my team's abstract was accepted for a poster presentation at a conference. The abstract submitted is not a complete work. Over time, we still don't have the desired results that are worth publishing / presenting.
... what should we do in this situation?
I worry that our contribution is not good enough - or bad.

I suppose that standards differ, but in my experience (CS) posters don't need to be all that refined. Unless your standards are different, I suspect that you could put enough together to inform people about your project, its current state, and its direction, if not the conclusions that aren't yet ready.
Many posters are "work in progress", rather than completed.
Alternatively you can withdraw if it is impossible to do enough to meet your own standards.

Someone has to say it: simply withdraw the poster presentation. Of course, no one wants to do this. But there is nothing wrong with simply yielding to reality: things just did not work out as expected. Then, next time you submit an abstract, bear this one in mind! Best of success with future submissions!


What is the best secondary language for an academic to know? Let's say someone young (~PhD student stage, possibly earlier) wants to become a professor. He doesn't mind moving around and will go wherever the best offer is. He'll obviously need English, but he's also motivated enough to learn another language. What is the best language to learn that will open the most opportunities?

If we proxy the number of jobs available in any country by research spending, then according to Wikipedia the most likely destinations are the USA, China, Japan, Germany and South Korea in that order. The main language in the US is already English, but the other four have local languages. However, I don't know how easy it is to get an academic job in any of these countries (or the ones later in the list - India, France, Russia ...) without knowing the local language.

If the answer to this question varies by field, the I'm most interested in the sciences.

It depends on what kind of job we are talking about. For a PhD student, or for a postdoc, knowing the local language is not necessary in general. I know plenty of examples of people who got such a job without knowing any shred of the local language (in France, Switzerland, Korea...). The general expectation is that you make an effort to learn the language after some time, though. If only to have an easier time ordering food in restaurants and talking to your colleagues during coffee breaks.

For a professor job it depends more on the location. In some countries (e.g. Switzerland, the Netherlands, and many others) some classes are taught in English, so you don't need to know the local language immediately, although that is probably expected after some time. (In fact, I've been told it's a "disadvantage" to know the local language, because only lower-division courses are taught in it, and they are less interesting than upper-division courses.)

In some other places, courses are taught in the local language, but new professors get some teaching-free time (say, six months to a year) before being required to learn enough of the language to teach. (I know an example in Norway.)

In some other countries (e.g. France), you need to know the local language before getting the job, because teaching is mandatory in the local language. But I expect that if you are a good candidate, they will make an exception and arrange for you to only teach during the second semester, so you have time to take a crash course in the local language. But you would have to make it worth their while...

There exists some permanent or long-term research-only positions, all around the world (in France CNRS, in Germany Max-Planck...) It's often possible to get hired for one of these even without speaking the language, since you do not have the constraint of teaching.

In any case, it is impossible to give a general answer to your question. It is not helpful to look at global statistics, because a particular person is interested in getting a job in their own particular subfield. Which countries have the most jobs is not uniform. Even in "the sciences"...

But as you can see from above, learning a language in the hopes that it will land you an academic job is rather pointless. Your academic record is infinitely more valuable. You would have to be in an extremely specific situation for it to give you any kind of edge. Unless you have another reason to learn the language, I expect that your time is better spent on research. You will have time to learn the language later.

Also, most people don't approach the job search as "I'll take any job anywhere in the world". Most people have family, friends... that they like to see every now and then. If your whole world is based somewhere in Western Europe, will you take a job in East Asia or the Americas? Some people will, some people won't, especially if it's a permanent job. (Other make an effort for their postdocs.) So I'm not sure that you can approach this as "I'll learn the language where the most jobs are".

PS: it is not "obvious" that the person you are talking about will need English. In some fields, English is not the main language. For example in "history of [location]" the main language will probably be the language of [location].

PPS: Your Wikipedia link is about R&D, not academia...

I am Finnish. The Nordic countries share much of the culture and climate and are an easy place to move to also for bureaucratic reasons, but in all but the most research-oriented universities the ability to teach in the local language is a requirement or at least a benefit, and it is likely a benefit in even the research-oriented ones. Now I can speak Norwegian, write that and Danish, and communicately intelligibly with Danes and Swedes, too. This increases the size of the job market for me significantly.
I have also read some mathematics articles in French, Spanish and some parts in German, and if I could, I would have read at least some abstracts and maybe articles in Russian, Japanese and Chinese. I can't speak any of these languages, but knowing the basics of French allows me to read French and Spanish mathematics close enough to my research field. Learning the Cyrillic alphabet properly is on my to-do list and should help in understanding paper titles in Russian; right now I can do it only slowly and partially.
If I ever decide to learn another Germanic language (maybe Icelandic or German), knowing one of the Scandinavic languages will certainly help.
Conclusions:

Are you interested in moving to particular countries? Knowing a language spoken there certainly helps. It might be required, but is doubtless helpful.
Is the science in your field done in multiple languages? Learning one that you occasionally meet can be slightly helpful. In some humanities subjects it can be very helpful, from what I hear.
Learning an additional language is easier the more languages you already know, and the effect of closely related languages is obviously even larger. Knowing at least two dissimilar languages is a huge step over knowing just one.

If you don't have any particular preferences for different countries, which I find unlikely, Chinese and Japanese are very different from English, and therefore difficult to learn, but also useful for that reason. French and German are a lot easier and faster to learn, but already useful.
According to rumours, many French jobs require French (I have not checked) and the language is also used in several neighbouring countries and several former colonies. German positions might or might not require the language. At least some Japanese positions do require the language. I don't know about Chinese positions.
You might also consider that every country has to educate teachers and engineers. Much of the education will happen in native languages and employs people with an academic background, though whether this education happens at universities or some other institutes varies by country.


Should I start my CV by telling about myself? Currently, in my CV, the first section is the About me section. It goes like this (I'll reserve the format of the text):

  Broad knowledge, is why my friends are proud of me.
  Never stops asking questions, is what my advisor values in me.

I wonder if writing like this gives makes me look bad. Will the recruiters see me as a confident person, get a better picture of me (which is the impression I want to convey), or will they see me as just arrogant, lacking self-esteem and paranoid?

Next sections are Education, Research Experience and Activities. They are about one page and a half long.

What do you think? Please be frank. Thank you so much.

Thanks to the many people who answered my question, I get that I should save it for the SOP. However, there are some occasions where I'm only asked to send my CV and not a cover letter with it. Should I still keep the "About me" section as a mini SOP in such cases? If it sounds like "platitudes, clichés, and self-compliments" (thanks for being frank, I do need it), how about this idea I just came up with?

  I chose science because I want to know everything. I chose physics because I think it is the buttress of other disciplines.

I can make it better later.

1) This is nonstandard, so people are likely to view you as odd, or at the very least unfamiliar with academic norms.

2) On a CV, you should prioritize specific, tangible achievements over things that literally anyone could say about themselves.  You say you have broad knowledge, but will anyone believe you?  It doesn't do anything to differentiate you from people who could also claim to have broad knowledge.  Save that for your letters of reference.

When I read a CV, I'm looking for why I should hire you. In particular, I'm looking for two things - how useful you're going to be in the first 90 days (how relevant is your experience right now!) and how easy you will learn things for the next 3 years (how broad is your experience, implying you can learn things as this field changes). I'm in computer programming, but I've found this holds for most fields.

I don't care about what your friends say about you. I care about what you have done. So, skills, experience, then education/other (in that order).

Remember - this is a sales pitch. You are marketing and selling yourself. Anyone who tells you a CV is anything else is wrong.


How to tell speakers that their English is terrible? I just had a lecture from someone who has been a senior scientist (and has completed a PhD, post-doc) at a hospital for already 15 years. So I'm assuming this person is experienced in giving talks in English. However, almost one out of three words was completely unintelligible because of a very strong Spanish accent where every word gets morphed into a Spanish-English hybrid word.

