Is it a bad idea to use other professors' Youtube videos as lectures? I am a graduate student at an American university, and I have been assigned to teach an online math class. I have noticed that there are many lecture videos available on Youtube made by actual professors, and since I am a first-time lecturer, their videos are superior to anything I could make.
I am wondering if it would be appropriate for me to assign Youtube videos as lectures? Or would this be considered unprofessional/frowned upon/likely not allowed?
Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of?

The answer depends on your goals.
If you have plans to work in academia, eventually you might find yourself on a track to becoming a professor yourself. In this role, you are expected to teach. Hence, you should be able to prepare teaching materials of high quality to support your teaching and benefit students' learning. The sooner you start working on your first video lecture, the sooner you prepare the one which you are actually not totally ashamed of. Your first lecture might be half-baked and otherwise of sub-par quality, but that's expected on your career stage, when people start learning the ropes. But if you listen to feedback from your students and your mentors, and reflect on it, then your second lecture will be better than your first one, and eventually you start producing good quality stuff. Most importantly, you will become a better educator yourself, equipped with a wide range of tools and techniques, and understanding which method works best in a particular situation. You will be able to adapt your teaching to the needs of a particular student cohort, and you won't depend on materials from the internet (which may or may not be available).
But maybe your goal is simply to survive this teaching assignment until you graduate? In this case there is probably no shame in using online materials to complement your teaching. Just don't forget, that you still need to support your students and help them contextualise and understand the content. You may achieve this by preparing some examples based on the materials in the lecture and working through them with your students. It may be appropriate to have a discussion regarding the material, or even to critically assess and compare the material presented by different lecturers.
Good luck.

If you find it too hard to come up with your own lecture in a short amount of time, you might as well write down the script of the mentioned Youtube lecture and learn it by heart or make it into your own version and give the lecture yourself rather than just playing someone else's lecture?


Will MCS be worth it for a Computer Science graduate? I have completed my BSc in Computer Science from a local university in my home country. Universities in my home country are not that great! For example, the university ranked first locally was ranked recently in the 801-1000 range by QS and the degrees offered are not ABET-accredited.
I finished my degree with a 3.0+ GPA. The only thing that went wrong during my undergraduate studies, is that I got very bad grades (lack of studying) in all the subjects of an area that, I'm currently, after 8 years of experience as a Software Engineer, very interested to do research in.
However, following graduation, I was able to get a job with an American firm and I've been working with them for the past 8 years on cutting-edge technologies as a Senior Full Stack Developer. After a couple of years in the industry, I got highly interested in ML and Artificial Intelligence.
Please keep in mind that my long term objective is to go into academia (not now ofc). Recently I was admitted to a very respected university in the US to study MCS part-time (not MSCS). I heard that PhD admissions usually look at your undergraduate course work and you research capabilities. So what I'm planning to do is to take this MCS as a chance to strengthen my understanding and grades in AI, ML & NLP and then pursue another MSCS (with research from a local university). Would this make me a good candidate for a PhD program later on? Would MCS be worth the two years of my time? Or should I just join an MSCS right away, even if it was from a lower ranked university?
For the difference between MCS and MSCS, please refer to: https://mcs.ics.uci.edu/about/mcs-vs-mscs/
(Thanks go to @user2768 for the link)
Thanks!

A MCS...is a taught degree...with no thesis or research. Although research experience isn't a prerequisite for a PhD, it helps and it enables you to decide whether you really want to pursue a PhD.


Length of a Dissertation Summary for a Postdoc job For a job application I am currently putting together, they request a document of Dissertation Summary and Other Recent Scholarly Endeavors where I need to, of course, "Summarize your dissertation and other recent scholarly endeavors."

The application page says this is to be a maximum length of 3 pages (excluding references). However, much of what I am finding online says that dissertation summaries should be pretty brief.

What is the typical length of a dissertation summary?

Why does typical matter? You have three pages. You may need it or not.

Don't say more than you need to, but give an explanation that the readers can relate to.

My dissertation, which was very involved and quite long could be described (to an expert) in a couple of paragraphs - and they would have been impressed. But other topics would take more explanation than mine did in mathematics.

But, as they imply you may have more to say about other recent scholarly matters - work in progress, for example.


What would be the best way to convince a professor to waive late submission penalties? I am a grad level student and I am completing my last course this semester.
The professor is reducing our grade by 20%/day if we submit our assignment late.
It is a lot. For example, my grade is 18/20 and he reduced it by 4 because I submitted it a day late. My total GPA is A+. It is a significant amount of grade that he is taking off. This will ruin my grade.

I understand that a late submission is not good. Having said that, I have always been trying my best to submit them on time. His assignments were more difficult than what he was teaching us during lectures and I always need to study extra books and material to solve problems.

I was thinking of sending an email and asking for him to waive the penalties. Especially now due to COVID it is somehow cruel to enforce these penalties.

What would be the best way to convince a professor to waive late submission penalties?

Reason for late submission: Due to my research internship, I have been working part-time in a company in another city (not the city that the university is located). So it was pretty hard for me to keep up with the deadline. Before COVID, I had to even commute in between cities to attend classes and that drained me.

Edited: I wrote this letter, please feel free to edit or add more details.

  Dear zyx,
     I am writing regarding the late-submission penalties.

  Due to my research internship and displacement, It was pretty hard for me to keep up with the deadlines.

  During this time I had to commute in between cities and I had only slid to follow up the course and solve assignments that I can save them for submitting my assignments earlier.

  Not accessing the in-person classes made me spend hours studying other references to solve my assignments.

  So I was wondering if you could please waive late submission penalties?

  Best regards,

  XYZ

Professors will say no by default to all such requests, but a lot of the time they secretly want to say yes, so you need to help them help you by providing all the relevant context, being logical and reasonable, and generally convince them that you are worthy of their attention and understanding.
Here is my attempt at a draft email.

Dear Professor xyz,
my name is ZYX, I’m a student in your Programming for Programmers class. I submitted the first class project one day late on February 17 and as a result you imposed a 20% late submission penalty, which reduced my project grade from 18/20 to 14/20.
I know that this penalty is in the course policies and accept that there is a good reason for such penalties and that you have the right to decide such things. But I wonder if you considered that such a high penalty may be unreasonably harsh? I am an excellent student and have worked very hard to maintain an overall GPA of A+ in the program. Because of the penalty it seems almost certain that my final grade for the class will end up lower than what my performance would merit without the penalty, which in turn would lower my overall GPA and future academic and career chances. The consequences seem disproportionate relative to the one time mistake of submitting an assignment late by just one day.
I therefore want to ask respectfully if you might consider waiving or at least reducing the penalty for this late submission.
I do sincerely apologize for the late submission, and for not contacting you in advance of the deadline to request an extension (something that in hindsight I obviously should have done when I realized I was going to be late). Normally I am very good at keeping up with my workload, but back in February, because of a research internship I was doing at [name of company], which required me to commute back and forth between [name of city 1] and [name of city 2] and took up a lot of my time and energy, my commitments ended up piling up in an unexpected way, which caused me to fall a little behind and miss the deadline. I nonetheless worked diligently to catch up and ended up managing to submit what I think you’ll agree is a high quality project the next day.
Thanks for your consideration. I hope you understand my anxiety and do not think less of me for making this request. In this difficult period when students like me are facing an uncertain job market and other unusual difficulties related to the COVID-19 crisis, we could use a bit of leniency.
Regards,
ZYX

The penalty is set for some good reason, or at least the professor who set it must think so. However, the penalty is reasonable because of some assumptions work, and those assumptions are likely to work for all students, because if they weren't, the professor would have changed the deadline for all students after some of them asked in time.

Therefore, if you are going to request a change for you and not for the other students, you need to explain why the assumptions on which the penalty is based don't hold for you, and just telling that you are a good student is not going to do the word.

Furthermore, you are asking for an extension when the deadline has already passed. Then, in addition to give a good reason you need to explain why that reason was unforeseeable.

And last but not least, such a hard penalty seems a reaction with the professor not wanting students being late with excuses, probably as a reaction to past experiences. That means that the excuse needs to be very good and very well documented.

And Covid-19 alone doesn't seem to be a good excuse, but documented days of hospitalisation may be, or being unexpectedly confined without a computer or a pencil too.


Advisor asking me to do review work after my PhD is finished In the question Is it common to review papers assigned to your supervisor?, it is answered that it is not uncommon for the advisor to ask a student to review a paper.

I was ok with it during my PhD program. But now my PhD is finished, and even though I keep working with my advisor on some research papers related to my thesis, he sent me a new request to review a paper on his behalf.

I really would not like to review this paper, as it was not assigned directly to me and I'm not a PhD student anymore. On the other hand, I don't want to sound rude and, in the future, I plan to work as a teacher on the same university, so I wouldn't like to burn any bridges.

How should I answer to this?

