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<issue_start>username_0: How often are research domains "competitive"?
That is, is there often a competition within the field for the "most content" or "highest quality results"?
Is it always the case?
OTOH, I find that "competition for truth" is inherent to scientific method, particularly "criticality", but OTOH I find that as in other endeavors, having competitive interest might also lead to poorer quality papers, due to e.g. working faster.<issue_comment>username_1: Your last sentence gets precisely to the point - it is to make the author adopt a new mentality and develop an approach to academic work; the thesis is supposed to be the start of the path, not the end of it. Or maybe a new beginning, if you wish, a new stage in life.
It is an accomplishment and is celebrated accordingly, but it is similar to the first item crafted by an artisan or the first song written by an artist. It is not supposed to be their last, far from it, but more often than not it is special and holds sentimental value to the author.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: The truth, as so often, is somewhere in the middle. No, a PhD thesis is not an *exercise* in the traditional sense - it's supposed to be a novel, useful contribution to the scientific state of the art. For PhD students that leave research behind after their degree it will typically indeed be the most advanced, most complete piece of research they ever produce. However, for academics that stay longer at university it will often be only a starting point, with more, larger, better work to follow.
Basically, a PhD thesis is a student's [masterpiece](https://www.definitions.net/definition/masterpiece) in the traditional meaning of the word (*"A work created in order to qualify as a master craftsman and member of a guild."*). It's not necessarily a "masterpiece" in the sense of "the defining piece of work of a researcher", although it might be (most commonly if this researcher quits academia after their PhD).
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: I am doing my final year research under my supervisor for my Master's degree. I also wanted to do a short project to utilize my summer vacation. So, I approached a professor who was teaching a semester course, who seemed to be happy to supervise such a project. He agreed to guide me on a short project, that I wanted to start after the semester. Once the vacation started, I put a lot of effort into gathering knowledge about the topic he gave me. The topic was not in the syllabus, so I had to try a lot to understand it. After 2.5 weeks, he sent me a document with a rule in the institute that the project duration should be a whole semester. But I know I can't spend so much time during semester time for the project, so I suggested if the total duration can be extended more, so I can work during the 2 months of summer vacation and the next holiday, after this semester. He seemed interested and asked me if I have decided about my final year research. But once I told him that I am doing research under another professor, he got disinterested and didn't want me to work on this project anymore.
I had mentioned it clearly in my initial emails, while asking for the project, that I want to work for 2 months during my holidays, but he accepted at that time.
I want to know if it is good practice to discuss my research topic and reveal my guide's name to other professors, or is there an unwritten rule to keep it secret.
I am confused as, why he accepted it first, and then after knowing there is no chance of me doing research under him, he rejected it? I want to know if I have violated any code of conduct/ any unwritten rule because of which he changed his mind.<issue_comment>username_1: Firstly being transparent about the expectations and duration is good conduct. Hence if you state that you have mentioned these details then it is useful and there is nothing wrong with it. There is no rule/good conduct in hiding such information in doing a Bachelor's/Master's short/long project.
It sounds like that this professor with whom you were interested in a short project is not interested in your way of doing this, so I would say that it is beneficial that he did not start this project at all - starting it and then becoming uninterested would have been derogatory to your plans.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Well, I personally wouldn't say it is good or bad. It is a matter of discretion. The thing is this, most supervisors like to deal with serious students. Students who know what they are doing. Once they know you're interested in research, they will like/love to groom you because it gives them credit. Working on a certain project under them could add to their tally of research works. Perhaps the reason why he got disinterested is that he felt you are taking your seriousness somewhere, which will end him up losing.
So I believe it is a matter of discretion. But there are no hard and fast rules.
Upvotes: 0
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<issue_start>username_0: I had a research article posted in arXiv on November 2020 and it is currently in review by a leading journal, I call it J1.
Today when I was browsing research papers, I found that a research paper has been published in a lower tier journal (let's call it J2) and it has one section with ideas that are very similar to mine.
The paper published in J2 was sent for review on 1st Feb 2021 and it got accepted on 15th Aug, 2021 (per the dates given on the website of the journal).
The section which is similar to mine has results which form the main idea of the paper and I find that it has been allegedly stolen. I am amazed how my paper which is already on arXiv can get scooped like this. Obviously the wording has been changed by the authors but the main idea in the section is the same as mine.
**I am confused what should I do now. How do I prove the plagiarism, whom should I reach, and how should I approach this?**
*Is the fact that their results in Sec 1 are similar to mine and I have published it first on arXiV not a valid claim to prove that my work has been scooped?*
I am in my PhD days and the author who has done this is an Assistant Professor.
**Note:** By "similar" I mean that the results obtained in Section 1 of the paper in J2 and the results obtained in my paper in J1 are the same. The other sections of the paper i.e. Sections 2 and 3 in J2 are different from mine.
But the results in Sec. 1 are very important and form a base for the other sections of the both the papers in J1 and J2.<issue_comment>username_1: It could be that the paper in J2 first appeared as a preprint much earlier than Feb 1, 2021. It could be also that it was first submitted to another journal and was rejected there. So before you make any accusations, you should contact the authors of the paper published in J2.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: So far, *nothing* in your question at all indicates they have indeed stolen your results. You can claim you came up with them earlier, but the history of science has had plenty of occasions where the same results were formulated *independently* with years, sometimes even decades or centuries (!) separating them. This seems the most likely conclusion.
In general though, if you have a more reasonable suspicion (similar or identical wording, order of points they make, similar-looking data, sometimes even stolen figures), that is an ethical issue to be raised with the editorial board of J2. Make sure to have proofs, and these proofs should be as rigid as the proofs in the articles you're writing.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: [Simultaneous discovery of research ideas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries) is an entirely normal occurrence in academic research. It happened to me several times over my career so far, and I’m just one guy — some versions of this happen to practically everyone who works in crowded, competitive research areas.
>
> I am confused what should I do now.
>
>
>
What should you do? First of all, take a deep breath and think very carefully about the seriousness of your accusations and whether they are substantiated by hard evidence. You have at least one very clear misconception in your post and follow-up comments, namely the belief that other people must know about your work if they are working in the same area, because it is posted on arXiv. That’s absolutely not true. How would you feel if someone accused you of misconduct because you failed to cite a relevant paper of which you were unaware? Have you read *all* the literature in your field? I bet you wouldn’t feel that that was a very fair accusation if someone accused you of stealing someone’s work that you never even heard about.
After taking a deep breath, my suggestion is that you show both your paper and the other one to an adviser or senior colleague, and ask for their advice on how to proceed. Quite possibly there isn’t anything you need to do — mathematics journals are quite tolerant of publishing independent discoveries, and in any case your posting to arXiv will establish precedence in the unlikely event that people care enough about this to make an issue of who has priority over the ideas. You may want to contact the authors of the other paper and point them, diplomatically and without any hint of accusation of wrongdoing, to your own work. And you may even want to cite their paper or add a discussion to your paper of how their ideas relate to yours — that depends a bit too much on the details so I don’t feel I can advise you precisely. Regardless, please don’t accuse people of stealing ideas based on such flimsy evidence. That is a very serious matter and could badly hurt your reputation.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_4: Your arXiv preprint shows that you had the idea first. Does the subsequent paper in J2 harm you in any way? You can still demonstrably claim credit for your work in subsequent papers, job applications, etc.
Finding whether there was plagiarism or not, in addition to being difficult, would not be useful to you. It might be useful to your competitors' employers and more generally to the community, but this is probably someone else's business.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I have written a research article and everyone else has timely submitted their part of corrections after reading the paper. My supervisor is really busy, all the time. I can understand that.
However, I also have my interests at stake. A timely publishing means more citations and ensuring the idea is still new. Me and another student submitted the articles to him to read and the other student has already published that article. It has been almost 5 months where I remind him at least once a month to read my paper and suggest whatever minor suggestions there are, but he always says he will look into it and doesn't.
What it the most diplomatic way to handle this situation of getting the paper read and maintaining good relations?<issue_comment>username_1: Perhaps you have resolved this already, but if not, I'd suggest a sit-down with them. I don't see it as an escalation. Say that you realize how busy they are and ask permission to move ahead with the paper without their further input. If they trust you and the others, then they may say fine, implicitly approving the current version.
If you think there are some portions that truly require their input, you could come prepared with a few questions and even a marked up copy of the paper, highlighting the areas you are unsure of. It need not be a long meeting, nor a confrontational one.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: As a busy professor, who has held up publication of papers in my lab, I would recommend scheduling a sit-down meeting with them and just asking the professor to read the paper while you sit there.
It seems like time-management might be an issue for the professor, but by agreeing to the 1 hour meeting (or maybe you can ask for 2 hours), they are committing that time. Maybe it's enough to get them to sign off.
At worst, you will get some feedback about what needs to be done before submissions. Then ask if you can do the same thing the following week.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: Unless your supervisor is intentionally evil and/or ignoring you, they should be more than happy to accept an invitation to sit down and discuss it. They should also understand that this is important for you.
Asking for an appointment where you meet in person may be what is needed to move this to the urgent pile. Most over-stretched professors mean no harm, even if they unintentionally cause it...
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_4: I note the suggestion by [username_2](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62052/username_2) to set a meeting with your professor and use it to sit there and watch him review the paper. This is a reasonable idea, but it might be off-putting to the professor for you to sit there while he works; it might also cause him to rush his review.
A slight variant on this that is sometimes used in busy consulting firms is to "book time in the calendar" by sending a meeting request for a 2 hour block in the professor's calendar (with a reminder ping on the invitation), but setting it just as review time without the expectation that the student will be there --- e.g., title the calendar invitation "Review quantum's paper" with no location specified. If the professor accepts the calendar invitation then you can be confident that they have locked in time for the task and it is in their calendar to avoid conflicting appointments. This is a method used in some busy offices, particularly in large consulting firms.
Upvotes: 0
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm coming up to the end of my PhD. My work is industry funded, so although I've presented my work, and written technical reports and patents\*, I'm probably not as experienced in 'scientific writing' as perhaps I should be and my literature reviews have tended towards application-based, rather than pure science.
I've made what could be a big discovery, but I can't shake the feeling that the general case must have been observed somewhere before — maybe not in my field, and not with the exact materials I work with, but it seems too obvious for nobody to seen or thought of it.
I've described it in my thesis and said it's new for my materials etc but my supervisor says that I'm underselling it and it could be a really big deal. We've been referring to it with one specific name — literature searches on that bring up nothing similar. I've tried what I think are synonyms and can't find anything. I've written that it's a novel pathway for my material, and again I've been told to make it a bigger deal and say it's novel in the general case.
I'm still worried. What if my examiners decide to do their own lit. search, and hit on a search term I just haven't thought of, and there are actually lots of examples? I feel like I've searched lots of things, but perhaps somebody with a different background will think of another search term, or worse, just know an example. I've tried searching adjacent fields it might be related to (chemistry/geology/construction/material type) but I know that wording can be different in different fields as well.
If I'm right and it is brand new, then it's really exciting. If I've missed it though, and the examiners find it, realistically what will happen? I'll have to correct obviously, but I'm worried that they'll accuse me of "reverse plagiarism" and not looking hard enough so I can make it sound more impressive.
\*A patent based on this has gone through, and I've checked what the examiner has written to see if he found anything similar (he didn't). However, the patent focussed purely on my particular system and it wasn't written as being a new general pathway, he might not have looked for that.<issue_comment>username_1: Here are some observations I've gathered from reading your question (with the disclaimer that I don't know you and am taking your description at face value).
* You have done a PhD in a topic and know that area extremely well.
* You have done a thorough literature search with different search parameters and have not found something equivalent to your work.
* Your advisor thinks your work is exciting and that you are underselling it. So you are not the only person who thinks your work is novel.
Given all this, I think it is *extremely unlikely* that your exact work exists elsewhere. *Maybe* there is overlap with some work you don't know. But even in the absolute worst case scenario that this hypothetical overlap exists and is significant, people in your field are apparently not aware of it. So even in the worst case, you are still making a contribution by connecting those results to your field.
Additionally, keep in mind that no one has thought more about your thesis than you. Your examiners may ask tough questions and realize connections to other work you didn't know. But they are extremely unlikely to find an obscure connection with such a major overlap in their literature search that you missed. Even if it exists, this connection is much more likely to be made by the person who actually did that work, than a busy professor with their own interests getting up to speed on your topic. And in the even-beyond-worst-case scenario that your work significantly overlaps with some obscure paper that one of your examiner happens to know about, I really doubt that they would accuse you of wrongdoing; if they thought you were dishonest I doubt they would agree to be on your committee, and to accuse you of dishonesty would also by implication be accusing your advisor. But more to the point, it wouldn't lead anywhere productive. Based on the professors I know, I think it is much more likely that they will bring it up to try to help you, and you can show how your work is complementary or builds on it or how you can relate it to your field. However, to reiterate, I think this scenario is unbelievably unlikely.
I think it is much more likely that you actually have made an advance. Bizarrely, sometimes this can actually be more stressful than realizing your work did not make as much of an impact as you originally hoped. Presumably there is now a research program that can be built on this advance, and it will take a lot of energy and work you can and should now spend in developing the ideas and pushing it forward. Apologies for the armchair psychology, but sometimes we get wrapped up in "worst case thinking" as an avoidance mechanism for the most likely case. Writing your thesis is a stressful time. Take some breaks and occasionally let yourself be happy about what you accomplished.
---
It's maybe worth adding a sentence about what I mean by "probability" here. When I say it is "unlikely," I mean in the sense that a reasonable person could assign a small degree of belief to the possibility that there is an obscure overlapping work and act accordingly without being irresponsible. Reasonable people would not rake you over the coals with criticism if it turns out your nightmare scenario turns out to pass, because you aren't omniscient and sometimes rare things happen. If it does happen, it happens, and you'll deal with it. But, being overly concerned about rare events, can mean that you are underprepared for more likely ones.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: #### Just submit to the reviewers and see what happens
It's always possible that you and your supervisor have missed something, and really, we can't offer any helpful analysis of how likely this is. It happens sometimes in academic work. I've had it happen to me a couple of times due to literature searches that did not search the correct keywords (see this [related answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/159450/159452#159452)), but fortunately not for my PhD dissertation. You are in a situation where neither you nor your supervisory panel are aware of previous publication of this work, so the best thing to do is to submit to the reviewers and see what happens. If it turns out that there is some existing work you've missed, you can revise accordingly.
I also note your statement that your supervisor thinks you are "underselling" your work. Personally, I'm a big fan of work that is understated, so if you have a big discovery and present it in an understated manner, that sounds pretty great to me. Of course, you should consider your supervisor's view here, but in my view it is much better to understate the importance of your own work than to overstate it. Referees are experts in the field so they will be able to judge the merits of the work without being beaten over the head with how important it is.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: How likely is it that a reviewer will point out relevant research you missed? Unlikely. They have limited time and are unlikely to know the details like you do. It's more likely that they'll point out something that they think is related but is not actually related in my experience.
How likely is it that you missed relevant research? 90% probability or higher. The amount of literature out there is vast and finding synonyms isn't easy. I tried hard to do a comprehensive search during my PhD but I still missed relevant documents. Most likely the relevant research won't be the same exact thing, but maybe it will be.
If you have missed something, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Most likely it won't be exactly the same. Highlight the differences and move on.
You can probably call the patent examiner on the phone to ask about what they searched and what they did not search if you want to be certain. Your patent attorney may want you to not speak to the examiner at all, unfortunately. There are also various search logs you can look at. These vary from a list of the "field of search" which is just patent classifications searched (this is listed on issued US patents) to a timestamped log of search queries run and a narrative search notes document. You can check websites like [Global Dossier](https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/) for your patent application to find these logs.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_4: Even experienced researchers can wrongly believe to have discovered something new when a similar observation had been reported before. The consecrated phrase to tone down a priority claim is "to the best of our knowledge". As far as I understand, your discovery is indeed to the best of your knowledge entirely new. You can write it, and in case a reviewer proves you wrong, what is expected is that you'll be even more interested than disappointed!
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: Being a new idea isn't a binary. One thing that always strikes me when trying to find discovery dates is that discovery is a fuzzy process.
Normally the best things are rediscovered many times over. Neural networks are a good example (see [Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Information
Science and Statistics](https://cis.temple.edu/%7Elatecki/Courses/RobotFall08/BishopBook/Pages_from_PatternRecognitionAndMachineLearning1.pdf) by Bishop).
Yes, maybe someone else has done something similarish, with a different name, in a different field. But if you have put it into a better format, and seen its use as the solution to a problem that the other person missed, that is a groundbreaking contribution.
So, yes, do make it clear that you have done a literature search and not found it elsewhere. If possible, name the next closest thing you know of. At worst, your reviewer knows of a closer example, and you have to make a correction. They won't fail you for that, it's just a correction.
Also, this may be less obvious and surprising than you are imaging. We tend to forget how specialised our field is, and how few people are involved. It's easy to forget that the central problems and advances in our world are not even on the radar of someone in the proverbial "next room". This normally becomes more apparent at conferences. At a conference, I'd normally want to spend at least half my talk explaining the state of the art in my field, otherwise there is no clear need for my work.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: The point of a Ph.D. defense is to show that you know a specific topic to an expert level and can contribute to creating new knowledge in the area.
There is no expectation that your work is flawless and spectacular. No sane examiner will kill your work at the defense. If there are serious flaws you will know in advance.
Furthermore, you can defend only what you have done. If your opponent points out relevant work that you have missed, use your literature search methodology as a defense. Ask your opponent to explain how the missed work is relevant to your work. Listen and point out your specific contribution.
People come up with similar ideas independently all the time. You will be accused only if the similarities are on a detail level, e.g. word order in the description and such.
It is good to have a mock defense with some tough opponents. Start with some soft and likely questions, end with them hammering you until you cry. Observe and learn how to respond to tough and provocative questions. Write down strategies for how to exit from a corner.
e.g.
Opponent: This work is exactly what X did 5 years ago. How did you miss it?
You: Thanks for pointing this out. My work was done specifically for company Y taking their specific needs and context into account. We further implemented the results into zzz. A patent was submitted as a result.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_7: I am making some assumptions here, but even if the phenomenon turns out to be known and previously studied, you could rework your thesis to describe what novelty it brings to ***your*** field.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_8: It's vital to distinguish between work adequate for getting a patent and that done towards a PhD.
Whether you get a patent or not is not a concern for your external examiner:
he/she is concerned with the (knowable) independence, originality, substantiality and worthiness for publication in peer-reviewed journals of your final thesis.
To you and your supervisor this is at least a novel path for the materials you've applied it to. Your supervisor thinks it novel for a range of materials too. But you are not so sure and want to remain cautious for the time being. I think that this is wise as external examiners dislike immodesty even more than opaque writing and you don't need trouble at the final hurdle.
On the general question of your thinking that *someone* working in your field must have come across this before, I know how you feel. What you did might have seemed rational or a common sense thing for someone working in this field to do. Hence your doubts.
To allay your doubts, try to reduce the gist of your innovation to its pure science (e.g. chemistry/physics) essentials. Using the relevant terminology for the phenomena involved, do some more literature searches. Not just papers, but texts, theses, conference poster papers and other media too. It might be worth discussing the value of the innovation with a senior scientist in a relevant government laboratory - but only do so after getting approval from your supervisor as not every government scientist puts country over pocket-money, sadly.
You have had a good outcome to your work. Appreciate and enjoy it. Maybe keep a memento of these successful experiments as a gift to your father and mother.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_9: I wish to point out that, over the history of science, there are any number of stories where two people discovered the same thing at roughly tomorrow. A famous example is <NAME> and <NAME> invention of the telephone. That fight went to the US Supreme court. See also the Leibniz-Newton calculus controversy.
So if you find that somebody did discover something along the same lines as what you have found, you will be in distinguished company.
I have every confidence you are beginning a long and productive career.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_10: As others have stated, you are almost certainly the worlds foremost expert on the exact thing you have done. However, if you are working in a system where you will have two examiners who will devote substainal amounts of time to studying your thesis in preparation for a formal exam (e.g. the UK), then they will almost certainly find some things that you have missed at some point. Almost all theses require some level of corrections after the viva - this is expected, and is not a problem.
However, it is unlikely they will tell you your entire concept is no good. In the unlikely situation where someone has published something very similar that you haven't found, the most likely outcome is that the examienrs will make you write a section discussing this existing work and how it is similar and how different from your own. It will not prevent you getting a PhD, and since you already have the patent, when what other negative outcome could it have?
Upvotes: 0
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<issue_start>username_0: I am in the position where I applied for a job in my **current** institution and did not get the position. I think one of my referees may have provided a negative reference. I know that Universities (or companies) are under no obligation, normally, to show a candidate the reference letter they received for them. However, I am already employed by them in a different role and therefore couldn't I ask for a copy of the reference letter under the DPA? i.e. my employer must provide any information they have on the system about me upon request.<issue_comment>username_1: Your university should have a procedure regarding the data request. For example, I found these three websites from UK universities regarding this topic:
1. [SOAS](https://www.soas.ac.uk/infocomp/dpa/access/)
2. [U of Sussex](http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ogs/policies/information/dpa/rightsofindividuals)
3. [Bath](https://www.bath.ac.uk/guides/data-protection-at-the-university/)
These all state that you are allowed to request an overview of which data is stored regarding you, and get access to all that data as well.
Furthermore, [this website](https://www.xperthr.co.uk/faq/do-job-applicants-have-the-right-to-see-notes-made-on-them-at-interview/59213/) states that job interview documents also fall under the DPA:
>
> Yes, job applicants have the right to see interview notes if the notes are either transferred to computer or form part of a "relevant filing system". The UK General Data Protection Regulation (retained from EU Regulation 2016/679 EU) (UK GDPR) gives job applicants and other data subjects the right to request copies of personal data that an employer holds about them.
>
>
>
So if these reference letters are stored in a university system, you should be allowed to obtain them. However, it is possible that these documents have been removed after the interview process ended.
Whether or not you are already employed by this institution shouldn't make a difference.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: While the question is about whether you are legally entitled to see the letter, I will take the liberty to comment on the question of "should you want to see the letter".
The questions are this: (i) What are the costs associated with requesting the information? (ii) What are the benefits?
As for the costs: Your university (i.e., the people in your department) is likely going to be aggravated by the request. They asked someone for a letter of recommendation, which is generally requested under the assumption that these letters will remain confidential because that is the only way letter writers will be candid. So it is embarrassing for a department to have to let a letter writer know that they will have to make the letter available to the candidate. It is also aggravating to the letter writer themselves, who believed that they can give candid advice. Nobody is going to be happy to break the promise of confidentiality, and people will talk about it because it is so aggravating. It will cost you in terms of your position in the department and your community.
So what are the benefits? Likely none other than you knowing that you shouldn't take that one person as a letter writer again -- but you already suspected that. There is nothing you stand to gain from learning what was in that letter that would help you in the future.
In other words, asking to see that letter is all cost and no benefit. Just don't do it.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: Frame challenge. Others have explained why requesting to see the reference letter through the data protection act may be a bad idea.
Other suggestion: arrange a confidential meeting with the person who you suspect may have written a poor reference, and ask them if they think they wrote a strong reference letter. There are essentially three possible responses you might get: yes, no, or decline to answer. The answer may or may not be truthful. Make sure your question does not come across as pressing for information they might not want to share. You may or may not get wiser, but the costs will be much lower (perhaps close to zero) than the costs for going through the data protection act.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: This question would probably be a better fit on [law.stackexchange.com](https://law.stackexchange.com/) but as you've asked it here I'll provide the legal answer.
Yes, you can *ask* (taking the question literally).
That doesn't mean that they have to give it to you though.
Your general rights of access to personal data come from [Article 15(1) - (3) of the GDPR](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/).
This is subject to various exceptions. Of relevance here is [paragraphs 18 and 24 of schedule 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/schedule/2) (the "**DPA**") (emphasis mine):
>
> 24 - **The listed GDPR provisions do not apply to** personal data
> consisting of **a reference given (or to be given) in confidence for the
> purposes of** (a) the education, training or **employment** (or prospective
> education, training or employment) of the data subject [...]
>
>
> 18 - In this Part of this Schedule, **“the listed GDPR provisions” means** the following provisions of the UK GDPR (the rights and
> obligations in which may be restricted by virtue of Article 23(1) of
> the UK GDPR) - [...] (c) **Article 15(1) to (3)** (confirmation of
> processing, access to data and safeguards for third country transfers)
> [...]
>
>
>
In fact, they might be obligated *not* to give you a copy of the reference. That's because the reference is also personal data belonging to the person who wrote it. Giving you a copy means "processing" the data (per the definition of processing in [Article 4(2) of the GDPR](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/)), and a data controller can only process data to the extent that they have a [lawful basis](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/) for doing so. In this case the only likely lawful basis is that they have the consent of the person who wrote the reference.
Because of this, there is an additional exemption in the DPA which is applicable here. I'm mentioning this only for completeness; the first exemption is sufficient. Paragraph 16 of schedule 2 of the DPA provides (emphasis mine):
>
> 1 - **Article 15(1) to (3) of the GDPR** (confirmation of processing,
> access to data and safeguards for third country transfers), and
> Article 5 of the GDPR so far as its provisions correspond to the
> rights and obligations provided for in Article 15(1) to (3), **do not
> oblige a controller to disclose information to the data subject to the
> extent that doing so would involve disclosing information relating to
> another individual who can be identified from the information**.
>
>
> 2 - **Sub-paragraph (1) does not remove the controller’s obligation
> where** (a) the other individual has consented to the disclosure of
> the information to the data subject, or (b) **it is reasonable to
> disclose the information to the data subject without the consent of
> the other individual**.
>
>
> 3 - **In determining whether it is reasonable to disclose the
> information without consent, the controller must have regard to all
> the relevant circumstances, including** (a) the type of information
> that would be disclosed, (b) **any duty of confidentiality owed to the
> other individual**, (c) any steps taken by the controller with a view
> to seeking the consent of the other individual, (d) whether the other
> individual is capable of giving consent, and (e) any express refusal
> of consent by the other individual.
>
>
> 4 - For the purposes of this paragraph (a) “information relating to
> another individual” includes information identifying the other
> individual as the source of information; (b) an individual can be
> identified from information to be provided to a data subject by a
> controller if the individual can be identified from (i) that
> information, or (ii) that information and any other information that
> the controller reasonably believes the data subject is likely to
> possess or obtain.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3
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<issue_start>username_0: Increasing citations of an individual or a journal across years is usually taken as an indication that this work is more impactful or gathering more interest. However, I suspect the number of journals, publications, and citations are increasing faster than the amount of publishing scientists, which means that increasing citations may not mean increasing interest. Therefore, is there a way to guess at the amount that citations would have increased over a single year, let's say 2018 compared to 2019, just as a function of increased citation and not more interest in the work relative to the previous year? One simplistic approach would be to multiply the 2019 citations by the proportion of 2018 over 2019 publications (in that field, or overall if that's not available). I welcome other ways to think about this type of question.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> I suspect the number of journals, publications, and citations are
> increasing faster than the amount of publishing scientists
>
>
>
This may be right to some small degree, but in the end, the number of publications can only grow faster than the number of publishing scientists if the average publishing scientist is writing more papers per year than they did in the past. It is possible that that number has increased by a factor of 1.5 or 2 over the past 50 years, but no more than that.
Likewise, the number of citations given is just the number of publications published times the average number of references a paper has. The average number of citations a paper then *receives* is the number of citations given divided by the number of publications -- that is, the average number of citations a paper receives equals the average number of references a paper has. (That's really only true assuming that references are given in the same year a paper is published; but it's approximately true anyway.) So the question then comes down to whether, over the past 50 years, the average number of references in a paper has increased. Again, it may have, by a factor of 1.5 or 2, but not substantially more than that, and consequently the average number of citations a paper receives will also not have risen substantially.
In other words, I think that the question posed is interesting, but that the conclusions drawn there are not correct.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: The number of citations generated per year is the product of the number of articles produced in a given year times the average number of references per article. Additionally, when it comes to observed citation metrics in tools like Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science, the relevant indicators are the number of indexed articles and their average number of citations per article.
Over time, the number of articles per year has grown as publishing has become easier and as the number of publishing scientists in the world has grown. Reference lists have got longer. And many citation indexing databases have become more inclusive, especially Google Scholar.
Journal citation indicators generally focus on some variant of citations in a given period divided by number of articles published in a period (e.g., impact factor and its variants). On this metric, publishing more articles does not improve the metric, because it increases both the numerator and the denominator. Increasing the number of references per article in a given field will increase impact factor. Likewise, capturing more of the literature in the citation indexing database will also increase measured impact factor. You can see this when you compare Web Of Science Impact Factors with the Scopus Cite Scores. Scopus is more inclusive and tends to return higher values.
Author citation metrics are more complex. There are a range of metrics that get discussed. Prominent ones include h-index, total career citations, citations per year in recent years. If we focus on citations per year, this is the multiple of the number of papers an author has and the average number of citations each paper is receiving. Putting aside factors that make one author more impactful than others, the average number of citations per paper is driven by similar factors as what influences journal citation indicators (i.e., number of references per article, breadth of coverage of the citation indexing database). We then have the issue of whether authors are publishing more articles per year. My understanding is that they are publishing more per year and that the number of co-authors is also increasing substantially over time (see @anyon's comment: <https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05150>).
I also think that several factors have made publishing in well-established journals more impactful over time in terms of citations. In short, as the number of lower-tier publications has expanded, this has increased the relative impact of the more established publications. So, for example, if a journal was in the past ranked 50th out of a 100, it might now be ranked 60th out of 200. Furthermore, a few of these low to mid-tier journals publish a huge number of articles per year (e.g., outlets like Frontiers, Scientific Reports, PlosOne). You could add to this PrePrint servers and the like. In summary, if you are the kind of academic who consistently publishes in top-tier journals, then the relative citation impact of those outlets has also gone up. This can be seen in the rise in impact factors over time.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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<issue_start>username_0: I was a PhD candidate from September 2016 until May 2021 in an university in the US. After that I dropped my PhD studies and switched to master's degree and graduated this August. Now, it's a couple of months that I started my work in a company and work outside of academia.
You can find the long history of fights and conflicts between me and my former adviser in my previous posts.
Today, I became aware that still my former adviser has some information in his website about me. There are a couple of problems with this information:
1. My former adviser put **he/him** as my preferred pronoun. Well, I never used any preferred pronoun and we never talked about it. I don't want to use it. I have my own personal preference and I don't want it besides my name.
2. He put my degree as master's non-thesis. OK, I got a master's degree and yes it is non-thesis but I think it's not his business to showcase it. After I left his group, I passed a couple of courses and wrote a literature summary that was reviewed by another professor and I got my degree. In official diploma, it only says **master's degree**, so I'm not sure why he put it that way when he was not the professor that reviewed my literature summary and gave me a pass grade to receive my diploma. Long story short, I think it's not his business.
3. He incorrectly claims that the topic of my literature summary was something else in that piece of information while it had nothing to do with the topic that I worked during the time that I was a PhD candidate. In another word, it's simply wrong. My former adviser put the title of my literature summary as **X** while it is clearly **Y** and has nothing to do with him.
Overall, it makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, I would move to west coast just within a month from east coast and I have a full time job, so I don't have much free time to waste talking with my former adviser. I want to report it somewhere in the university and get it removed as soon as possible with no interaction or argument with my former adviser. Any idea or suggestion is much appreciated.<issue_comment>username_1: There are a couple of possibilities, though the first is more likely.
Some universities let faculty maintain their own web pages. In this case you have to contact the professor and ask for a change.
Some universities have a staff person maintain pages, possibly with input from the faculty member. In this case, you can contact them with a request.
But, I'd suggest that you just say you are uncomfortable with what the page says about you. *But also supply what you would like it to say.* Ideally, say this in detail making it easy to make a change. Use wording that is consistent with the rest of the page/site, for example.
But, don't complain about what you *don't* want to see, suggest what you *do* want said about you.
It is, as I said above, the most likely case that the professor has either direct control or a lot of influence over the site. If you don't get a reasonable response, you could then make a complaint to the superior of whoever is responsible.
And, even in the best case, expect the change to take a while.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Depending on the **country** you would have different legal options and rights. If you're really bothered about this then perhaps look into that.
In general, however, start with a simple email to the individual politely requesting changes and see how that goes. Go up the chain of authority if you are dissatisfied.
Your second issue is rather contentious and I don't recommend pursuing it - you are IMO incorrect in arguing that it's "not his business" as he was your advisor. Your successes or failures do at least in some small way reflect on them.
Whatever you do, be polite - this may seem black and white to you, but other people involved may see it differently.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: If I wanted to do research related to the topology and geometry of space or their applications in quantum mechanics or general relativity, would it be possible to do that from a Mathematician’s POV without the upper level undergad physics typically required?<issue_comment>username_1: Check the website of the program you're interested in. Here's an [example](https://math.indiana.edu/student-portal/graduate/math-physics-phd/index.html).
>
> Basic preparation should include courses in advanced calculus, linear algebra, modern algebra, complex variables, classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, modern physics, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Knowledge of the following fields is desirable: real analysis, differential equations, probability, topology, differential geometry, and functional analysis.
>
>
>
This makes it sound like you should be OK, but my judgement is not useful; you need to convince the admissions committee.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: For
>
> topology and geometry of space or their applications in quantum mechanics or general relativity
>
>
>
one needs to have a good understanding of tensor algebra, typically used in General Relativity (GR) courses. So if you want to study different topologies of space-time and its implications on GR, then you need to be able to perform matrix and tensor algebra elegantly :)
Research on this can be done from two perspectives - (a) mathematically, identifying the space-time behaviour e.g. conformal field theory, and (b) with a somewhat more physical approach, but that can be in so many different ways that it is peculiar to each project. There is always a non-zero overlap between these two approaches in this research area.
Also, since each programme is unique, they usually will mention the specific courses/skills required to have been taken before they accept the candidates into the project. If that is not mentioned, asking it in the PhD interview is recommended.