I spoke to two people after the lecture and they both said they couldn't follow along because of the strong accent. The questions after the talk were also not about the lecture but about the speaker's field. My impression is that the talk was a waste of time for the two dozen people present.

Now I wonder if the speaker is aware of this problem, my guess is no and as such I feel the need to bring this to the speaker's attention. If it was me I'd very much like to know that I have a problem communicating because I feel like a lack of communication skills can be a very serious barrier to being a good scientist but I don't know if she feels the same way.

My plan is to use an anonymous email address to send this feedback, sandwiched between two compliments to avoid coming off as a negative person.

I think that your plan is based on number of possibly wrong premises. And even if they were mostly right, I doubt such a plan could have any reasonable success. Let's see my reasons.

  I just had a lecture from someone who has been a senior scientist (and has completed a PhD, post-doc) at a hospital for already 15 years.So I'm assuming this person is experienced in giving talks in English.

I've met along the years many senior researchers, even native English speakers, who where definitely not experienced in giving talks, at all. If academic researchers are frequently experienced speakers because, at least, they have teaching duties, some researchers from research institutes are really "lab rats" who rarely deliver talks. To give you an example, a few years ago I was attending a poster session in a conference and I told one of the presenters (a native English speaker) that I was surprised that his work had been accepted as poster presentation and not as an oral one. He told me that it was actually accepted as oral presentation, but he asked for a poster one because he doesn't like to deliver talks.

  My impression is that the talk was a waste of time for the two dozen people present.

Talks can be a waste of time for other reasons than terrible language: slides with unreadable results, talk targeted to the wrong audience etc. I certainly attended many talks that could be considered a waste of time for almost anyone in the rooms, and a large fraction of these talks were delivered by allegedly experienced speakers.

  Now I wonder if the speaker is aware of this problem, my guess is no

In my experience among non-native speakers of English, most of the people is well aware of their level of English and of their pronunciation: your guess is likely wrong.

  I feel the need to bring this to the speaker's attention.

Would you feel the same need if the talk were a waste of time for any other reason? And note that preparing readable slides is usually much easier than fixing pronunciation. And are you planning to do such an action for all the useless talks you will attend in your life?

  I feel the need to bring this to the speaker's attention.

As I said, the speaker is probably well aware of this issue, but can you offer any solution that the speaker is not already aware of?

Improving pronunciation is not something that can be done easily, especially if one is not keen on languages. The speaker might have had good reasons for not having been able to improve pronunciation more than that. Time and money can be two of them. I don't know how many languages you speak -- you speak more than one, right? I speak Italian, my native language, English and French. My level of English is decent, but my level of French is basic. I cannot make great conversations in French, just short sentences, and sometimes I've been misunderstood (e.g., I once asked for a book called Rue des Maléfices and the clerk searched for Roue des Maléfices). I'd love to improve my French pronunciation because I spend most of my vacations there but, guess what, I really cannot find the time to do this. Or I'd like to learn German, because I have many German colleagues and I also found some nice physics book in German that I'd like to read without Google translator. Again, I cannot find enough time to learn German even at a basic level.

To conclude, don't.

Yes, you might want to send the email. I think it will have good and productive effect overall, and help the speaker further in her career a lot. Such criticism, though very unpleasant and even hurtful to hear at first, opens the opportunity to self-improvement.
Your act thus shows that you do care for the speaker. Much more than a person who simply wants to minimize his or her in-comfort, shy away from confrontation and leave the speaker alone and deserted without knowing that secretly the community ignores and disdain her.

As for the fact that the email is anonymous, something that have alerted many commenters here, I disagree with the overall opinion. Academia is full of anonymous feedback, most of which has the potential to be much more hurtful and cardinal than a somewhat amusing email about one's accent. I'm sure the speaker got many harsh and brutal rejections through anonymous peer review, throughout her career, and she's not going to break down because some guy decided to write an anonymous email, peculiar as it sounds. Indeed, academia itself has reserved the right for people "not to stand behind their own opinions" and ideas, so that they feel protected to speak freely, through endless forms of anonymous feedback (reviews and student's feedback, to name a few).


Is talking about quitting to your supervisor a point of no return? I have been feeling miserable about my PhD degree situation for a bit of time, and I just started therapy. So far I've tried not to take drastic decisions such as quitting, because I know I am strongly influenced by my condition, but lately I can't think about anything else.

I wonder if it is possible to convert my contract in a research assistance, or what is a graceful way out so to continue deserving recommendation, or what is an adequate resign notice period, etc., but I know it would much better to finish the PhD degree, and so continue trying.

Is talking about quitting possibilities with your supervisor a point of no return?

Talking about quitting with your supervisor (or someone else in your supervisory committee or department) is not a point of no return. In fact, it can be a turning point.

PhD students all go through ups and downs and part of the job of the supervisor, and others in the department and university (head of department, counsellors, etc) is to help you get through the rough patches.

If you do not talk about it and things get so bad that you actually quit, then it may be a point of no return.

Full disclosure: I quit my PhD. The first my supervisor heard of it was the day I quit. Luckily, someone else gave me another chance a few years later.

There are few points of no return, else we'd all be lying at the bottom of cliffs.

Are you going to GET the PhD?  If so, finishing it and putting up with being miserable for a bit longer is an option you should consider.  If you're convinced you're going to flunk it, talk to your supervisor, it's what he's there for.  Maybe you'll be reassured that in fact you're doing OK.  Maybe he'll agree you should try to succeed at something less ambitious.

If you have the choice, not too long in the future, of having a PhD or not having a PhD, which would you prefer?


What consequences are there if, having already graduated and received my degree, I do not pay up my tuition fees? Background: I just graduated from a US university. I have also received my diploma (both in paper form mailed to me and also in electronic form) certifying that I have received such-and-such a degree.

However, I have not paid the tuition fees for the very last semester in which I enrolled.

I do not plan to have any dealings with that university ever again. Nor do I intend to work in academia.

It appears that eventually they will put some sort of "financial hold" on my student account, but given that I already have what I need (namely the degree), I don't really care about that.

So my question is this: What consequences are there if I never pay those tuition fees? For example, can they (or will they) revoke my degree? Are they likely to pursue me for the money?

New information added: I originally requested that morality and ethics be left out of this question, but it seems clear that with some exceptions (notably NateEldredge), this request has been ignored. So I would like to elaborate a little more on my situation, in the hopes that the focus will be moved a little further away from calling me a thief and instead answering my above questions.

(1) I last took classes in the spring semester and was supposed to graduate then, but because of a mistake on my part, I missed the deadline to apply for graduation that semester. And so in order to graduate, I had to register for the summer semester as well. I did not take any classes in the summer semester. I did not take up any additional resources during the summer semester, unless you include whatever little manpower was required to process my graduation. Nonetheless I was fully billed for it, as if I took a full load of classes.

(2) This is perhaps controversial, but I personally view the US higher education system as being costly to the point of injustice. I have already paid >$200k in tuition and fees into the system and now I am being billed for another semester in which I took no classes.

The money is not the issue. If I go ahead with this plan, I will donate every penny of that semester's worth of tuition fees to some worthy charity instead. The issue is that I am disgusted with having to give away even more of my money to the bloated, inefficient, "not-for-profit" US higher education system.

Some here have called me a thief. But I prefer to see this as a small act of civil disobedience---akin to what Aaron Swartz did, when he "stole" millions of articles from JSTOR and refused to compensate JSTOR for the "damages". (Note: By no means do I consider this potential act of mine as great and noble as Swartz's; I'm just trying to draw an analogy here.)

(3) BTW, I am an international student. So there is the option of me simply leaving and never returning to the US, in which case the concerns associated with bad credit are moot. Although I would also like to have the option of staying in the US, and so I do welcome and appreciate the answers given thus far regarding credit issues.

Some universities (perhaps most) will refuse to provide transcripts for students who owe money. Example.