I think this dilemma can be best understood by separating it into two sub-questions:

To what extent should you be doing reviews after graduation?
Assuming you are doing reviews, does it matter whether they are sub-review requests coming from your former advisor?

For the first question, there are already good answers on this site about number of reviews and about whether reviewing is mandatory.  Both essentially say that reviewing is good community service but never required, and it's better to not review than to give a poor quality or resentful review. Considering this, if this paper came as a direct review request to you from a journal / conference rather than a sub-review request from your former advisor, would you be willing to review it?  If the answer is no (which I think it might be given what you wrote in your question), then the fact that it came from your former advisor is beside the point; you can politely decline just like you would if you had been asked directly.

Now, if you would be willing to review if asked directly, but not when asked as a sub-reviewer by your former advisor, you need to ask yourself why this is, and frame your response accordingly.  For example:

If you are concerned about getting credit for your service and the review request is from a journal, then you can tell your former advisor you're wanting to build relationships with journals and ask them to have the journal transfer the review request (conferences may be unwilling to transfer, depending on how they manage their program committee).
If you're feeling resentful because you want to "leave the nest" and the way that you were asked makes you feel your advisor is still treating you like a student, then you might respond by saying you are very busy in your current position (no doubt true) and suggesting that your former advisor send this to one of their current students instead of you.

Other reasons may have other responses, but these are the main ones that I could think of, and I think may cover the most likely possibilities.

I assume you mean to review a paper for a journal. When a paper is assigned for review, it is supposed to be reviewed by the assignee, and not given to a student. So you should politely but firmly decline.


What should PhD students do if they submit a paper to two journals and a reviewer notices concurrent submission? I am in a desperate situation. I made a mistake and committed academic misconduct.

I have submitted my article to two journals in parallel, let's say in j1 and j2. Once I received acceptance from journal j1 I wrote a withdraw email to j2.

However, after the article came online it was found by the reviewer of j2 that the withdrawal article was actually a parallel submission.

I am 3rd year PhD student and my professor was unaware of this act. How can I handle this situation?

Should I write an apology email to j2? If j2 accept the apology, will j1 keep the article or still it will be retracted?

What is the best way to come out of the situation?

*I am reviewer of both journals as well.

If you are a seasoned reviewer you should know the rules, so falling back on being an inexperienced graduate student probably won't hold water. So clearly this was less a 'mistake' and more of a 'gamble'.  You should pull the article from both venues and state -unequivocally- that your advisor had no knowledge.

You didn't mention if your advisor was a co-author on the submission, but if he/she was, the infraction is even worse, because not only have you submitted without consent, you risked damaging their reputation with the journals as well.

The best path forward is to own your mistake wholly and apologize. On the positive side, it's not like you committed the mortal sin of fabricating data or plagiarizing - you violated a rule (and likely the terms and conditions of the journal). Probably not grounds for dismissal but you might be on a leash for a while.

Don't do it again!  The rule is in place for several reasons, not the least of which is respecting reviewers' time and effort (reviewers' time is precious and usually pro-bono. We can't have every journal reviewing the same work).

I tend to disagree with everyone here. One fellow noticed you submitted in parallel. So? That's not a problem yet.

Were you allowed to do that? Probably not. Should you have done it? Absoulutely.

Currently journals gamble with us. They take your article, hold it up for months and reject it in the end. Why shouldn't we do the same?

You can apply dor several jobs or schools at once just as schools and employers can consider a lot of options at once. The same should be true and acceptable for journals. The fact that it currently isn't is not your fault but the fault of journals displaying their power.


Just graduated with a master’s degree, but I internalised nothing I just graduated with a software-engineering master’s degree with a good grade from a top-five university in the UK. I also have a bachelor's in computer science.

I always revised just for exams and just enough to get that first-class degree, without actually learning anything. I basically revise for the exam itself, by looking at past paper answers, and I never study the actual material. I then forget everything after finishing the exam. I've been repeating this cycle since school.
This method has given me a great first-class degree but with practically zero knowledge. As @Sule said, I never internalised the material.
I also never did a single internship because I didn’t need to.

Now, I’m facing a problem: How am I supposed to find work if I barely know how to program? Will employers just accept me because I have a fancy software-engineering master’s degree from a top-five university? I also haven’t worked professionally a single day in my life.

I'm thinking of getting a PhD at this point.

You asked,

  How am I supposed to find work if I barely know how to program?

It sounds like you're looking for a job in industry, versus academia, so I will answer from that perspective.

Employers are generally looking for people who can get things done and will consider the ability to program as a means to an end. While technical skills (i.e. mastery of a specific programming language) will be important, it's never the only factor evaluated, and it's sometimes not even the most important factor. Combine that with the pace at which technology develops, and having a specific technical skill ends up becoming even less important, as that skill may be obsolete rather quickly. Go find a dozen software engineers who have been working in industry for a decade or more since getting a degree, and ask if they're still using the actual content from any of their classes. You may be surprised at the answers. What they will probably talk about is how valuable it was to become a "learning machine" rather than a knowledge repository.

You've described the process you used to get good marks on tests. That's a valuable skill. Employers don't inherently care about test scores, but they will care about someone who can pick something up, and learn it well enough to complete a task. In many programming environments, the ability to learn something, apply it, and then move on to the next thing is incredibly valuable - even if you "forget" that thing as you're picking up future things.

Further, Resumes and interviews are sales tools - you're selling yourself to an employer. Focus on the value you can add and match that value to their needs. There's a job out there for everyone - don't just spam every software job you see and hope one sticks despite your shortcomings - instead, focus on understanding your own strengths and then look for jobs where your strengths are a good fit. Write your resume to emphasize the skills you do have and be ready to talk about them in interviews.

Taking a bit of a tangent, there's a concept in motorcycling called "target fixation." Riding instructors working with new riders will emphasize the skill of looking where you want to go when in a difficult situation. This is because new riders who are surprised by a piece of road debris, or a vehicle out of place, tend to focus on that thing to the extent that the ride right into it instead of avoiding it. Apply that to yourself since you're undertaking the new pursuit of searching for a job: Don't become fixated on what you perceive as weaknesses or you may end up in a mindset where all you have to offer in an interview is nervousness about what you see as your own shortcomings.

As a final point, to address your comment of,

  I also haven't worked professionally a single day in my life

I have a feeling that the quicker you can change that, the less significant your problem will seem. Once you have a few years of work experience, you will see life through a different lens - on the one hand, you probably don't want a menial job for the rest of your life, but on the other hand, your first job doesn't have to be the job - it's OK to just take a job and get some experience to give you some confidence and expose yourself to a professional workplace.

You should believe in yourself. If you really like to study for a PhD, go to study. If you don't like it, start an internship and accept the challenge from now on, because this day will come sooner or later.


Preventing Verbatim Answers that Match Examples? When teaching students (especially in code, but this can apply to any subject), how do you prevent near verbatim answers that match your examples?

For example, I tell students how to find a document by ID in an array of documents. I show them the code foundDocument = documentArray.find(singleDocument => singleDocument._id = id). I then ask students to find a fruit in fruitArray. The answer I'll get is foundDocument = fruitArray.find(singleDocument => singleDocument._id = id), which works, but not the ideal answer.

Some notes based on the content discussion and answers so far:

This is sort of for a project. I teach both one off weekend classes and long term coding mentorship and this comes up in both. The goal of the weekend class is to build a website by the end. The goal of the mentorship is for the singular student to have built an MVP of their product.

The array example above was the simplest and shortest example I could think of to demonstrate my issue. I also see this happen where whole files get copied and the students expects something different to happen.

What I'm hoping to prevent is the pattern matching that students sometimes do but they don't fully understand the why of what they are doing. I've also seen (and done this myself) often in the STEM fields. You find a formula that works and re apply it but not understand what you're doing.

When teaching students...how do you prevent near verbatim answers that match your examples?

I ask questions that cannot be answered correctly by near-verbatim matches of my examples.

When tutoring my fellow students it is of utmost important that they understand the basic concept behind what they are doing or else they will just come again and ask me the next week. As far as I have experienced learning only really takes place if they figure out the solution on their own instead of copy pasting. This will take a lot more effort and time at the beginning but the payoff is well worth it.

Depending on the age of your students you should point them to the documentation of a function/object and let them figure it out by themselves. If they want to program properly reading documentation is one of the most essential parts, if this is too hard (especially at the beginning) you can give them the method signature and an abstract explanation.

Arrays.find(item => item.property == needle)

haystack = ....
item = ....
needle = ...

In this case they have to at least replace the variable names with matching names and abstract the assignment part. If lambdas are required make sure that you have covered them in an earlier example and reference it, in this case you can even keep the example more general


Prospective supervisor wants me to do irrelevant videos as a condition for supervision. Can I say yes when I mean no? This question is the reverse of Dealing with a PhD student reneging on an agreement to appear in social media, in which the student had agreed during interviewing to participate in social media outreach but refused to do so when hired. The top answers in the linked question sided with the student.