Hope this helps.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I have a bachelor's degree in physics and I am finishing my master's degree in applied physics, in the field of biophysics. So, in particular, I study methods typical of physics to investigate biological issues.
I have to choose the argument of my master's thesis and only now I realize that my interests and, perhaps, also my skills, are more oriented towards interpreting biological results and their implications in biology itself rather than studying and improving methods for obtaining them.
My academic career was not really brilliant: I did not graduate with full marks in my bachelor's degree and now I am taking more than 3 years to get my master's degree in applied physics. But my dream still remains becoming a researcher: I always love studying and the idea of leaving studies makes me very unhappy. Thus I still really would like to obtain a PhD but in a research area in which I could be really useful in the future.
Is there a way of doing a PhD and at the same time studying a new field? Like a PhD in computational biology and at the same time taking a biology bachelor's and master's degree?
I saw that also [<NAME>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Stormo) moved from physics to biology and received his PhD when he was already 31 years old. However, after this master's degree I can not go on only studying but I have to also work and the ideal plan would be to do a job that allows me to apply my knowledge acquired in my physics university and at the same time go on studying biology.
I am from Italy and I would like to remain here in all this. But I ask you if you know, in general, what I could do in this situation.<issue_comment>username_1: First (the bad news): <NAME> lived in a very different world. At the time science was working in a much more compartmental way: For example, a physicist solving partial differential equations (via numerical models) in biology, if the numerical model was succesful, it would have been **hugely** succesful. And nowadays the same numerical model or the results would be common knowledge of a biologist.
Second (the good news):
"my skills are more oriented towards interpreting biological results and their implications in biology itself rather than studying and improving methods for obtaining them."
There you are, you can either go down the statistics way (as a physicist your rudimental knowledge would be a good starting point) or the modeling way (as a physicist your rudimental knowledge would be a good starting point). Both ways, since you would like to interpret data, instead of producing machinery to produce them, it would be good to push up your informatics skills: learn R (maybe I am outdated already?), play around with opensource code used in biology.
Final note: There are companies and research institute looking for qualified people, and those companies are doing very interesting research, so do not completely discard looking for a job instead of following the PhD path.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: My answer would be, don't underestimate how much you learn through doing and interacting during a PhD.
There are many interdisciplinary groups offering PhD projects for people with a physics degree and little or no biological knowledge, but within which you'll be strongly exposed to some biology questions. That won't make a biologist of you, but biology really requires many biophysicists who are able to frame a biology question in physical terms, and make use of physics and mathematics to solve these. Biology departments around the world also hire as principal investigators people who have a physics degree and have not become biologists, although they have learned a lot of biology on a specific system.
So I believe a PhD in an interdisciplinary group, possibly located in a biology department, could be suitable for you and could offer you the opportunity to face research challenges which are very biological, for which physical knowledge is needed but not the development of new physical concepts.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: <NAME> did just this. Find a congenial environment. To do this, spend some time reading journals to find articles and scientists who do work that interests you. If they are at universities, apply. This is one of the rare cases where I would recommend contacting someone and meeting them to assess your past education and what you might need. You might only need a little bit of biology, possibly through informal mechanisms rather than courses.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_4: >
> Do you know if there is a way of doing a PhD and at the same time studying a new field ? Like a PhD in computational biology and at the same time taking a biology bachelor and master degree ?
>
>
>
I don't see why you would need to do a Biology BSc/MSc if you already have physics degrees. I am a biologist and have had many colleagues doing their PhDs in fields different than their degrees. In a Neuroscience lab, we had people whose bachelor's/master's degrees were in Biochemistry, Physics, Informatics, Biology, Molecular Medicine, etc.). It's quite common to change fields for your PhD and most labs are quite happy about the interdisciplinary collaboration that comes from having people with different backgrounds working together. If you wanted to learn more about a specific area of biology, you could probably take a free course at the university you're doing your PhD in (at least in the universities I've been in, you could ask professors to sit in lectures and it wasn't an issue as long as you didn't need the credits).
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm in my first year of a PhD program in the U.S. One of my professors scheduled a midterm exam for 8:30-11pm at night, and I think it will be very hard for me to stay up that late for an exam. I'm already working hard between my classes, TA responsibilities, and research. I sometimes go bed as early as 9pm because I'm exhausted (which was not normal for me before entering the program).
I emailed the professor soon after the exam was announced, but he is unwilling to change the time, since there's no other 2.5-hour time slot where all the students in the class are free (the class period is only an hour).
My question is whether this is normal. If I want to continue in academia, do I just have to learn to deal with this kind of scheduling, or is this an extreme case?
**Edit:**
To clarify, this is a graduate course that I am taking.<issue_comment>username_1: Universities that I have attended have always had specific policies for exam times. Generally, these policies required midterm exams to occur during normal class periods, and set specific final exam windows according to the time of the class. This helped to avoid conflicts, because everyone with, say, a lecture at 10 am on Mondays would have their final exam on, say, Day 4 of Finals Week between 2-5pm (some special cases always did result in conflict anyways, but these were dealt with on a case-by-case basis).
Typically, specific *night classes* would have nighttime exams, as well - the assumption was that at least a portion of students in a night class were taking those night classes to allow them to keep daytime commitments like a full-time job.
An 8:30pm-11pm exam time for a class that meets in the evening seems late to me, but could be justified as necessary to avoid other conflicts. For a class that normally meets in the daytime, yeah, if it were me personally I'd be finding a way to cope during more normal hours: splitting the exam into two parts, perhaps, or changing to a "take-home" format.
However, what matters isn't really my opinion nor yours, but the policies of your institution. What do those policies say about exam times?
As a PhD student, I would try not to worry about this sort of thing too much. Classes are a tiny part of the PhD experience, and I assume you'll be done or mostly done with them after a year or two. Your PhD classroom grades won't really matter too much for you unless they are below the "passing" standard - you'll be assessed for future positions based on your research output instead. Personally, I am very much a night person, but there have been a handful of times when I nonetheless had to crawl out of bed with some numbers on the clock that are horrible for me, like 6 am (even 8 am is pretty tough for me). Scheduling is difficult, and occasionally everyone will get pushed out of their preferred timing for one reason or another.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: It is common at many universities to have late exams if a class is taught several times in different sections at different times throughout the week, but the exam is common between the different sections. In those cases, you have to find (i) a common time that works for the students of all sections, (ii) one or a small number of rooms where you can accommodate everyone. For classes such as Engineering Calculus, Business Calculus, etc., that may have hundreds of students spread over several sections, that rules out every time slot other than evening ones, and so exams from 8-10pm are not uncommon.
In other words, what you describe does not at all surprise me. You will just have to deal with it. If you worry about staying up that late, take an afternoon nap.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: I once scheduled an exam in the evening. But I did reschedule it after a student told me that she is not allowed to fly an airplane in the dark (she lived in the mountains and came to classes on her family airplane). I would not reschedule if a student just wanted to go to bed early.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: This is not normal. Moreover, the professor’s explanation that he chose this time because it’s the only time when all the students are “free” is also illogical, since he clearly didn’t ask your opinion about whether you are “free” between 8:30-11 pm on the night he did schedule the exam for. If he had, it would have been completely proper for you to say you are not free during that time since you have another scheduled activity (sleep or some other late evening relaxation routine in this case, but the nature of the activity is none of his business). So, to my ears this sounds like an abuse of authority - maybe not the most egregious one I can think about, but nothing to be dismissive about, and one that would be taken seriously if it was raised at my own department, and other US departments I’m familiar with.
In view of this and of the professor’s resistance to persuasion, it would be completely reasonable for you to email the graduate program coordinator, express your concern, and ask them to intervene. It’s very possible that the professor’s approach violates specific departmental or institutional policies of which he is unaware. (Or maybe they’ll say he is acting within his rights and you need to respect that — that’s not a completely bad outcome either, at least you’ll know you tried and you’ll be no worse off than before.)
While I assume the professor is acting in good faith and out of reasonably good intentions motivated by a desire to solve a practical problem, it is not uncommon for professors to make incorrect assumptions about what sorts of measures are reasonable to take in pursuit of their ideas of how a class should be run. Sometimes a little gentle feedback from colleagues or a person with a bit of influence is all it takes to get your rights respected. Now seems like one of those times. Good luck!
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: I used to have a course that was held entirely in the evening hours because the location was somewhere different than the other courses were (it required specialized lab equipment in a Chemistry room). Those classes were usually until 22:00 (10pm), thus the exam was as well. Was it inconvenient? Yes. A lot of inconvenient things happen in life. Is it normal? Well, not in that it happened every semester. We only had it for the single course. But for that specific course it was normal. Everyone who did that course, did it during late hours.
However, we were warned up front that this was going to be the case for this course. Proper communication up front would probably have made a difference here.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I have a huge doubt about the work I am doing. Although the results have been reproduced many times, the idea is not really known or even explained. I have been struggling to write it in a way that explains it well (I am still not a good writer), but I understand what the whole idea is after one year of hard work. However, a colleague did not find it interesting, gave no comments, and that made me doubt how I am so passionate and I find this to be interesting, what seems to be useless to others.
I have been away from publishing for four years due to dramatic experiences in academia, and now as I am getting older and writing my first paper in that field, my heart is racing wondering whether I am really a good researcher in the first place. Sometimes I want to cry, I feel I am putting a lot of work to explain something never explained and sometimes I feel it is crap.
Also, during the process of submission, a colleague submitted a supposedly high quality paper to a journal claiming that the work was novel, but the editor's response was that it was not original. That makes me so much afraid: what if I sent the paper and it never got accepted? I worked so hard all over the year and I want to make a good reputation for myself. I don't know if anyone has been in a situation like that, I am dealing with huge fear and anxiety. As a researcher, I was always interested in what I am passionate about, but I feel sometimes I am very dumb maybe. I don't know but those feelings are not nice and sometimes I want to cry. Any advice would be appreciated.
Lastly, the co-authors are still trying to understand what I am doing since they have never worked in this area and that makes me so much more afraid.<issue_comment>username_1: It's okay for work to be incremental and not particularly remarkable to everyone in the field - sometimes the importance of the work will be more evident later, sometimes research as a community endeavor is about trying lots of different things out and reporting what you find, even if it just means some area has now been explored such that others don't need to do it. Everyone is working on their own things and may be most excited about their own little niche of research - that's just fine!
Writing, academic or otherwise, is very very hard. Very few people are naturally good at it, and even very good writers have room for improvement. I find the best way to write is to try to get your ideas down on paper without being too self-judgmental, then return to your writing at a later date (1 week, 2 weeks, a month, 3 months - the interval that works best is different for everyone) later to revise. It may take several cycles of this revision process to get to something you are happy with. It will never be perfect, so don't seek perfection, just seek to improve each draft.
If your co-authors are having trouble understanding what you are doing, then yes, that's a problem, but not an unsolvable one. You should work with them to find what they see clearly and where they get stuck, and use that to guide your revisions.
It's normal to submit to journals and not get accepted the first time. It's normal for good papers to be submitted several times before a suitable journal is found. It's normal for journals to require one or more cycles of revision before final acceptance. None of these things make it a bad paper or make the authors of the paper bad researchers. As long as the work itself is robust, it can be revised to be published *somewhere*. Too many people want to submit their work in the "top" journals, so those journals are more picky and reject most of what is submitted to them. Mid-tier journals will publish more incremental steps, including papers that confirm what has been shown by others already. It's most important for a paper like that to properly situate the work in what has already been done, and explain what about the approach makes it useful.
Academia is stressful even in the best of circumstances, and the best of circumstances aren't experienced by everyone. Stress, anxiety, imposter syndrome, feelings of failure and insufficiency - many people experience these. Some will talk about it, others may hide it and you will never even know that they suffer. People who seem to have it easy may be deeply struggling inside. People with a bright smile during the day may be crying themselves to sleep at night. When you read published papers you don't usually see all the times that same work was submitted and resubmitted, all the earlier revisions, the other three projects that only ever ended up half-done and never reached submission. You'll always be close to your own work at all stages of a project, good and bad; you see everyone else's only in its best state. It's not really fair to compare your own work at all stages with everyone else's best product, yet it's an easy trap to fall into.
It's perfectly normal to struggle mentally in academia, but "normal" doesn't mean you just need to cope with it. There can be benefits to seeking help with mental health in academia, whether that help is one-on-one therapy, some sort of support group (whether formal meetings or informal discussions with friends in similar circumstances), or medication - the best way to find out if any of these might work well would be to consult with a mental health professional.
Therapists/psychologists are experts in helping people manage conflicts between their emotional feelings and what they "know" logically. If someone has an irrational fear of, say, all snakes, it usually isn't enough for them to just read that "this snake is not dangerous". It's quite possible to read the first half of this answer, understand logically that these things are normal feelings, and yet *still feel fear and anxiety about your own work*. Therapy can help in both of these situations to build cognitive and emotional strategies to cope. With enough practice, the fear may lessen or at least the daily impact can be mitigated.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: From my perspective, after reading your question, it seems to me that the source of your anxiety might be a deep lack of self-worth (which can be solved over time, with effort and determination). To be more specific, you have created an identity of yourself as a researcher, and it is clearly an identity that you are deeply passionate about, but you are also very afraid that others might challenge that identity, and destroy it.
In your mind, the success of papers and grants is an absolutely essential, fundamental aspect of your identity as a researcher. That is, you are deeply attaching your worth and value as a researcher (perhaps even as a human being?) to the results of your paper. Perhaps you are worried that, if this paper is not accepted, and you cannot find any idea for pushing the paper forward towards acceptance, then you have fundamentally failed as a researcher, and if that identity fails, you might not have any backup plan for an alternative identity.
Of course, these assumptions that you hold about your identity and your worth as a researcher are clearly mistaken, and perhaps you already suspect that this is the case. Nevertheless, your anxiety is still holding a grip on you, and you are hoping that someone else can bring some clarity to your situation.
First, let us deconstruct your identity. In other words, let's make it clear that you are not your clothes, you are not your car, you are not your house, and you are not your wealth. If you don't have a certain car or a certain brand of clothes, that does not mean that you are worth any less as a person. In the same way, you are not your research papers. Your worth as a researcher cannot be defined by the success of your papers. And if you doubt this, just ask your colleagues and everybody else in academia about the multiple times they failed to get a position, got rejection letters, failed to get grants, and failed to get papers published. All of us have a long history of failing, it is not just you who is facing this issue. This is a universal experience in academia.
The challenge I want to propose to you is: can you be at peace with failing, even if you tried your best? Can you train yourself to dissociate failure from your sense of self-worth? Perhaps, can you train yourself to love failure? If everybody around you told you that your work was not that great, would you still feel passionate enough about research to continue regardless? This is crucial. Nobody can force you to gain a sense of self-worth and find internal strength to deal with regular failures. No matter what other people tell you, no matter how much they try to comfort you, ultimately the only person who can strengthen your mind is you. And this is achieved by telling yourself, everyday if necessary, that it is alright to fail repeatedly.
People who have succeeded in academia have trained themselves to think that, even if they fail one time, two times, three times, four times, it does not mean that they will fail a fifth time. History is not destiny. Furthermore, they have trained themselves to understand that in most cases, there is usually a second chance, and even a third chance. The important thing to do after each failure is to first get a good night rest, do something that helps you to calm down, find some comfort and laughter in a good comedy show, and once you have reestablished yourself mentally, you must start to discuss your paper with trusted colleagues and start elaborating a step-by-step plan to fix any problems with your paper and move forward with a positive attitude.
Please understand that, no matter how good you are, you will always face attacks and criticism by someone. Even the great minds of science have had to face repeated attacks by colleagues and society at large. Can you be OK with this fact? Can you be at peace with this and move forward with joy, no matter what? Can you accept the idea that the challenges will never stop coming, no matter how good you get? Instead of looking at the waves at the sea as your enemies, as something that you should be afraid of, can you try to ride the challenging waves? And if you fall from your board, and the waves hit you strong, can you get back to the surface, and look forward to riding the next wave with joy and anticipation? If you can train yourself to do this every day, then you can defeat the tendency of your brain to automatically cripple your energy and enthusiasm. Remember that all of us, no matter how famous, are all facing the same waves, and often failing to ride them.
Of course, even though everything ultimately depends on you, I still advise you to seek the counsel of your close ones and counseling from any experts on mental health issues at your institution, because you should seek all the help you can get. Just don't use them as crutches, or excuses to prevent you from doing the hard emotional work that needs to be done. And this hard work is the following: every time you get criticized by your superiors in public, every time your paper fails, every time someone attacks you, every time that research is not progressing smoothly, do your best to stay strong and balanced, and repeat to yourself: it's alright, it's OK. My self-worth does not depend on being successful every time. I am much more than just a researcher, I am much more than my nationality or gender, and I have value as a human being, no matter what happens. I will take a rest, get myself back in shape with a few laughs, and find a new way to address this issue with the help of my colleagues and close ones.
No matter how good you think you are, it's always possible to do a little better next time. Just keep trying your very best, and even if your effort fails, do not be hard on yourself. Always tell yourself that you did the best you could at that time, and that you will devote yourself to doing better next time. In order to survive as a researcher, you must value yourself and cherish yourself at all times, and once you get yourself into a stable emotional state, only then you will be able to face the constant challenges.
To conclude, what defines a successful researcher is not how many times they are successful, it is the way in which they gracefully deal with defeat and failure, and continuously seek ways to bounce back, and try to keep their passion for research alive and strong.
Do not be discouraged, and learn to let go of the paper's results. Try to get feedback on the paper from as many trusted people as you can, but at some point, you need to finish the paper, and offer yourself as a "sacrificial lamb" to the opinion of the journal's reviewers, with courage and dignity. No matter what the result is, in most cases there is a path forward, it just might take a few good rounds of busting your brain and rethinking your approach. Stay strong. You are worthy of being appreciated as a researcher regardless of the results.
My apologies for the long answer, but I felt your situation deserved more than just a few kind words of support.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: While I believe username_2's answer is much more relevant to your *actual* issue with this work, and Bryan has partially addressed your concern about communicating your ideas, I'd like to touch on that bit more.
Getting others to share your vision can be a *monumentally* hard task. Personally, I fail at that all the time! That induces a huge feeling of self-doubt: what if I am believing some absolute nonsense? What if I'm turning into one of these poor sods who could not figure out science for what it is and came up with some wild and also super incorrect alternatives? Would I end up with everyone pitying me, eventually?
Then, I also know many of these ideas I failed at communicating end up embraced by my collaborators couple of years later. Probably an issue of my explanations, then, rather than ideas being wrong. I know there is no other way forward for me rather than trying my best to stay honest and open to critique, and that should be sufficient to not become a bogus scientist. After all, there's nothing that can be done but doing what you believe but having enough plasticity to change those beliefs with sufficient counter-evidence being present. It *is* fairly hard.
I find that this entire struggle is best wrapped up by <NAME>:
"*Say what you know, do what you must, come what may.*"
Hope this helps.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/01
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<issue_start>username_0: An advisor relationship is consequential, and losing your advisor has a real cost. Has anyone seen a student take out a policy on their advisor?<issue_comment>username_1: I doubt that this will solve any problems. If your advisor dies you just need to move to a new advisor and most universities would be likely to help you do that seamlessly.
But there are other ways as well, that an advisor might not be able to continue with you. Sickness, of course, but also moving away.
And advisor who fears imminent death will probably help you make arrangements also.
And "retiring" on an insurance policy isn't going to be possible unless you insure them for millions of dollars or the equivalent. What you want is to finish your degree, not a modest pile of money.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Life insurance is a way to provide you with something that you lose if someone passes away unexpectedly. In most cases, this would be long-term financial stability, or at the very least the ability to pay for someone's funeral.
But in your case, what would you do with any money you get from an insurance claim? If you lose your adviser, you lose the *advice*, and no money can buy you that. You will need to find another adviser, but the money from the insurance isn't going to help you with that. The only benefit it would provide you is if your adviser currently pays your salary and you solely rely on that income for an interim time until you have found a new adviser -- but even for that, departments often find ways to support students who have been befallen by such bad luck.
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/01
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<issue_start>username_0: The question says it all but for a bit of context: Something I disliked about my former lab is how they handled the pandemic. It is important to me to work in a lab that cares about the safety of employees/students. For me, this means any lab that didn't take COVID seriously (require masks, allow home office wherever possible, institute flexible hours so there are not too many people in the lab at once) is not a lab I would want to be a part of. So is it appropriate to ask during an interview how they handled the pandemic in 2020? If it isn't, is there a way to ask about it without being too obvious?
I am applying mostly to positions in Europe but would assume this question could be relevant to other areas of the world as well
EDIT: For anyone coming across this in the future and wondering the same thing: the advice below was great! I brought it up in several PhD interviews and no one seemed to have an issue with the question, even got several offers!<issue_comment>username_1: I don't see any problem with asking about safety features of a lab in general, so I don't see any problem with asking about the specific approach to handling the pandemic. Obviously, there is an important distinction between questions about how a person handled the pandemic in their private life (which may be invasive) versus questions about how the institution handled the pandemic in terms of the safety protocols instituted. The latter is certainly fair game, and I see no reason why you would need to avoid making these questions "obvious".
In terms on advice for how to go about this, the most important thing is to be clear that you are asking about protocols at the lab, or about staff behaviour while at work, and you are not seeking information on personal medical decisions made by the supervisor or other staff members in their own private lives. (I think some sentences in your question are a bit ambiguous on that, so I recommend getting your questions formulated clearly before your interview.) If you focus on asking about decisions on safety protocols at the lab, the reasoning behind those decisions, and the behaviour of staff while in the lab, it is unlikely you will overstep the mark.
Of course, you should bear in mind that any type of questioning of the merits of institutional policies by a prospective student at an interview might rub some people the wrong way. If you pre-empt your questions by stating your own concerns about safety in the pandemic, you can probably soften this line of questioning a bit.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: It is appropriate, of course. But there is a huge caveat already pointed out: lots of things about the pandemic handling hanged on the personal choices. In here, pretty much every organization had mandated masks and social distancing, and the stay home policy during stricter lockdowns. However, outside of it things varied wildly.
I work in several groups and at pretty much all of the offices we still have a few people who have personal concerns and are wearing masks - and, of course, no one is pushing them towards not doing so - but the rest do not. Almost everyone is fully vaccinated by now though, but people largely ignored safety concerns long before that, and it was fully a personal choice. Anecdotally, earlier in the pandemic it was probably the most common to not wear a mask while working in your own lab (provided it was not huge) and wear it on meetings with (potential) collaborators and in public places. So, a small circle of friends and coworkers and reduced amount of social life outside of work.
Personally, I wouldn't work for a group who won't consider my wishes for working remote whenever at all possible and who would be pushy about office hours while not observing safety regulations, and this is not pandemic-specific. Rigid hours without any wiggle room for personal circumstances seem nonsensical to me in academia, sometimes you do need for everyone to be there to actually perform the experiment or bounce your ideas around but in most cases, it's possible to make it comfortably work for everyone at no extra cost. If anything, people happen to have teaching duties and these often don't overlap so one has to schedule in-person work around those anyway...
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/02
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<issue_start>username_0: How much of published papers is reasonable to expect to "fail" somehow? E.g. not having the impact you planned
Are there studies that would e.g. measure, how much of published papers become lesser than expected or become obsolete faster, than expected? Or the kinds of issues.<issue_comment>username_1: This is a question not about science, but about personal expectations.
Consider the following different perspectives on the same set of papers, some well received and some poorly received:
* All of these papers have failed, because I am not famous yet.
* Some of these papers have succeeded and some have failed, because my community embraced some and ignored others.
* All of these papers have succeeded, because the response to them has given me an objective assessment of how interested my community is in these pieces of work.
I recommend taking the latter approach and considering the impact of a paper part of its effective peer review and feedback for you with regards to your research choices.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: If "failed" means "not having the impact planned" then hell, it is probably close to one-hundred percent!
However, I think that's the wrong way to look at this. You can control the quality of your paper, but you can't control its impact (though perhaps you can influence it with some good marketing). If you write a high-quality paper that adds useful knowledge that is available to society, that is a great success in my view, even if no-one appreciates it. Obviously it is unfortunate if your good paper has little impact, and that matters, but it is not a reason to consider the work a failure.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/02
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<issue_start>username_0: Neither of my parents went to college. Is this something that can be brought up in the context of university diversity hiring and outreach?
This is for academic jobs - postdoc, tenure-track, etc.<issue_comment>username_1: Yes, colleges do track and care about encouraging first generation college students. An undergraduate application might even have a place to indicate status as a first gen. It's unlikely you'd ever see that on an application for a faculty or post-doc position however. But you might still work a mention into one of the essays you may be required to submit, perhaps to explain your passion for diversity, that you bring the "I've been there" lived experience of understanding of the challenges first gen and minority students face.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: I taught for many years at a school where many students were the first in their families to attend college. We were proud of that record.
This fact about your life will be a positive factor in your application, since it suggests motivation that might not be there in an application from a student from a family where college was just "expected". Some schools like mine value it very highly.
That said, I doubt that there is any formal characterization of your status as "diversity" or "outreach".
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: [united-states](/questions/tagged/united-states "show questions tagged 'united-states'")-based answer.
Yes, you can mention it, and in theory it can help as it is something that some institutions’ policies, and some individual faculty members, care about. Some caveats to keep in mind:
1. The word “outreach” as used in US academia has no connection to this issue.
2. It would probably matter more in the context of undergraduate/graduate admissions than for academic jobs. However, it might still matter a bit for academic jobs.
3. How you bring this up matters: you can mention it in a “good way” that might slightly help your application, but if you’re not thoughtful about what you write you can also mention it in a “bad way” that will have no effect, or even slightly hurt your application, by showing you to be a person who misunderstands why universities care about this issue and/or who thinks that their first generation college student status makes them entitled to preferential treatment in hiring.
4. Related to but separately from the above, you can bring this up in an “honest way” or a “dishonest way”. Here, by “honest way” I mean bringing this up out of a genuine belief that this information is relevant to the question of whether you deserve to be hired over someone who has similar qualifications to you but has parents who went to college. And “dishonest way” is bringing this up without having that belief, but just knowing that this might help your chances. (The words honest/dishonest are just an approximation; some people might disagree that there’s anything dishonest about the second approach. But just to give an example, if you grew up in a wealthy household with privileged access to many resources that helped you succeed academically, but your parents just happened to have never gone to college, and you mention that latter fact but not the former, I would consider that dishonest and a form of gaming the system. Which is not to say that it wouldn’t work, just that it’s ethically questionable.)
Obviously, it would be best if you bring up the issue in an honest, good way. But you might do it in a dishonest, good way, or in an honest, bad way, or in a dishonest, bad way. I wouldn’t advise you to do it in a bad way, and I wouldn’t advise you to do it in a dishonest way. But avoiding those pitfalls, the answer to your question is “yes, you can mention it”.
Hope this helps, and good luck with your job search!
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_4: I think that the earlier answers were focused more on undergraduate education, where there can be some effect in the US.
However, for post PhD position, post docs and regular academic jobs, I doubt that anyone will hire you because you went farther in school than your parents did. The focus will be on you and what you can offer. It will depend on predictions that you will fit a position and the recommendations of others who can support those predictions.
That said, there are people who went to the finest schools because their grandparents and such did and those people get hired, but a lot of that isn't for the quality of the applicant. A lot of that turns out to be misplaced faith.
But, for the great bulk of people, at that age and level of education, it is on you, both your accomplishments and your perceived potential. Other aspects of diversity might count for something in these days but not first-generation alone.
I was one of the first generation folks. My mother had a 2 year nursing degree and I had some uncles with bachelors degrees. I had the support of teachers to get into college and suspect that the family history paid no part. It did help me get scholarships, though. But everything post BA was entirely on me and the recognized (by professors) fact that I knew some things, had some insight, and worked hard. FWIW, I became an academic and my uncles became rich.
---
There are a few colleges, perhaps not especially prestigious, that specialize in first generation students. For jobs at those places you might get an edge for a faculty position if it is perceived that you are more likely to understand the needs of the students.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: The literal fact of being first-generation college grad is not quite what "diversity and outreach" can be about, at the level of faculty positions in the U.S., I think.
Namely, I would be interested in the *awareness* of faculty candidates about the difficulties first-gen students face, as well as the difficulties other "traditionally under-represented" demographics face. E.g., college is easier if your parents can tell you what it's like, *and* have the money to allow you to not worry about money too much while you're in school.
Faculty in roles of appraisal of undergrad applicants and grad-program applicants should (in my opinion) be aware that some people have had more opportunities and advantages in early demonstration of talent and interest. That is, peoples' early-life accomplishments certainly occur in the context of their family and social environment. Having been through difficulties oneself *can* lead to better understanding of those difficulties... but, not necessarily.
In particular, at the faculty hiring level, in very legitimate regards it's not literal *membership* in traditionally under-represented groups, but awareness and some understanding that no, "it's not a level playing field".
Upvotes: 3
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2021/10/02
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm affiliated with one British and one American university. Both mandate students to email from their university email accounts. Some students don't. When I emailed them to ask why, one student replied
>
> I need to use my personal, rather than university, email account because of personal issues.
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I don't want to ferret out what this student's "personal issues" are — I am upholding privacy and confidentiality. I'm just asking this — at large and out of curiosity. What rightful reasons can prevent a student from using a university email, but not @gmail.com? Thank you.<issue_comment>username_1: Even as a practicing academic, I use my personal email as the first email listed in my publications and for all correspondence with academic journals (though I use my university email for most other things). The main reason for this is that you might change universities over the course of a career, and it is nice to have your important academic emails in a single place. By advertising an enduring personal email, you are easier to contact in the future if you change institutions. Also, it can be difficult to get access back to a university email account when you are no longer at that institution, so backups (or original copies) of important emails on a personal account is often desireable (though there are also other methods to mass-backup emails). There are probably other reasons that use of the university email might be inconvenient.
Getting to the substance of your problem, some universities have rules that students must use their university email for certain purposes, and they would require permission/waiver to ignore those rules. So if the proposal by the student is outside the rules of your university (check the details of those rules first, because it would be unusual to require students to send *all* emails from the university account) then you certainly have the prerogative to let them know that their request is insufficient. As with any special consideration request, the student will need to do more than just cite "personal reasons". Usually they will have to give details on the personal reasons at issue (which are of course treated in confidence) and make a request for exemption.
My understanding is that the main (legitimate) reasons that universities want students to use the university email is that they don't have to worry about things getting lost with spam filters, and they can limit vulnerability to cyber-attacks. The cynical part of me says that the other main (illegitimate) reason is the standard desire of large institutions to engage in totalitarian control, micromanagement and empire-building for everything touching their domain. In any case, it may be possible to make an individual exception for a student by having them email all relevant lecturers, so that you can each add that personal email account to bypass your spam filters.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: I have never encountered a "legit" reason. Most people are just used to certain email clients, don't know how to merge another account on their current client, or are just lazy.
There are good reasons to maintain certain emails internal. Some sensitive things can't be sent to external addresses. For example, if a student has a disciplinary issue, I believe I have to let them know on their institutional account. In addition, some services (e.g. Moodle/Zoom/Blackboard) may limit their access to institutional accounts only, and for good reason: you don't want random people spamming your class/Zoombombing your lectures.
I suggest you highlight these issues to the student, and make sure that you don't break any university policies by letting them use their personal account.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: One reason for such rules is that someone could easily pretend to be a student by creating an email account and use it to get confidential information from an instructor or other university official. e.g.
<EMAIL> writes
Hi professor Smith. What is my current average in Calculus?
vs.
<EMAIL> writes
Hi professor Smith. What is my current average in Calculus?
If I receive the first email, I’ll reply and tell them to resend from their university email account.
There's no reason that I can think of that a student couldn't make use of the university email system as they are required to do.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_4: One possible reason a student may prefer to use a third-party email service is that the university has control over the university email account - something that might prove important if there is ever a legal dispute. I have read of cases where a student faces accusations and is expelled, and then finds it extremely difficult to challenge the ruling because they have suddenly lost all access to and control over the evidence proving their innocence. Worse, an unethical university (or more likely, unethical staff working for the university) could delete or falsify the evidence.
Using an external independent email provider ensures that the university has no control over the records of what was said by who and when. For an honest university, that's beneficial too, as it also prevents students falsely claiming the evidence was tampered with.
Another reason is that students may be particularly concerned to keep their professional and private lives separate. If other students know and routinely use their university email address, they may accidentally use it for discussions about private matters the student does not want the university to have access to. There are lots of legitimate reasons for that - information about relationships, family matters, medical and financial issues are deeply personal. And some may be concerned about widespread prejudice against their politics, sexuality, religion, hobbies, etc. And again, in case of a dispute, such private material could be dug up and used as a weapon for character-assassination.
Foreign students may have grown up in totalitarian states and may as a result be particularly nervous about authorities with power over their lives also having control over their online presence or access to their emails. They may even have dissident opinions, or be doing things that would put them in real danger if their home country ever found out (e.g. Afghan girls/Christians or Chinese Uighurs studying in the West), and so be particularly careful about anyone having control over or visibility of their email account.
Another possibility is the complexity of administering multiple accounts. You have to remember more passwords, you have to change them more often, you have to remember to back up both accounts, you have to curate and transfer address lists, you have to remember which account you are holding which conversations on, and so on. If you have moved on from school to college to university to post-grad, you may be tired of having to change accounts and set everything up again every time you move institutions. Or maybe you find you can't remember lots of long/complex passwords, but the university system insists. It may be simply a desire to avoid the stress and effort. It may be the comfort of habit and familiarity with your own long-time email account.
There are plenty of public figures whose private lives the press and papparazzi would love to pry into. And there have been many cases of unethical reporters hacking phones or bribing IT people to leak data. So it has become routine to have multiple unofficial accounts known only to friends and colleagues, and only use the official, easily identifiable ones for PR statements and marketing. I don't know if any of your students are related to the famous, famous themselves, or plan to be, but they might be.