This can be a serious problem for you. Some employers insist upon an official transcript as a condition of employment. Your  diploma or similar certificate  will not suffice; the  employer wants a document directly from the university, which has not passed through your hands (to avoid the risk of you falsifying it). If the university won't send a transcript because you didn't pay them, too bad, no job for you.

Also, you say you are done with academia, but if you should change your mind someday: US  graduate programs generally require an official transcript from your undergraduate university as a condition of admission. So no grad school for you, either.

Academic matters aside, the university also has all the same options that would be available to any other creditor. This side of things is more on topic for our sibling site, http://money.stackexchange.com, but as a partial overview:

They can report you to a credit agency, which will damage your credit score and make it difficult or impossible for you to get credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc. Bad credit can also keep you from getting a job in certain industries, especially defense and other work that requires a security clearance.
They can refer your account to a collection agency, who will try pretty hard to bother you until you pay.
In principle, they could sue you, and they'd almost certainly win, as they can easily prove you owe the money. This would enable them to get a court order to seize your assets (eg take money directly from your bank account) or garnish your wages (take money directly from your paycheck).

Another point not mentioned by others is this:  College debts CANNOT be included in any subsequent bankruptcy actions on your part.  In other words, if you owe your university for your last semester's tuition and figure you'll simply file for bankruptcy and "wipe the slate clean" your college debts will still be with you after you've filed for bankruptcy.  And, with that bankruptcy action following you for at least seven years into any requests for credit that you might make - including mortgages - it seems a pointless exercise.  In addition to credit worthiness, a bankruptcy affects your attempts to get a job, to obtain a security clearance, and even to obtain rental housing.

Pulling a fast one on your university is not something you first thought up.  This idea is NOT original by you.  Universities are plagued with a few shysters like you every year.  That's why it's so surprising to many of us that the university allowed you to think that you've graduated and "got away with it."  If I were you, I'd start looking over my shoulder at my credit report, waiting for collection agencies to start calling at all hours, and find either your bank account or paycheck docked the cost of your tuition - plus attorney's fees - all actions you will have no control over.  You might think you've gotten away with something, but you'll learn the hard way that the real world (beyond academia) has a way of dealing with shysters and thieves.

The amount you've already paid for your education has no bearing on the matter.


How to inform a student about my appreciation of his/her original solutions In the final exam of a course, a student has solved some problems in a really ingenious way.
He gets perfect score anyway.
What is the appropriate way to inform him about my appreciation of his solutions?
(Also what if I don't have the occasion to meet him again?)

Just write the student an email and express your appreciation. Don't overthink this. Then again, don't go over the top ("you are the best student I ever had") - you never know how he will take this.

Depending on how well you know the student and on whether you would actually be willing to do so, inform him that you would be happy to write a glowing recommendation for him if he ever needs one, e.g., for admission to grad school.

And as Compass comments, think about how you can help the student develop even further. Do you have any follow-up courses, maybe even advanced ones that the student would usually not take but that you think he would be able to follow? Tell him. Can you give him a research project? Take him on as an Research or Teaching Assistant?

At some point, this turns from "helping the student grow" to "nurturing your own future grad student", and that's OK. This is a mutually beneficial thing, after all. And it's never too early to snap up the promising students. If you don't do it, others will.

You already did: you gave him a perfect score.


ResearchGate: an asset or a waste of time? There are now may different ways of increasing your research visibility: Google Scholar, laboratory/faculty/industry or even personal websites, LinkedIn, to name a few.

In your opinion, how does ResearchGate fit into all of this ? Is it really a good way of increasing the visibility of your publications and finding fellows with common research interests, or is it just a "waste of time"?

It's hard to predict how this will develop in the future. As is, I have yet to hear any positive success story from my peers. All I've heard of ResearchGate  are complaints about their invitation spam.

If you sign up (or are already signed up), make sure to carefully check all settings. There are some "hidden" settings that will repeatedly send out "Invitations" and even "Invitation reminders" to your peers (make sure to disable this right at signup time, before "claiming" a single paper!). You can imagine that if your peer gets a dozen of them each week, he will get annoyed. And ReseachGate uses your name for the invitation, so he will get annoyed at you.

Before "requesting" a paper on Researchgate, make sure they have signed up. Otherwise, use regular email (even better, just use regular email right away!)
When you request a paper from a non-user, they will be sent an invitation letter, but they cannot answer without joining: researchgate does not include contact information in your request!?!

Other than that, I have the impression that ResearchGate is mostly used by students, not by established researchers. Therefore, do not expect much high-quality interactions to happen.

Most of my peers that were on RG once, seem to have left. This is not a good sign.

If they don't manage to get high-quality interactions happen soon, their name may end up remaining associated with spam. They may have been too aggressive at boosting their user numbers quickly. The overall idea is good, but they need to find a way to get quality contributions, not only quantity. As is, I see them only strong on the quantitative side so far...

Honestly, in my opinion there is one thing really important for the visibility of your research:

Make it available. Publish with open access, or a publisher where you can put the preprint on your webpage. Make sure that Google Scholar indexes it, because that is what everybody I know uses for searching literature. You must get Google Scholar to return a PDF link for your article.
Make it available. Also put data sets, detailed description, source code, etc. on your web page; offer collaboration.

If you make it easy for others to build upon your work, they are more likely to do so. In particular, you must make it easier to build upon your work, than on alternatives. Making a RG profile does not really help; effectively it just means your data is spread to one more site. Instead, put a lot of information on your homepage.

Here is an example. I'm convinced that one of the reasons why he has been very successful is that you can download data and software and tutorials right on his homepage. Compare to his ResearchGate profile (I was even surprised he has one)  - it's a dead duck, absolutely useless. A Google Scholar Profile may be much more useful, as it will be linked from any article, making it easy for people to reach your other publications. Again, the same example: Google Scholar does a much better job at providing an automatic publication list for you.

IMHO, Google Scholar is a must, because the profile will make it easier to get updated on your other publications. I visit Scholar profiles quite often; in particular to see the latest and the most cited work of an author of which I already have discovered a good article.

I don't really think that ResearchGate is a waste of time.

EDIT:

As this answer was being downvoted because it was not originally focused on ResearchGate, following I try to explain why this social network is not a waste of time for me.

You can already search for journal articles and or researchers in Google Scholar and Scopus, to name just a few. ResearchGate gives a social approach to it. InResearchGate you can follow researchers, so that you can get notified when any of them publishes new papers, for instance. Moreover, you can set your profile and tell other researchers what you are dealing with, what topics you are interested in, and so on.

I think it could still be quite more useful if some functionalities were added (maybe adding the ability of creating, announcing and promoting à-la-Facebook events, which means conferences, workshops, symposiums, etc., for instance), but it is actually becoming the social network for scientific researchers, in my humble perception.

THE REST OF THE ORIGINAL ANSWER:

I personally recommend having your own academic profile in the following social networks/tools:

ReseachGate, It is nearly the Facebook for researchers, so you just must be in.
A personal website (better if it is hosted by your University) - With all your contact information, teaching and research info (the info that you consider to be interesting for those people that are looking for you at the Internet). Keep it as clean and simple as possible.
LinkedIn - More professional than academic. One doesn't know when it can be useful.

Optional but also interesting:

Twitter, A simple and fast way to share short messages, interesting pieces of info, etc. with your audience, whoever they are.
About.me or similar, A kind of landing page that you can configure to show all your very basic information, together with links to all your Internet profiles, etc. all with a minimalist and nice touch. You can add it to your e-mail signature.
A blog, Basically a place where you can say things. It could be integrated within your website.


A team member of a coursework software development project didn't contribute in any way. Can I remove his name from the project? I am the project manager of a small team of five undergraduate developers who have been working for months on a large system for our Senior Capstone project. Four members of the team, including myself, have put in an extensive amount of work on this project. The remaining member failed to contribute anything at all to the team project (not only did this team member fail to contribute any source code, he failed to contribute in any way at all).