Suppose I'm a prospective PhD student looking for potential supervisors. I'm attracted to one professor in particular for both academic (e.g. matching research interests) and non-academic reasons (e.g. solves my two-body problem). The only problem is, he wants me to make social media videos to boost the profile of his research group. I think this is unreasonable, since doing this isn't part of the requirements for a PhD. I know I'm unlikely to enjoy doing these things as well, and would rather concentrate on my PhD.

The professor wants me to confirm both verbally and in writing that I'm willing to make these promotional videos. It's likely that if I say no, he will decline to supervise me. Is it OK to say yes, and then try to get out of making the videos?

No, this is not okay.
If you lie your way into a position you are not suited for, you will almost certainly pay for it down the line.
That's a very general rule, and I think it applies here. If you say you are willing to do X while interviewing for a PhD position and, after getting the position, you refuse to do X, then you are going to have soured the relationship with your advisor. That is a very important relationship. If you say no in the interview and you don't get the position because of it, then it's probably for the best.

From an ethics standpoint, yes (but with caveats).

You have the premise:
The professor is asking me something unrelated to the work in order to give me the position.

If this is the case, surely it is ethical to answer with yes as it will not impact the job. I knew a superstar professor who firmly believed that scientists should never have relationships - in his interviews, he always asked "Do you want to marry at some point?" The whole faculty, of course, advised prospective students to answer with "no". This question is, in my opinion, not different then your question.

However, there are two things to consider:

(1) Probably you don't know if making videos is relevant to the position. This is very likely! So you cannot assume your premise and therefore, you would deceive the professor (in another answer, your unwillingness to make videos is described as "you are not suited for the position). In this case, a lie would be unethical.

(2) You would damage your relationship with the professor when they find out. This is very, very dangerous -- in Academia, you really need good connections, recommendation letters to survive. So from an interpersonal standpoint, it would not be okay to lie.
(For example, the superstar professor I mentioned before terminated his student's position immediately after for some bizarre reason he found out that the student was dating someone.)


current supervisor vs. previous work My M.Sc. Thesis' abstract got accepted for presentation at a conference this year and I am about to send the paper. Should I give the paper to my current supervisor (of my Ph.D. in a different University) to read it and have an opinion?

EDIT: Including answers to comments

My previous supervisor has read it and gave me feedback. He suggested me sending the abstract and his relationship with my current supervisor does not exist since they don't know each other.

Since you already have feedback from your previous supervisor (who presumably knows the research in question much better since it was done with him) it's not critical to get feedback from your new advisor. But any feedback can be useful, especially if your new advisor is in the same area.

I would at least make your new advisor aware of the paper and ask if they want to read it, just so there won't be any surprises or perceptions that you are publishing "behind their back". Leave it up to them if they want to give you feedback or not.

Yes, it's your current supervisor's job to coach you.


Can PhD students patent their work I'm not aware of any PhD candidates patenting their novel work/product. Is it not ok to patent something you worked on?

There is no generic rule that PhD students can't patent their work. When they do, usually, the university or research institution has rules about who owns the IP of what's being done in their labs. My alma mater had a 3-thirds rule where the student, the supervisor and the institution all held a third of the IP.

I don't find it particularly surprising that only few students end up patenting their work. Patents are much less useful than good scientific publications when applying for academic positions or grants. It seems normal that the focus is set on the later.

Also relevant: patenting costs money to file and money to maintain. It only makes sense to secure future sales. Students rarely have the funds for this and institutions usually prefer to spend on other things more closely related to their mission. Most of the time the decision not to patent is motivated by the low potential gain vs. costs ratio.

Universities are usually a bit generous in what they accept to file, but then eventually drop the payments later on if it's evident that the work does not bring any profit.

If you are working with industry during your Ph.D., it can be maybe of interest to do some patenting in collaboration between industry and university, but this is depending on legal matters. It can or not be possible.
Usually universities are more interested by writing papers rather than patenting.

Impact factors... and so on. Reaching Nature Journal... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor


Can I say no when my principal investigator asks me to help cover lectures next semester? I'm a postdoc at a US university, and my principal investigator (PI) asked me to cover some of his lectures next semester. I do not want to do any lecturing as I want to focus solely on my research. I am involved in two funded projects, and I therefore have a lot to do research wise.

Can I say no to covering lectures or would that be considered a mark against me?

I don't think a flat "no" would go over very well.  Covering classes is something that colleagues are expected to do for one another, within reason.  Yes, everyone has their own projects that this takes time away from.  But it's really the only way that faculty are able to travel during the school term, which most find essential to keeping an active research program.  Saying "I don't want to do any lecturing" will come across as unreasonable and possibly selfish.  Keep in mind that "focusing solely on research" is a luxury that basically nobody ever has.

However, you can certainly negotiate, and maybe reduce the amount, while still showing that you're willing to help.  Keep in mind that the PI presumably has an interest in your research success, so if the teaching would impact this in specific negative ways, beyond a generic "this is an hour of my time that I could be spending on research", you can point this out and suggest a compromise.

"I'm happy to help out, but seven classes over the semester is kind of a lot.  I am going to need to [achieve specific research goals] next semester and I think this might start to get in the way.  Maybe you can find another person who can cover some of them, and we'll split them up?"
"I can do January 18, but on March 7 there is a conference that I was really hoping to attend.  Perhaps someone else could cover that date?"
"February 10 would be fine.  April 3 is the week before [important deadline] and it might be kind of a crunch, so maybe someone else could teach on that day."

You can also ask for materials or other help that will lessen the amount of work for you.

"Sure, I can teach on January 30.  Can you point out the specific sections in the book that I should cover?  Will you be preparing notes for me to follow, or do you have notes from a previous semester?  Can you suggest any particular examples that I should present?  [etc...]"

With such assistance, covering a lecture should not end up taking an excessive amount of time away from your research.  You really should only need to prepare and deliver the lecture - you likely won't have to deal with creating assignments, grading exams, supervising TAs, holding office hours, answering emails from students, or the other things that end up taking the majority of time when teaching.

You should respectfully tell him to "Insert Coin" (but be careful)

Most post-doctoral positions involve research work under the supervision of a more senior researcher. They do not include teaching or institutional-administrative duties. This is related to their fixed- and short-term nature - and to their significantly lower pay.

With due respect to your PI - making precarious researchers serve as a backup teaching workforce is a further degradation of their (or should I say our) position in academia. So while - as @NateEldridge suggests - accepting a backup request is the collegiate thing to do, it is also collegiate for your PI to make sure you are then recognized as having been employed as a teacher, even if for a short period of time, and paid for it (with consideration of the extra relative overhead per class hour when you are teaching just once or twice).

With that said,

It is very possible that refusing will hurt your relationship with the PI and even threaten your continued employment - this depends on the specifics of the situation. It is still possible, though less likely, that even requiring formal recognition of this duty and payment will hurt your relationship.
Careful management of your rhetoric and order of actions (see @Scientist's answer) is important, regardless of what exactly you choose to do.
Ignoring the questions of status and rights, I would be disposed to help a colleague in need, as @NateEldridge suggests. You mentioned your wish to focus only on research - remember that, collectively, as academics we have an obligation to teach students, so it is important that someone competent cover for your PI.


Transition from PhD to project-manager position I’m approaching the end of my PhD adventure and I’ve started looking around for job opportunities. Recently, I found a job posting that fits my career goals quite nicely, but it has more managerial ingredients in it than pure research. It is concerned with managing/coordinating multiple research teams – something I’d like to do eventually but maybe at a later stage after gaining some more research/management experience as a postdoc.

Yet, I found the job description really encouraging:

  Requirements: experience in project management or a strong desire to learn it.

That’s why I decided to try my chances anyway. Lucky enough, I'll be interviewed for this position.

In the past, I have had students (BS, MS) who did their theses and semester projects under my supervision. Additionally, I’ve had a graduate-level course on general management and took the lead role in a small research project. Even though these experiences were valuable, this job would arguably require managerial skills at a higher level.

So, my question is as follows: What type of difficulties/changes should I expect from this transition that I may undergo: from a technical PhD to a research manager/coordinator?

If you've taken Project Management classes and have taken lead roles in regards to projects and BS and MS students, you'll find Project Management to be a more intense version of that. For example, you'll be needing to ensure everyone is working at the pace they should, getting the needed work done, and be prepared to figure out ways to remedy issues that occur. You will be working closely with stockholders, include managerial people, customers, etc, and you need to have the ability to answer any questions they may have regarding your project, even though you yourself are not the one directly creating that content. You'll need to figure out how to effectively communicate with people under you to get a sense of what they're doing and how things will impact the project. Be prepared to do scheduling of the project, which includes figuring out things in terms of Man Hours required for project in contrast to what you have available as resources. A lot of these things are similar in respect to what you've done in school, though to a higher degree: there's more riding on it, and these people aren't grading you, they're expecting it to be done right the first time.