Or maybe they just don't like being given arbitrary orders about who to entrust their personal data to? In the modern world of hackers and data breaches, young people are getting more wary and privacy-savvy, and maybe trust the security at a big organisation like Google over the overworked IT staff at a small provincial university. I'm not saying they're necessarily right to do so - just that some people might think that way.
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_5: I'm assuming the question is specifically about students using personal email accounts to correspond with university staff.
When students enrol at a university, they agree to abide by a code of conduct, student agreement, or whatever other official policy document sets out such expectations of students. If the code of conduct at your university says that students should use their university email account for all email correspondence with university staff, then the only *legitimate* reasons for not doing so are those set out in that code of conduct. I suspect that at almost all universities with such a policy, no exceptions are provided for, in which case the answer is: **there are none**, at least not for uses of email the policy applies to (i.e. correspondence with university staff). But if in doubt, you should check your university's actual policy.
To address some of the reasons proposed by other answerers:
* **Preferring to give out an email address which will continue to exist after graduation**. This doesn't apply to correspondence between students and university staff. A student is free to give out whatever email address they wish for correspondence outside of staff at their own university, and is also free to share any email address they wish with staff at their university whom they would like to continue corresponding with after they graduate.
* **Having backups under one's own control**. Students are free to make their own backups and store them whereever they like (so long as they aren't externally backing up anything which is not *their own* personal information).
* **The university might rescind access to email accounts in a legal dispute**. In most jurisdictions, the university is *legally compelled* to provide to the other party, unaltered, all relevant evidence during [discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)) before any trial. If the student doesn't trust their university to follow the law, then see above about making their own backups.
* **Keeping their professional and private lives separate**. This is an argument *in favour* of using the university-provided email account for university matters.
* **Nervousness about authorities being able to access the contents of their emails through the university**. Using a personal email account doesn't help with this anyway, since any email correspondence between the student and university staff is already being stored on the university email system because that's what the *staff* use. If an authority had a legal power to access (or compel the university to provide) the contents of emails sent or received by a particular student, the authority would still be able to get them.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_6: One reason to require students to *read* their university email is simple database convenience: if a staff member is emailing a particular student about something, or emailing the members of a particular class (etc), and if the email is delivered to a student's canonical inbox, then we can effectively presume that that email was received by the student. And we can declare ‘we presume you read `<EMAIL>`’. If a student doesn't hear that a class was rearranged or cancelled, because they've decided not to read that email, then that's their problem.
Maintaining a database of students' preferred addresses doesn't work: how does that get updated?, who's allowed to query it?, what if some systems do query it and some don't?, how do you persuade (the admins of) the weird antique IT systems in Finance and in the Library to do that?
It would of course be highly desirable to let students configure that address to have it forwarded to some other preferred address. We don't have to have them use the (probably hideous) institutional email interface.
One reason to require students to *send* email from their institutional account is, as others have suggested, to add a little bit of security (I am more confident that a query from `<EMAIL>` is really from <NAME> than I would be about `<EMAIL>`), and to keep things formal. If I were emailing `fluffybunny` I would be to some extent within their private life, and if I were mad enough to be doing this, as staff, from a private address of my own (*not* a good idea!), then there's all sorts of way such an off-grid communication could be perceived as creating, or potentially enabling, a wide variety of improprieties.
I also am curious what the ‘personal issues’ are, that are quoted in the original question. Like others, I'm a little sceptical that this might in fact translate to ‘I'm too idle to work out how to configure two addresses in my mail client, which I am *going to have to do* at some point in my professional life’.
---
**Edited** to add the following (since there may be an element of talking past each other, in the answers and comments here):
Looking at the other answers here, I get the impression that those (including me) saying ‘I don't understand, what's the problem?’ appear generally to be presuming that anyone reading or sending email is doing so via a mail client, where adding multiple addresses/identities, to receive and send email, is a core function; but those saying ‘it's really annoying having two addresses, or having to wrangle two UIs’ *seem* to be presuming that one reads email via a webmail interface. In the latter case, I can see why having two addresses would potentially be inconvenient.
I don't *forward* my work or personal email addresses (plural in both cases) anywhere – I simply read them all in the one mail client. Each of these has a webmail interface that I could use in emergency, but doing so routinely would drive me insane. But someone who sees webmail as usable, through familiarity, would presumably set quite a high premium on only supporting a single address/identity, and would have a quite different take on this question and the various answers.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: It’s completely legitimate for a student to *prefer* to use a personal email over an institutional email. Everyone has preferences, and we all know that IT policies can be a drag. But preferring something does not make it “legitimate” to violate a policy or claim a “need”. Especially since, as others have explained, these policies exist for some very good reasons, e.g., related to FERPA and protecting student privacy.
As for an actual legitimate need, the only one I can think of would be a student who has accessibility needs that are not met by their institution’s email infrastructure. E.g., if the student uses a [screen reader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader) or other assistive technology that works significantly better with a non-institutional email client, I would consider it legitimate for them to consider their accessibility needs as overriding the institutional policy, both as a matter of law (at least in the US and other countries with legislation similar to the Americans with Disabilities Act) and ethics.
Other than that, I can’t think of a legitimate personal *need*. But this could be due to my limited imagination, so I’m willing to keep an open mind that there may be others.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_8: You are the teacher. He wants to pass your courses and not vice versa.
>
> Sorry, I can only use the university account of the students on personal reasons.
>
>
>
His personal reason is that he is incapable or unwanting to use a new email address. He wants to use his gmail account forever.
The personal reason in your case is that the 30 second in your life worths more than the 30 minute of the IT-illiterate student to learn to use another email address. But you do not need to detail it.
That is all. You don't need to think too much about it. You don't need to spend time and intellectual effort for that.
You can safely use his uni mail address. If he does not read it, it is up to him. You have no time and you are not obliged to consider and follow such personal wishes.
P.s.
If the student has a problem to follow such a trivial administrative nuance, what will happen if he will need to work day & night, month long, on his thesis?
What will he say to his first boss, on his first workplace?
>
> "Sorry I can not use my company mail, only my private mail account, on personal reasons"
>
>
>
I am sorry to say, but this is clearly the case that he needs a lession. If you do not give it him, the life will do.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_9: * Some universities have a governing body that operates like a Westminster-model parliament: the executive leadership team of the university proposes a policy, and the governing body votes on whether to adopt that policy. The executive branch usually, but not always, wins the vote; when the executive branch doesn't win, its policy doesn't go ahead. Sometimes, both students and staff opposed to a proposal by the executive are involved in making the case for a negative vote; if those students and staff wanted to discuss tactics or confer during the drafting of their arguments (at early stages, i.e. before they submit their arguments into the formal university system for campaign literature), then I think they'd probably want to keep those discussions off of university servers for fear of giving the other side of the debate advance warning of details of their arguments.
* Some research students may feel a need to keep some of their correspondence out of the reach of vexatious and frivolous Freedom of Information Act requests (I suppose some might also feel a need to keep some of their correspondence out of the reach of *genuine* Freedom of Information Act requests, but that wouldn't count as "legitimate"),
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_10: Control of the content and their device-
I have had my emails destroyed by universities on multiple occasions - certainly I had backups the later times, but that's not particularly helpful when I cannot revive services attached to them. Nor are they sufficiently valuable to be worth my time to bring some valid suit (the second time I had a real, printed email asserting that I would be able to keep my email after graduation).
Many service provides are also through arguably horrible companies which students don't wish to have any accounts or even interactions with, especially if they are familiar with or at all zealous about privacy.
Different service providers also have competing and incompatible services, especially around the sharing of platform-specific files (ie. Google Docs "Why Not Use POSIX Capabilities?" vs Microsoft's Self-perpetuating Hellscape)
---
Still, that control comes at a price (will they manage their email better than the university? if they run their own, will or how frequently will it be hacked or rejected? how can they prove legitimacy if they're not part of the domain, etc.) and they are likely being obtuse. However troublesome, it's a requirement of modern academic institutions to maintain an email account with them, if just for accessing digital services.
Creating any content is dangerous, but you should still use their academic domain email for official business to provide some liability buffer, and also consider sending them a *reminder* to their personal account for important communications.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_11: My personal reasons as a student:
1. I like to keep all emails in one place and if I switched to student mail I would have to update my email in all the countless places that I have used it. Currently I have my student mail redirect to my main account so that mails that get sent to my student mail still end up in my inbox.
2. If (when) I leave this university I would have to change my email again and like I mentioned in 1. this is a huge hassle.
3. Perhaps most importantly: somehow all online tools that are provided by my university are slightly annoying to use. My aversion for these tools makes me really not want to use their email. For example forced 2-factor authentication. However important cyber security is it really hinders my workflow when I have to open my phone everytime I want to login. My current email program is much nicer. Excuse me for this little rant.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_12: It's not my place to tell students what email address they must use. It *is* my place, however, to tell them they are responsible for receiving messages I send out using tools within our LMS, and they can change their address that the LMS uses, or read emails from the account that the LMS uses.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_13: Of course having control over your email is a legitimate thing to consider. But there can be much simpler causes which seem more likely.
A perfectly valid and legitimate reason is also **convenience**.
It is much more convenient to contact people from your existing email, the one you already track and check, than have a specific account , only for 'university purposes'.
Most probably, the majority of students has already established communication channels in email, social media, sites etc, mobile apps, etc several years before enrolling in a university.
Most probably, the majority of their communication goes through these channels.
It is an extra burden for students, to check and use the 'university account' to send an email as they have nothing to gain and have to spend time and effort to set it up or check it.
When using an online email service, instead of email client, checking another email for an answer is also an additional burden.
On the other hand there is no additional benefit for a student to use the university account for communication. Especially if they are just attending courses and not doing research or any other activity that requires a more "academic" identity.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_14: If somebody was harassing or stalking a student using their university email address (which quite likely the university will give out to anybody who wants it), this is an excellent reason for using a private email address. Somebody can only get your gmail address if you give it to them.
It's also quite conceivable that you wouldn't want to tell your professor you had a stalker.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_15: One potential personal reason, that a student might not want to explain: if a student is trans and not out yet, or out, but has not had an official name change recognized by the university, and does not feel comfortable with their birth name. They haven't gotten to the point yet of changing their name officially, but one thing they can control: their email address. They probably can't change their university email address, but they can change their gmail.
Upvotes: -1
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2021/10/02
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<issue_start>username_0: I go to a high school that allows us to attend college classes to obtain an associate's degree. I had this instructor for both physics 251 and physics 252 (calculus-based physics). I feel like he would be a really good reference, had I not cheated on two of his tests in physics 1.
The first time was a test redo that we had a week to complete. I let another student copy my work and he copied literally *all* of it down to the placement of the work. The second time was an actual test where he did the exact same thing a second time. We took this test before the retest of the last one, so I had no clue I would get caught at all. The third time was a big misunderstanding of the instructions: I used [Desmos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmos_(graphing)) to graph one of the questions and I had no clue I couldn't.
Despite his anger and frustration towards me and my behavior in the class, he allowed me to stay in the class (I think it was because we went from 30 to only five students). I did not have a single problem in Physics 2 and I ended the class with a B. I am scared he reported me to the college, but I am not sure. I never received a letter, email, or phone call about the incidents.
I feel really bad about the incident and wish that I didn't give the guy my answers. It sucks that I put him in such a predicament.
Should I even take my chances and ask him for the letter? I am scared that he will write me something bad and I won't get into any college, which is 100 percent fair. I have other people I can ask (two calculus teachers and a high school teacher).<issue_comment>username_1: You have an opportunity, but it is a risky one. It also depends on some things you probably don't know and can't judge about the instructor.
And, it would require a face to face meeting. This can't be done any other way.
But, my view is that it would be worth having a meeting with the instructor, apologizing for your transgressions, and asking for advice about your future.
Teachers are human too, and few of us have no blemish in our past. Some of us remember that we were once also young and foolish. The important thing is to learn to not be foolish in the future.
If you pick up from this conversation that the instructor still supports you and doesn't condemn you forever, then you are in a position to ask for a letter.
I once had an uncomfortable conversation with a professor over a different "transgression" and learned a lot from the conversation and also that he could understand my wish to do better. It worked out.
But if you feel a negative vibe, then there is no point in asking. The conversation might be valuable in any case, especially if it leads to better behavior in the future.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: From my point of view, the person who enables plagiarism is clearly as guilty as the person doing the copying.
My reputation depends in part on the references I write, and if I want to be trusted with people I highly recommend I could not in good conscience knowingly overlook this. I fully expect that anyone writing a letter I would read would not knowingly overlook such an offense either.
As a result I personally would *never* accept to write a reference for someone who committed an academic offense in a course of mine, unless the person granted me explicit permission to discuss the academic offense in the letter of reference. As you can imagine, the reference would not necessarily be glorious, as in my mind an academic offense like facilitation reveals extremely poor judgment on the part of the student, whatever his or her academic merit might be.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_3: Assuming the guy isn't a total jerk, he is not going to write something that would sabotage your application. But his experience with you is going to color the letter he writes you, and he may refuse to write a letter at all for the reasons given by other commenters here.
If you were a college student, you could pretty much forget getting a letter, but he might be willing to cut you some slack because you are a high school student. If for some reason you think he has extremely positive things to say about you which no other instructor would be able to attest to, then it would be worth approaching him. When you talk to him, let him know that there are other people you can ask instead. If he seems at all reluctant, drop it and thank him for considering it.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: No, even if they were to agree (some people are just too nice to say no), you should not put your instructor in the unenviable position of trying to figure out how to recommend a student they caught cheating twice. You will have to find someone else.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_5: This is where you learn how to have adult conversations. I don't think it's a matter of you determining whether or not you should ask, I think you should have a serious conversation with the teacher about the whole situation. It's promising that you took the second class and had no issues. It shows that you learned and grew over time.
You should bring this up to your teacher. Tell him: 1.) you recognize the problems you previously had, and you were wrong. 2.) you did better, and learned from your mistakes and didn't have any problems in his second class. 3.) Ask him if he feels like you have grown. 4.) If he says yes, then bring up your request for a recommendation letter, and ASK HIM if he thinks its appropriate. 5.) If he says yes, then ask him if he would write that letter.
You have to learn that you have certain goals, and other people do as well. A dialouge between you and someone else about how to get what you want is important, even if it's unlikely to get what you want.
Edit: This answer is based on the fact he is highschool, and highschoolers should not be cheating, but a bit of leniency is given considering his age and reformed behavior. If this was college or professional, I would say NOT to ask for this recommendation.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_6: I agree with @username_5: focus less on any possible (if improbable) letter of recommendation, and book a chat with this instructor to seek general advice on proceeding with studies, given your initial failings.
I'm a little puzzled about the exact sequence (your "second" event was on a test that preceded the "first" one?) and I'm really struck by your comment that you "had no clue I would get caught at all" as if *getting caught* is somehow the root of the problem. Couple this with the third event, which appears to be a problem processing instructions, and it all rather makes you look like someone who perhaps has attention or judgement challenges.
I won't argue about the relative moral/ethical weight of facilitating vs submitting plagiarism, but there is an undeniable functional difference in that at least you completed the work on your own smarts. Since you made it through the second class without further problems, and have bothered to ask us, I think your apparent optimism may be well-founded. And, I have to add, I'm not of the opinion that only those who have an unsullied adolescence should ever be allowed a chance at success.
So have a chat with this instructor, focus on apologizing for your early transgressions and the clean completion of the subsequent course, indicate an interest in proceeding in the field they're working in (most academics have a soft spot for this) and ask him for his thoughts on ways you may proceed. If he looks at you incredulously and reminds you of a number of subsequent delinquencies that you haven't bothered to tell us about, you really have a reckoning to work on. But ideally you'll get some decent advice, at the least an objective view of your capabilities. And you *might* find he volunteers a reference, of the "on the right track after some initial unfortunate mis-steps" variety. And it's *infinitely* better to proceed with these events fully disclosed, than to have them discovered later.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: It won't hurt to ask. As someone who has applied to bachelors, masters, and phd programs, I have requested many letters of recommendation. Only one time did a prof decline: he basically said "You did mediocre work in my class: I cannot write a strong letter for you. If you really want me to write a letter, I will, but I am probably not the best person to ask."
When you ask a prof for a letter of recommendation, it is implied that you are asking for a good letter: one that actually recommends you. It would be unusual for a prof to agree to write a letter for you and then write a letter that they think will hurt your chances of acceptance. If you want to be sure, ask the professor if they think the program should accept you. That being said, I would be surprised if this prof agrees to do it.
P.s you will probably succeed at college only if you stop cheating, even when you have "no clue" that you will get caught.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_8: I think a huge detail that many answerers have missed is that you took a whole extra class from him without incident. Depending on how much time was in between, the instructor might see this as a sign of growth (or, unfortunately, maybe just a sign that you don't like consequences).
I strongly encourage you to have a sincere conversation with this person. Openly and honestly share your position. Tell them what you've learned, who you are now, and why you are still considering asking them for a letter. Ask them what they think and whether they would be comfortable. Be real and human. Don't go in with expectations or ulterior motives, but to have an open and honest conversation. After that, each of you can make a sound decision. They can decide whether they are comfortable writing the letter, and you can decide whether you want that letter.
Growth and grace are very real, especially at your age, and many academics will see it that way. Some of your best letters can come from people who really KNOW you, the good and the bad. Don't let negative experiences scare you away.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/03
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<issue_start>username_0: I submitted a paper to a scientific conference through easychair website and I have just received the reviewers' comments with an opportunity for rebuttal, where they said:
"Please include in the revised version one page where you explain how you addressed the reviewers comments".
I have a few questions:
1. I understand that I have to submit a revised version of the 15-pages paper, but how can I include one extra page, I mean should I just add an extra page (page #16) at the end of the revised version or add it as the first page? or indlude it as a separate single page file?
2. I assume that the reviewers will look at the revised paper again after the deadline of the rebuttal phase, which means they are able to see all the comments (and my answers) from ~all~ the reviewers which will be summarized on that one page, is that correct?
3. One of the reviewers was confused with a definition at the beginning of the paper and he said that this definition is "so wrong" that he didn't even look at the rest of the paper (no complaint from the other reviewers about this definition).<issue_comment>username_1: The problem with a conference submission is that there is a firm deadline, unlike a journal submission. The rebuttal is a *separate* document, seen by the program committee and reviewers that helps them make a speedy second review.
I'd guess that you should mention the definition issue if you can do it within the space requirement. The chair will eventually make a decision and may favor one opinion about the definition over another. The evaluation "score" at that point doesn't mean so much.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: 1. If you can submit two files, do that. If you are only able to submit one file, put the rebuttal on the first page and make the revised paper start from the second page.
2. Probably, yes. Within the one page you can make one section for each of the reviewers.
3. Make the definition clearer and explain what you have done in the rebuttal. If this reviewer gave any more detail, make sure you deal with his/her points.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/03
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<issue_start>username_0: Recently I got a rejection of my research article from a mathematical journal. The referee report says "the results are correct but it has not motivation why should we care such results".
Now I have a got an idea and applied those results of my research paper to make a link with some interesting results of great interest.
My question-
Should/can I submit to the same journal with same Editor and explain the situation asking for another review ?<issue_comment>username_1: The problem with a conference submission is that there is a firm deadline, unlike a journal submission. The rebuttal is a *separate* document, seen by the program committee and reviewers that helps them make a speedy second review.
I'd guess that you should mention the definition issue if you can do it within the space requirement. The chair will eventually make a decision and may favor one opinion about the definition over another. The evaluation "score" at that point doesn't mean so much.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: 1. If you can submit two files, do that. If you are only able to submit one file, put the rebuttal on the first page and make the revised paper start from the second page.
2. Probably, yes. Within the one page you can make one section for each of the reviewers.
3. Make the definition clearer and explain what you have done in the rebuttal. If this reviewer gave any more detail, make sure you deal with his/her points.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/03
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<issue_start>username_0: I am a postgraduate student and will start my studies in Europe in the next two months. As you may know, it is prohibited in Islam to touch people of the opposite sex (regardless of their faith) except family members.
In case a girl/woman offers her hand, how can I refuse to shake her hand without offending her?
Note: This Islamic rule has nothing to do with underestimating women ( as some comments/answers mistakenly perceived). It is all about the opposite sex; men don't touch women, and women don't touch men (except their families).<issue_comment>username_1: Shaking hands with male academics but not with female academics is something many in European academia (including myself) will find somewhat offensive. Explaining this to be inherently tied to you being a Muslim is also problematic, as this can be seen as implicitly questioning whether others not following this rule are "real Muslims". That said, the principle of "no touching without consent" is widely accepted - and requiring you to shake hands with women would go against that.
The usual recommendation for someone with your objectives would be to forgo handshaking altogether and not shake anyone's hand. In a greeting situation where hands might be shaken, put your hands behind your back (to minimize the risk of someone reaching for them and making things awkward), and bow (more than just a nod, but definitely not deeply) while smiling.
From my experience at conferences, etc, there is not that much handshaking happening anyway (even in pre-Covid times). Most people will be vaguely aware of the cultural and personal issues surrounding it, and vaguely accepting. Some Germans really like to shake hands though. Currently I'd expect that shaking hands would violate Covid safety rules at most European academic events anyway.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: I intended to stay out of this as such questions are off topic as well as fraught. But....
My suggestion is to just tell them, gently if possible that your religion, or tradition in your culture, forbids you to touch men/women not in your family. If you wear any distinctive clothing it will make some things more obvious to others, but that isn't needed.
I think most *reasonable* people will just accept it, even if they don't understand it. Those who are unreasonable can be ignored. There are a lot of chauvinists around, as come comments here demonstrate; people who think their standards simply must be adopted by others.
My opinion is that people who don't/can't accept other people *as they are* have no valid place in academia. There are proselytizers everywhere, of course, both for religion and, for example, western European values. But they have a mission that you don't need to buy in to.
Just say it. Anyone reasonable will accept it. The others won't be convinced but you probably don't want association with them in any case. Haters gonna' hate. Be true to yourself.
Upvotes: 1 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: I think I'll start this answer by addressing some of the hostility in the comments (and one of the answers) to your proposed conduct. As an opening observation it is worth noting that this religious practice potentially applies *both ways* to Muslim men and women, forbidding either of them to shake hands with a member of the opposite sex. There have been legal cases involving Muslim women who have eschewed shaking hands with male colleagues in the workplace for this same religious reason (see e.g., [here](https://www.npr.org/2018/08/16/639239165/muslim-woman-says-she-refused-handshake-received-discrimination-swedish-court-ag)). So even from a Western-egalitarian perspective, while the practice involves differential treatment of men and women in individual cases, it "balances out" in a holistic sense.
It is also worth pointing out that Western countries also have norms about what physical touching between members of the opposite sex is appropriate in professional settings, and these norms also distinguish between the sexes in some cases. If you doubt this, just think for a moment about what kind of touching of a man in his chest area would be considered innocuous (e.g., a friendly slap on the pectoral muscle), and now think about whether you could do the same with a woman. So really, while some specifics differ, I find it quite laughable that some consider the OP's proposed conduct to be offensive.
---
Getting to the substance of your matter, universities as institutions tend to be quite accommodating of religious differences in cultural practices. Some universities have even adopted an explicit "Muslim handshake rule" in their policies to explicitly state that this practice is allowed, and is not in breach of other policies (see e.g., [here](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/why-three-australian-universities-have-a-muslim-handshake-rule)). So at an institutional level, you will probably find that there is general support for the fact that some religious people will not want to touch members of the opposite sex, including shaking hands with them. At an individual level, when dealing with other students, there is going to be a lot of variation, and some small minority of people might find this offensive. I doubt it will be many, but that will depend on the culture at your university. If you are looking for a way to "soften the blow" for people who find this practice strange or offensive, you could consider substituting an alternative method of greeting that does not involve touching (e.g., a nod of the head, a bow, etc.). I'll leave it to you to determine what alternative greeting is consistent with your religious practices and preference. As for dealing with other men, I disagree with the other answer that suggests that you should cease shaking hands with women *and men* altogether. I don't think that is necessary, so you should feel free to continue shaking hands with other men if that is your preference.
Although he didn't end up mentioning it in his answer, I quite like [username_2](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368/)'s original suggestion that you could print up small cards explaining this practice and hand them to people in the event that they show signs of offence to your practice. This is a practice that has been used successfully in other cases where a person has an individual practice or disability that they think might cause offence to others. (A recent [example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT9B4yHE7OA) was shown in the movie *The Joker*, where he uses cards to explain a disability that causes him to laugh uncontrollably.) The other nice thing about the card idea is that it helps to teach other students explicitly about your cultural practices. Students are at university to learn, so if they learn a little bit of information about Islam at the same time, that is a little educational bonus.
Finally, you should be careful with citing Islam as a blanket reason for your practice, since there are evidently many Muslims who do not use this practice. Thus, if you decide to specify the religious basis for this practice then I think you should be a bit more specific, or just say that your particular type/sect/practice of Islam forbids it.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_4: I live in a university community that has both a large number of muslims and a large number of non-muslims. In situations where a handshake might be expected but the Muslim person prefers not to, they put their right hand on their chest. I don't know how widespread this practice is, but in our community it is very well understood and accepted.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_5: The very first time they ask you to shake your hand, you should simply tell them "Sorry, I'm a Muslim" and they will never ever try it again because they are nice enough to understand the religious aspects in my view.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_6: My pragmatic advice would be "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". Islam can't *prohibit* you anything, you have to decide your behavior yourself in the end.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: I would like to and a bit of perspective as to why not shaking a woman's hand could easily be perceived as sexist.
As you assert, the rule of not touching anyone of the opposite sex is not necessarily sexist in a vacuum. However, the social context of academia and the world cannot be ignored. Women have systemically been excluded from academia, especially STEM (which I'm assuming is your background based on your profile). As such, the practice of not shaking the hand of anyone of the opposite sex necessarily negatively impacts women more than men.
For instance, imagine attending a conference in which there are 9 men and one woman (this is not at all uncommon in many fields). If you shake the men's hands but not the woman's you will also contribute directly to the isolation of that woman. Thus, in this broader sense, the act can be viewed as sexist. As such, it will likely be perceived poorly by others. The problem is not the act itself but rather the larger context.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: I'm answering mostly from German background, where (especially in the East) handshakes are culturally important. But they are not super-important, handshakes can be replaced by other gestures.
### Summary
* Try very hard to initiate your preferred greeting gesture before any hand is actually stretched out to you.
* *Refusing* an actually offered hand is far more difficult to do without offending: within Western cultures, refusing to shake hands when offered is a way to intentionally insult.
* Respectfully not shaking hands with anyone is acceptable, shaking hands with some but not with others is not.
* Please make super clear that you are respectful: there are others who act out their sexism by shaking hands with men but not with women.
By putting in extra the effort of being unambiguously respectful in a way that is easily understood also the in the culture you're moving to, you'll actively contribute to a more peaceful society.
---
### More detailed thoughts
* In academia (and many office-type workplaces) handshakes are not very frequent.
* In most situations, you can avoid shaking hands in a face-saving (for everyone) and respectful manner.
However, you need to be clear and consistent, and [non-verbally] communicate this *early on*.
+ A handshake signalling peaceful intentions as greeting or farewell can usually be substituted by other gestures.
- Here in Germany, waving your hand would be a natural and acceptable, but somewhat less formal, substitute. *But do get someone to explain and show you the local waving customs. You do not want to accidentally use a flirtatious handwave.*
Waving is done at longer distances. I.e., you initiate the waving greeting long before anyone stretches out their hand to you. This gives you a very nice opportunity to suggest a less formal and non-contact greeting mode.
- I'd think hand behind your back unusual,
- what I've seen more often is the hand on chest gesture @username_4 describes.
- The Japanese please gesture you refer to in one of the comments would also look well to me. Answering an offered hand by this gesture may be perceived as slightly awkward, but I think it is a graceful way to save the situation. The perfect timing would be to initiate it just those few milliseconds before the hand is extended towards you.
+ Hand shaking also serves a business purpose of closing a contract and in this function is a purely professional and formal act.
You're unlikely to find yourself spontaneously in a situation where this formal handshake is required.
If you end up getting some award, poster prize or the like, I'd recommend to tell the committee when they inform you that you don't shake hands for religious reasons and ask how to perform the prize ceremony under these circumstances.
* Making a difference with whom you shake hands according to sex or gender is plain unacceptable (as is making a difference according to religion, skin color, ethnicity, disability, etc.).
*I think this is where lots of the emotions in other answers and comments are about: differentiating between women and men in shaking hands violates an important Western value (treating all sexes and genders equally) in a way that is perceived as unnecessary considering your need to not shake hands with women: both can be reconciled by not shaking hands with anyone.*
Re comment to one of the other answers: this applies also to Muslim women not shaking hands with men *but* with women. However, so far I've only seen men making such a difference, never women. (We do have a certain self-selection here: several [female] Muslim colleagues who live in Western countries have explicitly told me that they are here because of exactly these Western values.)
Not shaking hands/touching *without making a difference* may be seen as reticent or shy - that's entirely acceptable.
>
> In case a girl/woman offers her hand, how can I refuse to shake her hand without offending her?
>
>
>
In the Western cultures we're talking about, *refusing* an offered hand is an *offensive* gesture that can be used intentionally to insult. Specifically, if someone's offered hand is refused while others are shaken, this is an even stronger insult.
I do think this cultural/religious conflict can be solved gracefully and respectfully by you - but you need to be aware of this and you need to very clearly and unambiguously communicate that there is really nothing disrespectful in your behavior here. One straightforward way of doing this is is to *show* respect for the Western value of *treating* men and women equally.
Otherwise confusion and conflict will result: while your action may be with respectful intention, there are sexists who act in a way that observed from the outside is indistinguishable from you shaking hands with men but not with women.
(Among those, many are Muslim men. Sexists with Western cultural background certainly exist as well, but refusing to shake hands with women is not one of the typical ways how they act out their sexism.)
Your colleagues (of any sex or gender) have likely had encounters with Muslims who are sexist (or bigot) and have refused to shake hands (or worse). You'll likely also have colleagues who were hindered in their carreer and/or personal life by sexism.
As your colleagues should respect you and your reticence in shaking hands, you should respect them and their cultural background.
Depending on regional and situational subtleties, your question may be similar to saying "If someone greets me with a Salaam, how can I refuse this greeting [for religious reasons] without offending them?"
Hence my recommendation to try and make sure beforehand that no hands are extended.
---
As a side note, I'd recommend to also be very careful about spacing if you come from a culture/setting where you are used to crowds and not having much personal space.
Avoiding handshakes will likely be perceived as more acceptable if it comes together with also maintaining more distance in general. The other way round, if you are perceived as intruding too much into personal space *and* refusing to shake hands is a combination that is prone to be read as very disrespectful.
Upvotes: 4
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2021/10/03
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<issue_start>username_0: I contributed to a conference. I just received feedback from reviewers. I need to write a rebuttal. But I am limited to 800 words.
Three reviewers pointed out some writing problems. For example, the picture did not explain clearly. The layout is unreasonable. But they all give a weak accept.
A reviewer completely misunderstood the concept, and he directly gave me 1 point for all items. The other two reviewers asked a lot of questions and gave Accept and weak reject respectively. How should I organize my rebutal?
If I answer the questions one by one, it seems that it cannot be limited to 800 words at all. If I only answer part of it, would it seem disrespectful? And some reviewers asked the same question. How should I layout?
Can I directly point out that the reviewer misunderstood?
>
> But there seems to be some misunderstandings here.
>
>
>
Does this seem disrespectful? The reviewer who misunderstood the concept mistakenly regarded the two advantages of the paper as major flaws.<issue_comment>username_1: *Disclaimer: I have not read the [linked blog post](https://andreas-zeller.info/2012/10/01/patterns-for-writing-good-rebuttals.html), that may contain better advises than mine.*
I pretty much always structure my answers the same way:
1. **Thank the reviewers.** Honestly. They spent time reading and assessing your paper, take the time to thank them for their comments.
2. **Rephrase.** They generally show they understood your paper by re-phrasing its abstract, do the same. Briefly restate what the reviewers thought of your paper. It will help them gaining confidence in the fact that you actually read and understood their comments, which is important.
3. **Answer *some* questions**. If they asked questions, answer some of them briefly. If they are vague, simply defer to point 5.
4. **Get the easy to fix out of the way.** If there are discussion on presentation or typo, briefly comment on how you plan on addressing them. If you have a pre-print on-line, you can even update it to prove your good faith.
5. **Discuss the difficult points.** Address the genuine concerns that your reviewers raised. If there are misunderstanding, apologize for not having written your paper in a clearer style, and clarify the difficult points precisely. Don't hesitate to "play the reviewers once against the other": if R1 claims that Theorem 1 is wrong but R2 defends it as ingenious, explain that maybe R1 missed the argument and could consult R2's comment to get a better perspective.
6. **Thank again.** Explain that you value the feedback and that they will make your paper so much better, that you regret not answering all their questions (if you did not) but that they will help you make a better presentation / paper / future research.
I would start by writing down *everything you want to say*, and then edit it until you reached the word limit.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: There is a PLoS Computational Biology paper (Ten simple rules for writing a response to reviewers) by <NAME> (<https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005730>) that contains excellent ten easy to follow "rules" (note that they are not rules per se). I will list the points from the paper here (and a one sentence summary) but would recommend reading this short article for more insight.
As with most things, take your time to go through these and formulate your own thoughts about it. While these are general markers that can help along the way, this is not a rule book (don't get misled by the word "rule") and not everything works/applies in all situations.
* **Rule 1: Provide an overview, then quote the full set of reviews**
Provide a summary of changes, along with new data, additional figures, etc, followed by interleaved comment+response.
---
* **Rule 2: Be polite and respectful of all reviewers**
"Keep in mind that if the reviewer failed to understand something, the fault likely lies, at least in part, with you for not making the point clear enough." - enough said!
---
* **Rule 3: Accept the blame**
"In general, even if the requested change seems unnecessary, it is usually better to go ahead and revise with the goal of showing the reviewer that they were listened to and understood."