I spoke with this individual multiple times about how failing to contribute, or even contributing minimally, could result in having to retake the Capstone course. Still the individual made no contribution. I spoke with the Professor leading our Capstone team on multiple occasions, and provided documentation supporting my claims. This documentation, along with several peer evaluations, should give the Professor enough information to make fair decisions involving each of our grades, which is really none of my business at all.

What is my business is that this fifth team member has his name displayed on work that he did not contribute to in any way. My question then, is can I remove his name from the completed system?

Can I remove someone's name from an academic software development project that didn't contribute a single line of code?

Just to focus on the title itself; lines of code contributed is not an accurate summary of contribution. This is a variation on the workman's fallacy of "management is useless because they don't directly make the product".

For example, someone can contribute by working together with the others, and due to working with everyone in different steps, they end up not writing the code and have only contributed to the design of the application. Or testing. Or analysis.
As a second example, maybe their initial code ended up being refactored due to a midway design change, thus technically not having their contribution added to the final product while still having contributed.

I'm aware that this is not the case here, but I want to advise you to refrain from using "not contributing a single line of code" as the main justification. When I read the title, before clicking the link, it implied that you were blindly measuring value by measuring LOC which would put you at fault for using a faulty metric.

However, as this person didn't do anything at all, let's address the real situation.

Whether or not removing the name is warranted depends on whether you are being graded collectively or not. If you all share the same grade, then this person should be prevented from mooching/piggybacking off of your results.

If the grading is done individually, and the professor is already aware (and has evidence) of this person's lack of contribution, then removing the name is unnecessary. It would only be a matter of principle/pride.
While I can certainly understand your desire to not give credit to someone who did not contribute; keep in mind that doing so may come across as petty and may even suggest to outside observers that this person was being ostracized by their team mates, which can end up as a mitigating circumstance in that person's favor.

In either case, I suggest you ask the professor on the right course of action. Since they are already aware of the issue (and presumably have not refuted your claim, since you didn't mention them doing so), having the professor agree to remove this person's name from the project safeguards you from possible negative inferences about having done so.

No, you can't. Bill Gates doesn't write code himself since Windows ME. Does it make possible to say he is not contributing to the development of Microsoft products?
Steve Jobs was not a software developer neither software engineer nor software team lead. He was a designer. Does it make him useless for the software corporation he was CEO of?


Is it standard that universities in some countries don't give affiliated students/faculty email addresses? All my experience in academia in western countries is that if you're an enrolled student or affiliated faculty, you get an email address from that university. Are there countries where this is not common practice? And if so, is there a good reason for not providing one?

Many universities, especially private universities, in  India do not provide an email address to its students. This is due to the cost of maintaining email server, ensuring confidentiality etc. Even in top universities in India such as the IITs, where everyone is provided with an email address, the email server is suspect and fails.
While I was teaching a graduate class, I circulated a sheet in which they were supposed to write down their email address. I would then make a group and circulate any class related notes or ideas. I noticed that 90% of the students gave gmail or yahoo address and not the institute email address. When I inquired further, I was told they never had an institutional email address at their undergraduate university and are not accustomed to it.
Many faculty in Indian universities also do not use official email address due to reliability problems. You can notice this from noticing their publications. The address of the corresponding author refers to an university while the email address is generally yahoo/gmail.

No, it's not standard.
It's the same as with all institutions everywhere - if you are employed by that institution, you get an email address that makes it clear you are affiliated with that institution. This means you can send emails that immediately identify you as a member of that institution. Once you leave the institution, you will also lose access to that email (or you will get another different email address), which again makes it clear that you are no longer a member of that institution. This has obvious advantages such as making it harder to spoof others.
This applies for not just universities, but also companies big and small.


Is it plagiarism to reuse your own full-text material from a previous conference in a new conference? I am a reviewer at a conference. An author submitted a paper, and I searched the   author's previous papers. I found they have one paper with a very similar title accepted  to a conference in 2012. I downloaded the paper, and about 1.5 pages of the 6 page document is exactly the same as the 2012 paper (all words and everything else.) So is that plagiarism?

There is no reference to their own 2012 work. Without paying attention to the rest of paper? Should I drop that or not?

Update:
Yes the paper was accepted and indexed on IEEE web site. and I download the paper from IEEE web site.

Yeah, copying 25% of a prior paper without attribution is definitely self-plagiarism.  Report it to the program chairs of the conference, and let them sort out how to manage the problem from there.

Additional information, for any coming from different publication cultures: electrical engineering / computer science conferences are serious publications that take originality very seriously, and IEEE policy on the matter is quite explicit.

Answer to the question: no it is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined as passing off someone else's text, idea, representation as your own. As the author in question is actually the author of the old paper, it is not plagiarized.

If the author signed over the exclusive copyright, it is a copyright violation.

If your conference requires contributions to be novel (but see below), then it fails on that account - regardless whether the abstract is copy&paste or rephrased (and even in that case you may report that the citations are not appropriate, and previous work is missing).

In addition, as reviewer you may decide that it is not interesting enough (e.g. because it is known already) even if there is no formal novelty requirement.

Personally I find  self-plagiarism a misleading and unfortunate term (but yes I do know what it means, and I totally agree that we need to fight the underlying problems). But IMHO is not a straightforward extension of plagiarism, and in my experience, there are better terms to unambiguously name the problems.

In addition, the term has the clear connotation of an offense - but whether and how much one should cite oneself depends a lot on circumstances. In particular, not saying that this your idea is 5 years old is offensive (only) if there is a requirement or expectation of novelty. On the other hand, one would expect a lifetime-achievement award lecture to be full of widely known ideas.

But even in a paper I'd not cite all my previous papers that are somehow relevant but only the one (or maybe two) that is of most use to the reader. Excessive self-citation isn't better than not citing yourself - it is just a different problem.

I thus find it much more practical to require a contribution to be novel (no duplicate publication) and substantial (no salami publication - though for a conference presentation less is often more). There are further requirements (outside the self-plagiarism questions), e.g. the contribution must be the authors' own (no plagiarism).

With students if necessary for the purpose I clarify that novelty includes written from scratch. In addition, even if that is independent of self-plagiarism, I make people aware of the fact that they can violate the copyright of somehing they hold the (in my legislation inalienable) authorship rights to.

(I do think though, that academia would be better off if the novelty requirement would be somewhat dropped in favor of replication studies)

I'd like to throw in a slightly different view from a field with presumably very different conference culture, which I'd formulte as

When reviewing conference abstracts, I ask myself:

Overall quality (as far as one can tell from 200 words)?
How well does it fit with the interests of the audience?
I rather disregard "global" novelty compared to novelty to the audience at that conference.
Our conferences do not have novelty requirements and neither do they ask for an exclusive copyright transfer (unlike our journals). Ultimately, if the topic is too old and well-known, it will fail at the "interesting?" question.

Long story:
we submit 200 words or maybe 1 page abstracts - so 1.5 copied pages are plain impossible. More importantly, our conferences don't count as peer-reviewed publication, for that we publish in a proper journal (we often don't even have conference proceedings but instead have a special issue of one of the reputable peer-reviewed journals). In particular with my medical colleagues I see a trend that they are concerned someone could steal their idea - so they will present only results that have already been published in a peer-reviewed journal (pretty much the opposite of "novelty").

For me the important point of a conference presentation is to tell the audience something interesting for them. I freely admit that I hate presentations that don't convey any useful message to anyone in the audience beyond "I, the author, am a hero" or "This [totally useless crap] is sooo new".

If there is already an accepted paper, I include the reference into the conference abstract, for several reasons: the reference serves as "topic has passed peer-review" tag and of course it is an additional advertisement for the paper. The propriety* of citing oneself is only a minor point as we don't have strict novelty requirements; and the lower the number of allowed words, the less usual it is.