As far as difficulties, if you have done all the above in classes or with your BS and MS students, then just be prepared for the faster pace and higher volume of stockholders. It can be a bit overwhelming, but doable.

Having a technical PhD will help you in these situations, because you'll have a better understanding of what your workers need to complete their tasks, how fast it will take them, and what it is exactly that you're working on. In fact, it will give you a leg up on other candidates or PMs that don't have technical backgrounds. If you can listen to a technical explanation of what's happening, and relay it to stockholders in a way that non-technical people can understand, you'll be fine.

Doing PhD research usually means following waterfall methodology or iterative waterfall, while most project management requires Agile and Scrumban. You just need one course on project-management methodologies and you can be in and be even better than other project managers who have no PhD experience


"Dressing down" to impress in academic settings I came across this highly-upvoted comment on reddit (15,300 karma) by /u/Semi-Hemi-Demigod

  The CEO of the company I work for said that it's not uncommon for
  programmers to be asked to dress down for important meetings.
  Apparently investors don't think programmers who dress well are good
  programmers.

I was wondering if this logic applies to academia, particularly in fields like math, computer science, and philosophy where stereotypically many top people  dress sloppily. In other words, are there academic contexts where dressing badly will make me seem more competent at my job?

Perhaps this would be an interesting social science experiment to perform, if it hasn't been done already!

If an academic is dressed in an unusually casual manner, I generally ignore it.

If an academic is dressed in an unusually formal manner, I assume one of these:

They are an administrator, or manager, rather than an academic
They are here for a job interview and they don't know it is not necessary to dress formally
They are going to an event outside academia, like a funeral

I do not think anyone is impressed by either dressing up or down, but it can send a signal.

are there academic contexts where dressing badly will make me seem more competent at my job?

In my experience with CS in the United States, no.

You rarely have someone making important snap judgements about you. In a situation where they need to evaluate you -- a talk, job interview, etc -- they have something meaningful to go on.
Most people you need to impress have seen plenty of smart and less-smart folks of all sorts, so they distrust the stereotype anyway. Smarts and reliability/maturity are treated as separate axes and you want to impress on both.

The only context I can think of is if teaching a class of impressionable undergraduates, maybe this strategy could make an impression on them for a lecture or two. But I think your teaching will be much more important after that.


Is it okay to include a graduated phd student as a reference in resume/C.V? I'm trying to apply for a PhD and want to include references in my resume. Is it okay to include a PhD student, one who has gotten a degree and has worked in our lab,and is currently working in industry, as a reference?

Yes, they can, but consider whether they're the best choice:
A referee needs to be your champion. A lab mate who you've never worked with probably can't do that, because they don't have a working relationship with you. Someone you've worked with can. (It's unclear which case applies here.)
Senior referees carry more clout than junior referees, so that's something to keep in mind.
Having referees from both industry and academia can be useful—it depends who the recipient is: A theoretician will surely be less interested in a referee from industry than someone more applied.

Why “former”? Has their PhD been revoked?
As to whether to include them, if they can vouch for your skills, abilities and/or experience then there is no reason why you should not include them.


I have 3 months to submit my PhD thesis. What should be my strategy be like? I am going to write a manuscript based thesis. It will be having 4 manuscripts as chapters 3,4,5,6.
Chapters 1 and 2 will be introduction and literature review. While 7 will be on conclusions. Now, I still have 50% work left for chapter 6, which I will complete withinn two weeks max. And will write the chapter as I go about doing the simulations to get the results.

My question is, I have to submit my thesis by June end. Extension is not an option. I am freaking out about deadline approaching so fast.

So, what should be my strategy be to complete the thesis on time? I know this is a vague question. But any advice would be most helpful!!

Make an output schedule that will let you finish.  By "output" I mean completed material, e.g. a page a day.  For each day, work at least as long as necessary to stay with the schedule.

If you can do that, you'll finish on time.

I did it in 10 days.  Painful.  But possible.

Chapter 1 intro/lit review summarized the organization and cribbed some applications and overall intro stuff from a school paper I had done.  Chapter 2 methods was synthesis of methods from 4 papers.  Then 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 were just the specific papers (cutting the methods section and intro and light editing for consistency).  4 of the 6 papers were already published.  The other 2 were close to publishable (work done, wrote it up).

I did not bother with a general conclusion chapter (3-8 chapters had conclusions by chapter within them).  Avoided the LaTex rathole and did it all in Word (significant amount done from published papers already).  Didn't do a large Word file as Word tended (back then and probably still now) to break down for book length projects...and dealing with section breaks and the like is a pain (easy to mess up).  Did each chapter as a separate Word file.

Endnotes were by chapter and at the end of whole thesis.  Figures not embedded, but at the end of each chapter, just like a paper submission (even copied one diagram in on a transparency, totally old skool).

Did a chapter a day and had 2 days at the end to compile and print (used Kinkos for the print job).  I typed at night, all night for isolation and concentration (this was before PCs at home were common, so in the lab).  Would go for a run and eat breakfast and sleep in the day.  Very disciplined.

Set all the pagination of the different files at the very end manually to make it all work (once edits done). Then printed all the different files and compiled them all (then went to Kinkos).  Even did the TOC/TOT/TOFs manually (was easier to just kludge it).

Obviously follow the rules for margins and double space and all that.

I offered the advisor to see each chapter as I finished it, but he didn't give any input and huffed a little about how most students did their thesis with more warning.  (But really the papers were all mine 100% in content anyways.)  I just told the old man that I was treating him with the same rules as the rest of the committee (10 days to read and then a defense).  If it wasn't good enough, he could fail me.  He wasn't going to do that since I was a little golden boy with national award and first to graduate and fancy job (and really I had aced the Ph.D. program, written lots of papers, so why fuss about the thesis drill).

It ended up being fine.  And was way faster to just hack it together like I did than people who told me I should spend a few months learning LaTex at the last minute or stuff like that.  Just saw so many people struggling with huge documents but my hacking it into little Ricci flow segment approach worked great for being under the gun.


Should I cite R or RStudio? I ran my data analysis and created my graphs in RStudio, but RStudio is just a platform for R. In my paper should I cite R or RStudio?

RStudio is an IDE for R — essentially an editor and debugger packed together. Your work is made possible by statisticians who developed the language R and graphical packages for it. If you want to cite R in your publication, here is the explanation how to do it.

Cite what you use. RStudio has a collection of developers who have made your work possible. Cite them. R is a language so it is, perhaps, less important to cite it. But if it has features that are important to your work, cite it. If you had used Python to do data analysis it might not be necessary to name it if there was nothing special about Python, but R is specialized for statistics so more likely that it should be cited.

Cite what you use. It is a courtesy to those who enable your work if nothing else. Citing RStudio


Should I focus on my grades or on finishing my degree on time? I am doing an 5-year Integrated Master's degree (3-year Bachelor + 2-year Master) on Physics in Europe. Aiming for a thesis in Quantum Computation/Information. I am currently on the 4th year and have a "good" overall grade (84%).

However, due to health issues, I failed to perform well on my 6th semester (the last of the Bachelor), almost failing half of the courses. I got 50%-60% on 4 of them.

  So I am faced with a dilemma:

  Should I focus on finishing my degree on time, potentially having to either manage doing a thesis and improving some grades at the same time, or settle for those low grades and just move on?

  OR

  Should I focus on improving my grades and achieving the ones I know I am capable of, potentially getting to ~88%, with the
  disadvantage of having to delay/prolong my thesis to a 11th semester?

This might be a very close call and depend on a lot of factors, but I am interested in knowing, in general, which option gives me the highest chance of success in continuing my academic career with a PhD.

Not sure if a Postdoc would follow after, but I eventually want to go for a top-tier job in industry, either related or not to research (like IBM's or Google's Quantum Lab, or some other not focusing on research).

Usually there is a scheduled time and an expected number of credits for a degree. A BSc normally takes 4 years, with a given number of classes. This is because the ability to absorb the material in the allotted time is part of the evaluation of the student.

Ordinarily that is. But you mention health issues.

If you had some major life altering illness then it is something you should discuss with the university. I mean something like as serious as pneumonia. I had pneumonia a couple years ago. If it had happened in university it would certainly have cost me a term, maybe a full year.

Under such circumstances, and presuming you now have some kind of control of the situation, you should consider repeating either a term or a year, depending.

First talk to your favorite prof or your department chair. Ask if there is the possibility of repeating the year. Or possibly repeating only some of the classes. In most cases, they will want to help you. It looks good for them for you to perform well in the university. They will nearly always want to help you finish the degree.

Be open to their suggestions. They may have suggestions of alternatives.

My advice is to stick to the schedule and get the best grades you can along the way even if not perfect.  Hanging out in school extra time is unproductive.