---
* **Rule 4: Make the response self-contained**
Try, for example, a tactic like original and revision comparison style
---
* **Rule 5: Respond to every point raised by the reviewer**
"In some cases, the reviewer may disagree with your response, but you should not try to avoid a difficult point by simply ignoring it"
---
* **Rule 6: Use typography to help the reviewer navigate your response**
I find it easy to color code the comments along with keeping the comment in a `fixed width` font while my responses are in regular Times New Roman black
---
* **Rule 7: Whenever possible, begin your response to each comment with a direct answer to the point being raised**
"Your goal is to show the reviewer that you took their comments seriously, and you should quickly convey what you did in response to their critique."
---
* **Rule 8: When possible, do what the reviewer asks**
"If the reviewer asks for 10 things, and you say that 9 out of 10 of them fall outside the scope of your work, then you are not likely to satisfy the reviewer."
---
* **Rule 9: Be clear about what changed relative to the previous version**
" In your response, refer explicitly to the previous and revised versions of your manuscript and explain what changes have been made."
---
* **Rule 10: If necessary, write the response twice**
"In practice, it is often helpful to write the "venting" version of the response first, wait a while, and then begin working on the "real" response several days later, perhaps after you have done some of the work to address the critiques raised by the reviewer."
---
**Edit**
With respect to fitting it all in a given word limit, try and see if multiple reviewers have similar comments/concerns; then you could answer them together rather than individually replying to all. Additionally, in this case, summarizing all changes in the response document will clearly not work.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: OP also asked how to respond to a reviewer who clearly misunderstood something (while the other reviewers did not complain about it ); well I think the options are:
(1) Apologize and clarify: "I apologize for any confusion; I should have been more clear on the ... ".
(2) Straightly saying "There seems to be a misunderstanding about ...".
(3) Or a combination of (1) and (2): "I am sorry for the confusion, there seems to be a misunderstanding about ..".
Some may argue that apologizing here may mean admitting that something was indeed missing, which can be viewed as a weakness of the author. However, I would use (3).
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/03
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<issue_start>username_0: I am in the process of writing a rebuttal response for a conference submission. Unlike others, a reviewer who only looked at the first 3 pages stated that there is a fundamental error (that he explained) and he rejected the paper without looking at the rest. I will explain to him how he missed a key part.
My question is: Is it normal to ask him explicitly in the rebuttal letter to reconsider his evaluation score? especially since his score becomes very important to the overall scores.<issue_comment>username_1: Your job is to address the reviewer's comments, not the reviewer. You don't ask the reviewer to change the evaluation.
You should explain in your response to the editor that what the reviewer thinks is an error is in fact correct - give reasons that directly address what the reviewer said.
You cannot know that the reviewer stopped at page 3. If the reason the supposed error isn't actually an error is addressed on page 7, just say that. Do not say the reviewer didn't read it.
If the explanation you want to give to the reviewer calls for material that is not in the paper, then the reviewer is right.
You can note that the other reviewers found no error. Clearly there was something you did not explain to that reviewer's satisfaction. If you can, add wording early on that would keep a reader from misreading your paper and thinking it wrong.
Thank all the reviewers and provide the extra material in the resubmission.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: No. You might not even get assigned the same reviewer should the review go for another round, and in that situation that direct address makes no sense whatsoever. As a rule of the thumb, never argue with a person, deal with the points they make instead. Otherwise, it often derails to something dangerously close to *ad hominem* arguments which are somewhat legitimized by political debates, but not in academia. Don't focus on what and how the reviewer or opponent is thinking, rather the essence of what they are saying - and let everyone else judge for themselves.
Upvotes: 3
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2021/10/03
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<issue_start>username_0: Often when distinguishing one variable from another we use different characters or if using the same character different subscripts. For instance we might use x for one variable, and y for another, or we might use x\_1 for one variable and x\_2 for another. I was wondering if in a paper I could get away with using the same character but with different colors when referring to different variables. So for instance if I was referring to two different objects, then I might refer to variables related to one object using the color red and variables related to the other object using the color blue, and variables related to both objects using the color magenta. So for example the schrodinger equation for a system of particles only interacting with each other would be written in the form
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XLyQP.png)
Would writing equations with variables denoted with color make a paper less likely to get published assuming that I explained what the colors meant?<issue_comment>username_1: Do not do this. Those of us who prefer to read on paper and have black and white printers will be extremely confused.
Upvotes: 7 <issue_comment>username_2: The obvious problem, as noted in another answer, is monochrome (black) printers. Yes, you can get a color printer for very little money (not much more than the cost of the ink cartridges), monochrome printers are still far more common for those who need to print a moderate amount (hundreds to thousands of pages per month) because the cheap color printers tend to cost a lot per page (inkjet) and the expensive color printers (laser) have a high upfront cost.
But there are other problems as well:
* Screen readers for the visually impaired. I'm amazed (my evil twin has told me all about it) how many people rely on screen readers to read email, web pages and everything else on a computer. The colors would either be lost altogether or would add a lot of extra time to the reading ("white a blue x squared").
* Copying. Even if the journal is published in color, someone might make a photocopy (yes, an actual photocopy, not a print from a PDF!) and that will very often be only (or default) in black and white.
* Readability. In addition to true color blindness, color text can be harder to read on paper than black text simply because it has lower contrast.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: If you are trying to publish in a journal which has printed issues, you will (at best) eventually run into the problem that these (even ones which normally have no publication charge, which is pretty much all the ones in my field) typically impose a significant charge for every page which needs to appear in colour. Normally that might just be one page with a particular diagram, but in your case it sounds like it will be most of the pages, and there's no way for you to argue that colour printing isn't really necessary.
However, I very much doubt it will get to that stage, for the excellent reason username_1 gives. I can't print in colour at work, and I doubt that's unusual. That means I wouldn't review your paper, since I always make notes on a printed copy when reviewing. And the editor might veto this idea even before trying to find reviewers, since readers will want to print.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: You should not "get away with" anything while trying to publish your work. You comply with the rules/guidelines, and everyone will be happy. Less headache for everyone (you, the editor, the publisher, the readers) - there's already a lot of headache in publishing a paper.
"*Could I use color...*", yes you could, in theory, depending on the rules imposed by your publisher. But you probably shouldn't.
The guidelines are there for their reasons. In some conferences or journals I sent papers too, they even highlighted that I couldn't/shouldn't use/rely on colors in my charts, let alone for the text content (like the variables). Instead of using *red column*, *blue column*, etc. which is discouraged, they suggest using texture patterns to fill the columns. The extensive use of (verbose) description using colors in the Figure captions or in the text body is also frowned upon: e.g. *"we can see that the red line diverges significantly lower from the blue and green lines"*, instead use [markers](https://matplotlib.org/1.3.1/_images/line_styles.png) on chart lines, and the legends in the chart should be sufficient enough (a picture is worth a thousand words, no?).
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: (Personal opinions, so a fully anecdotal answer, but too long for a comment.)
My immediate thought when seeing that screenshot was "wait, aren't those red and green ones the same variable?" (Obviously, I don't know the Schrödinger equations.)
I automatically expected that *of course* you meant to use color only for emphasis, while still keeping the "traditional" subscripts or whatever to actually distinguish them. I could see some uses in using color as a helper, while keeping the same equation readable if, no, *when* it gets turned black-and-white. But color as the only distinguishing feature seems unconventional enough to be surprising.
Even if colors are used only for emphasis, the choice of them can be somewhat problematic. My immediate second thought was about the blue-on-black being almost completely unreadable. Someone with bad eyesight, or color blindness, or such might have different problems. Switching the background from black to white might also require reconsidering the colors.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_6: The general consensus is to not use colors.
However, this also depends on the field.
Some fields, particularly in computer science, have accepted the use of colors for sake of readability.
The following does not only hold for papers, but also for presentations, since accessibility at conferences or workshops should also be considered.
If you really want to add colors to your work, some care must be taken.
As the other answers have indicated, using colors to convey important information can seriously impede the experience for the color-blind.
It really depends on what colors you choose. You can choose colors that any type of colorblind people can still distinguish.
To make sure you use the right colors, use a tool like Sim Daltonism.
In order to distinguish on black-white print, it's advisable to add additional emphasis/use different fonts, e.g. the blue one is bold, the other, green one cursive, the next, orange one is underlined.
That way, people with monochromatic vision and people who read your work on a black-white printout can still benefit from your highlighting.
That said, depending on how adopted the use of colors is in your field, you might have more trouble than good if researchers, and ultimately referees, are not used to it and strongly oppose to the use of syntax highlighting, despite its benefits and, if done rightly, accessibility. To try to remedy this, you should add a line to your paper that says "This paper uses colors. While still readable as a black-white print, for an enhanced experience, view this paper in colors."
Concluding, *yes* you do can use colors in your paper. However, do so in a sensible manner that keeps the accessibility. Nevertheless, you should really ponder whether the inclusion of colors+font diversification is actually beneficial to your work after all.
As a personal judgement from your screenshot, the current choice of colors and fonts makes it much more difficult to read than without colors. You should abstain from using a hard blue or a hard red on black background.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: **my opinion in 2 parts**:
**part1**. bad since confusing even for non-colourblind.
besides having to read the thingy as like 'red-x', 'green-x', what's hard is reproducing the equation like when we write the equation in our notes we'll write $(red-x)^2$? (as mentioned in a comment above this is the same with those cases where multiple fonts like mathfrak, mathscr, mathcal are all used in the same thing)
**part2**. BUT i think a good idea for certain cases, but most probably just informal cases of explaining things directly to students or other colleagues, where you have show certain [details in proofs](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2895737/leibniz-rule-prove-int-0y-u-ttx-t-dt-u-y-x-y-u-y-x-0)
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Woc4V.png)
>
>
>
BUT as much as possible no using different colours for the same letter... here i had to use different colours for the same letter y to show where each y was going. (I forgot the exact context, but I think $y\_0$ would've been weird to use. But right now I'm screaming at my past self to use $y\_0$ instead somehow. idk.)
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_8: **If it helps to convey meaning and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages mentioned in the other answers, do it.**
The answers make some good points about the usage in your example, but I honestly think that using color in equations is a good idea. Inventing new notation to declutter equations has certainly [been done before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation). I think color could really help make complex equations easier to understand. The common use of color for syntax highlighting for programming languages supports this idea.
Honestly, I can't believe the most highly voted answer makes the argument that people won't be able to distinguish it if they print it out in black and white. Literature from recent years is full of images and graphs that are useless in black and white. For instance, I see a lot of biology papers that include fluorescence microscopy images like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/g8ENc.png)
Fluorescence microscopy image from Slater et al. (CC BY 1.0) <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0040164>
You won't get much out of an image like that in monochrome. In the graph below from a recent PLOS ONE paper, color and shape both carry distinct meanings, so you won't be to get all of the information in the plot without color:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rMCkH.jpg)
Zhao et al. (CC BY 4.0) <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009345>
Let me address some criticisms in the other answers.
1. *Not accessible for people with colorblindness.* You can avoid ambiguity for people with the most common types of colorblindness by [choosing](https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/#%23D81B60-%231E88E5-%23FFC107-%23004D40) your [colors](https://thenode.biologists.com/data-visualization-with-flying-colors/research/) carefully. This [Nature Methods](https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.1618) paper has some good suggestions. Some will argue that you should never represent information purely with color, but in the era of "big data" you really need all of the tools available to synthesize complex information into a plot. At the end of the day, we have to make some compromises. Most plots are not accessible to people with visual impairments, yet we still rely on them heavily for the enormous benefits they have in imparting information.
2. *The publisher won't let you.* You could include the equation as a "figure" or "diagram" rather than a pure equation. If they don't let you do that, then find another journal.
3. *Extra charges for color pages.* Many journals used to charge extra for color pages, but, increasingly, journals are all digital and these page charges have gone away. I haven't published in a journal with such charges for 10 years. Journals used to suggest using different patterns for different data rather than colors, but high contrast patterns can be distracting and difficult to distinguish.
**As you've seen here, you are likely to experience some backlash when introducing a notational innovation; however, if it truly enhances understanding, others may pick it up and it may become more standard despite initial misgivings.**
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: The problem with colors in an equation, is suppose I don't believe your calculations and want to re-derive the equations myself with pen and paper. Do I need now need to find a set of color pens to work with? and hope I don't pick up the wrong pen at the wrong time? Just make your readers lives easier and just use different symbols (or subscripts) for different variables. Or if the equation is still too complicated break it up into smaller chunks and use intermediate variables.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_10: Since your profile avatar mentions physics as an interest of you, I assume you either possess, or know someone with working knowledge of LaTeX. (If not yet, [learnlatex.org](https://www.learnlatex.org/) is an entry, and [tex.stackexchange](https://tex.stackexchange.com/) worth a subscription.)
If so, you may consider underbraces, e.g.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/81TBf.png)
which define the terms contributing to the global function in mind. In the paper/poster/presentation, you may focus on each of them on a one-by-one basis (minima/maxima/symmetry and other peculiarities). If the equation spans into a second column, you equally may split the equations over multiple lines, too.
---
The MWE of above was generated on [latex2png.com](http://www.latex2png.com/) (no affiliation, your TeX editor of choice likely equally offers a .tex to .png/.pdf conversion) with this snippet:
```
%
% syntax of an underbrace: \underbrace{content to underbrace}_{underbrace label}
%
i\hbar \frac{\partial \Psi}{\partial t} = - \frac{\hbar^2}{2} \bigg(%
%
\underbrace{\frac{1}{m} \left( \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2} + \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2} + \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2}\right)}_{\text{contribution a}} + %
%
\underbrace{\frac{1}{m} \left( \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2} + \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2} + \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2}\right)}_{\text{contribution b}} + %
%
\underbrace{\frac{1}{m} \left( \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2} + \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2} + \frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial x^2}\right)}_{\text{contribution c}} %
%
\bigg)
%
%
+ V_1\Psi + V_2\Psi + V_3\Psi
```
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_11: As others have said, color is fine as an *aid* (so long as you select more sensible color combinations than dark-blue on black), but it is *useless* on its own
Something I haven't noticed mentioned yet: if someone wants to quote or discuss your work, whether in speech or writing, they'd be unable to do so without circumlocutions like "the blue m".
No form of OCR would be able to read the expression. MatLab would not understand it.
You could not even *ask this question* without using an image.
So it's not just about "black and white printing" or "e-readers" or "colorblind people" - it's about people being able to *apply* the expression you have written.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_12: Existing answers make a lot of different points, but there’s an overarching summary point that I think hasn’t been highlighted: You’re approaching the question a bit wrong. **Your main question shouldn’t be “Could I do this?” or “Would this reduce the chances of publication?” — it should be “Is this good scientific writing?”**
As other answers amply show, the answer to that is “Certainly not, in most people’s judgement” — it has many clear and serious drawbacks, and not much advantage. But what I want to emphasise is that all these reasons aren’t arbitrary rules or conventions of publishing — they’re about making your paper clear and useful to readers. Asking “will publishers be willing or able to accept this?” is only useful when you’re already confident that something is good writing style, and able to make a case for that to people who disagree.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/04
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<issue_start>username_0: I am an international student and applying for Ph.D. in a university in the US. The application portal is prompting me to select (Yes/No) the "**Residency (Tuition) Claim**" of that state. It is saying in-state and out-of-state and something like that. I cannot understand what this is.
I am going to do the Ph.D. and it will probably take 5-6 years to complete it. So, what should I do?
Requesting suggestions. Thanks...<issue_comment>username_1: Choose "out of state" unless you are a resident of that US state for tuition purposes, or perhaps a resident of another US state with a reciprocity agreement. Living there while a student doesn't count as residency for tuition purposes (there may be special exceptions to this, and if you were a domestic student it would definitely be worth studying more how your specific state or university defines things). As an international student you are not a resident of any US state for tuition purposes.
If your PhD is funded in some way that includes tuition remission (typical of US PhDs), it won't really matter for you whether your tuition is at the "resident" or "non-resident rate": you won't pay any tuition so the number doesn't matter (except perhaps for internal accounting, which isn't really your business). If your PhD is not funded, it's going to be extremely expensive for you and unless you or your family is wealthy enough to not care about such things you should not attend such a program.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: For state sponsored universities, such as the University of Wisconsin, if a person has established "residency" in that state prior to enrollment, they get a lower tuition rate since the state itself sponsors them to a degree.
The rules for establishing residency vary by state, but it means more than just living there at the moment. It usually involves some period of time with a residence in the state, and therefore paying property taxes there.
Out of state students, including international students, don't have residency and haven't paid taxes there, so are charged a tuition that is closer to the actual cost of providing the education - though usually still less, since the state still subsidizes things to some extent.
In the past, in-state tuition was very low, but that is changing as the willingness of legislators to actually fund education adequately has declined in recent years.
Each state will have its own rules about this. There is no national higher education system in the US. In some cases it might be possible for a student to start out as an out of state student and, along the way, establish residency, and then pay in-state tuition.
But note that most PhD students in the US serve as TAs (or RAs) and those jobs almost always come with tuition forgiveness. So, if you have a TA, the difference is probably moot.
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/04
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<issue_start>username_0: I graduated from college in July, and I need to get someone to be a job reference. I have one from a previous job, but I need a second one. The recruiter indicated that I could use a professor with whom I'd taken a class as a reference.
I've contacted my former faculty advisor, who informed me that as a general rule, department faculty prefers not to be references for people who have only taken one class with them. In other words, the professor who is most likely to agree to be a reference is a professor with whom I have taken at least two classes.
Unfortunately, there is only one professor I can think of that meets the criteria I described, and said professor is retired.
How should I contact him?<issue_comment>username_1: Try sending a nice e-mail! Us retired faculty still exist and writing strong letters of recommendation does not come to a full stop instantly. In any event, it does not hurt to ask. The professor’s e-mail address may be on their department’s web site, if you do not have it already. Best of success!
By the way, that “general rule” you mention may be more like “parlay” in the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie: not a real thing all that much. In any event, individual faculty members decide for themselves if they want to write letters of recommendation: they are not in trouble if they do so. And retired faculty have even more freedom: we are free range!
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: To more directly answer your question, if you don't have a contact for them or you're not certain if it works, ask the department to contact them on your behalf!
Something like
>
> Good temporal greeting,
>
>
> I am a former student of XYZ, but I'm not sure if their email <EMAIL> is still valid, is there an appropriate account I can contact them at, or would you please help them contact me?
>
>
> Specifically, I'd like to request a letter of recommendation for a job and also to reconnect.
>
>
> Choice-of-thanks,
>
>
> Name
>
>
>
It would imo be unusual for any retired professional not to occasionally assist or be interested in their area of expertise, and professors are no exception - it's likely that if they remember and you both got on well that they'd be delighted to oblige any such small request, and also have more (arguably) spare time each day since retiring
Upvotes: 0
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2021/10/05
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<issue_start>username_0: I am planning on applying for PhD positions in Europe (both open calls and cold emails). I have two publications from the lab where I did my BSc. Of course, they are listed in my CV but I am wondering if I should mention them in the cover letter? They're my only publications so far so I thought it might be relevant but they involve a completely different set of techniques/model organisms than what I'm hoping to work with during my PhD. My master's thesis research topic and experience as a research assistant in a different lab are more closely related to what I want to do for my PhD but no publications have come from those yet. So far, I have been highlighting my experience in the last two labs and not mentioning the first lab and the publications.
The main advantage of mentioning the publications is that it shows I produce good quality results that can be published in peer-reviewed journals (the one I'm first author in is IF >6). However, since the field is quite different, I'm concerned it could detract from the overall message of "I want to work in X field/topic" and that it could seem like I'm just padding ([see](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/77605/job-market-cover-letter-mention-undergrad-experiences) a similar question here where they were advised not to mention undergrad experience).
So I'm wondering if I should mention the publications on the cover letter/the email or not at all?<issue_comment>username_1: In general, the goal of a cover letter is to provide context & color to your resume. The resume is the facts, the cover letter conveys intent, motivation, and fit. As such, you can definitely reference your publications if you think it helps convey why you're a good fit for the position.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: While I agree with [username_1](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73/) that a cover letter is *supplementary* to the CV, it is also good practice to draw attention to the main strengths in your CV. For application to a graduate program, any peer-reviewed academic publication in any field is helpful. Even if it were a publication on 14th century French poetry, it still shows that you have experience with academic writing, you are able to conduct research up to a publishable standard, and you have successfully navigated the peer-review process before. That is a strength of your application and you should make sure it doesn't get missed by the admissions panel.
Your concern that this publiction will cause people to believe that you are less interested in your new subject is highly misguided. Academics understand that people are not robots in an assembly plant --- they have varied interests and may be interested in multiple subjects. Many successful academics have publications outside their main field ---sometimes *way* outside--- and that is not seen as a negative. ([Prof <NAME>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky) is a linquist by trade, but he also writes plenty of books on foreign policy and politics. [Prof <NAME>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell) is an economist, but he has written a book on late-talking children.) Your slight variation in techniques and methods within the same general scientific field is not even close to the kinds of varied interests held by many successful academics.
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/05
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<issue_start>username_0: I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in a top institution. Sadly it did not really go well, principally for human reasons. Therefore I decided to leave my position and last year I made it clear to my PI that I would leave this year (I said exactly that it would be my last contract), which he was fine with. I found a position and got an offer, which would have required me to start two months before the end of my contract. I came to my PI, who refused to let me go, as he wanted me to finish my current project. I later realized that he invented a vastly exaggerated story about the company to justify his refusal. At the time I believed him and refused the position. Looking back it was clearly just a story to keep me for as long as possible. Sadly I am in a country where I don't have the right to resign unilaterally from a fixed-term position, only by mutual agreement and he made it clear that I won't be able to leave before it expires.
This is after I already delivered on one of the two projects, that I worked on with a best-in-class solution (I am on the computational side), published, and distributed it. The second is in a very good spot, just not 100% finished.
I think that preventing a postdoc who wants to leave academia from getting a permanent position does not conform to the usual informal deal in academia, and that this conduct should not be rewarded. The problem is that if I keep working hard and deliver, it means that the behavior of my PI is rewarded. I also really want to pass this knowledge on, so that another postdoc doesn't end up trapped with this PI.
I would also add that at least 50% of the last students/postdocs of this PI left and do not want to talk to him ever again. He frequently does not talk to his PhDs for years, even when being the principal supervisor. He is simply the worst 'mentor' and 'manager' that I have met in academia, because he does not even try to be any of this.
My PI is clearly keeping me out of the 'next generation' job interviews probably because he knows that I'll be bluntly honest and discourage anyone to come in this lab in 1 on 1.
Is there any way to get the word out about his behavior? If I finish the second project, do I not reward this behavior, so that he will do that to future students/postdoc? What are my options to ensure that this kind of behavior does not reproduce?<issue_comment>username_1: As this questions is still unanswered, a few things to consider:
* Are you sure that you cannot terminate your contract giving e.g. two
months notice? Don't ask your PI if you are allowed to terminate the contract but rather
ask someone like a labour union representative.
* Even if you cannot terminate your contract: What happens if you just
don't show up for work anymore? He would possibly fire you. But isn't
this exactly what you want anyway? (Added: Could you be sued for noncompliance?)
* If for whatever reason the " don't show up anymore" is not an option
for you then you can still come to work but stop doing anything there.
I'm pretty sure then your PI will agree to a contract termination quite
quickly. As an employee you have always much more leveraged
in such a situation.
The PI will not get what he wants - if he learns his lesson from that is however another question.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: As I read this, it boils down to reading contracts carefully, and possibly having a lawyer go over them to be on the safe side. Key points:
* Contracts are very specific and clear from a legal standpoint, and anything that is not clear is not applicable.
* If you sign a contract *you explicitly agree* to everything it says. If it says you cannot leave before its end without them (whatever other party) approving, then you have explicitly agreed to that term. and must see it through.
* But not all is lost: The other party has to obey the same contract. If there is a clause that says that you can leave, as long as the circumstances in the clause are applicable, you can use that with certainty.
* The repercussions of breaking the contract by not fulfilling what you agreed to can range from nothing to, as was pointed out in comments, a non-compliance lawsuit.
The core advice here is: read carefully before signing, consider how each term can be used and abused, and when you need something that the other party does not agree with, **talk with a lawyer** specifying what exactly you want, in order to find the loophole that gets that done - if it exists. Simple as that. The operating principles of contracts are simple, the details of the law are not, which is why we have lawyers that know the laws, the caveats and the gotchas.
Also keep in mind that "having the right" to do something does not mean they have to do it, nor that they must remind you to do it. They can stay silent, unless the contract says they must notify you, so it is very likely that they are aware of how you can get out but will not tell you.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_3: I it is been a a few months and my situation changed a lot. I left at the end of my contract and started a new interesting job. I can say that the country is Switzerland, and from my knowledge it should apply in all Switzerland. I decided to post my experience about the follow-up to help people in a similar situation. About the question "How to prevent the situation from reproducing ?":
* People contacted me about doing a postdoc in this lab. I said I was leaving because I was not interested in academia, but that they needed to be very independent. No word about the relationship with the PI, as 40%-50% of people seems to have a decent run in the lab.
* The PI had trouble recruiting, I think it is because a lot of people quit, and it is visible if you follow the publications record of the lab.
About the legal aspect raised in the different answers:
* It is not possible to resign from a fixed term contract in a general case, you have to give a rightful justification. The majority of postdoc in switzerland don t know that, but it is the case if not specified in your contract.
Other considerations which might be useful for someone in a similar situation:
* The company still asked my PI for references, so keeping good relation was important. **Taking a legal action or not working at all would probably have been worst to find a new position.**
* Despite my perception, doing a postdoc in a top institute and sticking to it was ultimately very worth it, I had a lot of interesting offers to choose from.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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<issue_start>username_0: I've recently been doing some (non-serious) job search. My background is STEM with a focus on computing.
What I have noticed is that the requirement to get a job with many tech companies seems to be **much higher** than the requirement to obtain a graduate degree and even after getting a PhD it does not seem that you would even match half of the requirements that these companies are demanding.
Does anyone else feel the same?
For example, I am currently looking at a company called Groq. For one of their few non-senior roles, it says: requires 2-10 years of experience in machine learning or software engineering, knowledge in hardware accelerators, familiarity with a subset of: linear algebra, Python, computer vision, natural language processing, C, reinforcement learning, FPGA, recommender system, C++, among others, and preferably publication in top-tier machine learning conferences.
I can firmly say that even PhDs whose primary research is in ML do not have these backgrounds that the jobs are looking for. This job description just doesn't seem to make sense in terms of what actually happens in school. A computer vision researcher is unlikely to be doing reinforcement learning and FPGA programming at the same time. A Python programmer is very unlikely to be somehow doing C programming at the same time and vice versa. Different people fundamentally uses different tools. Nobody designs integrated circuits while doing linear algebra (of any depth) at the same time.
This is just one job description out of hundreds I've seen and heard from other people. The numerous stories of STEM PhDs who are jobless or can't break out of academia seems to corroborate with my concern. I wonder if it is really true that it is harder to get a job nowadays than a graduate degree (or even a PhD) in STEM.
Can anyone who has been on both sides chime in on this?<issue_comment>username_1: Job requirements in IT are total bs and it's a well-known thing, and there are many kinds of it - small companies tend to post a magical unicorn requirements (be able to train NNs and write FPGA code at the same time) while big tech does whiteboard programming interviews which are utterly unrelated to the actual daily job process. Still, the job market is ever-shifting and somehow manages to handle all that.
The secret? In large, people in STEM-related industry use references instead of job postings to find jobs.
And to answer the actual question - yes and no. Academia does not prepare one for the industry job from day one as well as someone well versed in the industry can't just enter academia and thrive there. **These are just different sets of skills.**
In ML particularly, unless you're aiming for a "guru" consultant position, a single really successful model can become a business, so I'd say requirements are fairly similar: it's just how communicating results and requirements that differs.
If you ever consider taking the industry path - what matters is the now-acquired ability to learn and quickly sift through references (being able to do a cursory lit review in a day or less is a big boon!), job ethics, extracting valuable knowledge from experience and applying it to new problems... These things are universal, really, but one needs flexibility and agility rather than laser focus.
**Both academia and industry like people who can solve problems**, it's just that the latter has many smaller and commonly ill-defined ones whereas the former likes to go in-depth, as a general rule. And the one is not necessarily harder than the other.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: >
> Objectively speaking, are STEM jobs more difficult to acquire than STEM graduate degree?
>
>
>
Not in general. *Individual* jobs may sometimes be difficult to get into (for example, getting some jobs at Google or Facebook may indeed objectively be more difficult than acquiring a graduate degree), but most employment statistics I know agree that STEM graduates, to a large degree, get relevant jobs after graduation.
In that sense I am a bit suspicious about your claim:
>
> numerous stories of STEM PhDs who are jobless or can't break out of academia
>
>
>
I have worked and taught in STEM for 15 years now, and from the top of my head I can't think of a colleague or fellow grad student that remained "jobless" for more than a few months after graduation. Not all of them scored great jobs, certainly, but everybody found something within the industry.
It's possible that the Machine Learning field is different since it definitely feels a bit overheated right now, but if you "can't break out of academia" with a decent ML degree you may be a bit *too* picky with what jobs you apply to.
Further, I agree with what Allure says in a comment. Your example job posting really doesn't contain anything that an applied ML candidate shouldn't have:
>
> requires 2-10 years of experience in machine learning or software engineering, knowledge in hardware accelerators, familiarity with a subset of: linear algebra, Python, computer vision, natural language processing, C, reinforcement learning, FPGA, recommender system, C++, among others, and preferably publication in top-tier machine learning conferences.
>
>
>
Basically, if you did your PhD in computer vision, NLP, reinforcement learning, or recommender systems, you *should* have about 5 years of experience in ML, experience in at least one of the listed fields, probably quite some practical experience in Python and/or C++, and you probably have at least some experience working with hardware accelerants, plus some publications (if these are "top-tier" is always a subjective matter, I would not read much into this). All in all, you are in fact checking all the mandatory and even quite a few of the optional boxes. I see no reason why you could not apply to this job.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: I am working on the enumeration of some relations in Combinatorics, which is a branch of Mathematics.
OEIS is an online digital repository of over 3,50,000 integer sequences, and it has been cited in more than 800 papers.
I have a contribution to OEIS. It is sequence [A345317](https://oeis.org/A345317).
Should I add my contribution to OEIS in my CV?<issue_comment>username_1: Generally, there are two ways to go about it - either it is important on its own to warrant a publication, or goes into some "uncategorized" heap sometimes present in the CV. After all, you showcase what *you* think is important and representative of your work as a whole. Now, if you include it in the "main" section, let's see it through the eyes of someone reading it, *assuming there's no article it's acting as a supplementary for* (I couldn't find one):
* If it is obscure, you just submitted a sequence into that online repository and it has little traction - that is not a particularly strong result AND you chose to showcase it. Probably that's indicative of how your work as a whole is...
* If it is some well-known result - but still not published as an article - perhaps the result is good but you seemingly failed to recognize that. Not great again.
Therefore, to me it only makes sense to include as a part of "other" work like reports, research grant participation, case studies or what you might have there.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> Should I add my contribution to OEIS in my CV?
>
>
>
Yes, but do try to say more about it than just, "I contributed A345317 to the OEIS." Surely some research has gone into its discovery, so describe that in brief. Because, that will determine how interesting and relevant your addition to the OEIS appears in the eyes of whoever reads your CV.
The impact of your contribution might also depend on your level. A contribution by a high-school student would be intriguing, so I would strongly recommend putting it on your CV. If you're an under-grad or grad student, it would still be worth putting on your CV, but I would expect to see the surrounding research highlighted more than the bare bones of your contribution.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/05
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<issue_start>username_0: Term just started and I think every class does have some students who sit in the back (which is totally fine) but sometimes are challenging to deal with when they show some disrespect towards other students who wish to participate.
For example, if their colleague asks a question they start laughing. I try to be nice by asking if their colleague's question reminded them of an incident (in order to get them engaged). They say no and when I turn my back they keep on laughing.
I know I shouldn't take this seriously but I find it challenging at times to figure out how to deal with such kind of students. I know they might not be interested in my material but still want to be physically available which is fine. I don't know how to say enough is enough in a kind way such that they appreciate other students' questions.
This concerns last year undergraduate students. If you have any advice for such situations please share best practices.<issue_comment>username_1: I understand your challenge. Have you established house rules at the start of your course? If not, you still can. Also, you could consider inviting the misbehaving students for a one-on-one in your office.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: In my opinion, you *should* take this seriously. What you are observing is bullying. The students that are asking questions, and trying to participate, need to know that you have their back.
For example, during class, as soon as students start laughing:
"Excuse me, X was asking a question."
"Please be respectful of other students."
After class, follow up by email, again asking them to stop. I wouldn't worry too much about trying to be "kind" or "nice"; instead, ask them directly to stop laughing at others. If the behavior continues, threaten disciplinary action, and follow through if necessary.
Good luck.
Upvotes: 8 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: My solution might not be yours, but I learned from many (many) years as a student and professor that when one student asks a question, others in the class also have that question but aren't brave enough to answer it.
I developed a facial expression (one raised eyebrow) that can be used to express skepticism or extreme displeasure. I might walk over to an offending student (for this or other actions) and simply look down and put on "that face". They got the idea pretty quickly. But an invitation to my office, or to leave the room, might be appropriate if the behavior continues.
The second possibility would be to hand one of the offenders the board marker (chalk in the early days) and ask them to show the answer/solution to the question. It won't work for everyone, but for many it is a clear disincentive.
Both of these are a bit aggressive, of course, so I hesitate to recommend it to non-tenured faculty. But, you could also have a conversation with the department head and ask for advice, perhaps making a couple of suggestions for a response.
I never had a problem with administration over some seemingly radical actions, but sometimes you have to do somewhat dramatic things to get through to people.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_4: I'm afraid my response would not be as diplomatic as those suggested in the other answers.