Due to our few 100 word limits, I'd also never look for much originality in a conference abstract: once you've found a formulation that saves 5 words, you're not gonna give it up easily ;-)

As I work at the interface between some disciplines doing statistical data analysis for chemical data and medical diagnostic problems, I attend conferences with rather disjunct attendees.

Consequently,

I've been presenting the same software (poster) at three conferences (within 2 months) with a total of probably close to 2000 attendees but an overlap that I estimate to be < 20 people. I submitted it to those conferences because I thought it interesting for their respective audiences and I did not expect many people to attend more than one of them.
I'm invited to speak in more detail about a topic that I first presented 3 years ago at a chemometrics conference. (The paper was published 2 years ago and of course I refer to it: after all I want people to read it - but not to the previous conference)  Again, I am the overlap in attendance between the statistics-heavy first conference and the application-centered conference now.

And, by the way, I was taught about scientific writing to avoid synonyms and always try to stick to the same terms (once good terms are found) - even if that is repetitive throughout the paper, and use easy language in order to be unambiguous and as understandable as possible to other non-native English readers. This is another source of not so very original formulations.


Peer-correction / evaluation of homework Many MOOCs have a system where enrolled students get points for submitting homework, and for grading a fixed number of their peers' homework (On a MOOC i took earlier, each student had to evaluate at least three other randomly selected submissions).

I'm wondering if anyone has used this approach in a physical classroom with handwritten homework submissions. Apparently this is legal in the US, but I'd like to know if anyone has first hand experience with managing the logistics.

I'd keep a dedicated 'tutorial' hour for this where I could solve and discuss the homework problems on the board, and students would grade problems. Perhaps the most selfish benefit is that I am spared the drudgery of grading an scoring a stack of homework.

Peer evaluation (offline) is common in many universities and schools.

It is beneficial for students to see what their peers have written and to learn from their own and their peer's mistakes and strengths.

However, a well-formulated evaluation matrix would be necessary for objective evaluation.

In my University, short papers are almost always evaluated by students themselves. There is blinding and we even attempted three independent, blinded evaluations and awarded the maximum marks obtained if and only if all the three evaluations were within 15% difference range.

Hope this helps.

Avoiding a stack of scoring is a completely valid reason to do this.

I have about 80 students this semester. If I spend 10 minutes evaluating each student in a week then that's 13.3 hours per week. If you consider that I'm physically in class for 9 hours per week and reviewing and preparing for those classes is another 9 hours per week, then I'm already at 31 hours before you start thinking about other obligations.

And then you sit back and realize that a 10 minute evaluation isn't time for anything more than marking problems right or wrong and scribbling a few pointers for next time.


What to do if most of my students have switched to a better lecturer's class? I teach a certain course which is part of the obligatory undergraduate curriculum. I teach two groups out of four; the other two groups are taught by two other lecturers. In one group I have about 20-30 students. The other group also started with the same number, but students left the group gradually, and now there remain only 5 or even less; the others go to the other lecturer who gives the same lesson in parallel. One reason is probably that I am a new teacher and still not very good at teaching. Another reason is that the other lecturer is very good.

I feel that some of the 5 students remaining in my class do so only because they are being polite. I appreciate it very much since I put a lot of effort in preparing the lessons, but it is not very efficient for me or for them. So, I thought of suggesting to the remaining students that they move to the other lecturer's group. This way, they will have a better lecturer and I will have more time for research  (the other lecturer said it's OK with him). What might be the implications of such a step?

UPDATE: Thanks a lot for all the feedback. While there are many great answers, the one thing that convinced me to keep going was the fact that this is the only way I can become a better teacher. So today I came to class as usual. For some reason, the number of students rised to 10.

You should discuss this with your department chair (the person who runs your department). While the teaching chair (or graduate/undergraduate chair) might seem more relevant, it is the chair of the department who you have to keep happy. Their opinion matters more than ours.

Describe the dwindling number of students as a concern, then see where the conversation goes.  Instead of offering your suggestion, invite your chair to offer their thoughts and suggestions first, before you launch into yours.  Who knows?  Perhaps they will suggest closing down your section on their own and you get what you want.  Their response probably also depends on the attractiveness of your research alternative versus their need to find instructors to cover sections they've already committed to offering.

Your chair may also be glad you invited the conversation, because they may have some feedback based on their own observations and conversations with your colleagues and students they would like to share with you.  They may be able to tell you how you could get better so you could one day be the instructor who draws away everyone else's students.

But I agree with and upvoted DBB's answer, that trying to dump the class could make you look bad and that if you care about getting good at teaching, you should simply "push through" and deliver the lectures.

Student perspective here: In addition to improving your oration, make sure your lesson materials are good.

For me, that's been the single highest most important thing for a good class: quality visual aids, whether it be live math on a white/chalk board, or a slideshow). It's really important that they don't have too much text (that's what the textbook/google is for!). It's astounding how many people get this wrong, both in professional and academic settings. Slideshows are meant to illustrate your point, and add to your speech, and not just be a transcript of everything you said.

There are lots of public resources for improving general presentation skills, which would carry over quite naturally to lecturing. Perhaps those are worth checking out


Why do Americans care so much about recommendation letters? In Europe, we judge students based on their work and abilities. How are their grades? Do they have relevant work experience (TA/RA, maybe part-time industry work, etc)? What projects have they done? What courses have they taken? And of course the odd recommendation letter is always a nice bonus.

We expect students to write up a summary of all these things (it's called a resumé) upon which they are to be judged, and further detailed inquiry can then be made during a possible interview process.

However, as I understand it, it seems to be quite different in the USA. Reference letters is all that matters. Be a mediocre student, but have a good friendship with Professor Abstract Algebra? You're as good as made. Be a fantastic student, but be a bit shy or having done most of your work independently of the professors? Tough luck.

I am particularly bemused by so many of the questions on this very site where professors come to talk about awkward situations where they are being forced to write a recommendation letter for some student that they don't even know. Who the heck is Robert James? I lecture to hundreds of students, for Christ's sake!

Or when you in turn get students here asking for questions about how to approach a professor they've spoken very little to all year and ask them to write a recommendation letter.

And yes, I get it. One day, one time, you'll get a fantastic reference letter from a professor who actually knows and has worked with a particular student, and that reference letter will give you a better understanding of the capabilities and experiences of this student. I get that. But that's only part of the whole process here in Europe: That's the bonus I mentioned in my first paragraph, but we don't make it our everything. We realize that some people might get luckier with recommendation letters than others.

So why do Americans put so much weight on  recommendation letters?

I think Bryan's answer gives a nice perspective on the issue. A perfect system does not exist, and different continents have developed different (imperfect) ways of dealing with the fundamental recruiting problem that it is hard to judge whether a specific student (or employee) will perform or not.

What I want to add is that, if you peek behind the covers, the European and American systems don't actually differ all that much. You assert that in Europe "your CV is all that counts". That is, unfortunately, quite naive. The CV of your average student is simply not expressive enough to be "all that counts" - good grades are at best a weak indicator of research potential, and (despite your counterexample from France), also in many places in Europe many students have very good grades, to the extent of being low-value as a discriminator in hiring. Grades also do little to measure the soft factors such as motivation or being a good team player, which ultimately matter more than whether a student had an A or a B for some largely unrelated undergrad course.

How professors in Europe largely have dealt with this uncertainty is by personally asking the professors that the student worked with before what their impression of the student was - so you still have your "recommendations", but not through written letters but through informal email or telephone exchanges. This was possible because traditionally, students in (at least central) Europe were not particularly mobile - most prospective PhD students did their undergrad in the same university, a close-by university, or a different university where the professors are already in close contact. Applicants from other places were often rejected outright. Now times are (slowly) changing and more and more PhD students come from abroad - and, lo and behold, suddenly formal recommendation letters are becoming important as well.

Another aspect that I am missing in your question that at least central and southern Europe has historically had a problem with rampant nepotism in academia. So I find it particularly curious that you draw Europe as a haven of objective hiring strategies.