My university does not do anything to prevent cheating in online exams, and grading is relative. What should I do? I am from a reputed university in India and despite informing the department professors and higher authorities of the rampant cheating in the online exams, they haven't taken any steps to curb it (they use Google Meet/Zoom proctoring which is basically useless because students can still text and make excuses). They don't even reply to the emails that raise these concerns. They made no effort to change their examination mode for the online semester - by increasing the weightage of take-home/research assignment components in the syllabus.
This has taken a toll on the mental health of students like me who did not use unfair means but are now suffering because the university follows relative grading and the skyrocketing averages of the exams have made it next to impossible for us to get grades proportional to our efforts.
What should a student do in such a situation? Should he/she start cheating too?
Edit:
Switching the institute is not possible because this is India — students have to go through a gruesome procedure to get admitted into these reputed institutes in the first place.
Secondly, the jobs and higher education somewhat depend on the grades of the student so this unfair disadvantage for 2 semesters straight without cheating would be hell for any honest person.

Given the comments, you have eliminated the two most obvious responses: Exit (leave for somewhere better) and Voice (complain to the administration for improvements). There may still be more available to you than you think. A good resource is Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman.
Because marking is relative, you are dealing with a tragedy of the commons problem. The total available high marks are made scarce because your professor has a particular mean and distribution in mind. There are more people who want high marks than are marks available. If everyone cheats, all the allotted marks are worthless as a measure of coding or other talent. Everyone has an incentive to cheat because not cheating does not prevent the cheaters from being rewarded.
In a commons problem, you will not be able to resolve the ethics on your own. The problem is social-structural, therefore the solution also needs to be social-structural. Your options are as follows:

Brainstorm ways to associate a cost with cheating. For example, you could launch a honeypot for an assignment with an answer that is wrong in a specified way. Then you can take the students to task for stealing your intellectual property.

Work with administrators via the institutions available to you (Student unions, associations, political movements etc.) to punish cheaters more harshly.

Establish a network of students who recognize the same problem and seek to establish norms across your colleagues against cheating. For example, raise some money to establish an award for merit for students who succeed while following the rules. Elinor Ostrom, the nobel economist, is the expert on this kind of solution. I would read her work, but summaries of her ideas do exist.

The ethics of cheating, even where you are disadvantaged are pretty straight-forward. Contributing to the cheating makes for a worse society from utilitarian (everyone loses from coders who do not know how to solve problems), deontological (a world where everyone cheats on everything is not a world I would want to live in) and a virtue (people will not improve if they always cheat) ethics perspective.
Assuming that your institution is indeed not interested in fixing this problem, it is corrupt. The World Bank has a list of actions to deal with corrupt institutions. There may be something there to help you.
Beyond that, you should know that blowing the whistle on an issue almost never benefits the whistleblower. Take a look at where your favorite whistleblower is now, and you will see I am correct. You will need to evaluate for yourself the degree to which you can fight this problem. I do recommend fighting from the inside first, assuming that everyone is interested in resolving this problem. You should go all the way to the top, explaining your understanding of the problem as succinctly as possible. You should also offer to be part of the solution as much as possible.

The student should do what ever is needed to be successful. Inability to adapt means you're kind of useless. Companies don't care if you cheated or not, they care if you can be successful. If cheating is the most productive use of your time then cheat.


Tips for introducing a speaker I will introduce a well-known speaker who will give a lecture in his work in neurobiology in front of a large student audience. What is a good introduction and followup?

I have noticed people often give what I consider trivialities like the year he received his PhD degree and spend a long time listing their awards. I am planning to talk about his recent papers briefly, his areas of research, and just briefly mention his position now and who he worked with as a postdoc.

I would appreciate any input, particularly from profs on how they like to be introduced.

The long and boring introductions that you've noticed are probably due to people simply reading off the "speaker biography" paragraph that is typically included with a talk announcement.  That, in turn, is usually prepared with little thought by the speaker, often by grabbing a recent bio blurb from a proposal or their website.  Thus: boring list of dates and awards.

My personal preference is to ask the speaker how they would like to be introduced and to keep things quite short: any good speaker will begin their talk with a high-level perspective on their technical vision and work in any case.

The most important thing is to highlight what matters about the speaker and avoid the the long boring list.


How to evaluate an implementation Master's Thesis in Evaluation chapter? I am writing a Master's Thesis where I developed an application. The application was developed after the study of another similar application. My application does things differently but the principle is the same for both of the application. Now I need to write an Evaluation chapter for my thesis.
So how do I evaluate my application in the Evaluation section? Is it by comparison or mention my own results?

Since you mentioned that the application is similar to another previously developed application, your evaluation ideally should compare how yours stacks up to the one it is derived from. Mention what differences there are in terms of implementation, as well as what it does better, and also whatever pitfalls exist as opposed to the other application.
You want to show what you did and learned throughout the whole process, as well as what potential improvements you might make to the application in the future. Best of luck.


How to supervise a bad PhD student I am a postdoc helping in the supervision of a PhD student who is finishing his 2nd year now. This is in Europe, meaning the student came in with a MSc degree and these 2 years have been of research. "Helping in the supervision" actually means here that my professor is nominally appointed as supervisor but I am doing all of the actual supervision (my professor is not familiar with the details of our project, just the "big picture").

The project is on computational physics/chemistry, and the PhD student has a background in chemistry with no prior computational knowledge. At the time of hiring we were under pressure to get the project going and complementing my physics background with someone who actually knows chemistry seemed like a good idea back then. Also the student was very motivated.

I have been spending a large amount of time teaching this student lots of physics and programming/scripting, which is needed to carry out the project. I assumed I would need to spend a lot of time at the beginning because of the background mismatch, so that was no problem. I thought things would improve with time. Unfortunately, they have not. The student is terrible at any kind of programming and has a lot of trouble learning new concepts, but what worries me the most is his attitude.

He basically is obsessed with getting results but is overlooking learning, in the form of reading books and papers and working hard on a problem for a period of time. If I tell him to "bang his head against the wall" for a couple of weeks trying to crack a problem before seeking advice from me (like we all have done during our PhDs), he gets frustrated after one or two days and starts sending me lots of desperate emails begging for me to intervene. This is a "gimme teh codez" kind of student, looking to avoid any problem which is of any real difficulty. I spend long meeting sessions explaining the theoretical and practical details of some approach, but he only seems interested when I write code that he can copy paste and use to get results (without even understanding the code, let alone the underlying physics).

Because of this I have to do lots of debugging and finding the same little (and large) mistakes that arise now and again because the student does not understand what he's doing. I have discussed many times with him that he needs to focus on understanding theory and code, instead of just getting results. But this is to no avail. I get the impression the student wants to do a technician's job rather than a scientist's job, but still get a PhD out of it.

As a result, I find myself working personally on any part of his project which has any hint of difficulty in it, spending way too many hours a week doing supervision, and getting increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress on the project. At this point, it would be fair to say that I could myself get everything he has to do (and more) done just in the time I spent meeting with him.

I have brought some of these concerns up, but the student won't accept they need to adjust how they work, instead claiming the tasks are too complicated (believe me, they're not), the professor does not help enough, the project is not well organized, etc. I don't know what to do - this student is getting easily 10 times more help than I did during my PhD (and I had a good experience).

To complicate things, I am just a postdoc so I have not a wide experience supervising different students that would tell me whether this case is common or isolated.

Am I expecting too much from my student? Is the problem I'm having a common one? How can I improve his attitude towards learning and working? How to deal with a bad research student?

Since I have been that student at the beginning of my PhD, I think I can give you some perspective. I was very motivated when I started, but I didn't know anything about research, so I lost my motivation when I had to be on my own.

I tried the same approach as your student with my PhD adviser, and he told me he's not going to do my work or homework because I have to be able to do everything myself. Obviously, everything I did as a PhD student, I can still do now, so it worked.

But, you have to establish your boundaries. You have to set some discipline, and the first thing is to reduce the interaction with your student. Set a meeting, once a week. One day before the meeting, your student should put in writing, briefly, what progress he made, and what problems he encountered -- that should be discussed in the first half of the meeting. The rest of the meeting will be you telling him what needs to be done next. You should not talk with or help your student outside these meetings, and you should ignore those abusive "help now!!!" emails he's writing you.

If your student just wants to do his job quick, as you describe, you have to realize his output won't be something you can rely on. You need to give him two types of assignments. Some imply things he already does well, so he doesn't lose completely his courage, and the others imply him learning new stuff. The latter have to be easier. You do not help him with them beyond suggesting papers or books to look things up. In case of programming, suggest SE for him to look for help, and give him some examples to get him started and nothing else. Under no conditions you should do his work.

There are things you should demand from your student. If he has to present data to you, the data should be in the format your group is already using, if there is code that he needs to write, it should be documented, and he has to present tests that it's working. If you assigned him to read a certain paper, you have to make sure he read it. If you told him to search for literature, he needs to be able to discuss what he found and how is that relevant for the project and so on.