>
> This concerns last year undergraduate students.
>
>
>
You are dealing with adults. Moreover, you are dealing with adults who are likely paying tuition in order to attend your lectures. This isn't grade school; attendance is not compulsory, and they are free to leave if they feel your class is not worth their time.
For the first and second incidents, I would respond [as suggested by username_2](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176311/111468):
*"Excuse me, your classmate is speaking. Do you have something to contribute?"*
Hopefully this puts an end to their disruption. If not, I would respond to subsequent offenses with stronger language:
*"Excuse me, why are you here? If you don't feel like you can prevent yourself from disrupting our class, you are free to leave. No one will stop you. If you need this class for degree credits, consider dropping it and re-enrolling at such a time that you've matured to a point where you can contribute meaningfully to the discussion."*
I realize this is more confrontational than most instructors are willing to be. That said, embarrassment can be a *very* effective means of making your point.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_5: If you know the names of the offenders, I would contact them directly by email asking them to show respect for other students in the class.
If you don't know the names, if such an event occurs, without calling anybody out, I'd ask the class to please show respect to the others in the class. If the behavior continues, you have the option of immediately asking the students to leave the room, or pull them aside after class and tell them that they'll be asked to leave the room after such an event in the future.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: Irrespective of whether this rises to the level of bullying or not (and I don't really want to get into the weeds on that), as an username_2 teaching undergraduates, you need to learn to "control the room". Undergraduates are generally young and sometimes immature. Consequently, you should ensure that your classroom is being run by a responsible adult (you) and you should avoid allowing a situation where "the inmates run the asylum". This is a situation you should take seriously, and I think you should look at it in a broader sense that abstracts from the specific problem you are having with these partiular unruly students.
Establishing authority in a classroom (without being overbearing yourself) is a subtle art, but you can speak to experienced username_2s in your department and get them to help you with this. As a general rule, if there is persistent misbehaviour, you can start out with polite requests, then escalate to calm but firm statements of what you require, and then escalate to removing students from the classroom. In extreme cases you might escalate to a private meeting or a disciplinary action. In some cases it can be appropriate to give unruly undergraduates a bit of a "dressing down" (usually in private) to enforce behavioural standards.
From your description of the problem here, it sounds like you have probably already established an atmosphere in your classroom where misbehaving students do not take your authority and instructions seriously. This can be difficult to remedy for the class under consideration, but it is a good prompt to try to start your next course with a commitment to establishing control over the room early on in the course. Seek help from experienced username_2s and have them sit in on a class with you to observe if that would be helpful (but take account of the [Hawthorne effect](https://catalogofbias.org/biases/hawthorne-effect/#:%7E:text=The%20Hawthorne%20effect%20occurs%20when,considerable%20opportunity%20for%20instantaneous%20modification.)).
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: Simply have them leave the class, they cannot disrupt if they are not there and a very strong message is sent to the others that it will not be tolerated. Repeat interruptions simply drop them from the class. I taught ordnance disposal and never tolerated for 1 instant a source of disruption. I would show them a photo of someone who needed to be fed, wiped, placed into bed, bathed for life. They were not even able to kill themselves and were a burden to everyone they loved for the rest of their life. Just have them leave, the remaining students will thank you for it and you can fulfil your goal of imparting knowledge instead of playing class cop.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: I mostly agree with the general theme of the other answers here, but figured I'd contribute by making something very explicit: You absolutely should take this seriously, and furthermore whatever you do should ensure that the number of times that a student behaves disruptively in such a manner is kept in the low single digits.
I'm surprised that this behavior has not yet completely stifled participation from the rest of the class. That shows that the at least some of the other students are headstrong enough to ensure they get the best of their education despite the rude interruptions of others; not all students will be this way and it should not be expected of them.
The other answers have already given suggestions on how to escalate if the problem does not resolve. But you also need to make clear to yourself that at some point in this escalation there needs to be a step that reads "inform the offending students they are no longer welcome at your lecture", regardless of what else you may do. You cannot allow this to have a long term effect on the degree to which other students feel comfortable making the most of your class.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: In addition to giving warnings and removing students from class if they don't heed the warning, you should also consider if attending class is really necessary. If not, and it's good enough if students submit homework problems, then that should be mentioned at the beginning of the course. You then don't have bored students in your class who would rather do something else if attendance was not compulsory.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_10: Instead of taking a rude or passive-aggressive approach, you should just lay out the facts of the situation to everyone. Just say,
"It seems like people are laughing after questions are being asked; while you may be laughing at something unrelated to the questions, it's hard for people to know you aren't laughing at what they said. Please exercise judgement when deciding when to laugh."
If students keep it up after this, then just say "name, that was a inappropriate time to laugh" at each occurrence.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_11: Maybe some of you will find this a bit harsh but as a student, I had last year a professor asking the question back to the people laughing :
>
> John, can you answer the question you are laughing at?
>
>
>
If he failed, he would get a small remark from the professor and was laughed at, a bit.
People quickly stop chuckling at each other questions and from then. It became the favourite professor of a big part of the class.
Note that he almost never asked the question if it could be answered, in this case, he directly made a remark.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_12: In my classes, part of their grade is professionalism. In the syllabus, it's a multiplier applied to their final grade, so there is no limit to how much impact it can have. I explain on the first day of class that any disrespectful behavior toward me or any other student will immediately result in a reduced grade, per the syllabus.
Since you didn't start out this way, I would make an announcement at the beginning of class that being respectful toward your peers and toward the class content is a part of their participation grade (I'm sure you have something like this in your syllabus), and that any comments that distract from questions or other educational activities will henceforth result in reduced final grades with the possibility of failing. I would do perhaps a half a letter grade per incident. Be serious and prepared to do it.
I would not call anyone out specifically during class time as that may further embarrass the person asking the question and make an enemy of the offender. Instead, you may want to send private emails to the offenders letting them know that they are at risk for a participation penalty. Even better, ask them to come to your office, separately, and then tell them in person what you expect from them in a serious but not punitive tone.
Making class less educational for others is a significant offense, and I think it should be treated as such. If you have a repeat offender, start a paper trail so if you need to fail them, you can do so.
You need to be very professional and sober about this. You set the tone for the class and can be a powerful influence on them without having to explicitly punish anyone.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_13: The questions might (intentionally or unintentionally) be hilarious.
I would ask what is funny about the question. This isn't guaranteed to get an answer as sometimes for various reasons people don't want to or can't articulate why something is funny, but it seems to be a good place to start. Or you could ask some other people about the questions, and see if any of them think they are funny. I think it would probably be okay to share some examples of the questions here.
If the laughing students are not actually laughing out of amusement, then I would first get that agreed on, and then ask why them they are laughing. If they say, "no reason", then explain calmly and respectfully (kindly, if that is your preference) that you are finding it difficult to teach when they are laughing, and that you would appreciate it if they would not laugh while another student is asking a you a serious question.
By treating them with respect, you increase the chance that they will treat you with respect.
If this doesn't work, then you can try again, asking whether or not they are willing to agree to stop laughing when other students are asking serious questions. If they say no, then you can ask why not, or if you don't care why not, explain that they will be kicked out of your class or whatever if they don't agree to it.
That's what I'd like to think I would do.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_14: You did not add a country name but since you mention "undergraduate", I guess this is the US - my perspective is French.
I had once this case when teaching (first year of university). I asked once "What is the problem?", and then "Leave the course now" when they were maliciously sniggering again. They tried to explain that I have no right to throw them out, I said "leave now" again and they left.
This did not happen afterward (they were back for the next course).
I think you should take this **very** seriously. It is a juvenile attempt to see who is stronger, and if you want to have a normal year you should be over the top to show that this cannot happen.
Getting rid of this behaviour is also something you do for other students so that they are not afraid to ask questions.
Disclaimer: this is for France, a country where students come to study and there is no expectation that they are "paying customers". They are students and learn from a teacher, whose role is also to keep the course in one piece.
One note that is probably not relevant: I had a hard time once, as a student, to not burst into laughter when someone asked a question. The question was generic, it is just that we've been teasing each other with other students (yeah, I know) and it was that time when you giggle about anything. I do not believe that this is your case at it seems to be repeated, but a *mea culpa* just in case.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: My parents are professional copy editors. On occasion, I will send them a manuscript to read for spelling, grammatical, and stylistic suggestions. It occurs to me that, whereas I would always automatically acknowledge any colleague who provided feedback on a draft (no matter how minimal), I have yet to do so when it comes to them. Should I be acknowledging my parents?
Argument in favor:
* It feels slightly dishonest not to.
Arguments against:
* Their input is strictly confined to language, and has no bearing whatsoever on any technical aspects or conclusions drawn.
* I have a distinct last name, and having two more of that name appear in the acknowledgements section looks nepotistic, and/or like I'm in 7th grade.
* They don't care.<issue_comment>username_1: Certainly, do it. You don't have to identify them as your parents, however, just by name. But indicate that it is for copyediting so that it is clear that it is only an ack that is needed.
Lucky you to have such a resource.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: Reading down your question, my first thought was to simply have the conversation with them to see if they wanted the formal acknowledgement. For your "automatic" acknowledgement of any colleague who provided feedback I would also suggest discussing it first (assuming the acknowledgement is not already in the draft copy they are reviewing). This would not be with an intention to withhold the acknowledgement, but rather as a polite curtesy to allow them to opt out if for whatever reason they choose to decline. A simple offer "Thank you for your contribution to . It is my intention to include an acknowledgement of your contribution by . If you prefer not to be acknowledged or have other concerns please let me know."
>
> They don't care.
>
>
>
Having had the conversation, recognize that there are two elements to consider.
1. There is the personal acknowledgement for their effort in assisting you, presumably for free as your parents. If they have no personal interest in the acknowledgement you are free to do as you wish. You don't have to name them as your parents, or by last name, a simple "Thank you John and Jane for your valuable assistance in copy editing." would be fine.
2. As professional copy editors there may be a professional acknowledgement to consider. If they are freelancers, running a private business, or otherwise accepting outside work and not dedicated full time to a particular publication it may be helpful to them to have an acknowledgement for marketing purposes. An acknowledgement "Thank you to of Xyz Inc. for copy editing services." may be an easy "throw away" inclusion for you, but could be the basis of published referenceable work and potential sales leads for them. You do need to consider the cultural sensitivity of this to decide if even a subtle acknowledgement may be taken as blatant commercialization.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: I recently wrote and submitted a research proposal for a fellowship. I am now also applying for a permanent lecturer position which requires an outline of research plans. Is there any problem taking text, directly or with minor changes, from the proposal and reusing it?
Of course, the proposal has a lot more details, but there are a couple of paragraphs that summarize the research which I could use almost word-for-word.<issue_comment>username_1: I'm not an expert in this by any means, but from what professors and others have told me, I think a policy of "When in doubt, cite your source" could serve you just fine here. Just make a small note in an appropriate place that some of the used writings are adapted from a previous work. Cite it as specifically as you can.
I'm curious what others will answer, though, as the hows and whens of source citing are something I'm only recently needing to thoroughly consider.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Since a grant/fellowship application isn't a publication, you can reuse it freely. The overlap is natural and you should mention that you are pursuing funding for your research in the job application. You can mention, though it isn't essential, that "the following is taken from the application" or "the following describes the research proposed in the fellowship application.
It is publications of prior work that need citation. A fellowship application is a private communication. Private communications of others might need to be cited, but not your own.
Upvotes: 3
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2021/10/06
| 3,773
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<issue_start>username_0: While going through the lecture and study material on the internet, I came to realize that, in some universities in some countries (e.g. Hong Kong, New Zealand, etc) lecture materials are far more streamlined and easy to grasp.
For example, in the following universities, the teacher-supplied materials are easier to grasp as if they are prepared for Kindergarten students (in a good sense!):
* this is [a lecture note on stochastic processes](https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Efewster/325/notes/325book.pdf) at the University of Auckland
* this is [a lecture note on stochastic processes](https://www.math.cuhk.edu.hk/course_builder/2021/math4240) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
On the other hand, in the following universities, the teacher-supplied materials are very hard to grasp:
* this is [a lecture note on stochastic processes](http://www2.im.uj.edu.pl/MarcinPitera/files/StochasticProcesses.pdf) at the Jagellonian University, Poland
* this is [a lecture note on stochastic processes](http://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/wiki/pub/CompMolBio/MarkovKetten15/stochastic_processes_2011.pdf) at the Free University, Berlin, Germany
I have the following questions in this regard:
1. Why is this difference prevalent?
2. is it because of the salary level of the teachers or is it because of policy or something else?
3. if it is because of policy, why are their policy different?<issue_comment>username_1: Note that the notes from the University of Auckland seem to be for an undergraduate course (Bachelor's Degree), while the notes for Stanford are from a graduate course (Master's and Doctoral students). It doesn't seem surpising to me that the undergraduate notes are easier to grasp. Graduate courses are generally going to assume more background and more effort.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: Not all universities have equally strong programs.
as to course material, this depends on a lot of factors, most obviously the instructor and the level of preparation of the students. Teaching philosophies and learning outcomes are also different: if you take a grad course in a department which is research-active in the area as a prerequisite for a thesis or a project, it will likely be more technical than if the focus of the unit is on another topic. It may also depend if the course is required or an elective. It may depend on the total number of contact hours, the availability of the instructor after class, *etc*.
Of course the best set of notes is the one *you* like best.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: (Answering title question)
Yes, studying at some universities is harder than others. This is because the curriculum is different, in turn because with better students one can also teach more difficult topics. That's why the same BSc degree from a top university is worth more than one from an obscure university, even neglecting the brand name of the university. Other factors could be that a lecturer at one university could simply be more familiar with the topic being taught than a lecturer at another university, and therefore teach it with more rigour.
There are also cultural differences. Here's a [quote](https://www.scientific-computing.com/feature/renaissance-scientist-fund-ideas?feature_id=1) by <NAME> <NAME>:
>
> [<NAME>] started at the Moscow Technical University at the age of 17 and worked hard. He says that getting an undergraduate degree in Russia is much harder than in most western countries, because the course is more comprehensive and goes into greater depth. He says he may have learned a lot more than he really needed to, but the course was so tough that many people simply dropped out, or even cracked under the strain.
>
>
> He says: 'The pressure to work and to study was so intense that it was not a rare thing for people to break and leave, and some of them ended up with everything from schizophrenia to depression to suicide. I would say that people work 10 times harder than in any UK university, even Oxford and Cambridge. Many of the things I learned I never used in my professional life, but I guess it helped develop some of my axial lobes. I used those lobes to replace the lobes I lost due to the amount of alcohol we needed to wipe out after the exams.'
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One can imagine what would happen if one tried to raises standards without students who are able to deal with the material: the students would fail, many would leave the program, and the university would run a loss.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_4: To answer the question in the title: **yes, studying at some universities is harder than others**
My answer is more a comparison of universities within the USA as opposed to around the world; nonetheless from my experience how challenging a university/department/program is depends on several factors:
* How large/reputed the department is
* How competitive the department is (if the bar to get in the program is higher, the department may make the classes more challenging to suit the students in that department; if you were trying to transfer in or didn't start out with much experience, the department made the "weed out" classes much harder compared to the intro classes at another university)
* The expertise of faculty in their fields (although this may generally apply more to their research, several faculty in my undergraduate department designed and taught *electives or special topics courses* that provided perspective one may not be able to gain from a standard upper-division course (one example being a cloud computing course that I took in my senior year which was one of the most challenging courses I took but gave me new perspective as to what is involved in software development)
* How much emphasis is placed on undergraduate research as opposed to just taking courses (my department fell into the latter, with not as much opportunity for undergraduate research outside of finding REU's as opposed to other universities which may take ugrad research more seriously)
I'm not sure that salary would play such a role into this. Instructors still have their own teaching styles, and the difficulty of a course at a university will largely depend on their teaching style. Occasionally, at the "weed out" level in a competitive university, certain policies may dictate how a course is to be taught or graded, but this is generally for required courses, if not just weed out courses, rather than upper-division electives from my experience.
Also from a graduate school or even job-searching perspective, companies and graduate schools know that not all departments are equal. It's been said before that a 3.3 GPA from a very good school is just as good if not better than a 4.0 from a lesser school.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: Both instructional quality and difficulty vary considerably among universities. I don't know how it works worldwide, but the [Publish or Perish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish) paradigm at research universities in the United States and the UK (maybe Canada, too?) puts pressure on university professors to publish large numbers of papers in academic journals. Little emphasis is placed on teaching.
I personally attended research universities through Ph.D. and I can say that on the whole, I was disappointed with the instruction I received. And I got better instruction from the older professors who already had tenure than the younger professors who were trying to get tenure.
What I don't know is if instruction tends to be better at non research universities. One hypothesis is that at these institutions, professors are judged more on quality of instruction than quantity of published papers.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_6: Broadly speaking, there are three main factors affecting how difficult it is to study at university:
* The student's prior knowledge and competencies before arriving at university. If all else is equal, a student who is already better at their subject will have an easier time studying the course.
* The level of knowledge and competencies the student is expected to attain in order to successfully complete their course. If all else is equal, harder exams at the end of the course will make for a course which is harder to study for.
* The level and quality of support the university provides for students to achieve the desired learning outcomes. If all else is equal, a student who receives more effective teaching will find the course easier to study than a student who studies the same course but receives less effective teaching.
All three of these factors vary widely even within the same country. Some examples from just Mathematics at universities in England:
* Different universities have different entry requirements for their courses. For instance, students applying to Cambridge University must receive a top grade at [A-Level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-Level) Mathematics and also do sufficiently well on the the even more challenging [STEP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Term_Examination_Paper) exams to achieve their place on the course, whereas students may enter other universities with lower grades and no additional entrance exams.
* The syllabuses at different universities are not intentionally aligned with each other, so sometimes it is very clear that the requirements are at a different level. For instance, the exact same question *"state and prove the orbit-stabilizer theorem"* occurred on a first-year exam at one university and on a final-year exam at a different university.
* The quality of teaching can vary wildly even between different lecturers at the same university. When I studied abstract algebra, the lecturer assigned to teach the module had such a reputation for incomprehensibility, that another lecturer voluntarily taught the whole module unofficially on the side, because he didn't want students to later take his more advanced module without a good understanding of abstract algebra.
It's of course true that these factors can be expected to cancel out somewhat, particularly universities with higher entrance requirements will tend to have a more advanced syllabus. But overall there are still very often big differences between universities.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_7: Of course it is absolutely possible, but universities may a be way too coarse level to look at this issue.
There may be large differences even between different faculties of the same university or even between individual departments within the same faculty (that will mostly concern graduate students only).
At general universities the faculties could bee to different to make any comparison meaningful (everyone expects the math for physicists, economists, social scientists, philosophs... to be different) but at technically oriented universities you will have all faculties technically oriented, all teaching introductory and more advanced mathematics but may well have different level of difficulty.
Alas, even the same courses might be taught at different levels. I know that at the Czech Technical University you can choose between A-level math and B-level math, at least at the faculties I have som knowledge about. You can only get into some specializations (like mathematical physics, mathematical modelling,...) with the harder A-level.
There are many factors that determine the difficulty and level of a course and the university itself is just on of them and by far not the most important one.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_8: I think a very important factor is:
>
> What is the teacher-supplied materials for?
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Sometimes it is:
* To replace the teaching for students who did not turn turn up
* Or to get the students thinking about the subject before the teaching
* Or to remind students of the important details, so the students don't need to take notes so can understand the background information that is covered in the teaching
* Or even because the person doing the teaching can't be trusted to explain it.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: As a graduate teaching assistant at one state university in the USA, my answer is not necessarily reflective of all universities. Instructors mainly professors and also teaching assistants with the support of the course instructor have the leverage to create new courses and edit courses. The undergraduate program and the department stipulates certain knowledge that is supposed to be taught, it is the responsibility of the instructor to teach this information. However, how the information is taught is up to the instructor.
Instructors can create new courses. There is one instructor in the Biochemistry department of my institution who created a new elective course the "Biochemistry of Beer". He teaches students how to brew beer, teaching the students about the enzymes involved in the production of beer and the enzymes involved in the metabolism of beer. This is a lab course so the students get to actually make beer. The department is happy about this because the cost of running the lab is cheap compared to running a lot of other teaching labs, the department is also happy because the students are learning enzymology by brewing beer, and this fulfills one of the professor's teaching obligations and it is fun for him.
I am a graduate teaching assistant and my course instructor allows me revamp courses. I can teach really advanced modules in the course so long as I present the information simply. I have written computer programs to show the practical application of advanced statistics concepts that would otherwise not be taught in the biochemistry major. The biochemistry program is happy that I am teaching the students advanced applied statistics concepts that they couldn't figure out how to teach, the students are happy because my computer programs make understanding the statistics concepts easy to grasp, I am happy because my employment is more secure because now the program has evidence that I am a good instructor so they would rank me higher among grad students competing for Teaching Assistanceship positions.
Also, if you checkout for example the journal of biological education, the journal of chemical education, the journal of visualized experiments you will find creative experiments developed by instructors to teach undergrads. Most of the articles in these journals are original experiments that are cost effective and easy to implement in a lab setting.
Also at my undergrad university, there was a course called Biochemistry II. We are supposed to learn about stuff like amino acid biosynthesis, but the course instructor that year instead taught us strictly about the business of biochemistry. The course instructor got terrible reviews at the end of the semester, but he wasn't too sad because he started his own company. So instructors do need to teach students certain fundamental skills in their major.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_10: In addition to the other answers, there is also the cultural aspect.
France has an obsession for maths that goes beyond reason. You can have up to 10 hours per week of maths in high school, for people who will be then going to study finance where their needs are hardly above basic arithmetics (but you still need to show proficiency in math at a truly advanced level).
If this was not bad enough, the "purity" aspect is primordial, so when students are introduced to new concepts, they get a big fatty definition first, some time to recover, and then four weeks later the actually sensible way to approach the topic.
This is one of the possible reasons that some topics may be much more difficult in some countries, with the equivalent curriculum.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_11: Yes and no.
If the admissions process functioned like a frictionless marketplace, everybody sh/would end up at a place that is *subjectively as challenging* to them as it is to everyone else at all other places.
Of course in reality there are many factors that introduce "friction."
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<issue_start>username_0: Assuming a student has full funding from an outside source. Do the TA and grading responsibilities become optional?<issue_comment>username_1: It entirely depends on the department, but most likely no. In the US, students can be funded on an internal or external fellowship (like you've described), on a research assistantship (i.e. on a specific grant), or as a TA.
However, I say most likely no because it is possible the department will require some time as a TA as teaching experience before graduation.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: "Normally," no. But you should never make any assumptions and always get a written statement of your obligations to the department. Some math departments require some teaching as a part of the program, but how much varies a lot. It might also be the case that if you don't have instructional duties, then you don't get office space.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: While it is now several decades past and details may have changed, I was a student in a Tier 1 US research university math department with multiple years of (so-called, see below) "full" external funding.
The tone of your questions suggests you would prefer not to have TA or grading responsibilities with such funding. There is, of course, good reason for this if those responsibilities are extensive or onerous. However, in mathematics in particular, even the most successful researchers end up doing some teaching during their careers, and training/experience as a grad student to do this is helpful. So I would strive to negotiate a *reduction* in teaching/service time, but not try to skip it altogether.
As a formal point, while this may have changed, in my time many private research universities nominally charged quite significant Ph.D. program tuition, which they "waived" (i.e., it was a fiction on paper only) for all recipients of internal or external funding, which was ultimately everyone in the program. Therefore, technically, the department may well insist on some labor from you as a condition of the "tuition waiver" part of your "support". Or you could theoretically find that your external funding doesn't go as far as intended...this is why I put "full" in quotes at the top of the answer.
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<issue_start>username_0: We have 7 subjects to study every semester. You must be thinking "Oh that's a lot". It is not actually if you look at the exams. I am from India, here 90% of exam questions are already fixed(they come from past papers).
PS if 7 days a semester is an issue then no student should be performing well. There are lots of students who perform well even though I come from a really bad college.
Now you might say I might not be as good as others in engineering and that is why burnout. I have actually excelled my academics before engineering and interestingly, I never faced this issue of burnout before. I actually used to study even more around 15 hrs everyday when I was younger. Also it is not like I am a weak student. Now you might bring your argument "Oh you can be great in college but university is a different thing", here is the catch I am good at university until the exam comes when I have to study at high pace for long hours. I actually study for 10+ hrs every single day. Now you might say "Why so?" Because I need it as simple as that. No I don't do lazy study during exams or wrong study methods. I have literally read every book there is to "how to study engineering subjects" And I have found my sets of things that work perfectly for me.
No, smartphones etc aren't my distraction. My only problem is that I get burntout after some time of serious study(generally after a week or so). The problem is that our exams last around a month, that is why getting such burnout is very harmful for grades..
This is really really hampering my grades in exams. Please don't suggest to drop courses as that is not really feasible(I am in final year and I don't want to delay my graduation) as well as I do believe there is definitely some way I can cope with this burnout rather than dropping courses. I don't believe I am not capable enough to deal with thing like burnout if I can focus 10 hrs per day studying. I simply don't know the techniques that most people know and that is why I keep getting stuck in burnout rut. I am sure those my friends who are getting good grades in exams have also overcame this. Now of course, if I ask them they won't tell me as competition is very tough in India and people are generally unhelpful specially students, they will just joke and tell "Oh i don't study that much"...and bla bla.. I hope internet is different though.
We have 3 days gaps between exams. Say today our exam occurs at 2 PM. Then we have holidays for 3 days and our exams start at 2 PM of 4th day from that past exam day.
It is not like I study 10 hrs in 1 go. I study for 45 mins and take 15 min break. That is how I do it. The only time I don't get burn out is when I study for 6 hrs everyday rather than 10 hrs. But the issue is my performance drops to below average when I study for less time as I fail to finish my syllabus.<issue_comment>username_1: Below are some answers to your title question. You may feel that none of these things are feasible in combination with excelling on the exams themselves. However, that trade-off is a multi-objective optimization problem which is impossible to solve, so you must find a good trade-off yourself. But for burnout prevention and/or recovery, the following things should help.
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**Take daily breaks**. Plan them frequently, and don't cut them short. By letting your brain rest regularly, it will absorb information more efficiently during the times that you do work. Consider taking half a day or even a full day off after every individual exam; this will shorten the time to prepare for the next exam, but drastically increase your efficiency during that time.
**Listen to your aging body**. You say you could study for 15 hours in one sitting when you were younger, and now it's going down (although still above 10 hours). This is normal. When stuff needed to be done, I used to be able to pull allnighters when I was in my twenties. I am closing in on forty now, and I am no longer able to do this. Use less time, but use it more efficiently; with age comes experience. You, like everyone else, will need to adapt behavior over time.
**To prevent burnout, take longer periods off**. As soon as your exam month is over, take it very easy in the subsequent two or three weeks (if you can afford to take a month, do that; adjust length to personal requirements). A very stressful peak workload can happen without necessarily leading to burnout, but burnout will almost surely happen when you do not give yourself enough time to recover after the peak.
**If you end up being burnt out, forget about recovering fast**. The worst thing you can do in this situation is add more pressure on yourself to get out of a burnout as soon as possible; this will aggravate your burnout and/or lead to a relapse if you are on your way to recovery. Fast recovery is the #1 enemy of full recovery, and you should be focused on the latter.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Although debating the points made in the question itself is usually regarded as unhelpful, there are quite a few things wrong there. Exaggeration ("I have literally read every book there is to [...]") aside...
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> I have found my sets of things that work perfectly for me.
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Apparently not. You are having burnout issues (and good thing you have figured it out).
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> I actually study for 10+ hrs every single day. [...] Because I need it as simple as that.
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You need it to achieve what exactly? This is a kind of thing you can afford at 17 but your body will nope out of it by mid-20s. It is an absolutely unreasonable schedule.
>
> No, smartphones etc aren't my distraction. My only problem is that I get burntout after some time of serious study(generally after a week or so). The problem is that our exams last around a month, that is why getting such burnout is very harmful for grades..
>
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Congratulations, you have started figuring it out. Your friends indeed do not study as much - longer study does not mean better. In fact, no (normal/healthy) human being can possibly stay very focused and productive after working super hard for a week or so, which does indeed happen to you. Being well-rested and taking care of your bodily needs (light exercise, healthy diet) makes one accomplish more in 4 hours than some who chooses to ignore it does in 10. [Going past 50-55 hours a week](https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/96687/1/dp8129.pdf) [does not really increase output](https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145237/1/dp10103.pdf) **even on relatively low-skilled jobs**.
Researchers do tend to work long weeks but that is not just sitting down and thinking really really hard about the problem without any breaks. There are some movements towards four-day working week which you probably have heard about. Generally less strict and fewer working days [does not mean less productivity](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Boris-Baltes/publication/232480680_Flexible_and_Compressed_Workweek_Schedules_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Their_Effects_on_Work-Related_Criteria/links/0c960527e3c588c2b9000000/Flexible-and-Compressed-Workweek-Schedules-A-Meta-Analysis-of-Their-Effects-on-Work-Related-Criteria.pdf).
And finally, very very importantly...
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> I am good at university until the exam comes when I have to study at high pace for long hours
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If you study like you are supposed to during the semester (and you seem to do or at least think you do), studying for the exam should be super minimal, to the point you reread the material for an hour or two and go for a walk in the park. Seriously, **your brain health matters**. Both for performance itself and *more* than your current academic performance could ever be.
Needing to study so hard for an exam specifically suggests it would reside in your short term memory primarily, kind of defeating the purpose of the study itself! What's the point of taking these courses and working really really hard and then burning out if after that burnout your brain would eliminate the very thing that tortured it in about two months' time?
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<issue_start>username_0: I plan to apply for an MS in CS in the United States as an international student. While some universities provide guidance on the Statement of Purpose word limit, I can see that most don't. In such a case if my Statement of Purpose is 1000-1200 words and ends up spanning 1.5-2 pages, can that be somewhat lengthy to read?<issue_comment>username_1: I would not exceed 1000 words. Honestly, you should avoid going over one page. 500-750 words is the range I would aim for. An MS in CS is not going to be a program that will be enthralled by lengthy prosaic statements of purpose.
As someone who has read many applications, brevity is much preferred. At the very least, a long statement of purpose gets skimmed, whereas a short one gets fully read. I have never seen a statement of purpose longer than one page that changed my mind towards acceptance because of its length.
Unless the university specifically asks for a longer statement of purpose, I would keep it somewhat short.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: There is almost never a need for a statement of purpose to be this long. By aggressive editing -- rephrasing and deleting -- you should be able to cut the essay down to 800-900 words without sacrificing any actual content. The resulting essay will be better not only because shortness is inherently good, but also because removing the superfluous words produces a more mature writing style.
The trouble with saying "almost never" is that everyone thinks that they are the exception to the rule. But, most people who think this are wrong.
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<issue_start>username_0: It seems to me like 10 weeks per course may not be enough time for some graduate courses if they are not developed carefully. Do colleges using the quarter system like Dartmouth or UC Irvine have about the same difficulty compared to similarly ranked universities using the semester system?<issue_comment>username_1: I taught at a university that had terms of 7 weeks in spring and summer and semesters of 14 weeks in fall and winter. I taught the same class (Integral Calculus) four times, twice during the terms, twice during the semesters.
Term classes met twice as often as semester classes. We covered the same material and used the same book.
Guess which classes had better grades overall? The term (7 week) classes. There are many confounding factors here of course, but the accelerated nature of the course actually made students focus in and learn the material a bit better I felt.
There is a point of diminishing return (2 week crash course meeting 8 hours a day would be tough of course), but instructors and students who are prepared for a shorter calendar can do just fine.
---
I also was a student under a system similar to the one described above. I took several graduate math classes in 7 week terms. I learned the material just fine. You have to be prepared to devote twice as much time to studying for the class--but you also have a lower class load, so this is possible. In some ways, I would be in favor of short terms year round.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: The University of Chicago is on the quarter (meaning trimester: the fourth quarter is in the summer) system: a quarter lasts ten weeks. Harvard University is on the semester system: a semester lasts 13 weeks.
I received a master's degree (while being an undergraduate) at Chicago, for which I took 9 graduate courses. I received a PhD at Harvard and took, well, certainly more than nine semester courses there. Which one was easier, quarters or semesters? The answer is...the other differences between these two programs (which have similar rankings and draw from a similar cohort) were so much more significant that it is impossible to say what quarters or semesters had to do with it.
It makes more sense to compare three quarter courses to two semester courses than to compare one to one. The nine graduate courses I took fell into three full year sequences: in analysis, in algebra and in geometry/topology. If you were to take e.g. the graduate algebra *sequence* at these two places, at the end of the year there would not be much difference between quarters and semesters (especially compared to other curricular differences).
For what it's worth: I remember liking 10 week quarters more fondly than semesters. For the last 15 years I have taught at the University of Georgia, which has 15 week semesters. This is really too long, and the Faculty Senate tried to shorten it some years back, but it failed because apparently some administrators and even a few faculty members asked how we would be able to offer "equivalent educational content" in one fewer week. This was of course ridiculous: any instructor knows that you can just go slower / faster, be more / less efficient and so forth from class to class, and you can gain or lose a lot more than 15/14 this way. Moreover 15 weeks is really too long: even with breaks in the middle, everyone is more or less worn out by the end. In fact UGA *used to be* on the quarter system a while back, and the faculty that experienced it said that they liked it better. But I don't think it translates directly into material covered.
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<issue_start>username_0: How can one write a thesis in Computer Science, without actually providing the solution, but researching it and explaining how it's being solved right now but not for the specific problem (research area) identified by the researcher.
For instance, imagine that you spend your first year doing a literature review on the subject matter.
Now in your second year you're expected to build this solution, what if you cannot build it, or it requires too much code/time/investment. Obviously, I'm going to try to build the solution, but what if I fail building it, because it will require a lot of advanced code and algorithms.
Is there a way to survive that? Are there methodologies that can be used when you have done a literature review, and then tried to build a solution, potentially failed.