I think it's partly a historical thing.  From what I remember reading in my history classes, recommendation letters were big during the industrial revolution.  I seem to remember a passage where the historian talked about it literally being a case of job or no job for a laborer moving to a new city.  Think about it: they weren't looking for real skills or talent, since anyone could work a machine.  They probably cared more about your willingness to work stolidly and follow orders reliably, since you were easy to replace but having to do so could slow down production.  They would want to know you were committed and wouldn't cause problems, and the best way to confirm that would be the word of a past employer.  Nowdays, skills and experience are far more important since we do more specialized work, but employers still want to get a reading on your character before they spend the money to make you part of their team, as it's very costly to hire a new person and then have to terminate them and hire again when they can't adapt to the new workplace.


What to do with an overtly exasperating colleague in computer science? I am working on my undergraduate research project in an HPCC. Whoever does programming knows this is a "teach-yourself" skill. Everytime a problem arises, you search the wealth of tutorials and guides on the Internet, you ask in an specialized forum and the last resource is to consult a colleague (everybody is very occupied with their own business).

A few weeks ago, a new MSc candidate entered our lab and was assigned a seat next to me. She seems unable to go beyond very basic commands like executing a for loop in a Bash script. We helped during the first weeks, but she is making no progress. I myself handed her down a couple of tutorials and scripts. What exasperates us is that the more frustrated she gets the more she starts mumbling expecting that someone will approach and solve the problem for her, not to mention that she interrupts every five minutes asking the same question we have answered several times. We spoke about it in the most kindly possible way, now she says we are bullying her!

She is completely unprepared and we are starting to think that she lied to get accepted by our supervisor. She is destroying the amicable relations in our lab and affecting performance of almost everybody. I decided to program the most I can in my laptop instead of using the HPCC, but a process that gets done in five minutes at home is solved in seconds in the lab.

We don't want to mess up her reputation with our supervisor, but we got to find solutions. Does anyone had a similar situation with a colleague? How would you solve it in the most diplomatic way?

UPDATE: Group meeting this morning. Our supervisor found out she has done nothing. She blame us. Our supervisor said it is not our business to solve her problems, she might have spoken them out a couple of weeks ago. She (our supervisor) asked her to separate an appointment to talk privately. Let's see what happens...

I will try to present yet another approach than the ones in the answers above. I don't consider it a definite solution, rather a way to go that may work for someone and may not for someone else. (And also, I would much more prefer to speak to someone higher-up, if you can; that's what the other answers discuss.)

The thing is: Be honest, but without judging the other person's qualities at all. I had been in such a situation before: person coming to me with simple problems that fall in the "googlable" or "in every book" or "in every course" or "in every tutorial" category, again and again.

The honest answer was, for me at least: Well, we have discussed a similar thing before. I'm sorry but I have got other things to do as well. I'm willing to help you with the burdens, but please, try to [point out some good resources here] before approaching me, and if you approach me, please make it specific enough so that we don't lose too much time solving the problems.

It is true, honest but not rude. After all, it is your time, your studies and you yourself who'll go on the market to sell your results, and you need to be productive. If this is a serious annoyance that makes your productivity drop significantly, they need to know it.

Is she pretty?  This may sound like the most sexist question possible, but in some STEM courses/disciplines particularly with a low female quota this can be a large contributing factor to not getting used early to organizing your workloads and learning yourself.  Because those male coeds who get along well with their stuff have little better to do than fall over themselves providing help and support in study groups.

Been there, done that, got no T-shirt (800 coeds starting with me, about 16 female students among them).  Now depending on the college and courses you are in, you still need the skills and brains to pass.  There are hard limits to how far you'll get just by being someone to look at.  Which is not restricted to females, actually: it is well-known that taller and/or more self-confident men convey much more competency than their less visually gifted counterparts.  But they are less likely to be the victim of unabating "let me do as much for you as I can" attack waves.

Whatever the reasons, it is becoming apparent that she is not well-prepared for the kind of workflow she is supposed to be part of.  That does not have to mean she is dead baggage: one thing that comes to mind to me is oboists: one of the most time-consuming and exasperating part of playing that instrument is making your reeds.  As an amateur, you easily spend an hour on a reed, and then it will work any amont of time from 5 minutes to several months.  Several professional oboists have a side business of making reeds for amateurs.  You can perfectly well perform on your instrument while never making a reed yourself.  But it makes you dependent on the skills and availability of someone else.  Of course, you'd not expect another colleague in your orchestra to make your reeds without compensation.

So at any rate, it is clear that your colleague here is not able to do her work without the involvement of others.  That's a department and managing problem.  You need to get together, figure out what is missing here, figure out what is required for jump-starting her into become productive in the manner expected in your department, figure out who can help with that in what manner and what effort, and figure out how to free the resources necessary to do that.

Basically there are three possible outcomes:
a) she'll be more work than she gets done.  This will not work out, separate.
b) she'll require work on a continuing basis, but deliver more than one puts in.  This requires proper work arrangements and understandings.  One needs to evaluate whether the net benefit justifies the pay and the work disruption.
c) she can develop into a productive member of your team once she gets over the culture shock and develops the necessary skills.

It is clear that this will not work without someone originally carrying some of the weight, and the self-organizing of that does not work well.  Fingerpointing will not get this situation under control.  Actively trying to fix this on a department level will keep the cost under control, will make it clear who needs to get credit and responsibility for carrying that initial cost, and will make it clear how to assess where one is getting.

This is an unproductive and aggravating situation for all of the involved.  Conflicting plans, targets, and expectations are not going to help.


How do you send personalized information to each student in Moodle? My institution uses Moodle as our learning management system. I want to send some information to each student that is personalized to each student but without any other students seeing it. This is a need I often have from time to time, but my most recent need is to give each student a  unique ID to access a separate online resource.

In the past, I have done things like posting a spreadsheet with all student information, except that I somewhat hid their student IDs by only showing the last four digits of their student IDs: that way, students could identify which row applied to them, but could not easily tell which one applied to any other student (unless they already know their student ID). This is an unsatisfying solution, since a student who knows another student's ID would then know their information.

Is there a way to send small bits of information customized to each student? I'm imagining some sort of interface where I could maybe upload a spreadsheet with each row having a student IDs and the custom information in other columns, and then students would only see own their uploaded information, not any other students' information.

Edit: In response to one of the answers: my point here is that I am looking for an automated solution where I can post feedback to many students (whether 20 or 200) at one time, yet personalized based on some criteria (in my example, giving them individual IDs for an external computer system). So, individual entry of feedback one-by-one is not an option for my need here.

Note: I've searched around other StackExchange sites, and Academia SE seems to be the one that would be best for responding to specific how-to questions for Moodle. I'm surprised there is no tag for "Moodle" or even for "learning-management-system".

Here's a quick thought based on a different learning management system (LMS). Sometimes in other LMSes you can upload feedback to assignments: you batch download each person's file, add comments, and upload each file with exactly the same name. Perhaps you could try a workaround like that, perhaps requiring you to create a fake or trivial assignment and get everyone to submit it.

For a more general approach that is LMS-independent, you could use a spreadsheet and your email program with mail merge. That is, one field would be email address and another field would be the comment, and optionally you could have the person's first name in another field. Then you could send a generic message with blanks filled in by the program. (You could send out a practice message to your own addresses or without any personalized content beyond student names and you can check your Sent log to see if it worked right.)

(The latter solution defeats the purpose of a LMS, but limited feature sets do, as well.)

With so many ways to give feedback within moodle I wonder why you are creating a separate spreadsheet with feedback in it? You can type feedback directly into any assignment activity you create in moodle. Even if the assignment was a traditional paper pencil assessment you can still create an assignment and post the feedback within it for each student.

You could make private wikis in moodle for each student where you can post comments. In addition you can put each student in their own group and make a forum that only group members can see.