Since you are a postdoc, you probably can't enforce things properly. If you were his adviser, you could tell him to follow your discipline, or find another adviser. As a postdoc, you could go to the boss, tell them about what's going on and that the student consumes too much of your time. Tell them you are thinking of setting a discipline and ask them to back you up, especially since you are doing their job. Anyway, whatever you do, once you set your new set of rules, don't let him cross them, or break them yourself.

Edit - in response to @CaffeineAddiction comment claiming that, as an adviser you need to introduce the student to the basics.

The job of the adviser is not to introduce you to the foundations of whatever field. Part of that job is to teach the student how to introduce themselves to the basics. In other words, you don't teach the man to fish, you teach the man to teach himself how to fish. The basics should have been covered in classes. If they were not, you do have to make a compromise, and intervene when the student seems to have a block and doesn't make progress. But, you do that simply because you don't want to lose the student.

That's what I do. If my student has no background, I give him an easy test case, I suggest them a class to take, I recommend a book, or two, and give them one of the not so complex code that works. The code is a model, and might contain a few layers of complexity. My job is to make the student aware of this, and guide them to search for the knowledge they need to improve the code, or write their own.

I took the code as an example, since that was the original question. But, when you start research in my field, you don't get a code. You get a paper with a bunch of formulas. To understand those formulas, you need a few years of reading textbooks and other research papers. It's very easy to get lost in the process, in other words, spending 6 months on trying to understand something completely irrelevant. The adviser's job is to offer limited guidance to understanding that paper, help you recognize your blocks and address them. The heavy lifting is still yours.

As far as I understand, there are only two valuable skills that an adviser is responsible to teach a PhD student. The first is to teach the student how to learn on their own a completely new subject. The second skill an adviser must teach is how to do research. Many advisers skip the first skill because of many reasons, but mostly because of the lack of time. Then they complain about students with technician mentality. But, learning that first skill, also teaches you the right attitude towards the unknown, which is essential in research.

Most of the 'answers' here suggest that the post-doc "save himself," but they do not provide constructive manager-employee conflict resolutions.

I want to outline some suggestions. Try to honestly, objectively assess the following:

Does your employee have a learning/language barrier? If yes, seek specialist assistance for clarifying instructions to the employee.
Does the employee have adequate resources to understand and execute instructions? (Consistent computer, software, textbook, tutorial access).
Is the employee failing to perform due to poor scheduling? If yes, is it due to his own choices (procrastination, under-estimating time needed), or because management has failed to allocate appropriate planning stages for the project?
When confronted with a new problem to solve, is there a consistent stage at which he is failing? Consider requiring documentation or a lab journal for employees so that they can demonstrate what steps they took to resolve issues.
Is the employee/manager conflict emotional? An employee that dislike his boss may engage in active sabotage, while a manager who personally dislikes his employee may engage in exaggerated fault finding.
Does the employee have adequate pre-requisite training/skills to perform at the level required? Consider having a third party participate in a meeting to determine if you are being unreasonable in expectations. If employee has skill inadequacies have a skill-set expert advice on a learning plan, do not invent one on your own. Refer employee to appropriate tutoring, courses, or online tutorials where he can be held accountable for completing a training session.

Motivating and correcting the student should come, once a week, in timed, structured meetings. The student should also be given time to state his own concerns, ask questions or offer solutions without interruption or ridicule. Consider the following:

If this is a chemist, perhaps the tutorials closer to their area of expertise.
If the programming is unrewarding consider offering short-term incentives, for example allow him to present a successful model or GUI to undergraduates and get a round of applause for it.
Find bait. If he is publication motivated, use it. If he enjoys educating others, have him write a tutorial, if he likes editing graphics, assign those.
Consider partnering the graduate student with a successful undergraduate who has programming expertise. Ask the graduate student to provide chemistry insight in exchange for the undergraduate learning/practicing programming at a more advanced level. If possible, hire an undergraduate to collaborate with the graduate student. Having an ally or a position of authority may invigorate both.
Praise what can be praised. When the student does solve a problem or does something that demonstrates initiative signal gratitude and do not be sarcastic or condescending.
Network the student, if possible, with someone who could have experienced a similar learning curve and motivation challenges, but who is now successful.

When positive reinforcement fails, or falters, here are some appropriate negative reinforcement techniques:

Document your weekly expectation and give instruction on what the employee should do to "self troubleshoot" before the next meeting. When reviewing work consider if step 1 and 2 were taken, if applicable; if 0/2, report to overhead supervisor.
Ask employee to be responsible for correcting his own errors. Provide annotated code, not corrected code such that he has to go in and implement corrections directly.
Provide task specific deadlines and meeting agendas (even if one-sentence long e-mail). If your employee is failing to respond to milestone requests through procrastination or disrespectful attitude to your position, document it and show this to the professor and/or department chair. Harassment or personal attacks are not okay.
Ask the student to present/summarize the purpose of individual experiments or coding that is being performed. If there is a failure to comprehend the project, ask a (qualified, objective) third party or additional participant to provide feedback. If the third party agrees there is a comprehension gap, report this to the professor.

I am not doubting that you are in a difficult, time consuming situation, but I do think you might be failing as a manager and educator if your two solutions are "do his work for him" or "fire him." Learn to manage, motivate, and document your efforts. After documenting the experience, allow the professor to make the hiring/firing decision.


Removing a grant number from a published paper How can I remove a grant number from the acknowledgment of a published paper? since my institution refused to pay the reward for publishing this paper.

Depends on the policies of the venue at which you published the paper. Ask them.


Is it possible to survive as a researcher being a dispassionate person? I heard a lot of tips for (upcoming) researchers by top professors and researchers.
Almost all of them told that passion of a candidate is one of the quality that drives her research life.
All of them told the same fact in different ways. Some says that the element of surprise or shock is necessary in-order to lead research life.
It is true that anticipation/passion/element of surprise etc., may lead to a great research life. But, I am thinking the other way round.
Suppose there is a professor named dispassion. She won't get surprised or excited to the results of great researches of researchers. She is neither passionate nor dispassionate towards research or results. She does it as a routine task without any excitement or surprise.
Is it possible for her to survive as a productive researcher in academics?
Note: Dispassionate here does not refer to the unwillingness towards work. She feels that whatever results that can be obtained by research are normal or ordinary and hence she is not excited or influenced by them. As a lecturer has anxiety, researcher is dispassionate here.

The "passion" thing is a myth and a shoddy cliche.
Your true feelings need not have any effect on your career.  You just need to do the job.  In academia, there is lots of competition, so "doing the job" means doing it very well - among the best in the world.  But this requires actions, not feelings.
It can be handy to have the skill of making others believe you have certain emotions, though.
If you dislike academia, don't be an academic.  Especially don't teach if you dislike it.  There are better paying and easier jobs that are no more dislikable than teaching, but where you cannot harm students.

No, not for longer than 10/15 years.
The amount of overwork and the necessary submission to hidden power games and the extremely laborious task of writing proposals only to see them rejected will provide ample dissatisfaction to the dispassionated person to get out of research.
However, a non-negligible quota of research&teaching workforce of the academia will root its motivation in egoistic and selfish feelings, which makes academia a terrible world, where people are "happy" and are actaully enjoying and passionate about the progress and research, but at the expense of other people feelings and in a rather absurd competition mood, with the constant need of proving themselves better than the others by constant overworking (forcing the other to overwork themselves, in a constant downward spiral) as well as by smearing other colleagues and research groups, building closely knitted comunities and "how you dare" leave them.
So, no, you need a lot of self fuelled passion to survive in such a world.
Disclaimer: yes, I am very bitter, been there done that, in the academia for 11 years, since 3 years I left the Academia and I found that in the corporate world the human nature is more streamlined, at least people try to s***w you just because of profit/career and not because they dream they are helping a superior good (which they think they are entrusted to).


Can a professor not pay a student who will be working on a funded research grant project? I am a starting PhD student and my advisor got a research grant funded, and I am supposed to do the project. I have been supported by my family in the hope to find funding. well, the professor said that all the money from the research grant went to the department and so I am not getting any. Could that scenario happen?
P.S. My adviser is a new assistant professor and she is getting another student in the fall.

Thanks

That would be illegal in the US. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but here, all people who work are entitled by federal law to be paid, at least, minimum wage. If he refuses to pay you, you can either quit, refuse to do the work, or call your state's department of labor (or whatever it's called) or the US Departmen of Labor. I don't think Florida has such a state-level department.

If all the money that came from the grant to your school was swallowed by the department, then they should pay you instead. In the US, awards by the NSF are made directly to the university with the requirement that the funding listed in the budget for the workers must go to the named PI and the other named people or (often) unnamed student who will do the work. There are other line items that go to the university (indirect costs, etc.), but I'm not considering those here. The university, essentially, must send the salary money down. I don't know where you are or what terms the granting body puts in its terms, but some similar model seems likely.