How can one continue and research the topic, write the thesis, or even get published, without having all the code to a solution? Will graphics/images combined with some kind of methodology be a way of actually conducting that research?
Very anxious and need help, motivation and support in order to know how to tackle that period when building the solution is required.<issue_comment>username_1: For a doctoral dissertation (I missed the tag, initially), there is probably no way out. I suspect that there are very few doctoral programs, world wide, that will give you a doctorate for a "faithful, but failed, attempt".
The solution is to, sadly enough, pick a different problem, perhaps related to the original, but which is more amenable to solution.
However, if you are doing "real" research and not just going through the motions, there are no guarantees. Research is about the unknown and the unknown can be tricky to reveal. It can be very elusive.
In my dissertation days, I worked on three problems (three bears style). The first was too easy and I could develop a theorem and its proof just about every day. I got a lot of results in a few weeks, but it failed the test of significance. Cute, but it was abandoned. The second was too hard and I couldn't scratch the surface of the diamond/titanium like coating that cut me off from the least result. Also abandoned.
The third problem was just right. Hard, doable, significant (to a very tiny audience, of course). But had I beat my head against the second problem I'd likely still be there almost fifty years later. (Oldest living grad student emerges from dusty cave to say "nope" once again.)
Talk to your advisor. Work out an option for a different problem. It would be good if it were close enough to the original that your literature search gives you tools for the attack. But there is no guarantee. The unknown is the unknown until it becomes known.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: >
> Is there a way to survive that?
>
>
>
Yes, there is. <NAME> has hinted at it but I'll elaborate.
During your research, there will be many failures and "schedule overruns". Thankfully, this is expected in academia - you *are* dealing with the unknown, after all. However, if the part you have failed at is actually already done by someone, it rapidly becomes lot less forgiving: a PhD in biology might be expected able to do titration, whimsical as the materials might be, and a PhD in CS might be expected to glue together some code and write something on their own. That gets you into "no guts, no glory" territory - there *will* be some risks to be taken, and your past experience shall guide you through it. It is very common to have both under- and over-estimates of problem complexity in your career.
The trick here, of course, is to turn "failures" into "wins". Related: [this](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/117887/what-if-the-research-was-failure), [this](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/166693/in-academic-papers-is-it-really-a-bad-thing-to-not-report-the-relatively-not-go/166727), [this](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/83137) and [this](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/47692/what-to-do-when-research-leads-to-poor-results/47716).
While you are dealing with big unknowns there in terms of time estimates, you still get paid for it. And are expected to be able to show some results for it, start to end. That means **seeking alternatives and always having a plan B (C, D...)**. Writing the code turned out to be too hard? How else could you show the merit of your results? Maybe instead of glorious solve-all code you might be able to solve a couple of oversimplified cases which would make writing relevant code lot easier? Maybe you could do some analytical work instead (it would likely take lot longer than writing code but still)?
Bottom line - you may cut your work short and not cover everything that was originally planned but you still have to make sure your work is **complete**. What this means actually is a pretty specific approach to planning in the first place - you ought to seek these extra exits and don't just hope you'll ride the highway from start to end in more or less given time. The PhD is, in large part, exercise in precisely that.
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/06
| 577
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<issue_start>username_0: Suppose some has done coursework in Algebra and Analysis. After that they want to pursue a PhD in commutative algebra or in Ring theory or any pure mathematics topics.
My question : In PhD programs, what type of work are PhD students doing after the coursework?
My thinking : I mean, there are lot of theorems in commutative algebra. Did PhD students modify all theorems or do they choose a particular theorem and try to modify that theorem? Also, there are lots of exercises in Atiyah's commutative algebra book. Do PhD students choose a particular/specific exercise and work on it?
Note: I'm a MSc student<issue_comment>username_1: Typically a Ph.D. student would have had enough exposure at the graduate level to be able to choose a problem they find interesting as their thesis topic with the help of their supervisor.
It does not always have to be a novel solution. For instance, it can be a different way of proving something already proven.
They also can continue to study and take relevant coursework to their thesis topic in either reading or classroom courses.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Choosing a suitable problem requires deep insight. Often a student just finishing coursework won't have that insight yet. Insight comes from very deep dives into the essence of a problem space. It is an emergent property, not easily or automatically attained.
Hence, students are often guided to a problem (or problems) by their advisor who does have this required insight.
I once had deep insight into classical real analysis and classical topology, but almost none in algebra. This seems odd, but I think it common. I entered the research stage as a good and hard working student, but didn't have sufficient insight yet to come up with a problem on my own. My advisor was a great help.
In fact, it was in working on my eventual dissertation problem that I got that insight. I don't think I could have really considered myself a *mathematician* until I was at the end of my research. Only at that point was I able to "bank" a number of future work problems that seemed to be important enough for further study.
Get a good and experienced advisor. Accept their guidance.
---
There are a few students who don't need this advice and come with a problem of their own. Sometimes that works out. But I doubt that, in math, at least, that it is the most common case.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/06
| 2,392
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<issue_start>username_0: Programming skills such as experience with Java, Python, C++ or work experience as a software developer can be indispensable for applied mathematicians. How useful is it to have such experiences as a pure Math graduate student where the focus tends to be on proofs and rigor rather than computation?<issue_comment>username_1: In many parts of pure mathematics you use software to calculate examples that a while ago you could do only with pencil and paper. That's particularly true in combinatorics (my field) and number theory.
There is a tradeoff. Sometimes you learn from the slow process that forces you to see what happens at each step - like looking at a program with a debugger. But you get a lot more data in a lot less time, so are less likely to be misled by the [law of small numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_law_of_small_numbers).
I have taught an undergraduate course whose purpose was to expose students to the possibilities of calculation: python, symbolic manipulation (mathematica and sage), spreadsheets, LaTeX for writing mathematics.
You may not need programming skills to be admitted to graduate school, but any on your cv would be a plus. You might well have to learn some
when you start your researchl
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Yes. For example, in my case Matlab programming was quite helpful for plotting figure. The latex language Tikz/PGF the is almost very essential in plotting figures, diagrams in commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, number theory etc. The Language like PARI/GP and SAGE are very helpful in algebra and number theory.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: Maybe, maybe not. Ignoring some of the more obvious expectations such as LaTeX, you might consider becoming familiar with Pari as well as Mathematica programming and Sage/Python. Apart from that the cognitive development that comes from learning both procedural and declarative programming can be fruitful in unexpected ways.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: Not really an answer to what you asked, but: Look beyond grad school as well. Most math PhDs do not actually stay in academia but end up in industry in one way or another. Nearly every job mathematicians will eventually take on outside academic pure math research will benefit from having computer programming experience. So there may not be an advantage to knowing programming when you apply for grad school, but it will be useful to you in the future anyway.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_5: Having a familiarity with programming languages is useful in pure math too. It is easy to observe some patterns by plotting a suitable graph.
For example in number theory, if we are studying a particular type of prime number and we want to see how they are distributed, the first step I would do is to plot the counting function to get an intuition which can not be done by hand. If this function is not studied before it is unlikely that you will find an existing inbuilt function in standard programming languages. In this situation, if you are familiar with programming then you have an advantage.
Also, we can do various calculations using a computer which would be laborious to do manually.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: Long-term usefulness aside - during your PhD, you might have to teach a class that is not pure math and may require you to know how to program...
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: Computers are sometimes used to solve complex mathematical problems because it's impractical for humans to enumerate all the cases and combinations. Famously, the [Four Color Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_computer) was proved using a computer.
There's a list of proofs that used computers in this Wikipedia article: [Computer-assisted proof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_proof#Applications)
And while the eventual proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was purely mathematical, [computers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem#Early_modern_breakthroughs) were used by many researchers to confirm the conjecture for many cases.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: As someone who is currently doing a PhD in mathematics, yes, it is definitely useful to have a prior understanding of programming. However, I don't think it is necessary - if you can keep up with the maths, the coding will follow.
A lot of people keep mentioning Latex. I wouldn't really call this programming per se, but you will definitely need to learn it. This is not very hard though.
You will almost definitely use some sort of programming language in a PhD for visualisation or computation (yes, computation is common even in pure maths these days). Exactly what languages/programming you will do is difficult to say with out more information about the project. 'Pure maths' is extremely general and can cover a vast range of fields.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: Practical programming experience is very useful for *any* high-educated worker that spends most of their time behind a computer, and for a PhD-student in particular. Why?
Automation
----------
As a PhD student, you will increasing likely be working with software systems in order to do basic tasks such as writing, literature search, interacting with students, having meetings, administration, grading homework. Some of this systems have a well designed UX (user experience) and allow you to tell the computer what to do at the speed of either your thoughts or your typing.
However, many of these systems can be rather painful. Often these are simple things, such as dragging the cursor all over the screen rather than pressing a key, or waiting 10 seconds on a page to load that could have been loaded while you were doing something useful. These are minor things, but when you have to do them ~200 times on a day, these annoyances add up. So, what to do?
Do it yourself
--------------
You could ask someone else to solve this issue, such as the developers of the software. However, this is a task more difficult for them than it is for you (assuming you have the practical programming experience): they need to change it (if they agree to change it at all!) and make it work for all users, you only need to make it work for yourselves.
This may sound a lot of work, but it's not bad at all, time-wise. It's a time investment that has paid of for me within a week, whenever I improved some frequent painful processes. And while the time gained may be peanuts, the main purpose is to remove annoyances, which allow more enjoyable and more focused work.
It's not particularly difficult, either, if you have some practical programming experience and know what tools are out there. A web-app drives you crazy? Write a user-script with Greasemonkey/Violentmonkey/Tampermonkey. Some simple DOM-manipulation often works, I personally use [MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_object_model) as a reference. An application can use more keyboard shortcuts? [AutoHotkey](https://www.autohotkey.com/) can help.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_10: >
> how useful are they when applying to pure a Math program?
>
>
>
Having to contend with (La)TeX to typeset your publications already means you'll be doing a bit of programming; and if you're even the least bit finicky, creative or perfectionistic, it will be more than a bit.
... you might think this answer is tongue-in-cheek, but many a grad student has TeX battle scars they could tell you about :-(
Want another example? Well, will you have a personal website? That often benefits from being able to program. Is there any chance you might want to demo some of the abstract concepts you work on for a wider audience? That would require programming. Will you be using abstract/symbolic math software packages? Another case programming comes into your life. Hell, if I could, I would reprogram my alma mater's math department building elevator, the logic of which I couldn't figure out.
So, programming is (nearly) everywhere, for pure mathematicians as well.
(Also, what @EthanBolker and @WolfgangBangerth said.)
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_11: Obviously having a skill is better than not having that skill. As far as direct applicability to a PhD in pure mathematics, Python and possibly C++ *might* be useful for certain kinds of computational work (such as generating examples or testing hypotheses) mentioned by other commenters here. But this is usually done using packages tailored more specifically for mathematics such as Magma or Sage.
If what you're really asking is whether experience as a Python or C++ programmer is going to boost your application, the answer is probably not, unless the advisor you're planning to work with wants someone who can do that (e.g., if they don't want to do coding themselves).
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_12: Well, in addition to other good points raised, in these days if a math/tech-oriented person is clueless about talking to computers in any serious way, they're just a babe-in-the-woods. Almost immediately incompetent in various sorts of not-strictly-math ways.
As many of us have noticed, "computers" are a big deal, as is the internet. Not all of that is relevant to "doing mathematics", but quite a bit *is*. I use Perl to rearrange text/TeX files, Python for basic computations, Sage for subtler computations and graphs... even if none of those computations or graphs enter in any public-facing paper I write.
Also, many notions from Computer Science, such as "scope of a variable-name", are quite valuable in understanding mathematical writing (and in writing more clearly). And in teaching more clearly, and understanding that most undergrads do not have the same sense of "scope of a variable" that mathematically trained people do.
One last thing: I myself would not want to be making choices based on weakness, rather than on interest and preferences. If one shuts oneself out from understanding how computers seriously work, ... well, maybe you'll be an "end-user". No reason to solicit that.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/07
| 1,212
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<issue_start>username_0: In my opinion, yelling and disrespecting should not be the case between supervisor(s) and their grad students regardless of how well or poor the student is doing. Supervisors are usually holding the highest academic degrees and they should be ideal principals for their students.
My question is, what to do if a supervisor repeatedly yells (whether personally or sounding as such in the emails). Do we have to accept it and do nothing to keep a nice attitude?<issue_comment>username_1: No, it shouldn't be accepted, unless the student has done some serious damage. But that would probably be a rare event.
Solution 1. Find a better advisor (advised)
Solution 2. Yell back (not advised)
Solution 3. Complain to a higher authority (conditionally advised)
Solution 4. If the benefits of working with this idiot advisor outweigh the pain, force yourself to ignore it. (conditionally advised)
---
Long term. Don't do that when you have an independent career. They are not a good role model.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: It is not acceptable. If this is a one-time occurrence the supervisor (or anybody else doing the yelling) should apologize.
When this happens regularly, the supervisor has an anger management problem. You should report it to the graduate chair.
There is *usually* some way of resolving this “internally”. In the cases I heard, the unit apologized, the supervisors were given official warning and some were eventually reprimanded (could not take students for some period) after repeated offenses. The students were given support to find alternate supervisors if they so wanted.
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: Almost never.
An example of an exigent circumstance would be a chemistry professor yelling at grad students who are in imminent danger of harm b/c of improper lab procedure.
If these exigent events happen regularly then the supervisor graduate student relationship is not working and you need to leave.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_4: There are a few definitions of yelling in colloquial American English.
Definition 1: Screaming with anger. This is never ok in a professional relationship; and if it happens regularly, it is a sign of a toxic work environment. This is not a good advisor.
Definition 2: Criticism. For example, if you do a presentation and the advisor has a lot of professional criticism, this is a good thing. The point of graduate school is to learn, and to have an advisor who wants you to improve is important. This sort of constructive "yelling" is a sign of a good advisor, uncomfortable as it is to have your flaws pointed out.
We all must use wisdom to distinguish between these two situations.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: In addition to other good answers...
Let's think calmly about this: in what possible circumstances should any person tolerate abusive behavior?
Ok, well, hopefully, as few as possible.
(Yes, yelling is obviously abusive, if there were any doubt. Duh.)
But, yeah, sometimes a person is stuck in a situation, and for various reasons puts up with abuse.
The point is not whether or not it's abusive to yell (in any sense), because it is. The only remaining operational issue is whether an abused person has sufficient reason to tolerate it for a while, to some better end.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_6: It should not be acceptable, but unless it is really extreme and continuous, **I think it's wise to live with it**. Some people have anger management problems or a tendency to yell when they are not actually that upset. That's who they are. I see no advantage to being the person who can't handle that.
You don't have to spend *that* much time with your advisor and you don't have to interact with them forever. If it's that much of a problem, seeking a different advisor is an alternative. If you confront your advisor or complain to HR or whatever, you may stop the yelling, but you will also close certain doors needlessly.
My first boss swore and yelled all the time. At first it was stressful but I decided to just live with it and respond to his requests as if they were given politely. After a year, all the yelling and swearing stopped. It turned out he had been going through a contentious divorce at the time and had been continuously at the end of his rope. We have now worked together very productively for years and I consider him one of my best friends and certainly my closest colleague. Frankly, I think he feels bad about how he was and respects me for having done good work and always been professional despite his faults. If I had gone to HR or confronted him, things would likely not have worked out as well.
Rude or loud people are a fact of life. Being the person who spends a lot of energy trying to change them is frequently not the best use of your time and social capital. This is especially true if you would like to preserve a relationship with the person in question.
Upvotes: 0
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2021/10/07
| 879
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<issue_start>username_0: While surveying a certain research area, I found 2 papers already published in 2 different conferences in 2019. Both have the same authors, same techniques, same figures (partially), but different titles and content descriptions. I'm so mad at their behavior, the editor's and also reviewers' approval, as a newbie to the academic world. How could this violation be allowed?
Is there a general way to pull out one of the papers?
For some concern, I cannot reveal the titles now. Both papers are computer science, one is a workshop paper, and the other is a conference paper.<issue_comment>username_1: I had come across something similar very recently (again in CS, might just be the same paper!), though there might be some legitimate (ethically ok) reasons.
Did you check the publication dates on both of the versions? Maybe the workshop paper was a work-in-progress version of the conference paper, or the conference paper supplemented the same results with further experiments.
It is also usual as far as I can tell to submit papers rejected from conferences to workshops while you are also working on improving the paper. This would result in two similar papers if the main version eventually gets accepted to a conference.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: You mention that the field is computer science, and one is a workshop paper and the other is a conference paper.
It is not uncommon that a paper is first submitted and presented at a workshop that is attached to a conference, often in a preliminary state, and a more complete version is later submitted and published at a future conference. This second submission is allowed by many conferences **when the workshop it was first presented in had no formal proceedings**, and so the paper was not considered formally published there. There is often no requirement for the second submission to have new content compared to the first. The paper may also still appear on the workshop's website in such cases, but no copyright transfer takes place.
It is possible that the situation in your case is something similar.
Examples of such policies:
[ACM](https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/simultaneous-submissions):
>
> Issuing the paper as a technical report, posting the paper on a web site, or presenting the paper at a workshop or conference that does not publish formally reviewed proceedings does not disqualify it from appearing in an ACM publication. Workshops and conferences are encouraged to indicate in their calls for papers whether or not they will publish formally reviewed proceedings so that authors can determine whether or not submission will jeopardize ACM publication.
>
>
>
[ICML](https://icml.cc/Conferences/2021/StyleAuthorInstructions):
>
> Submission is permitted for papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings (e.g., ICML or NeurIPS workshops), or with only abstracts published.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: Do not be mad. Besides other stuff already mentioned, **publishing the same thing twice - especially in conference proceedings - does not benefit an author a whole lot**. It's not like they get twice the citations or take up capacity from highly visible journals, they are part of the conference/workshop and whatever they have brought there gets a (published) representation.
Consider authors having first a workshop on X and then almost immediately a conference on X where they intend to present the same(-ish) work, which is perfectly normal.
They might want to alter title/abstract to better fit the conference or workshop format, respectively, although that's becoming more shady and generally speaking, annoying. From the POV of other attendees of the conference who also happened to listen to the talk on the workshop, they might get tricked into wasting precious time listening to the same talk twice and that'd be bad.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/07
| 919
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<issue_start>username_0: As a part of a research project, I perform numerical simulations in my computer, and initially I could not work with bigger systems due to lack of computer memory.
A friend from college had a spare RAM module, which was compatible with my computer. He gave it to me (for free), and I would return it when this project would be over.
This enabled me to work with larger systems. We got some new results, and we are in the process of writing a paper. How can I acknowledge my friend? I don't know if it is a standard practice.
Also, I had once told my research supervisor that I obtained this RAM module from a friend, but did not say that I want to acknowledge him if we write a paper (because back then I did not even know if I would get publishable results). How should I ask my supervisor about this? My supervisor is a friendly person.
---
My friend is a classmate, but not a part of my research group, and did not contribute to the research. But I feel that I should acknowledge his help, because without it I would not be able to run these simulations. Something like "I acknowledge X for providing computational facilities" might seem confusing.<issue_comment>username_1: On how to ask your advisor:
>
> Hi advisor - I got this RAM unit from friend X for the research, should I acknowledge them in the paper?
>
>
>
If you decide on doing the acknowledgement (I think you should):
>
> I would like to thank [friend] for lending me some of the hardware used in this research.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: The acknowledgements section in your paper is the right place. Although it is used a lot for more or less mandatory information (funding etc.), there are no strict rules what you can express there. You can just write it the way it was: "I gratefully acknowledge X for making the necessary computer memory available to allow the calculations." The sentence you suggest yourself is also good. Do not overthink this. There is nothing wrong with adding a personal touch, either. You know your friend, so you might know how to express your gratitude in a way he would appreciate.
In any case, acknowledging the help of others is good practice. So if your supervisor is a kind person, just ask the way you would ask any other question.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: There is no set format for Acknowledgments in papers. You can acknowledge anyone and anything, and a reasonable statement would be something like this:
>
> The author acknowledges <NAME> for enabling this research by loaning out a memory module that has allowed to run larger computations than would otherwise have been possible. The loan is much appreciated!
>
>
>
And, if you really want, you can always add something like this:
>
> ... The loan is much appreciated and will be paid back in the form of an invitation to the local pub, with the tab paid for by the author.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: You can mention the hardware in the main text and mention the help you got with this in a footnote. Alternatively, you could also include a reference and in the reference section you write his name and then specify in a short sentence the type of hardware that was provided. This is then similar to how people mention private communication in the references.
In the acknowledgements section, you can thank him for the help you got in an informal way. See e.g. [this paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01613) were colleagues were thanked for discussions and for "being cool":
>
> We would like to thank <NAME>, <NAME>, Oriol
> Vinyals, <NAME>, <NAME>, <NAME> and
> <NAME> for insightful discussions and being pretty cool.
>
>
>
Upvotes: -1
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2021/10/08
| 2,168
| 9,291
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<issue_start>username_0: Aside from decoration, memory, self-infatuation or other personal reason, is there any non-personal reason in keeping the paper versions of one's college diplomas? Or can one just throw them away and present the electronic versions at the rare occasions when they are required?
Assume the degrees are from universities based in the United States, if that matters.<issue_comment>username_1: Keep all paper certificates always.
Depending on what job(s) you apply for, and whether they require a certain degree, you may be asked to present the paper version. I have been asked in my last few jobs to present the paper version (an electronic copy was only accepted as a temporary measure while I tried to find the paper one), though this is in academia where it required that you have these degrees.
Industry jobs may or may not ask, so better safe than sorry and keep the paper ones.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: In addition to possibly having to present the diplomas for verification upon hiring in certain jobs, you may also be asked to present them (or verified copies) when applying for visas for certain countries.
So yes, keep them!
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: Anyone requiring a paper copy of a college diploma is also going to accept a certified copy of your transcript (which will include any degrees earned). Alternatively, you can request a replacement copy of your diploma. The above suggestions *will* incur a fee (a quick search indicates in the range of $20).
So, if you do not anticipate any immediate need, want to rid yourself of clutter, and are ok with a nominal fee should your situation change, toss it.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: An former instructor of mine once told a story about the school where he earned his undergraduate degree. A decade or so after he graduated, the school completely ceased operations after enrollment languished, the school went bankrupt, and a large portion of the campus was damaged beyond repair by a windstorm. He has protected his original diploma like gold since then, as it very well might be the only official record remaining of his degree. When a potential employer wanted to verify his degree, there was no records department they could contact. Someone at the state's education department had to look at the original diploma and certify that it was authentic based on the format, the seals, etc (akin to how someone would authenticate a historical document).
A friend of the family graduated from a smaller college that has since been absorbed into a larger nearby school. It changed its name to match the parent school, "*something* Women's University". Since this friend is male, and his graduation date was before the parent school started admitting men, he frequently fails background checks when applying for jobs. Employers request a certified transcript that will have the new name on it, which makes them think he's doing a poor job lying about his degree. He always has to show them his *original* diploma with the school's original name on it and explain the merger/rename, which resolves the dilemma fairly easily.
Never get rid of any official document (diploma or otherwise), even if it seems like you can easily replace it. You may not *always* be able to do so. Things like this seem less likely to happen in the digital age, but digital data can go *\*poof\** much easier than physical documents. Between software bugs, cyberattacks, and human error, you shouldn't trust the preservation of vital records to anyone other than yourself. Not to mention, digital formats are notorious for becoming unreadable as new technologies develop. We have readable copies of paper documents written millennia ago; meanwhile, I have a research report written in 2001 that's in a format no modern computer can read.
Not to mention, it would be rather depressing to think that I worked my tail off for how many years and all I have to show for it is a measly PDF file.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_5: ### It's very unlikely you'll need it
Remember that paper documents are easily forged - all it takes is a printer and some fancy paper. Back in the day this was harder to do, but these days any kid can fake up a certificate in Word. No sensible employer will rely on paper documents these days. That's not too say that there aren't employers around with obsolete ideas about this, but they're dying out. I've worked in industry for 25 years and I've never been asked.
If you attended a reputable university in a G20 country, the master record for your degree is not your paper copy, it's the university records. If someone wants to know if you got a degree from the university, they call the university. Even if the university shuts down, the state will normally preserve records for exactly this reason. But most universities in G20 countries don't shut down, because the trend is for increased higher education. At most they might merge with another university, but the historical records will still be preserved.
All this assumes anyone cares about your degree, of course. Remember that a degree is only a beginner's qualification in that field. Within the first few years of uni, your degree is going to be a major part of your "show reel" for getting a job, sure. After a few years of real work though, employers are far more concerned with the work you've done. A degree only proves that you've had some teaching - your experience at work proves whether you can apply what you were taught.
And even when you've only got your degree, as an interviewer I don't care about the piece of paper. I want you to talk me through the major projects you did, what the challenges were, and how you solved them. I want you to be able to geek out on the details - and after 25 years you'd better believe I can keep up with you on that! I want someone who's as excited to be working in the field as I am. If all you can tell me about is passing exams, you aren't the person I want working for me.
### Assuming you're looking for a job in the same area as your degree...
All this does assume that your degree was in any way relevant to the job you're applying for. If you're going for a completely different job, and the company is using "do they have a degree?" as a placeholder for "do they have a functioning brain?", then maybe they're more likely to want proof of a degree even after some time.
But I take exception to that attitude, because it implies people who've chosen to do some other line of work instead of getting a degree are somehow "lesser". The best engineer I've ever worked with, who mentored me for a number of years, started as a technician and got a degree in his free time a number of years later. I'd strongly disagree with any suggestion that he was ever "lesser" before he got his degree. So if this is the mindset you're faced with, you should think carefully about whether this is actually a good place to be.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_6: In Europe they usually ask for the real diplomas signed by the universities.
Sometimes they ask for a translation into the language that requires it
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: As pointed out by other answers, in Europe it is common that one has to present relevant degrees either as an original, or a notarized copy (or a certified translation of one of the former). In fact, this can go significantly further than the last relevant degree - e.g. in Germany, it is not uncommon to ask for high-school diplomas even for postdoc jobs (in the public sector, that is).
As pointed out in other answers, you can usually get a replacement document issued by your university, high school, etc., but given the small numbers of certificates to keep, I cannot see why one would want to risk that.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: Think of keeping the paper diploma as a kind of insurance policy. You “pay” a small “premium” in the form of allocating some space in your house to hold a piece of paper (probably together with other important paper documents). In return, you have protection against the very low-probability event that you will someday need that piece of paper. This also buys you peace of mind.
The benefit of getting insurance to protect ourselves against unlikely but unpleasant occurrences is well-understood. This one has a zero monetary cost so it’s an even better deal than most types of insurance. If you find it reasonable to pay for car insurance, health insurance, dental insurance, or any other form of insurance, the decision to keep your paper diploma should be a no-brainer.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: I live in Texas and I used to escape the Summer heat by teaching a course at the University of Calgary every Summer. I had to present my diploma at the border to get my work visa each year. That's just Canada. How much more this would go for less neighborly countries.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_10: My diplomas and certificates are in a drawer. I moved them every time I moved. But I have never used them. Conceivably, if my career had taken a different path that it did, there might have come a time when it would have been appropriate to frame (some of) them and hang them in a grand ante-room to my palatial office.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: Hypothetical (somewhat farfetched, but still in the realm of possibility):
A ten year old child is sliding down a slide at the local school playground when she sees something sticking out from the ground. Curious, she digs it up and admires it for a while. Thinking that she found something that might be scientifically interesting, she ditches school and spends her lunch money on bus fare to the local university, where she shows what she found to professors. One of the professors identifies the object as a "missing link" fossil and begins the process of writing up a paper for submission to a journal.
*Does the child deserve authorship?*
More generally, does discovering a "thing" merit authorship? Clearly, if I am on a grant-funded dig to find transitional fossils, rare crystals, paleolithic weapons, or mutant hermaphrodite hybrid lizard-bird droppings and I actually find one that turns out to be critical to the paper, I deserve authorship. Does stumbling onto a scientifically novel object by accident rather than design also merit authorship?
Similarly, if an uneducated, illiterate farmhand finds an axe in a field and it turns out the axe is a critical piece of archaeological evidence that pushes back a milestone in human civilization by a thousand years, does the farmhand deserve authorship or does authorship only fall to the one who recognizes the scientific merit of the find?
If scientific understanding of the find is required to merit authorship, what is the threshold? For example, perhaps our hypothetical child discoverer merits authorship only if she recognized that the item was a fossil. If she thought the item was a meteorite and took it to an astronomy professor, she wouldn't get authorship but would probably merit an acknowledgment ("Thanks to little <NAME>, age 10, who found this fossil for me on the grounds of North Town Elementary School."). If Suzie knew the item was a fossil but had no idea that it was interesting enough for a paper, would she still get authorship? What if she knew the item was scientifically interesting enough to merit a paper but did not know enough of the science to actually write the paper without help from someone actually working in academia?
Thoughts:
If the answer or convention varies by field, an answer that covers the field(s) with which you are familiar with authorship conventions would count as a good answer. For example, "In archaeology we have a strict requirement that nobody without at least a bachelor's degree can receive authorship, but in evolutionary biology it's based on a holistic analysis of your contributions, see e.g. Smith (2002) for a summary of recent authorship disputes as it pertains to fossil discovery." could qualify.
If something like this has actually happened, explaining the scenario and what decision was made would count as an answer. For example, "Last fall, this car salesman named <NAME> found a 17th century manuscript in his grandmother's jewelry box that he thought was an unknown early textual variant of *Hamlet*. Working closely with professors at his local university, he discovered that he was correct and published a paper together with them. The professors recommended him for an accelerated double master's degree in literature and archaeology and he is scheduled to graduate this spring."
Yes, I know that this is somewhat of a far-fetched idea and acknowledge that the vast majority of people will never chance upon a major discovery like this. I do note that this is a somewhat common trope in science fiction (e.g. some ordinary "Joe" falls into a bog and comes up choking on the Missing Link and tangled up in a map to Atlantis or something), so it seems likely that such a scenario has been considered or may have even happened.<issue_comment>username_1: I think you are making the (common) mistake of thinking of co-authorship as some sort of brownie point that should be awarded according to some criteria. Reality is much simpler - the authors of a scientific paper are the people who wrote the scientific paper. These are normally also the same people who planned the research, applied for funding for the research, executed the research, and analysed / interpreted its results.
If you think about authorship along these lines, it becomes fairly obvious that simply stumbling over an important artifact does not make you an author of any publications that would later on be written about this artifact. Clearly the 10-year old (or the "illiterate farmhand") was important to the research, and later write-ups would and should talk about their role when discussing the story of these results, but it would be silly to pretend that their chance discovery suddenly made them an expert in archeology or evolution theory.
---
As a sidenote, this question illustrates the main limitation of our current way of acknowledging scientific contributions over authorship of papers - there are simply many "other" ways of contributing to science besides writing up results, and our current model conflates them all. Ultimately, I believe that (especially in the more experimental sciences) we will need to move to a more fine-grained accounting, where we can distinguish between those planning and executing experiments, those acquiring funding, and those doing more menial support work. All of those should be acknowledged, but fairly for the things that they actually did. The [CRediT author statement](https://www.elsevier.com/authors/policies-and-guidelines/credit-author-statement) model is a good step into that direction, but ultimately we probably want to move towards a world where the authors of a paper are exclusively the people who actually wrote the paper, while still fairly acknowledging everybody else who had significant contributions.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: This should probably start by working out what the objectives of authorship are. Interestingly, a [number of guidelines](https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/publishing-ethics) [on authorship](https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/publishing-ethics) are silent on that. They mostly defer to the conventions of the field. Perhaps we might suppose that the objectives of authorship are these;
1. Identify those who may answer questions or respond to criticism of the work. The child and the farmhand might answer questions, or field criticism but it's likely they are not best placed to do so.
2. Establish the reputation of the authors, as people who are capable of making contributions of academic value. Authorship is pretty strongly tied to employability for many fields. This is what conditions like *"significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study"* are basically intended to cover. Both the child and the farmhand made a chance discovery, but they did recognise it as interesting. Lots of discoveries depend on some element of chance, so the random nature ought not to disqualify them. Anyway, a single publication will not normally generate much reputation, so perhaps the effects of giving authorship are not out of proportion. I'd argue that anyone who takes a muddy object in a field to an academic must have had some inkling that it was significant, and should gain reputation for understanding that.
3. The inverse of point 2; give significance to the paper, by merit of the author's reputation. This one is contentious, but the blunt truth is that there is more work coming out of most fields than most academics have time to read. In each subfield there are people whose work it's generally worth following. Lots of people probably have an alert set to tell them if <NAME> publishes something, for instance. From this point of view, the child and the farmhand are neither here nor there, it won't matter if they are on the author list or not.
So I'd probably conclude that overall giving authorship is not the best option, unless the would-be-author could reasonably answer common questions about the work. On the other hand, if the academic involved is listed as the corresponding author, it likely won't do any real harm. After all, this situation is sufficiently unusual that it won't occur often. <NAME> gave [his cat co-authorship](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.35.1442), and that has not caused any real issues.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: In contrast to the answers at this moment, let me suggest that *ethically* full co-authorship is deserved. This is based on ethical principles only as I'm neither an archaeologist nor a paleontologist, so don't know the actual practice in those fields.
But, the student brought more to the game than just "stumbling across" an important artifact.
Put yourself in the shoes of the academic who meets with this child. Could you have written the paper without them? Could you have formed a hypothesis about its importance. The kid brought you not only the artifact, but also the research question. They "sparked" an insight in you, since you had past experience, that you would not have had otherwise.
And it is even quite different than finding an artifact in an old museum collection, since the child took an active part in bringing it to your notice, after which, but *only* after which, a paper becomes possible. They had an "idea", no matter how ill formed, that the thing might be important.
Yes, they are an author. Ethically speaking, anyway.
The academic would also be wise to see if they could "adopt" the child as a protege and teach them a bit about their field. Perhaps they will become an important scientist with a bit of early guidance.