Another option is to send a message through moodle with the personalized info. By far the simplest answer is to avoid creating externalll spreadsheets and use the feedback options already built into moodle for assignments and quizzes.

You could also start a thread at moodle.org to see if this is a feature the larger community may want to include in a future  release. Lastly surely no institution uses moodle without some sort of on-campus support. Have you talked to your support team on campus?


Why do research faculty pursue administrative positions, such as dean, provost, president, etc. ? Do such positions spell the end of one's research? At a recent seminar talk, I was amazed to note that one of the two coauthors (not the presenter) was the president of a large and well-known university, since I had always assumed that taking on such a position would necessarily mean the end of a research career.

Are there m/any examples of people that continue to do substantial amounts of research when in a senior administrative position, such as dean, provost, president, etc.?
Do research faculty often become deans, presidents, etc.? Why do faculty usually do this? (I understand that there might be a pay increase, but does it usually indicate that they no longer want to do research as intensely?)

In these positions, one gets to influence the direction of the whole university, rather than the direction of the research of 1 to n individuals. At such magnitude, one can effect more change.

Often people get disgruntled with the way things are run at the level they are currently working. The only way to fix things is to move to more managerial positions. Don't like the way the Masters program is run? Become Coordinator of the Masters Programme. Don't like the way the faculty is being run? Become Dean.

Some do, some don't. Naturally, administration is different kind of work from that of the scholar. There are only so many hours in the day. But administrators have to come from somewhere, don't they?


How might being disciplined for participating in a non-violent protest on a public college affect my academic career? I go to a government-owned school that has certain policies regarding a student's speech, namely:

That speech shall not be discriminatory/offensive.
That on-campus protests take place only at a "Hyde Park" location in the student center.

Suppose I decide to form a protest and violate rule #2, and perhaps unintentionally violate rule #1, incurring a disciplinary action of record. How would my doing so affect my ability to pursue a degree at a different school?

Probably not at all.  Most academic institutions support freedom of speech.  However, this depends on the goal of the protest and the type/location of the hypothetical institution.  For instance, I imagine some religious institutions might not hire someone who had protested for abortion rights.

These policies are at the same time repressive and ridiculous.

First, because the fundamental principle of protesting is causing  inconvenience, annoynance, displeasure - so a designated "speech zone" is the same as "protest where we don't notice you and it doesn't matter".

Second, because any speech that management doesn't like (or that a student group which can put pressure on management to repress speech doesn't like) will be defined to be offensive. It offends them, after all.

Thus the only thing that happened is that you were involved in organizing a protest. If the regime in the state you live in is highly repressive, then maybe that means you'll have trouble getting into another school (although I kind of doubt it); if it isn't, then you won't.

Note that these policies are extremely repressive and are in my opinion contradiction of  fundamental academic principle.


Would it be okay to provide a template when asking reference? I am applying for grad school this year and I am considering sending an email to ask a professor to write me a reference. He had previously agreed to write me a letter because I took one of his advanced courses.

I am not sure if it'd be okay for me to offer to provide a template to him for the letter. The reason I want to do this is I will be applying for a PhD in a different, though quite related, field, and I want to make sure that he knows what the advisory committee will be specifically looking for in his letter, and make sure that his letter corresponds well with my statement of purpose.

Is this an acceptable practice between professors and students? Or would they consider it offending since he is supposed to provide his independent opinion? And if it is okay, how can I offer it in an appropriate way?

Personally, I would be somewhat offended if a student gave me a template for a letter, and I wouldn't use it.  (Unless I had asked for one, which personally I would not.)

However, it is perfectly appropriate to say, "I believe that the committee will probably be interested in my ability to dangle participles and reticulate splines; it would help if your letter could address this."  It is also fine to include a list or resume of your other activities that he may not be aware of, but leave it up to him how to use this list.

It's quite possible that your professor has written letters for students in this different field before and already knows what is expected.  Also, for letters which are submitted online, the writer normally gets a message from the requesting institution explaining what issues should be addressed.

I will prefer to give template. For higher research oriented studies the reference letter must contain the related information, and each institution has its own taste, so to create more chances of getting admission you need to give the template to the one who is referencing.


Is it okay to have a good (not strong) recommendation letter from a well-known scientist? I approached my internship advisor for an LOR while applying to Masters. She said she would not be able to provide a strong one but a good one based on an internship that lasted for two months. I approached her because she holds a PhD from a good university in the USA and she's published papers in top-tier conferences and journals. Will it adversely affect my application? Will it hold as much weight as a strong one because it's she who's recommending it?

Will it adversely affect my application?

No, but it probably won’t help it much either.

  Will it hold as much weight as a strong one because it's she who's recommending it?

Absolutely not.

Keep in mind what “strong recommendation” actually means. It’s not about the forcefulness of the language; it’s about the quality of evidence that the letter provides for your success in the graduate program. The writer’s reputation/credibility is definitely part of that, but that informs how credible I should find the evidence they write about, not just how credible I should find their unjustified opinion.

Compelling evidence from someone relatively unknown has more weight than a bare thumps-up from a superstar.

This is probably subjective because it will depend on the person reading the letter, and whether he/she knows the person who wrote the letter personally.

The way I see it: if the letter does not clearly state or imply anything negative it will just be seen as a good recommendation. If however the letter mentions (or implies!) negative points you may be better off with a good or excellent letter from a less well-known scientist.


Can I apply to other postdocs after accepting an unofficial postdoc offer? I am a PhD student in Applied mathematics. I submitted my PhD thesis (not yet defended) and am applying for postdocs. Until now I have gotten two unofficial postdoc offers: the PIs unofficially informed me about the offers mentioning the salary and duration. I accepted one offer by emailing the PI. However, I have not signed any contract yet. Till I get an official letter can I also apply to other places?

Any help/suggestions will be useful. Thanks in advance.

Till I get any official letter can I apply to other places also ?

Depending on the laws in your country, it is likely that you are allowed to do so without breaking any law. However you should be very careful about damaging your reputation in case you end up committing to several positions.

In my experience, in academia an unofficial commitment can be trusted and official paperwork can take some time to be issued. This depends on many things obviously, in particular how much you trust the PI who offers the job.

Since you mention that your main concern is about having a backup plan, I would recommend inquiring with the future PI (or the administration of the future institution) about their administrative procedure. Why not also mention to the PI that you are considering other offers? This could motivate them to speed up the process. And in case you feel that they are stalling, then you have a good reason to look elsewhere.

How important is your personal honor to you? How important is your academic reputation? I strongly recommend that you consider your acceptance as final, even though not yet legally enforceable, unless you come to an agreement with the PI in question that you want to withdraw "firm" acceptance until such time as the arrangement can be made official.

The proper (ethical) course of action is to communicate with the PI. You don't want to get a reputation that your word can't be trusted. Nor that you are willing to leave others "in the lurch" while seeking personal advancement. The negative consequences can all be on you and your academic reputation.

Of course, the PI can than withdraw the offer altogether if you don't come to agreement, so state your case carefully. But there is nothing unethical about changing your mind and communicating that to the PI. You just need to try to work out a suitable accommodation that is acceptable to both.

However, if you consider yourself bound, the only downside of looking elsewhere is that you may be wasting resources of the places you apply to. It may provide backup to you, but it would also be good to be honest with those new institutions that you are in the final stages of an acceptance. But then, if you get a new offer, you are in a deeper bind, unless the earlier offer wasn't as serious as it seems.

When you get such an offer it is even better to be clear in your intentions. If you are a bit tentative and feel at risk, you can say that the offer seems acceptable, but that it needs to be official before you can really accept it. In such a case you are clearly free to continue your search and even accept another offer. But even if you say that you would accept it if offered formally, you have given your word and shouldn't go back on it. But in this latter case you need assurance that it will be offered formally.