Yes. The funding can only be used for the purposes for which it was obtained. Unless the funding explicitly includes a line item to support a student it is unlikely that the money could be used for that purpose.


Is it appropriate to ask the professor a trick question? I'm a CS student enrolled in a class about a certain programming language. Recently, I discovered a trick that is pretty useless in actual production code and doesn't seem to be known by many. The trick results in a program not outputting the expected result. The program is less than 5 lines long.

I am curious as to whether my professor would be able to uncover the solution and would like to ask him during his consultation time. My concern that I do not want the professor to think I am trying to be rude, disrespectful, or anything negative to him.

Would it be appropriate for me to go see my professor during his consultation hours and ask him why my program is not outputting the correct output?

Asking it as a "trick", where you pretend it is a real question and you don't  know the answer, could certainly be annoying depending on the professor's mood.  So don't try to be tricky.

  Hi Professor, if you have a few minutes, I came across an interesting puzzle that I thought you might appreciate.  I thought the answer was pretty surprising.  [if invited to continue:] Look at this program; can you guess what it would output?

You should make it clear that this is a "riddle" to which you already know the answer.  If the professor isn't interested in spending time thinking about it, he can always ask you to tell him the answer, or just say he is too busy right now.

Also, you know your professor better than we do; use your own judgment as to whether he is someone that would find this sort of thing interesting.

Some commenters have raised the question of whether this is an appropriate use of office hours at all.  My view is that it is, since it is at least somewhat related to the content of the course (same programming language).  It also has the potential to lead to a technical discussion in which you might learn something.  I personally would be happy to have this kind of conversation with a  student during my office hours.

Of course, it should be low priority. If there are other students waiting with questions that are directly about the course (homework, lecture, etc), then this is not a good time to ask your puzzle; go away and come back another time.

I am assuming that your honest goal in all this is simply to share something that you think the professor will find technically interesting, and/or to learn more about it yourself.  If your intention is actually to "test" the professor, or to impress him with your obscure technical knowledge, or make him think you are smart so that you get a better grade, then please don't; that would be rude and disrespectful, and professors tend to be pretty good at seeing through things like that.

This really depends on how busy the office hours are.

At my university the office hours lines are often 30 minutes to 1 hour long, so you do your fellow classmates a disservice by taking up the professor's time with something that doesn't actually help you.

But if nobody comes to the professor's office hours, then sure, you might as well.  Professors are used to not knowing things (they do research, after all), so it's unlikely that you would bruise their ego.  You don't get to be a professor without being repeatedly humbled by your experiences.


Can I perform psychological experiments at home and be taken seriously? I've just finished my under-graduation in psychology in my country and I'm very motivated to start publishing and making my own experiments.
Following this answer: Does one need to be affiliated with a university to publish papers?, I've discovered that I can publish papers without institutional affiliation. Is it the same with experiments?
How can I prove that my experiments were rigorously conducted and that I'm not faking documents or participants?  how can I show that I didn't induce some answers to the participants to prove a given hypothesis?
If I can publish without an institutional affiliation, would my results be taken seriously in academia?

Publishing papers about psychology experiments does present an additional issue, human subject research ethics. A reputable journal is likely to require assurance that the rights and welfare of the research subjects were protected during the research.

If you were working or studying at a research university in many countries the university would have some provision for reviewing the ethics of planned research, and monitoring it in progress. US research universities each have an Institutional review board. A journal could rely on IRB approval to know that the research subjects were protected.

You need to find out how that is handled in your country, and make sure you are following procedures and getting reviews that will make your research acceptable for the journals in which you wish to publish. There are enough pitfalls in doing human, or even animal, experiments that one should really not attempt them without guidance.

Usually, a psychology researcher starts their research career as a graduate student with an academic advisor supervising them. They will learn how their supervisor, and other researchers, prepare and organize experiments. Their supervisor will guide them in selecting ethical experiments, getting informed consent, preparing paperwork for independent review, etc.

Is it the same with experiments?

Yes, assuming you have sufficient resources to conduct the experiment.

  How can I show my experiment was really made rigorously and I'm not faking documents and participants? How can I show the experiment really happened? how can I show I didn't induce some answers to the participants to prove my hypothesis? There are a lot of simple experiments I can do by myself and I want to publish them, how can I be taken serious?

In each instance: The same way a university researcher would.

I didn't think it needed saying, but: The necessary ethical and legal paperwork is required, regardless of where work is conducted; some experiments cannot, should not, or both, be conducted at home; and other caveats. Nonetheless, ultimately, publishable research - even in psychology - can be conducted at home, albeit, you'll need to be selective about the research and you'll need to compliant. (The OP might want to ask should such work be conducted at home, which Patricia Shanahan partly answers.) Working with an industry- or university-affiliated PI - e.g., as an intern working from home - would simplify the process.

That said, given that

  I've just finished my under-graduat[e degree] in psychology

You might want to ask: What are the benefits of a supervisor, over working alone? The benefits are significant and I'd recommend supervision.


What to do if I am on a hiring committee and I am aware that a candidate has exhibited unethical behavior in his previous position? After a series of unethical incidents that affected me directly in my previous academic institution, I managed to move to a higher ranked department in my field about seven years ago. I am now in the hiring committee in my current institution and one of the candidates who is being considered is from my former institution.

There are two unethical practices that the candidate performed that I am aware of. One is that he managed to squeeze in as a third author on a finished paper and he thus made no contribution. I did most of the work for the paper and the paper was finished when my co-author added this person's name and submitted it. The second incident is that the candidate has announced in the past how he has changed his research results before submission to please the editor of a top journal in my field. He did this in the early years of his career. There are others in my former institution who know about it but they find this to be no big deal.

I am considering doing one of the following:

Discuss this with my current dept.
Keep quiet and stay in the committee.
Keep quiet but step down from the committee

For your information, I am a foreigner whose work is appreciated by everyone. However, I feel that I will not get much support if I open up. I had tried this in my previous institution and I realized that only a couple of people supported me. What should I do?

If you're on the hiring committee, then your job is to evaluate the candidates.  I see no need to back away from that (and by the way, I can't see what your being a "foreigner" could possibly have to do with any of this).

One has to exercise some restraint in repeating "hearsay" in official matters: unless you can find evidence about the changed research, I would hesitate to bring it up because it's hard for everyone else to independently evaluate.  On the other hand, if you are a coauthor of a paper with the candidate in question, then your colleagues should be very interested to hear your take on that.  I think you should certainly describe the candidate's contributions -- or lack thereof -- honestly to your colleagues.  I might avoid putting the banner of "unethical behavior" on it: the ethics of it are really for your colleagues to evaluate as well, right?  In general I think that in these kinds of matters it is more collegial and also more convincing to provide information which is factual rather than subjective or purely evaluative.

There is also the issue of why you, as the first author of a paper, allowed a coauthor whom you feel did absolutely nothing.  Isn't that at least arguably unethical behavior on your part?  I think it's better not to open that can of worms, but rather say that in fact the candidate's contribution to the joint work was minimal and that you do not feel like he should get much credit for it.

The first question I would put is:
1. He is smart/competent enough for this position?
2. Is  he a hardworker who will contribute?

Come on man, everybody makes mistakes. Just get over it and make sure it does not happen in the future.


What is the process for getting a non-EU PhD "validated" in Germany so I can continue working as university associated faculty? I am a medical doctor in Bosnia and Herzegovina (which is not in the EU). I also hold a PhD title and am an associated professor on the medical faculty. I am moving to Germany (Oberbayern). I have already done all the necessary additional work so that I can continue practicing medicine in Germany.
I also want to continue my career in research and possibly work at a German university. I have several publications. For this, I assume my PhD will have to be "recognized" by some German institution. How does this work? Who do I contact?

PhD is often less problematic than MSc. It helps if your country is in the EU, but expect some bureaucracy. Contact the Bavarian ministry of education.


What should be done when the theory behind a PhD thesis turns out to be wrong? I have a friend who has been working on a PhD dissertation for over 3 years and he is supposed to be wrapping it up. Unfortunately, his thesis involves a complex model and populating the model with hard-to-obtain data. After having finally gathered all the data and plugged it into the model, he is finding that the theory is more or less non-predictive and does not work. In other words, he had an interesting theory, having been tested against the data it turns out the theory is wrong.

So, in this situation what would you do? Just write a dissertation that says, "well four years of research shows that this theory is wrong"?

Why was the theory wrong? "It didn't work" is not the end -- the end is knowing why it didn't work. There are at least two possible answers:

There is some fundamental, obvious mistake at the core of the model that should have been caught a long time ago. In this case, it may be a matter of starting over. It's difficult to produce a paper/thesis if the story is "I made a stupid model and it didn't work."
There is some previously-unknown reason why the model didn't work despite smart people thinking it would. This is likely an interesting, publishable result. In fact, it could be even more interesting than a paper that just says "we used a model and it worked as expected."