---
Note that I've answered the question as stated in the body, not just the top-line question, for which the answer might be *no* in a different context.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: You’re overthinking this. The child discovered the thing, and that discovery was instrumental to a major scientific result. She obviously gets to be a coauthor. There is no reason to deny her coauthorship based on her age, lack of scientific understanding, or anything else.
The point is, coauthorship is not a reward for being smart or scientifically sophisticated, and those qualities are not a prerequisite for becoming a coauthor. The list of authors on a paper is simply a list of the people whose contributions were material in leading to the paper being conceived and written. In this case, you can say that getting coauthorship was simply a matter of luck. Well, the same goes for many famous discoveries that do not involve children or physical artifacts, so conceptually there is nothing new about this situation.
Upvotes: 3
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<issue_start>username_0: While reading books on Indian politics (not aware if this happens outside as well), frequently the citations for a particular claim is some interview with a person being talked about. In this case, one reading the book can trust the statement only if he personally gives his belief to the author's word. This is OK if the reader personally believes in the integrity of author but this becomes problematic in debate since we cannot ask other side to trust an author for his unverifiable account if author is not well-known or known for political bias, these are genuine misgivings and I feel the one using these books must be the one to mitigate such concerns
In this case, how should we present a statement/claim in a manner that acknowledges possible ambiguity and unverifiablilty or should one abstain from this practice and cite only authors recognized by both sides as reputable??
Some particular examples are:
1. In the book "India after Gandhi", <NAME> cites some anonymous accounts.
2. In the memoir "[Accidental Prime-Minister](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accidental_Prime_Minister)", <NAME> has exclusively put his opinions and done away with citations and references.
3. The current book I am reading, [Half - Lion: How P.V Narasimha Rao Transformed India](https://www.amazon.in/Half-Lion-Narasimha-Transformed-India/dp/0670088226) also contains many citations in form of personal interviews conducted by the author<issue_comment>username_1: The technical answer to your question ("how to cite") is that you cite the book the same way you cite any other book, following the citation guidelines of the publication to which you're submitting.
However, your actual question seems to be more focused on how to ensure you don't mislead readers into thinking your sourced quotes are stronger than they really are. I don't think there's a definitive answer here. My recommendation would simply be to tell the reader that the cited source is based on personal claims. For example:
>
> Based on personal conversations, <NAME> has stated that <NAME> does not drink alcohol [22].
>
>
> [22] <NAME>. "Fire and Fury: blabbidy blab". Publisher. Page whatever.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: You should simply acknowledge the limits of verifiability and cite the source. There is no question of finding sources that are acceptable to 'both sides', because you cannot possibly know every reader's leanings. Also, choosing to cite individuals because they are 'reputable' seems to be rather unscientific and will only further selection bias.
(1) The available literature, primarily derived from personal conversations, suggests that this statement is true [ref].
(2) This statement is derived from the partly anonymous accounts provided by Guha in [ref].
(3) Interviews conducted and provided by Rao [ref] suggest that this statement is true.
(4) On the basis of opinions provided by Baru [ref], it appears reasonable to accept this statement as true.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: We would like to cite a not yet finished masters thesis in a project proposal, because the topic of the thesis is completely on point with the call. It shows that we are already actively working on the problem.
What is a good way to cite this?<issue_comment>username_1: Depending on the state of the work to be cited, you can add to a normal citation either "work in progress" or "private communication". I'm not as certain about the latter, but might consider it for a work in the early stages, with "in progress" for one in the later stages.
Perhaps "in progress" is best as it implies that the work will appear.
You could add various qualifiers as appropriate: "expected completion month, year.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: In [APA Style](https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/08/almost-published.html#:%7E:text=Manuscript%20in%20Preparation,(2011).):
>
> Doe, <NAME>. (2021). Embedded computing in underwater basket weaving: A case for sustainable textiles. Manuscript in preparation.
>
>
>
Other styles might have similar formats.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: In a proposal, you will often have to explain your previous experiences with issues related to what you are proposing. It is not uncommon to show some unpublished data there. If the data is the result of a student's work, you could simply mention that in the proposal text, a figure caption or the like, including the student's name. Then you would already provide all the relevant information this way and could decide to omit a separate citation in your list of references. I see this solution both in my own proposals as well as in proposals of others that I assessed in the past.
You could obviously also do both, include the mention in the text as well as the citation, and use *e.g.* the citation style @username_2 [suggests](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176464).
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]
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<issue_start>username_0: I am an international student currently working in my home country - India. I got admitted for a fully-funded PhD program in the US. Although I was very confident about doing a PhD when I applied for it, my interest has decreased over time by staying in an industry job, and now I no longer feel like doing a PhD. Can I tell the university a week before the joining date that I am no longer interested in doing PhD and won't be joining as I wish to stay in the industry and PhD doesn't interest me anymore? What will be the consequences for me as an International Student?
I know this sounds very unprofessional, but I am a perplexed individual who is not sure about his future, who once thought doing a PhD would be good but now thinks he is not a good candidate for it.<issue_comment>username_1: Yes. They may not be happy with your decision and it's possible you may regret it later, but yes, you can decline at the last minute here in the US. They can't force you to do the PhD if you've decided you don't want to do it.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: In almost all cases the answer would be yes. You will cause a bit of disruption, perhaps, but for most programs it would be minor. If there are any contractual obligations you have to ask to be released, but that would be unusual unless you have already been given some benefits.
If the program is a large one, as many are, the disruption to the program would be minimal unless you were slotted in to some vital position in a lab for which a replacement needs to be found. This is also pretty unlikely.
Send a polite letter.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: I cannot speak to potential immigration issues but yes, absolutely you should do this. As long as you clearly communicate your intentions, and perhaps your reasoning, to your would-be department, there is no issue and they will probably be grateful. If you are not interested in doing a PhD then, trust me, both they and you will be much better off if you go your separate ways. Dealing with burned out students who no longer wish to be there is one of the hardest issues any department with a PhD program has to confront.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: Just an alternative answer here. You may be able to defer your acceptance which basically means that you let the department know that you have been employed and would like to delay your entrance to the program. This changes from university to university so make sure to ask. I think this choice lets you have enough flexibility since you may be able to enter the program in a year if you choose to.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: I accepted a PhD offer but next I had to reject it due to family reasons that I explained to my supervisors and they understood.
A couple of weeks later I have overcome these family hitches and the position is still open as I can see from the site, and of course I would like to join again but I am afraid for the response of supervisors.
What should I do about this?<issue_comment>username_1: Contact the supervisor now, explain your situation and hope for the best. The worst that can happen is that your position has been given to someone else (so be prepared for this). The more you wait the less likely it is that your PhD offer will be renewed.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Just ask. Some supervisors might be a bit puzzled but would be unlikely to object strongly. If you are admitted then you can explain to anyone who asks what your situation is, assuming it isn't so private as to make that improper.
However, it is possible, if unlikely, that you aren't the top-rated candidate anymore, so act fast in case they are still looking. They may have other offers out, actually. But ask and do it quickly and politely, explaining as best you can.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: Be honest with your supervisor and let them know of the entire situation. Since you had to reject the position they might have given your seat to someone else. Let them know that you understand if they already gave your seat away, but that you would like the position if it’s still available. Also if possible make sure that you won’t have to cancel before contacting them again.
Upvotes: 4
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<issue_start>username_0: In a certain STEM graduate course, my professor made a claim and provided an solution without showing any derivations. After doing this, he mentioned that the students should derive the solution at home. I was able to derive the solution, but I was uncertain about some parts of my derivation. Basically, I wasn't sure if I was "right for the wrong reasons." As a result, I typed up my work and emailed it to my professor and mentioned my uncertainty. A part of his response was the following:
>
> "Your work is so thorough!"
>
>
>
Is it appropriate to respond with the following:
>
> Dear Dr. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_, Thank you very much. Sincerely, \_\_\_\_\_\_\_
>
>
>
Does this response seem like I am proud of the compliment? Does it make me seem arrogant? Or is this short response appropriate?
Note: My professor is in my grandparents' generation. He is from Eastern Europe.
Note: I always say "Thank you very much" to any professor's email, but all such emails were NEVER responses to compliments. This is not the first time I have taken a class taught by this professor.<issue_comment>username_1: There’s nothing wrong with thanking your professor for complimenting you. Though I think adding just a bit more will make it more heartfelt.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: This is fine: it's simple and professional. Your professor is very busy and, while they will appreciate your thanks, they are not going to spend more than a few seconds thinking about the phrasing :-)
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: In academic recruiting it is often asked that one has lots of experience which includes being at different institutions preferably in different countries.
I would like to who:
1. What are the potential issues and downfalls for this approach in Academia?
2. How bad is it from an academic career perspective?
3. If it is bad, how can one compensate?<issue_comment>username_1: The reason for wanting to study/work at different institutions is really just so that you see a variety of research approaches. Seeing a variety of organizational approaches doesn't hurt either. But if you study at a place you are in (just a bit) danger of becoming too comfortable. Working with others is a way to break out of that lane.
I question, however, whether working in different countries is all that important, especially if you start out in a large-ish country with a lot of institutions. If you are in Europe, the EU made it possible to do this more easily, of course, as did the general move to English in many places.
But, there are two competing issues.
In the internet age, you can collaborate cross institutions and cross borders much more easily than was possible in the past. Last century if you wanted to collaborate with someone at ETH-Z, for example you either went to Zurich or had to depend on very slow and unreliable mail systems.
The other issue is the pandemic. This has caused a lot of disruption in academia generally and made staying at your doctoral institution for, say, a post-doc much more common as well as much more desirable.
I doubt that, at the moment, staying put will have any negative effects that won't be overcome (even overwhelmed) by good work. So, on your scale, I'd give it (maybe) a 2. In more normal times it would depend more on the actual projects you are involved with. If you aren't stuck in a non-productive situation, then still a 2, but it could escalate if you are. Do good work. Live long and prosper.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: I would like to add a different perspective: moving means adapting to a different work environment, people and group. If you move to a new country additionally, it is also a new culture, new language and completely new life.
If one has been successful at different places, it shows adaptability and flexibility, a willingness to go down the scary path. The first two are certainly good traits to have. All things being equal, I would choose the person who has been exposed to different environments but I would not turn down automatically someone who spent all their life at one institution either. Then again, I am a wanderer myself so probably not completely objective.
(Also, if you are a native English speaker, living for a while in a non-English speaking country can be a formative experience.)
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: A couple of years ago, a colleague and I collaborated on a research report where we each collected a different set of data for our report. At the time, I conducted a set of interviews with one group of participants (school teachers) and my colleague conducted interviews with a completely different set (college profs). We each analyzed our data independently and wrote our own part of the discussion section pertaining to the data set we collected. The result was a research report that we presented at a conference and which we never published in a journal.
My question is: would it be ethical to write a new paper based on the data I collected and excluding my colleague's sdata? Of course, I would have to modify the whole paper starting with the research questions to the literature review and other parts of the paper as well. In other words, I would write a 100% original paper using data collected for a different study. What is your take on this? I appreciate the responses!<issue_comment>username_1: It might not be ethical. If you and your colleague discussed the questionnaire design and the methods you would use to analyze the data then even though you are using only your own data this new work is not yours alone.
If you are simply reusing your data to try to address a different question it is probably OK.
You should discuss how to go forward with your colleague. Perhaps just an appropriate acknowledgment in a discussion of the history of the previous project would do. Perhaps coauthorship is really called for.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: Presumably you designed the experiment together. That makes it a joint work. The best way forward is to find a way to work with your co-author on the paper.
In an extreme case, but ethical, you could write the paper yourself, list both of you as authors, and just get the other person to approve of it. More work for you, of course, but it avoids all the pitfalls.
But, perhaps in seeing a draft, they will decide to contribute more.
If you are willing to state a research question that depends only on your own ideas, re-define the methodology, and then re-gather data to test it is another way forward, that might only require acknowledgement of the other person's early contribution. But the existing data is tainted at this point.
---
See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging>
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: what is the deep meaning of this quote ?
"A good mathematician always soaks his nuts while trying to solve a problem."
by [Grothendieck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck)
Reference:<https://mathoverflow.net/questions/5499/which-mathematicians-have-influenced-you-the-most/5828#5828><issue_comment>username_1: My best guess is that he is just being a bit "dirty" or politically incorrect to make the point that hard problems (nuts) need to be softened up (soaked) in order to attack them.
Much of Einstein's work toward relativity was just a thought experiment based on the experimental work that preceded him. He was trying to determine whether the aether existed as a medium for the propagation of light.
His fundamental insight came from asking himself "If I'm traveling at the speed of light holding a mirror, will I see my image?". He pondered that for a long time and it helped him bridge the gap from 19th to 20th century physics.
Academics aren't always "nice" in the way they express things. It can be interpreted as "playful" or offensive.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Although I do not have resources at this moment to give citations, I can aver that the phraseology about "soaking a nut" (to be able to open it) is one of Grothendieck's (and others') metaphors regarding different methodological attitudes.
Specifically, I believe it was Grothendieck who said something to the effect that Serre would deliver a sharp blow to open a hard nut... while he, Grothendieck, would gradually soak it to soften it, and almost without effort eventually open it.
The specific wording of the quote in the question, if accurate, is a cutesy middle-school-provocative rewriting of the actual comments, to achieve the ambiguity. The original (obvs in French), and the natural English translation, did not achieve such a pseudo-provocative silliness.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: Grothendieck never said what you claim he said.
In fact, this question seems a bit disingenuous. You provided [this MathOverflow link](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/5499/which-mathematicians-have-influenced-you-the-most/5828#5828), but in fact, you have quoted only the last comment in the thread, which is pretty obviously a joke. If you look just two comments above the one you quoted, you'll see that someone already provided the actual quote you are asking about (in English).
Anyway, for the curious, here is the actual quote in the original French:
>
> Je pourrais illustrer la deuxième approche, en gardant l’image de la noix qu’il s’agit d’ouvrir. La première parabole qui m’est venue à l’esprit tantôt, c’est qu’on plonge la noix dans un liquide émollient, de l’eau
> simplement pourquoi pas, de temps en temps on frotte pour qu’elle pénètre mieux, pour le reste on laisse faire
> le temps. La coque s’assouplit au fil des semaines et des mois - quand le temps est mûr, une pression de la main suffit, la coque s’ouvre comme celle d’un avocat mûr à point! Ou encore, on laisse mûrir la noix sous
> le soleil et sous la pluie et peut-être aussi sous les gelées de l’hiver. Quand le temps est mûr c’est une pousse
> délicate sortie de la substantifique chair qui aura percé la coque, comme en se jouant - ou pour mieux dire, la
> coque se sera ouverte d’elle-même, pour lui laisser passage.
>
>
>
and my translation:
>
> I could illustrate the second approach with the image of a nut that one must open. The first parable that came to my mind earlier, is immersing the nut in an emollient, perhaps water, and rubbing it occasionally, so that the water penetrates better, and we let time do its work. The shell softens over the course of weeks or months; when the time is ready, a little pressure from the hand suffices, and the nut opens up like that of a ripe avocado! Or even better, one lets the nut mature under the sun and under the rain and maybe even under the winter frosts. When the time is ripe a delicate sapling will emerge from the substantial flesh that will have pierced the shell, as if playing - or to put it better, the shell will have opened on its own, to let it pass.
>
>
>
So, I disagree a bit with the accepted answer: (1) there is no double entrendre in the original or in a good translation, and (2) the quote is not so much about "recasting" the problem in a more tractable form, but more about giving oneself the benefit of months or years to reflect on a problem from many different angles, rather than trying to force something through on a tight deadline.
Finally, one editorial comment: while there is certainly wisdom here, perhaps we should find a similarly elegant quote espousing the opposite view: applying energy and finishing things quickly is often better than spending years and years in deep thought without actually accomplishing anything.
Upvotes: 4
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<issue_start>username_0: After my PhD and postdoc in computer science I got a permanent position in a company's research lab. This is my first time to work without a supervisor nor colleagues (other members have there own, not related projects), and it is very difficult: I realize my previous successful projects were due to my advisor and colleagues, not me.
It's not the imposter syndrome: I'm not a star; I'm very slow and stupid; I've contributed mostly to the implementation/experiments to my few papers; I've been told I should give up, I don't have any chance in the academic world, I miss important crucial points and I spend too much time in implementation details.
While sometimes I think I have interesting ideas to pursue, I do not have enough knowledge to put them in practice and other brilliant researchers are quicker to publish a better solution than what I would have done (this happened a few times). So I end up watching youtube videos or playing games because what's the point, everything I do will be bad. Unfortunately brilliant researchers don't have time nor incentive to help.
Are there other researchers in the same situation? How do you build up confidence and get back to work?
PS: I'm in Asia.<issue_comment>username_1: I guess your problem is not the absence of ability but an absence of self-confidence. Try to read some books on how to get that going, so you're not fixing the wrong problem. Read 'Self-Reliance' by Emerson.
I am assuming you joined this company for a reason and that you like your job. They hired you because they liked you and your profile. You just can't figure out 'how to do the job'. A good start is to discuss with your senior the short-term and long-term goals of your company. Clarify your tasks. "Do research" is not a clear task. You can even ask them if they are ok with you collaborating with others (e.g., your old team).
Other researchers will have the incentive to help if they feel they will get something out of it. Figure out your strengths: make a table of what you can do best and reach out to collaborators, telling them "how they will benefit" and not "how you will benefit". Also, read the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" to get a general idea.
As for the 'others are too quick' thought, I think two research articles are hardly ever the same. Maybe the idea is the same, but you applied it to a different problem? Maybe the details of the problem were different? Perhaps you used a different algorithm? You have to look for these details that make your research stand out. This is a matter of presentation.
Not all shiny things are stars ;)
Good luck and good going!
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> I have interesting ideas to pursue, I do not have enough knowledge to put them in practice and other brilliant researchers are quicker to publish a better solution than what I would have done
>
>
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Look out for "elephants in the room": issues that are potentially of great consequence, but to which no-one else is paying attention. If you work on issues like that, you don't have to go fast to avoid getting scooped.
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/09
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<issue_start>username_0: I want to apply for a PhD position in country X. My supervisor lives in country Y and wants me to apply only in Y. He is the corresponding author of my 4-5 publications. He said if I want to apply for any other country apart from Y, he would not write a LOR for me. In this case, what should I do?
Also, can a co-author of my 2/3 publication can recommend me? (She's a post doc.)<issue_comment>username_1: Ask him to explain himself, and try to reason with him. His behavior sounds unethical and abusive. It is not for him to decide which country you should live in and get your PhD in. Consider getting one of his colleagues or the department chair to talk to him and advocate for you in a diplomatic way, without applying too much pressure. They may be in a better position to explain to him how wrong such behavior is. Perhaps he is a decent person who simply has some misguided ideas, and following such a conversation will change his mind and all will be well.
But, sadly, if he persists in his refusal, there isn’t much point in trying to force his hand. In that case, you can consider explaining the reason why you are not including a letter from him in your applications to programs in other countries. It is a strange enough reason that I’m guessing people will accept it at face value and not question your sincerity. Of course, you’ll still need to have good letters from other people; get the best ones that you can. If they are good and written by people who have worked with you, you will be fine. Good luck!
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Ask someone else. Anyone you ask to write an LOR is free to decide whether or not to do it for any reason of their choosing or even for no reason at all. But if they don't want to do it, somehow pressuring them into doing it anyway is unlikely to result in a really positive letter that's going to be of any help. Asking someone to write an LOR for you is pretty quick way to find out what someone thinks of you. If they decline, you got your answer and you need to move on.
Realistically, not all that many people get along all that great with their supervisors or want to share their plans with them, especially if that's why they're leaving. (In industry, the popular adage is that no one leaves a bad job, they leave a bad manager.) It's a common experience everyone has sooner or later, so it's unlikely anyone will ever think it's odd if your LORs come from other people.
Unless the person writing your LOR is exceptionally well-known, it's usually far more important what the letter says, e.g., the nature and detail in the observations being reported in support of the recommendation, than who signed it. Best to find people who are unreserved in their willingness to help you -- then help them with whatever info they might find helpful, e.g., your transcripts, CV, any essays you'll submit, etc., so they can write a really good letter.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/10
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<issue_start>username_0: It has been three months since I joined as a postdoc. This is my first post doc position. I work along with another postdoc to set up pipelines for lab projects. This postdoc that I working along has more years of experience as postdoc but he is also new to the project that I am currently employed. Initially, he helped to get familiarized with administrative formalities like setting up an account to run things in the cluster etc. In the first few months, I started running each step in the pipeline and checking each step. As time passed, he became impatient and he discussed with PI and gave the data to another bioinformatician to set up the pipeline. The pipeline has been set up in different workflow system and it would take weeks for us to understand how the pipeline works.
I started working independently on the pipeline as I like to understand the errors in each of the steps before I proceed to the next step in the pipeline. Now, I am close to setting up the pipeline. But, this postdoc feels that I am wasting my time and insists that I follow blindly the pipeline set up by another bioinformatician. It seems difficult for me to work with this postdoc as we follow different methods to finish our work.Sometimes, I have to explain why we see the errors and it takes a whole lot of my time. He also tries to get information from me about the pipeline and does not share any information about the project. I am sidelined and made unaware of the things happening in other projects.
To avoid conflicts with this postdoc, I have started maintaining a digital lab book, in which I update my work. So, time doesn't gets wasted in explaining about the pipeline. I am also going to present the pipeline that I have been working in our lab meeting (to the lab PI and all the members in the lab). I am also going to suggest that scripts that we work in the lab will be made available in GitHub. So, with inputs from the lab presentation, we have one pipeline to follow for our projects.
I am planning to get an appointment with lab PI and tell him that I am interested in independently working on projects. How do I also tell the PI that I have problem working with this postdoc?. Sometimes, my whole day gets wasted dealing with this postdoc. He thinks that I should discuss every step with him. But, I am ignored and not copied in some of the mails. Can someone advice on how to deal with this kind of situation
I didn't use the word 'toxic' just like that, it is because I am being ridiculed for doing my work. For example, when I send query mails to some of the forums which work on the workflow, he would comment it as stupid and unnecessary. He feels that I should check every step with him, before I start running it. If I have to more specific, I would say this as patronizing behavior.
Thanks<issue_comment>username_1: Your lab PI has a vested interest in making sure his lab runs smoothly so that he can do high quality research. That involves ensuring good research takes place, administrivia is addressed (e.g., supplies, bills, approvals, etc), recruiting, and—among other things—addressing personnel issues. As you can probably guess, the last item is probably not the PIs favorite thing to deal with, but it's definitely on the list.
To that extent, if you have an issue, feel free to bring it up. That said, make sure you really clarify exactly what the issue is. Reading your description above I have no idea what the actual issue is (you don't like him? he doesn't like you? one or both of you is doing bad work? trust issues?) or how to deal with it. If you have a complaint, make sure its meaningful, make sure you can state it concisely, and bring at least one recommendation on how the PI can help fix it.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: I'm bit concerned with people just slapping a "toxic" label on this kind of behavior and calling it a day. What if it was a PI? "How to deal with a toxic PI not letting me do things my way"? Convincing others there's value in what you do is a big task, don't just take it for granted and communicate.
And yes, do bring it to PI, outline what you are doing and why. Your coworker postdoc does not see how what you are doing will help the project move forward and it is perfectly normal. They are not being particularly constructive with that, granted, choosing to sidetrack you instead of trying to coordinate efforts but I'd argue that burden is on you (and PI).
My point is, there are generations upon generations of scientists who grew up meeting and fighting *active resistance* to new and shiny techniques from their peers. I'm sorry you feel that way, but it is the bulk of your work as a scientist to clearly show the advantages of new approaches. Sure, getting really good new ideas is hard, but if you somehow thought scientists are supposed to be super progressive and immediately adopt new and better ways of doing something *that everyone else outside of academia does already* - sorry to disappoint. It is very often not the case, and I'd surely object to it being called "toxic". With how thin resources are, some things considered great in industry like CI/CD commonly don't work at all in academia.
Upvotes: 4
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2021/10/11
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<issue_start>username_0: I am currently a 5th year PhD student in math at an American university. I was talking with my parents recently and I told them that I had come to terms with the possibility of me not graduating with my PhD. As we all know in this community, getting a PhD is not a walk in the park. Rather, it is full of sweat, tears, and can even come at the cost of your mental/physical health.
After I told them this, they began to say things like "I'd be very disappointed in you!" ,"I never taught you to be a quitter!","That's not the child I raised!", and proceeded to hang up the phone on me. I usually talk to them regularly, but it has been over a week. I didn't know they were going to take it that personally. All I meant to say was that if I were to not graduate with my PhD due to circumstances out of my control, that I would ultimately be ok with this as there are other things I could do besides working towards a PhD. I never said I was going to quit myself.
Just a bit of background: I have an anxiety disorder and my therapist's advice to treat anxiety of not getting my PhD was to tell myself that it's ok to ultimately not get the PhD and that I am not by any means a lesser person because I didn't graduate with one. Their message is about self-acceptance and awareness and to be kind to myself. But according to my parents, that promotes mediocrity and is a conformist attitude.
I can see both my therapist's and parent's point of view. But at the same time wondered how common this is among PhD students. Am I alone on this or do other PhD students get additional pressure from their parents to graduate? I was also told by them that I needed to graduate soon, as if I was still in high school. I just want to see how others have approached this situation and what your coping mechanisms were.<issue_comment>username_1: I've had experienced something along those lines while undergrad and to a large part, broke off with my parents for a few years. Now, telling you to do the same would be a plain bad advice, but I do believe that now, since you're very much an adult, it is important to have some boundaries in place.
Nothing will change that they are your parents and that they are passionate about your success in life. Quitting after 4+ years in does not sound very productive to me, either - I would also advise you to continue, if just for the concern about being remorseful down the line.
**But these are two separate problems.**
Your struggles with PhD and anxiety is one thing, and your parents giving you some advice is a totally acceptable (and possibly even welcome) thing. Your parents engaging in highly emotional and manipulative behavior, however, is unlikely to help you in any capacity. This kind of talk is treating you as a 7 year old. You are not one for quite a looong time. So, push back. Probably tell them you appreciate their concerns but they are really not helping, and that you will do what is the best for *you*.
And good luck out there.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: I wonder if this could be a "simple" miscommunication. To my understanding the situation is this:
You are struggling and having a difficult time finishing your degree due to anxiety and some external issues. The simple truth that world will not stop if you don't get your PhD and you should not feel guilty in this case makes you feel better. You do not want to give up but the thought that you can helps. However, when you told your parents what they heard was that you want to quit.
**Try to clear this up with your parents. I would do this in an email, since talking to them backfired once already and you gave a clear picture of your feelings in this question.**
As for the contrasting views of your therapist and your parents, I think both are right and you have to find balance. It is always important to be kind to yourself but sometimes you have to do things that are difficult and push yourself to your limits. The difficulty is finding out when to emphasise what. In your case, I agree with @username_1's answer that you should try to finish your degree, adding this: if you can. You (mental) health is more important than a degree. Only you know if you can continue.
As for having similar experiences: my mother would have been OK with me not finishing high school if that was what I truly wanted and if it made me happy. My grandfather was pushy, asking every time when I will be submitting my dissertation and putting me under pressure. They are both professors, they know perfectly well what it is like to get a PhD. I dealt with the pressure by reframing it: it was grandfather's way of telling me he loves me and is concerned by my future. He was trying to be supportive the way he could. Try to think of your parents' reaction the same way: they got upset because they care about you and your future.
I hope this helps. Good luck!
Upvotes: 0
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2021/10/11
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<issue_start>username_0: While working on a paper, my PhD advisor (at a prestigious school, if that matters) sent revisions that included three pages plagiarized from a book. Thankfully I caught this before the paper was submitted, but otherwise it could have had terrible consequences.
The past year of the pandemic was quite hard on me, and this happened just as I was starting to get better. Now I'm back at feeling uncertain, isolated, and this is literally giving me terrible headaches. My semester is completely off the rails, my mood has been affected, and it's hard for me to perform right now.
I've brought up the issue with my advisor, who claimed it was an accidental mistake. We only talked once besides a few emails, and I'm dreading to have another talk about this and next steps. Whether or not this was a mistake, I feel hurt, cheated, and I have lost trust in my advisor. Actually I've lost trust in most of academia at this point — sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded with people that are very unhealthy and maybe a bit crazy.
Am I overreacting to the situation? I know I was in a vulnerable state before this happened, so it's definitely hitting me hard. But I'm also trying to not overreact.
My options at this point are to:
1. quit my PhD
2. change advisor and research field
3. find a co-advisor and stay in the same field
Option 1 is very appealing, since I have a nice life outside of my PhD. However job opportunities are not as good as they could be at this point. Option 2 is scary to me. I'm afraid that very few faculty act with decency and integrity and I don't want to end up in a bad situation. Option 3 would be easiest in terms of finishing my PhD, as long as I can get my productivity back up while regularly interacting with my current advisor.
Any outside, objective opinion on this would be very helpful to me. I haven't yet talked about the issue to anyone in my department, even though it's hard to avoid talking about it with friends.
**Edit:**
People are speculating about the gravity of the incident and the consequences for me if I take one decision over another. The most important things here are that:
* Trust with my advisor was broken and it will be difficult to work with them and trust their advice in the future. **Some people are trying to find ways that it could have been "ok" to plagiarize three pages, but here what matters is that it certainly wasn't ok for me.**
* It is a serious enough incident that both me and my advisor are very careful navigating the situation, and I cannot talk about it freely at my school without that causing problems or risking an investigation taking place.
* I will not make any decision based on internet advice. I have mentors I can talk to and many people I trust in my life. The answers provided here help me gain different perspectives from my own and help me process what is going on. No answer here is going to "cause serious harm to me" or anything like that.
**Edit 2:**
Some people seem to think that quitting my PhD would be flushing my career down the drain. That is not the case. Most PhD graduates in my field go on to work in industry. It's not uncommon for PhD students in my field to quit after being recruited by a famous company. I have many options. Regarding changing research subject, again this is not uncommon in my field which relies on a strong set of core knowledge and skills, and where everything can be tied together in a thesis. There are downsides to doing this in terms of networking, overhead, and continuity, but I've done it before and I know I can do it again. Regarding finding a co-advisor or changing advisor, again that is not uncommon in my field. I'm not helpless, I'm just distraught by what happened.
**Edit 3 (conclusions):** I've concluded that what happened is absolutely unbelievable and amounts to incompetence and/or research misconduct. However, I am also over-reacting in the way that this is affecting my mood and productivity. Realizing the latter should help me work on the mental health issues that I'm facing. Regarding issues with my advisor and next steps, this is something that resources at my university will help with.<issue_comment>username_1: #### At a minimum, you should change advisors
It seems highly implausible to me that a person would accidentally plagiarise three entire pages of another person's book. While I won't entirely rule out the possibility of some innocent explanation, it would be extremely unusual for such a thing to occur by accident. Such an incident strongly suggests research misconduct by your advisor, which could have had an extremely damaging effect on your candidature and your future in academia if you had not caught on to it before peer-review/publication.
In view of that, I recommend ---at a minimum--- that you change to another advisor. You have some options in terms of how you go about doing that, depending on whether or not you wish to report the (possible) plagiarism incident. If you want to report this incident then you can go directly to your Head of Department and explain the matter, and if you do not want to report the incident then you will probably need to speak directly to your supervisor and have him/her take the lead in moving you to someone else. If you are not satisfied with your supervisor's explanation of the incident then you certainly have grounds to go and speak to your Head of Department.
(Also, make sure you thoroughly document the incident and save all relevant documents and emails; send these to your own private email so that you have access to them outside of the university servers.)
Plagiarism of this kind is a big deal in its own right; in this instance it would also be a serious breach of duty towards a higher-degree candidate, since it occurred in the context of a joint publication with you. If you decide to report the matter, it is likely that the university will investigate the circumstances of this to see if (attempted) plagiarism has occurred. Unless there is an innocent explanation for the whole thing, it is likely that they will assign you a different advisor. If the incident is confirmed then the university will likely feel some duty to you for the damage to your candidature, and they ought to do their best to find you a suitable advisor with minimal disruption to your research topic. You might be able to work with other members of your supervisory panel, or they might find you someone who has not been on your panel previously.
Whether or not you wish to quit your PhD candidature entirely is something you will need to determine, but I would suggest you first talk to one of the senior staff in charge of the program and see what other options you have. It would probably be worth trying another advisor first, to see if things improve.
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Other answers are dealing with your academic options, but I want to highlight two things that you said which jumped out at me for other reasons:
>
> The past year of the pandemic was quite hard on me, and this happened just as I was starting to get better. Now I'm back at feeling uncertain, isolated, and this is literally giving me terrible headaches. My semester is completly off the rails, my mood has been affected, and it's hard for me to perform right now.
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> Option 2 is scary to me. I'm afraid that very few faculty act with decency and integrity and I don't want to end up in a bad situation.
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Both of these indicate a high degree of mental fatigue and possibly emotional distress going on in your life. One bad actor is potentially souring you to a whole class of people. This is not a healthy and proportionate response. Regardless of how you proceed academically, please seek out the mental health resources that are available to you (most Universities in the US now have something which is usually free or significantly discounted to students).
Support from a mental health provider will position you to more accurately assess your own needs and desires and evaluate which option is right for you. It will also give you the tools to persevere in that choice, once you’ve made it.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_3: Let's play devil's advocate a bit and try to find any plausible way it could've been a honest mistake.
I can think of exactly one: that they took these three pages as a starting point, pasted into their draft and forgotten about that.
But since you mention other red flags while going with your gut (advisor going into damage control mode etc)... Probably take it with the Department Head - they'd like to know why do you want to change advisor anyway, as per username_1's suggestion, so it's a good idea to anticipate that and go directly to them to rearrange things for you (and possibly have your current one investigated).
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_1: >
> I'm afraid that very few faculty act with decency and integrity and I don't want to end up in a bad situation.