Consider for a moment the opposite situation in which they offer you a position verbally, which you accept, but then they continue their search without notifying you that it isn't really an offer. Suppose they then hire someone else instead.


I've developed a close relationship with my past graduate teaching assistant, and I'm very interested in her: is it appropriate to pursue this? The graduate teaching assistant I'm interested in taught one of my introductory courses. She needed research assistants, so I decided to join her lab. From all this we became very close. Ever since the end of that semester, we talk nonstop.  It's been more than a year since I was in her class, but I am still an undergraduate. I am also applying to essentially the same graduate program she is in. We are not working with each other right now, but it is extremely likely we will work together again.
Would it be inappropriate to pursue this? The people in her lab know me. Would this make her look bad?

Since you are not working under her supervision right now, then assuming you are both adults, you are in the clear ethically, legally, and university policy-wise.
The only real caveats are that if you end up involved in a romantic relationship with her, she will not be able to write you a letter of recommendation, and will not be able to assume a supervisory role over you in the future. However, academia has plenty of dating and married couples working in the same department and sometimes on the same project. There are well-established norms for dealing with such situations, and no one thinks this is anything to get worked up about.
Good luck!
Edit: as I somewhat feared would happen, people are volunteering unsolicited advice about whether it’s a smart idea to enter a relationship with someone you may end up sharing a workplace with in some hypothetical future, based on further hypotheticals about what would happen if you end up splitting up or whatnot. Since I respect you as a fully autonomous adult capable of making your own decisions, I have restricted my answer to things you actually asked about and that are in the scope of the sort of advice this site is designed to offer. I would advise others to do the same. There’s nothing inappropriate about a romantic relationship in your situation. It may be a good idea or a bad one, wise or unwise based on numerous factors as with any question about whether two people are a good match for each other. But that’s not what you asked about, and has no connection to academia.

This is so sweet!
Before you proceed, do you know anything about her status, like maybe she has a significant somebody or obligations that would hinder the process?
Other than that, don't fantasise too much about the outcome, keep it lite.
Wait for her to be alone or make an appointment and invite her to go for a coffee. And then, just be a gentleman, don't jump ahead.
Work situations are not ideal and you may feel socialy inept, don't worry.
Give it a go and handle it with respect.


Why are papers without code but with results accepted? I just started reading some papers (Computer Science, specifically Computer Vision) and thought "now let's look at the source code" and was quite astonished that most of the papers don't have any source code implementing the described methods to look at, while claiming some performance or being better than other papers.

How do these papers get accepted in journals / conferences? Do people have to submit their source code privately to the reviewers at least, so that they can reproduce the experiment if possible.

Do most journals / conferences just "trust" that people who submit the paper really implemented the theory and got those exact results?

I always had this idea that any experiment should be reproducible by others else it's not scientific justified. Been wondering about this the last few days.

For me it seems that the reasons are two:

the belief that code is only a tool, a particular implementation being secondary to the idea or algorithm,
the historical residue (it was unpractical to print a lot of pages; especially as no-one could copy-paste it).

Additionally:

many scientist seems to be afraid to show their code in public, as they are aware of its poor quality (see also Why do many talented scientists write horrible software?), so they don't want to risk reputation (for both quality and catching possible errors).

Moreover, things related to current incentives in academia (where publications, not code, are related to one's career possibilities):

sharing code may mean risk of being scooped (instead of milking the same code for years),
cleaning up code takes time, which can be used for writing another publications.

  Do people have to submit their code privately to the reviewers at least, so that they can reproduce the experiment if possible.

Typically - not. If the code is not made public, almost for sure no reviewer have checked its existence; much less - correctness.

However, many scientists are starting to notice the problem (and they see how open source culture flourishes). So, there are new initiatives addressing such issue, like Science Code Manifesto:

  Software is a cornerstone of science. Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible. Without better software, science cannot progress.

Or e.g. this manifesto. Try to search for reproducible research or look at things such as knitr for R and this intro to IPython Notebook, or read about using GitHub for science. And it seems it is taking off.

Usually "performance" of code relates to "how well it scales with the size of the problem". This means, in my opinion, that a paper claiming "algorithm A is faster than algorithm B" needs to show timing for both A and B _ for different size problems_. While there may still be inefficiencies (and errors) in the implementations, this will at least demonstrate whether the underlying algorithm is more efficient (lower big-oh).

Where software is they key to the paper (the product, not the tool) I would expect it to be available (github or other). So a paper that says "I can sort in order 1/n by kerfugling the dargibold number" needs to show how that was done; the paper that claims "when I sorted these two data sets, the one from Whoville had bigger flubbits" does not need to show how the code was sorted - they need to focus on explaining what is significant about the flubbits from Whoville.


What is the motivation to start a new journal in a crowded field? I've recently noticed a trend of big names in my sub-field starting new journals whose scopes substantially or fully overlap with pre-existing journals, and the motivation is not very obvious to me. To be clear, these are intended to be reputable journals with rigorous peer review, hosted by major publishing houses such as Wiley or Springer-Nature, so I guess it's not a money-grab or anything similar.

To give some more background, my sub-field already has 4 well-established journals devoted to it, as well as >10 journals whose scope intersects with my field (think bioanalytical chemistry vs. analytical chemistry), not to mention the Science and Nature-level journals and the catch-alls such as Scientific Reports. Many of these are highly-regarded society-led journals, with 20+ year histories and the journals all have stable impact factors that range from incremental (1-2), standard (3-5) to relatively high impact (6+), accommodating a wide variety of work.

Thus, it seems a bit mysterious to me why someone would go to the substantial effort and expenditure of personal political capital to create a new journal, harangue your colleagues to submit, convince people to review, etc., when there isn't a clamoring need in the community for yet another journal?

Being able to set editorial policies can have a significant impact on how science is done in the field. Some examples of such policies include: encouraging the use of preprint services, mandatory data/code sharing, transparent peer review process, encouraging replication studies, etc. For the big names who are not satisfied with simply setting the direction of their own labs, setting up a new journal can be another ideal career ambition.

hosted by major publishing houses such as Wiley or Springer-Nature, so I guess it's not a money-grab or anything similar.

These are for-profit publishers.  They will not publish unless they expect to make a profit from subscriptions or publication charges.

  big names in my sub-field starting new journals

They do it to increase their own fame.


How to prevent cheating on take-home exams For certain undergrad classes, I assign a take-home exam, rather than the more familiar in-class exam. When I distribute the exam, I remind the students that this is an individual exam, and that they may not work in groups, and then I add "Believe me, I can tell when you cheat". This, however, is a bluff. Unless it is superobvious, I can't tell if students work together; I only tell them I can to scare them into honoring the rules.

Are there any ways, other than lying to the students, to prevent (or at least minimize) this type of cheating in take-home exams?

One way to do it: if the assignment has many small questions, you can make it more difficult taking a random draw from a bigger pool for each student, so they are all slightly different. So, any pair of students would have just a portion of them in common. This can appear unfair, but it should even out if you do it many times.

But, if this were a fight, you would be on the losing side; for any strategy you can come up with, someone else would find the way to hack it. You should instead focus on making people not want to cheat.

Make the problems interesting challenges, not mechanical tasks. If it involves some creative thinking it is less likely that two students arrive independently to the same solution (and even less to arrive to the same solutions in each exercise).
But make them approachable. If they look impossible, it is more tempting to cheat. In a course I took recently, we had to solve an easier version of a problem, and apply it to a more difficult one. We only had to hand in the difficult version, but handing in only the easy part gave also points.

For what I have seen from a student perspective, the more advanced the course, the less likely cheating is, and the more frowned upon by the other students is.

How do you mark the papers?
Do you mark a paper in its entirety before moving on?
If so this is wrong. You should mark everyone's questions 1's first then all the question 2's etc...
This will help you too see any patterns and also keep consistency.
What course do you teach? If it is maths/physics then it should be very obvious. I suppose it should be very obvious for essay style questions as well.