It sounds like the data is valuable as well. Even if it is a matter of starting over again, this dataset sounds like it could lead to a publication or be an ingredient in the new thesis.

I would structure a document entitled "On the non sustainability of the hypothesis that ...".

This document could be a research report, a journal article, a thesis chapter, anything. While writing, the logic of the thoughts will unfold itself; perhaps you can even find that it is not true that all is wrong. All other reactions given in this thread contribute to providing motivation and sensible ways forward.

In terms of self-reflection, beside a bunch of frequently occurring biases of judgement, please mind the impostor's bias as well: there is even a playlist of TED talks to choose the more suited variant from.

Finally, for inspiration, it could be interesting to look at the editorial lines of journals that publish 'studies of failures' as different from 'failed studies'. One in the medical community that I heard of is the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine. I imagine it is important to gather up the vocabulary appropriate to explaining 'studies of failures', and borrowing from any reputable source can be useful.


Is it appropriate to make a pun that references a highly charged topic in current events, in a lecture on an unrelated subject? For example, when discussing red-black trees in lecture, is it appropriate to use the phrase "Black Nodes Matter?"

The proof that red-black trees are balanced relies heavily on the property that each downward path originating from a node contains the same number of black nodes.  Given this, I am wondering if it is appropriate to say #BlackNodesMatter.

This would be very unfortunate. People across the political spectrum have strong feelings about the words Black Lives Matter. Indeed, the subject matter of the movement is literally life and death. It's not something that should be made light of in mixed company, let alone in a classroom.

Is the intention to provide an extra knowledge connection that would help students remember the material better?
It seems like it could be helpful in that regard; that'd be a primary benefit ('pro').

Pros should be weighed against cons and the net compared to alternatives.

Are you demeaning the lives of people who are killed by police brutality, or the work of those advocating on their behalf, by calling attention to that movement in this setting?  Based on the fact that you asked this question at all, it doesn't sound like you are intending to demean anyone, but whether or not people interpret it that way depends not only on intention but also on audience and context (e.g. classroom mood, what style students have come to expect from you), etc. If your audience receives a demeaning message from that line, that'd be a primary 'con.'

If you are supporting the work of those advocates by calling attention to their cause, as they seek, then your reference would be helping the #BlackLivesMatter movement (and whether this is a pro or con probably depends on how you feel about that movement).


I got accepted into a math PhD program but I don't feel adequate enough to attend I got accepted into a school that I really wanted to go to for a math PhD. I finished my masters and I love math very much. It's something that I've always been extremely passionate about. I used to always go for representation theory seminars with an old professor that I did research with (we mainly did work in certain parts of representation theory) and I thoroughly enjoyed them even if I couldn't fully understand.

But I suck at math. I think I only was accepted because I'm a woman and Indian. Everyone is so smart in all my classes. During my undergraduate degree I was amongst the top of the class but once I got to a master's, I was at the bottom of the barrel. I can't understand things the way everyone else does. Everyone is always able to engage in the lesson and it takes me 4 hours just to understand the smallest thing, it's depressing.

I still got A's in almost all my classes but it wasn't hard to get an A in the classes. It's not like I deserved it and it probably deceived admissions officers.

What makes me even more depressed is that on standardized tests, I can score in the 95th percentile in english/verbal without ever cracking open a book. But it's just not the same in math, I have to try so hard and even still I don't do nearly as well as I would like.

My strengths aren't in math, I am very good with english, history and philosophy. My professors from my undergraduate degree would always encourage me to pursue these fields but I love math so much more even though I'm not good at it. I just don't know what to do, I enjoy those subjects recreationally but not something I want to pursue full-time right now. I would love to get a second master's in philosophy but it's not my priority and if I never got it, I think I'd be fine just reading the literature on my own.

Anyways, even the most basic math facts I will forget. It's embarrassing to be a PhD student and forget things so easily. I don't even want to make friends because I'm scared they will start talking about math and I won't know what they're saying

Should I just quit?

First off, congratulations on being accepted to the PhD. That means the faculty have carefully evaluated your application materials and decided that you are a promising young mathematician. They are experts and they think you have what it takes to finish a PhD.

No one gets admitted just because of their gender and/or race. It would be a waste of the department's resources to admit unqualified students and it would be a disservice to those students -- setting them up to fail.

It sounds like you have Impostor Syndrome. The truth is that almost everyone, from time to time, feels like they don't belong. I have felt that way at many points.

No, you should not "just quit". You have a great opportunity in front of you. It sounds like you have other things that you want to consider doing. Perhaps you will decide that those other opportunities are better for you. But, if you do turn down the PhD, you should not think of it as quitting. You should think of it as taking a positive step in another direction.

That said, academia is hard. And I would not advise anyone to do a PhD unless they really enjoy research.

You should think seriously about what you want to do, as it sounds like you are uncertain about where your best option lies. Talk to people you know personally, as they can best advise you.

One thing to note is that a PhD should give you some flexibility to study other things or, better yet, to combine different research topics. My PhD program allowed — required, in fact — me to take graduate courses in totally different fields.

I agree with others that you should try if you love it. Two things to consider -

Think about the alternative. You will never know if you could have
done it and you will probably regret quitting before you start.
It is very likely that the people think the same about you, where you are the one who is smarter and more talented. They have reason to think so! You were at the top of your class, you are in the 95% percentile. Imagine how the other 95 feel about you =P

I understand how you feel. I also love mathematics/statistics and computer science but consistently score better in the humanities with less effort. That does not mean that I have no talent, I still score better than many of my classmates in STEM fields, and I do not love the humanities in the same way. In the end you become good at what you spend time on and you want to spend time in mathematics. Do your best, decide later.


Recommendation letters for "good enough" students I'm a math professor. I get asked to write a number of recommendation letters to graduate schools where my honest view of the candidate is "this student would fall somewhere in the bottom 25-50% of their student body. I expect there will be dozens of applicants of similar quality and I have no  reason to favor this one except that I have a good personal relationship with him or her."

Logically, this candidate deserves to go as much as any of the dozen similar people in the pool, but I feel that a letter which said the above would be a real disservice to them. Should I refuse to write them?  Describe their accomplishments and pointedly ignore that (if my estimates are right) they don't particularly make them stand out?

I've only been a student, so take this with a grain of salt.

Be honest to them about their abilities and your perception of them before you write a letter for them. Grad school is not a small commitment. See my answer here also, for an answer to a related question. An excerpt which I feel is very relevant:

  Be very honest. You have information that they don't have that will
  be useful for them. I would rather you tell them what you know and have
  them make the decision for themselves, rather than let them keep doing
  what they're doing and seeing them fail.

You may respond as follows to these flocks of mediocre students:

I wouldn't be the best person to write a recommendation letter for you, because (a) my standards are so absurdly high that I can only write a strong recommendation letter for about x% of the students in our department, and (b) I believe that our department doesn't give a solid preparation for grad school to many of our students.
Please don't let this discourage you from approaching other members of the department.  I am an anomaly.
Similarly, please don't let this response discourage you from going to grad school.
I wish you all the best with your future endeavors, and best of luck with your grad applications.


I'm 2 months into my PhD. When can I ask my supervisor about the rejected candidates? I was recently accepted for a PhD position after going through the application process of submitting the usual documents (CV, motivation letter,...) as well as an interview.

I have heard, from my now colleagues, that during the application process, my supervisor had mentioned that I had come across as very motivated.

I am curious however, if there is ever a good time (say after one has established a rapport with one's supervisor) to ask about the other candidates who fell short? Or is it something quite taboo?

You can ask, but it's really none of your business.  Admissions committee deliberations are generally treated as confidential.  Asking about the other candidates and why they were rejected will almost certainly be seen as intrusive.  It's the kind of thing that's likely to cause them to wonder how they made the mistake of choosing you over all those other candidates who would likely have known better than to ask that question.

Of course no-one disrespects other's privacy, and sure this is none of your business, but curiosity is also natural, and for some their curiosity on other people is stronger than others. For those, they might don't understand why a natural tendency is perceived as intrusive, and they will be confused. For me in the past, this confusion invokes more questions, and the cycle will begin.

I still don't think curiosity on other people is harmful, but my life lesson is that it's also natural for others for not having strong curiosity. In their natural point of views, this might be perceived as intrusive. Knowing their personality is crucial, and with time you will know when and how to ask to satisfy your curiosity.

Think of the people you will ask as a small Stack Exchange community. There are two kinds of question that get popular. The first kind asks from curiosity, but it evokes controversy. They're still good questions, but some will disagree with it. The second kind not only asks from curiosity, but also shows the desire to really understand what's going on. The curiosity is not anymore peripheral, it is indeed the one that everyone wants to see it. And this will evoke their curiosity.