>
>
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One of the potential benefits of this site is that most of the answers and voting come from academics, which means you get to see general reaction of a set of academics to the problem you raise. We are not necessarily a representative group (e.g., we skew heavily to the STEM fields) but you can still get a basic idea of the reaction of a set of academics at different levels, working in different departments, universities, and countries.
In the present case, based on the accepted answer and other highly-upvoted answers, it appears to be the general consensus that the plagiarism is a big deal, and you should leave your present advisor. Some comments on the answer suggest that you go further and report the matter formally. I hope this goes some way towards showing you that most academics do not condone research misconduct, and would work to ensure that a student is not negatively affected by misconduct of an advisor.
One should always bear in mind the tendency of people in institutions to become "captured" by what they perceive to be the interests of the institution and their colleagues, and one should also beware of the phenomenon of "circling the wagons". While this is certainly a real thing (which sadly does occur in academia, just as elsewhere) you are starting from a position where the immediate reaction of most academics is serious concern about the plagiarism you have described.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: ### tl;dr: Seriously consider continuing your Ph.D. despite your feelings
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> I feel hurt, cheated, and I have lost trust in my advisor.
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Then you are one of innumerable Ph.D. candidates who have felt this way, most of them with good reason.
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> Actually I've lost trust in most of academia at this point
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That is mostly relevant for what you want to do *after* the Ph.D. Also remember that "most of academia" is people whom you'll never hear of, from other countries, and whose work you'll never read, so it's not clear that "trust in most of academia" is all that important.
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> sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded with people that are very unhealthy and maybe a bit crazy.
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That may or may not be true, but it is almost orthogonal to whether some of them are unethical.
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> Options 1, 2
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Why should you punish *yourself* for your advisor's conduct?
I mean, if you've just started, then it's not that big of a deal. But if you're in the middle, and have an approved subject, and some to-be-published work done, and prospects of completing enough work to make a Ph.D. dissertation out of - don't throw that away. IMHO.
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> Option 3
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I find this to be a more relevant course of action. You should, however, avoid making it seem to your advisor like you're bringing in someone else to quarrel with them over their ethics, or advisorial practices, or because you think they're unworthy of being your advisor etc. Try to find an unrelated reason to add a co-advisor. And even while you don't have one - don't just put everything on hold. At worst, you'll need to finish your Ph.D. with a POS advisor whom you can't trust... not such an uncommon experience.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: I'm only familiar with CS. When something goes into a book, it has become background knowledge for several years. When someone has a new research result, they will try submitting to a conference or journal, instead of waiting for 2 - 10 years to publish in a book. In CS, even journals are not favorable due to long review time.
Therefore, I don't think your PhD advisor, at a prestigious school, would risk his reputation to copy verbatim background knowledge from a book (*I admit 3 pages background is too much for a paper*). Too little to gain, and too much to loose by doing so.
This is a more likely scenario:
* prof: undergrad A, write a survey on X
* A: here it is (copied verbatim many pages from book)
Then he sent to you the survey to you. I'm not saying this is an acceptable behavior, but it's not something worth quitting PhD for. Saying you loose trust for academia is actually too much. You cannot find plagiarized papers even in 3rd-tier conferences.
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> We only talked once besides a few emails
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I'm very surprised a publishable research could be done with so little collaborations. You should talk with your advisor more to understand the situation.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_6: I can empathise about losing faith in your supervisor – I experienced a similar loss of faith with my supervisor (but for a different reason). I was one of 2 PhD students and unfortunately we experienced different fallouts.
I picked up a second supervisor, got a paper published with him and managed to do enough work of my own to not need to publish with my original supervisor, getting a solo paper published. The other student did not have such luck – she didn't have enough work to publish individually and required our supervisor's co-authorship to publish, which she dragged her heels about for almost a year, endangering the student's entire doctorate.
I bring this up because, as others have said, 3 pages of near copy & paste is too much to be an accident. I cannot get it out of my mind that it might have been malicious. Now one bad academic doesn't ruin the rest and I'd very much suggest trying to stick out your doctorate, even if you don't plan to stay in academia.
However, if you plan to pick up a new supervisor ask yourself if you'll be able to do enough work with the new supervisor to be worth a PhD. By that I mean if your current supervisor said "I refuse to publish with you", could you still get a doctorate? Trying to get a new supervisor could burn a bridge – my original supervisor initially REFUSED to let her other student get a second supervisor. It had to be taken to the head of department and various university rules were trotted out by both sides. A terrible mess and I'm certain was part of the reason she then dragged her feet on submitting their original publication work till after the viva.
If you can get a clean break and feel you can get enough work done with a new supervisor to get a PhD then I'd very much recommend sticking with it – a good supervisor could really brighten your perspective on academia and can be almost parental in their support and ability to lift you up, it's a shame you've had such an experience.
But I'd be wary of any action from your current supervisor, you cannot hand someone the academic equivalent of a live grenade with the pin pulled and then just say "Oops, my bad".
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: 1. report the guy to the appropriate authorities at your university
2. find another adviser ASAP
3. continue your work, but be very careful and go over everything to make sure there's not more suspicious stuff in there
4. good work catching this, you could have got into serious trouble if you hadn't
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_8: First, I'm wondering why you didn't mention how you determined that three pages were plagiarized. Was the source material well-known in your field and therefore easily recognized? Did something (what?) strike you as odd and cause you to carry out a standard test for plagiarism?
You refer to the incident as plagiarism when the insertion occurred in a working draft, not a submitted manuscript. That's getting ahead of the case.
In my opinion, as a former PhD student and former assistant professor, your self-description of your condition suggests that you are not well-equipped for PhD work at present. This one event, which your advisor says was not a deliberate attempt to take credit for someone else's work, has all but devastated you. I refer to these words:
>
> Now I'm back at feeling uncertain, isolated, and this is literally
> giving me terrible headaches. My semester is completly [sic] off the rails,
> my mood has been affected, and it's hard for me to perform right now.
>
>
>
Have you never experienced anything disconcerting before? Compare with some things I had to deal with in a technical job after I had left academia. This is longer than a digression should normally be but without the details, it would be too easy to imagine that I just felt bad for a while. Not so. This was a life or death ordeal involving two healthy and health-focused adults. I found out I had stage 4 cancer, which is generally regarded as unsurvivable, a few weeks after I found out my husband had an inevitably lethal organic brain disease. At least 6 doctors or nurses I encountered in over a year of treatment told me I would not survive the disease. I was in my 40s. I only missed work on chemo days. I went through 9 months of treatment including total hair loss, all-day chemo every three weeks, a portable chemo pump strapped to my torso under my jacket for a total of ten days, and 20 days of morning radiation before my daily 1 hour commute. It ended with two abdominal surgeries classified as "major" performed less than 30 days apart. I told only my immediate boss and he told only his boss. Other than complimenting my hair-cut the first day I wore a wig, none of my coworkers noticed anything different about me during that ordeal. I also arranged for my husband's daily companions and medical care while I was at work, took care of our four large dogs and managed 5 rental units in addition to our home and all of the above. My oncologist advised me not to take a leave of absence so I did not. I didn't consider anything as rash as throwing away my career.
You offered some information about a conversation you had with your advisor after you detected the plagiarism:
"I've brought up the issue with my advisor, who claimed it was an accidental mistake." I doubt they used the term "accidental mistake."
A little later on you wrote:
"Whether or not this was a mistake, I feel hurt, cheated, and I have lost trust in my advisor."
If it was a mistake, why would you feel hurt and cheated and lose trust in your advisor?
You seem not to believe it was a mistake. That means you didn't trust your advisor before this event. Why not believe it was a mistake? Please follow along with this analysis:
Why would your advisor jeopardize tenure by pasting in 3 pages of someone else's writings given how easily journals can discover plagiarism and given that journal editors and reviewers routinely perform a check for plagiarism when evaluating new submissions?
In studying the nature and scope of plagiarism in academia, I didn't come across cases in which a block of stolen text ran for more than a few sentences. Three pages would have been a stand-out event.
Why is it impossible for the problematic three pages to have been inserted and left in place by mistake? Here are three scenarios:
• Can you consider that your advisor might have come across an article that contained some relevant facts or figures and pasted it into your shared draft with the intention of cutting it down to a sentence or two, enclosing the selected material quotation marks and citing the authors? Simply forgetting to edit and format a reference doesn't mean plagiarism was intended or accomplished. I'd call it a mistake.
Maybe the copied material was supposed to have been pasted into a different document, namely one that served as scrapbook of things he or she wanted to read and think about over a weekend? A mistake.
Alternatively, could your advisor have assigned the work he was going to do to a new student or an undergrad, and that person could have pasted in 3 pages from another paper? If so, your advisor might have decided not to discuss the incident with other students. Letting a novice work on a paper was a mistake.
What is more likely? That your advisor was too lazy to write what had to be written and too stupid to just ask you to write it, and both to the degree that he or she was risking the loss of a lifetime of income for doing almost nothing rather than handling a moment of weakness like any normal professor would?
You also wrote "...I'm dreading to have another talk about this and next steps."
Why dread a future conversation if there's no obvious reason it must take place? That is:
• Why do you expect to talk about the insertion of 3rd party material in a rough draft again?
• Why do you have to discuss next steps? Without any discussion next steps are unambiguous:
The draft is in your hands. Determine what it needs, bounce that off your advisor, ask them if they want to meet and/or discuss anything before you get back to work on the paper. Then get back to work.
Your options and their advisability, as I see them:
1. Drop out if you want to. It's hard or impossible to get back in.
2. If you stay, the changes you should make are in your interpretations of the behavior of others and the intensity of your reactions to those you deem "beyond the pale."
a. Don't change fields without doing that.
b. Don't change fields unless you want to flush all your prior work down the drain because you don't believe some errant material in a draft was not intended to remain there when the manuscript was submitted for peer review.
3. Don't seek a co-advisor to complicate your and their and your advisor's lives.
Do you realize that you ruled out the most sensible thing to do if one's advisor is revealed as a plagiarist? It goes like this.
4. Discuss with the department chair or, if preferable, a campus ombudsman or -woman whose role is to help in such a situation. If these authorities agree that your advisor is a plagiarist, request a new advisor from within your department. Request one who can supervise your work in the field you're in now. You'll probably have a new advisor within days. Of course, if the chair or an ombudsperson believes you got the whole thing wrong, all bets are off.
Upvotes: -1
|
2021/10/11
| 867
| 3,461
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm an 3rd year undergraduate student graduating this year studying computer science at a top 20 (read 10-20) school. I'm not sure how to even begin evaluating where I am compared to other students so that I can compile my "reach, target, safety" list, because I'm not sure what exactly admissions committees care about and most of the stuff online seems to be from seemingly disreputable sources. How do I determine what is cared about?
1. Letters of recommendation - obviously matter a lot
2. GPA - seems to matter, but I'm not sure where the cutoff is for Top 10 CS programs. I can find [equivalence tables](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63588), but am not sure how widely used these are used or what the cutoff is for the standardized GPA
3. GRE - very confounding. Many institutions don't require it, seemingly due to COVID. However, given that the schools will take the scores if you choose to provide them, they must consider it to some level. I'm not sure if/how helpful it would be to take or if I misunderstand about the GRE being an unsaid requirement.
4. Statement of purpose - [seems to matter a lot](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/162785), but I'm not sure exactly how much. In terms of actually writing it, it seems like there's [a lot of information](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statement-of-purpose?sort=votes) but it should me somewhat [tailored to each school](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/102107)
5. Internships - [doesn't seem to matter](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20423), but this doesn't seem to make sense. I've done almost exclusively research-based internships that were more grueling/productive than the undergraduate level of research done at university and feel like the quality of these internships speak more towards my level as a researcher than the couple labs
6. Years in university - doesn't seem to matter. I'm a 3rd year student that will likely graduate early, so the opportunities for research were at least 25% lesser (although I suspect more because it's easiest to get good research later).
This is a somewhat broad question, but to summarize - I have a little idea of where I am compared to my peers on each of these metrics. I'm not sure how these metrics are weighted and how I would go about choosing which selection of colleges to apply to<issue_comment>username_1: The way to learn this is to "get in the game". Make some applications. Make a fairly broad search, not just top ten institutions.
But asking the question this way is like standing on the edge of the pool going through a list of things that contribute to good swimming and wondering how you do even before you get wet.
Your ideas about the importance of things seems about right. Get good letters, do well in the courses you are now taking and don't fret about the past. Take the GRE if needed. Write a good future-focused SoP. Have a prof or two review it.
Get wet.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: You should ask your professors for advice, and ask in particular the professors from whom you are requesting letters of recommendation. Considering that you are in a program that regularly sends undergraduates to a variety of graduate programs, they should have a good idea of what programs are more or less likely to accept you. You may have to fill them in on parts of your application they are not familiar with.
Upvotes: 0
|
2021/10/11
| 671
| 3,189
|
<issue_start>username_0: In computer science, in general, the time complexity is one of the important features to be checked before publishing a research paper in a journal.
I am confused about this in deep learning. If I am able to design a model that can outperform the existing architectures for a particular task on some metrics, then is it enough for publishing a paper in deep learning without mentioning anything about the time taken for training?
I got this doubt because of the following reason:
Many research papers in several other domains in computer science generally mention the running time. But when I started reading the research papers in deep learning, the key focus is on the architecture and other hyperparameters, but not on the time complexity. There can be exceptions, but I am asking this question regarding general consensus on publishability in the deep learning research community.<issue_comment>username_1: "Not significant" is too strong. But note that there is theoretical (worst case, usually) and practical time complexity. Many problems can be solved with "inefficient" algorithms if the worst case is unlikely. And complexity is most important for problems that need to be solved frequently on different data, making it more likely that you hit a worst case.
Also, even an exponential time algorithm can be very useful if the 'size' of the inputs can be guaranteed small so that the exponent is small. I once built such an algorithm into a product. One person freaked out, but it worked in practice.
Additionally, if you can choose from among many algorithms it may be best to choose the efficient one (other things being equal), but in the case of few choices you use what you have if you want the answers.
Finally, some problems are so important to answer that in order to get *good* answers you may have to just use an inefficient algorithm. Deep learning may be one of these problems, since many existing approaches seem to come up with scary conclusions.
So, important, yes. But not the only consideration.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: For most applications inference time is much more important than training time. The general idea is that you do training once, and even if it took 4 days, you can evaluate new instances within fractions of a second so the training time was well invested.
For (most) non learning methods training time and inference time are the same so the time complexity matters a lot.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: I don't think this statement is completely true. There are many papers which mention about the run time in Deep learning. Interestingly, there are quite few papers out there analysing run times for "Greener deep learning".
Also, another reason why a good chunk of paper do not have run times mentioned is because it isn't important to the task. Most, if not all times, choosing the right metric to evaluate one's model is of utmost importance and the run time not affecting the overall objective of the problem is quite common. Hence it is not included.
But all papers which have GitHub repos generally mention the runtime and computer resources required to run their code.
Upvotes: 0
|
2021/10/11
| 646
| 2,839
|
<issue_start>username_0: Is sending a shared spreadsheet with the university names, deadlines, and a box to check when completed be something beneficial or appreciated by my recommenders? I thought maybe it would be nice for them to have all the info there and also get to see if they forgot about a particular application.<issue_comment>username_1: I see no harm in asking, but since it's unlikely you are the only person they are writing letters for, they may already have their own system and decline to use yours (or forget).
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: This is exactly what I did when I applied to grad school. One of my recommenders asked me to create such a sheet, and I shared similar lists with the other recommenders, after checking if they would prefer to have them.
It is a good idea, but ask first, particularly if you want them to check a box after submitting each letter. It might otherwise look a bit presumptuous and as if you were telling them how to organize their work.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: Personally, if I were writing multiple recommendation letters for a student, I would find that extremely helpful. It also shows that you are systematic and well-organised, which is something I would note (to your benefit) in my recommendation.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: It's helpful to get a concise list of the schools a student is applying to and the dates, but putting it into the email request is enough for me. TBH, if the list of schools you're applying to is so long it takes a spreadsheet to keep track of all them, the spreadsheet isn't really a solution to the actual problem.
I'm always delighted to write the first couple of letters for a student because I'm always so happy they're going on to graduate school. I think that's a great choice for most students who did well as undergrads. Once I've written the first LOR for a former student, it's pretty quick to revise it for the next school. But once I've done 3 or 4 letters for the same student, the thrill definitely begins to wear off.
Possibly more helpful than the spreadsheet are the basics: copies of your transcript, CV or resume, any essays you expect to submit with your applications, and suggestions for anything you hope they might emphasize in their letter. Completely optional, a photo can also be helpful for reminding them who you are. (It's also helpful to plan ahead and cultivate future references by participating in class and hanging out in their office hours so they get to know you well enough they don't need to be reminded who you are.)
Also, here in the US, if your reference knows you as a student, pretty much everything they know about you is confidential under FERPA unless you *explicitly* grant them permission to discuss your academic career and performance.
Upvotes: 3
|
2021/10/11
| 1,179
| 4,302
|
<issue_start>username_0: For this question I exclude the Nobel Peace prize.
A few years ago there was some [talk](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06879-z) by the Nobel committees and the Nobel Foundation board to be more inclusive. The committee explicitly called for nominations to take into account geography and gender for 2019. There was apparently some increase in nominations of female academics, and in 2019 and 2020 there were also a few female laureates. This year, however, all Nobel laureates (excluding Maria Ressa who won half the Peace prize) are male.
I'm wondering if the Nobel Foundation has said anything about this.<issue_comment>username_1: The BBC has posted an [article](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58875152) stating:
>
> <NAME>, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said they want people to win "because they made the most important discovery... not because of gender or ethnicity"
>
>
>
It goes on further:
>
> "It's sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing. And there's so much more to do," <NAME> told the AFP news agency.
>
>
>
So, they recognize that this year was heavily male, but will not go for quotas.
Upvotes: 8 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: The question asks whether the Nobel **Foundation** has said anything about the gender ratio. As far as I am aware, they have not. However, that's probably not the right question to ask. The foundation itself is not involved in the process of selecting the laureates, so it is more useful and relevant to look for statements from the different Nobel committees or the prize awarding institutions (which, again are separate from the foundation). [The existing answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176592/17254) includes some quotes from <NAME>, secretary general of one of the prize awarding institutions.
There is also a [recent Science news article](https://www.science.org/content/article/one-reason-men-often-sweep-nobels-few-women-nominees) with some statements from members of several Nobel committees. They want more women to be nominated, but do not consider that the full story.
>
> “The fraction of women among the nominated people is very low and I don’t think it represents the [fraction of] women that were doing science even 20 years ago,” says <NAME>, a biophysical chemist at Chalmers University of Technology who is one of two women on the eight-person chemistry committee. “We want to have more women nominated,” agrees <NAME>, an experimental physicist at Chalmers who is a member of the physics selection committee.
>
>
> Wittung-Stafshede adds that, in addition to finding ways to boost the number of women who are nominated, the committees might also want to broaden their view of what counts as a Nobel-worthy discovery. “It’s possible we miss certain topics and candidates because we are biased and have a narrow view of what is an important chemistry discovery. We may need to think more outside the normal box.”
>
>
> She agrees with those who say the scarcity of women winning prizes is due in part to the systemic disadvantages women face throughout their careers. But that explanation is not the whole picture, she adds. “That’s kind of a passive way to approach the problem. … We also need to address it ourselves,” she says of the Nobel committees.
>
>
>
They also effectively state that there are no quotas. The article further discusses the representation on the Nobel committees themselves.
>
> The committees don’t consider gender when they discuss which discovery to award a Nobel Prize, Olsson says. “The focus is on science.” But she thinks it’s important for women to participate in the selection process and ceremonies because they can serve as role models. “We make sure that women are there and presenting the prizes.”
>
>
> “The few women we have at high positions in academia are used a lot, often too much, for committee work,” Wittung-Stafshede says. “One should be careful around this, to save women’s time. But in the case of the Nobel Prize committees … it is extremely important. It sends a clear signal we care about this topic.”
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3
|
2021/10/11
| 1,177
| 4,428
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am in the process of contacting potential advisors at various universities, and finding out if they would be willing to take me on as a student, and then mention this in the application. However, I have run into a problem. The area of research I am interested in (desalination & water treatment) typically comes under the Civil and Environmental dept. in the US, and so do the faculty. Where I am from, this topic comes under Chemical Engineering. I have done my bachelors and masters in ChemE and want to do my PhD in it as well.
So now I would like to know if I mention that I want to work with professors from these departments in my ChemE PhD application, will it hurt my chances? Do I now have to consider applying to CEE Department instead?<issue_comment>username_1: The BBC has posted an [article](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58875152) stating:
>
> <NAME>, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said they want people to win "because they made the most important discovery... not because of gender or ethnicity"
>
>
>
It goes on further:
>
> "It's sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing. And there's so much more to do," <NAME> told the AFP news agency.
>
>
>
So, they recognize that this year was heavily male, but will not go for quotas.
Upvotes: 8 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: The question asks whether the Nobel **Foundation** has said anything about the gender ratio. As far as I am aware, they have not. However, that's probably not the right question to ask. The foundation itself is not involved in the process of selecting the laureates, so it is more useful and relevant to look for statements from the different Nobel committees or the prize awarding institutions (which, again are separate from the foundation). [The existing answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176592/17254) includes some quotes from <NAME>, secretary general of one of the prize awarding institutions.
There is also a [recent Science news article](https://www.science.org/content/article/one-reason-men-often-sweep-nobels-few-women-nominees) with some statements from members of several Nobel committees. They want more women to be nominated, but do not consider that the full story.
>
> “The fraction of women among the nominated people is very low and I don’t think it represents the [fraction of] women that were doing science even 20 years ago,” says <NAME>, a biophysical chemist at Chalmers University of Technology who is one of two women on the eight-person chemistry committee. “We want to have more women nominated,” agrees <NAME>, an experimental physicist at Chalmers who is a member of the physics selection committee.
>
>
> Wittung-Stafshede adds that, in addition to finding ways to boost the number of women who are nominated, the committees might also want to broaden their view of what counts as a Nobel-worthy discovery. “It’s possible we miss certain topics and candidates because we are biased and have a narrow view of what is an important chemistry discovery. We may need to think more outside the normal box.”
>
>
> She agrees with those who say the scarcity of women winning prizes is due in part to the systemic disadvantages women face throughout their careers. But that explanation is not the whole picture, she adds. “That’s kind of a passive way to approach the problem. … We also need to address it ourselves,” she says of the Nobel committees.
>
>
>
They also effectively state that there are no quotas. The article further discusses the representation on the Nobel committees themselves.
>
> The committees don’t consider gender when they discuss which discovery to award a Nobel Prize, Olsson says. “The focus is on science.” But she thinks it’s important for women to participate in the selection process and ceremonies because they can serve as role models. “We make sure that women are there and presenting the prizes.”
>
>
> “The few women we have at high positions in academia are used a lot, often too much, for committee work,” Wittung-Stafshede says. “One should be careful around this, to save women’s time. But in the case of the Nobel Prize committees … it is extremely important. It sends a clear signal we care about this topic.”
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3
|
2021/10/12
| 1,159
| 4,359
|
<issue_start>username_0: I'm a US student applying to PhD programs in pure mathematics this semester. Most of the programs I am applying to are highly ranked schools which are making the subject GRE optional this semester. That being said, I scored an 810 (76th percentile) on the exam in September. I believe an 810 would usually correspond to a higher percentile (maybe 80th) regularly, but I assume that since the test is optional this round, the pool of people taking the exam is better than usual. I was wondering if, assuming the rest of my application is quite strong, I should submit this score. I'm not sure if this makes a difference but I also happen to be an ethnic minority (latino). Thanks.<issue_comment>username_1: The BBC has posted an [article](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58875152) stating:
>
> <NAME>, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said they want people to win "because they made the most important discovery... not because of gender or ethnicity"
>
>
>
It goes on further:
>
> "It's sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing. And there's so much more to do," <NAME> told the AFP news agency.
>
>
>
So, they recognize that this year was heavily male, but will not go for quotas.
Upvotes: 8 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: The question asks whether the Nobel **Foundation** has said anything about the gender ratio. As far as I am aware, they have not. However, that's probably not the right question to ask. The foundation itself is not involved in the process of selecting the laureates, so it is more useful and relevant to look for statements from the different Nobel committees or the prize awarding institutions (which, again are separate from the foundation). [The existing answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176592/17254) includes some quotes from <NAME>, secretary general of one of the prize awarding institutions.
There is also a [recent Science news article](https://www.science.org/content/article/one-reason-men-often-sweep-nobels-few-women-nominees) with some statements from members of several Nobel committees. They want more women to be nominated, but do not consider that the full story.
>
> “The fraction of women among the nominated people is very low and I don’t think it represents the [fraction of] women that were doing science even 20 years ago,” says <NAME>, a biophysical chemist at Chalmers University of Technology who is one of two women on the eight-person chemistry committee. “We want to have more women nominated,” agrees <NAME>, an experimental physicist at Chalmers who is a member of the physics selection committee.
>
>
> Wittung-Stafshede adds that, in addition to finding ways to boost the number of women who are nominated, the committees might also want to broaden their view of what counts as a Nobel-worthy discovery. “It’s possible we miss certain topics and candidates because we are biased and have a narrow view of what is an important chemistry discovery. We may need to think more outside the normal box.”
>
>
> She agrees with those who say the scarcity of women winning prizes is due in part to the systemic disadvantages women face throughout their careers. But that explanation is not the whole picture, she adds. “That’s kind of a passive way to approach the problem. … We also need to address it ourselves,” she says of the Nobel committees.
>
>
>
They also effectively state that there are no quotas. The article further discusses the representation on the Nobel committees themselves.
>
> The committees don’t consider gender when they discuss which discovery to award a Nobel Prize, Olsson says. “The focus is on science.” But she thinks it’s important for women to participate in the selection process and ceremonies because they can serve as role models. “We make sure that women are there and presenting the prizes.”
>
>
> “The few women we have at high positions in academia are used a lot, often too much, for committee work,” Wittung-Stafshede says. “One should be careful around this, to save women’s time. But in the case of the Nobel Prize committees … it is extremely important. It sends a clear signal we care about this topic.”
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3
|
2021/10/12
| 1,063
| 3,986
|
<issue_start>username_0: With reference to manuscripts, does 'ensuring pagination' only mean that each page is numbered, or does it mean that lines are numbered as well? Is there an equivalent word/phrase for numbering lines?
The question is about the general use of the term, rather than a journal/publisher specific requirement.<issue_comment>username_1: The BBC has posted an [article](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58875152) stating:
>
> <NAME>, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said they want people to win "because they made the most important discovery... not because of gender or ethnicity"
>
>
>
It goes on further:
>
> "It's sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing. And there's so much more to do," <NAME> told the AFP news agency.
>
>
>
So, they recognize that this year was heavily male, but will not go for quotas.
Upvotes: 8 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: The question asks whether the Nobel **Foundation** has said anything about the gender ratio. As far as I am aware, they have not. However, that's probably not the right question to ask. The foundation itself is not involved in the process of selecting the laureates, so it is more useful and relevant to look for statements from the different Nobel committees or the prize awarding institutions (which, again are separate from the foundation). [The existing answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176592/17254) includes some quotes from <NAME>, secretary general of one of the prize awarding institutions.
There is also a [recent Science news article](https://www.science.org/content/article/one-reason-men-often-sweep-nobels-few-women-nominees) with some statements from members of several Nobel committees. They want more women to be nominated, but do not consider that the full story.
>
> “The fraction of women among the nominated people is very low and I don’t think it represents the [fraction of] women that were doing science even 20 years ago,” says <NAME>, a biophysical chemist at Chalmers University of Technology who is one of two women on the eight-person chemistry committee. “We want to have more women nominated,” agrees <NAME>, an experimental physicist at Chalmers who is a member of the physics selection committee.
>
>
> Wittung-Stafshede adds that, in addition to finding ways to boost the number of women who are nominated, the committees might also want to broaden their view of what counts as a Nobel-worthy discovery. “It’s possible we miss certain topics and candidates because we are biased and have a narrow view of what is an important chemistry discovery. We may need to think more outside the normal box.”
>
>
> She agrees with those who say the scarcity of women winning prizes is due in part to the systemic disadvantages women face throughout their careers. But that explanation is not the whole picture, she adds. “That’s kind of a passive way to approach the problem. … We also need to address it ourselves,” she says of the Nobel committees.
>
>
>
They also effectively state that there are no quotas. The article further discusses the representation on the Nobel committees themselves.
>
> The committees don’t consider gender when they discuss which discovery to award a Nobel Prize, Olsson says. “The focus is on science.” But she thinks it’s important for women to participate in the selection process and ceremonies because they can serve as role models. “We make sure that women are there and presenting the prizes.”
>
>
> “The few women we have at high positions in academia are used a lot, often too much, for committee work,” Wittung-Stafshede says. “One should be careful around this, to save women’s time. But in the case of the Nobel Prize committees … it is extremely important. It sends a clear signal we care about this topic.”
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3
|
2021/10/13
| 1,006
| 4,694
|
<issue_start>username_0: The vast majority of faculty applications I've made explicitly require the candidate to submit both a research statement and a teaching statement, and the institution usually describes the expected length and topics to be covered. However, a few institutions don't ask for any such statements, even though the position is described as one that involves both research and teaching. That is, neither the job posting itself, nor the application instructions accompanying the online form, make *any* mention whatsoever of a research or teaching statement, even though they may specifically enumerate other documents to be submitted (cover letter, CV, list of references, writing samples, etc.). In such cases, the application form usually does allow one to submit one or more arbitrary attachments, so it would certainly be *possible* to submit research and teaching statements. My question is, *should* I use this functionality to submit research and teaching statements? Or does the conspicuous absence of a research/teaching statement requirement in the application instructions mean that the search committee doesn't want them at this stage in the application process? (For all I know, they prefer to get a brief overview of the candidate's research and teaching qualifications from the cover letter and CV, and then ask for further details if the candidate makes it to an interview.)
I usually spend a lot of time customizing my statements (by mentioning how I'd fit or expand the institution's research profile, opportunities for collaboration with local colleagues, which existing courses I could teach, how I could further develop the curriculum, etc.) but I don't want to do all this if the statements are going to be ignored. Conversely, if any statements I submit *are* going to be read, then I don't want to submit generic ones for fear that I'd come across as lazy, uninformed, or taking a shotgun approach to applications.
For further context, all of the positions I've had this dilemma with have been at UK universities (and relatively highly ranked ones at that).
Also, I understand that the best course of action for any given case may be to write to the contact person listed on the job ad, though I'm still interested in hearing from the Academia SE community whether these sorts of postings really don't want research/teaching statements, and what happens to any statements that get submitted anyway.<issue_comment>username_1: I think it is farily common to not ask for specific teaching or research statements in a job application in the UK. However, it may well be that the panel expects the key points of what would be in teaching and research statements to be found in the cover letter. In a cover letter for a UK job application, I would look at the person specification and write in the cover letter a concise description of how I meet that criteria. So if the person spec said "Lead an internationally competetitve research program", I would explain in the cover letter how my research program would be internaltionally competitve. If the person specification said "Provide high quality teaching in X, Y and Z", I would write in the cover letter what I understood "high quality teaching" to look like, and provide, or point to evidence in my CV, that I could provide it.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: I have applied for multiple lectureships/assistant professorships in the UK and have never submitted a research or teaching statement. It's not common in the UK, and while I don't think you'll be penalised if you do submit them, I'm not convinced they'll be read at all. My experience in the UK is that it's a fairly rigid process: committees might literally put your cover letter next to person specification, and assess how well you've addressed each essential/desirable criteria.
I much prefer the UK process: I got a permanent position here based on a CV, covering letter & 60-minute interview. No job talk, no extended campus visit, no sample syllabi, teaching/research/diversity statements or 437 other documents.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: As others have pointed out, statements on research and teaching are sometimes required and sometimes not. Setting that aside, as a general rule, you can give additional material in any job application if you think it will help your application. If you think your teaching and research statements are particularly strong, or exhibit some strength in your fit for the position, you should feel free to add them to your application. Use your cover letter to explain anything unusual about your application, such as why you have chosen to include additional material.
Upvotes: 0
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2021/10/13
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<issue_start>username_0: Suppose we define an acronym in a scientific paper.
Should we do it like this?
>
> (...) We call this approach the First Output Once (FOO) (...)
>
>
>
Or like this?
>
> (...) We call this approach the first output once (FOO) (...)
>
>
><issue_comment>username_1: It doesn't really matter. Pick the option you prefer, and then the important thing is to be consistent throughout the whole paper.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: As mentioned by others, there is no definitive rule (except if defined by the journal). However, let me give you a reason for and against capitalization.
On the one hand, capitalization makes it clearer and easier to see what the acronym stands for. Especially if the acronym is long or uses multiple letters from the same word, capitalization can be useful.
However, I have seen referees see capitalization as "condescending" to the reader, in the sense that it implies that the reader could not have figured out what the acronym stands for without it.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: Capitalisation where you wouldn’t expect it orthographically is irritating and breaks the reading flow, so I would avoid it whenever possible.
Rarely, it can be helpful to clarify where your acronym comes from by typographically emphasising the respective letters, but capitalisation is no common emphasis (except for all caps, but that doesn’t work here). Rather I would use boldface. It is clearly emphasising without breaking any spelling rules or similar:
>
> We call this approach ***f**irst **o**utput **o**nce* (FOO).
>
>
>
This has the advantage that it also works if your acronym contains lowercase letters, stands for proper names, other acronyms, and similar.
For example:
>
> We call this ***d**irected **a**synchronous **Mo**nte **C**arlo **les**son* (DAMoCLes)
>
>
>
(Note that I would opt for no emphasis at all in either example, but then they are obviously just examples.)
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: You capitalize the initial letters of a **proper noun**. There is no rule that you would capitalize letters merely because you want to make an initialism out of them. You may be getting confused because long proper nouns are often turned into initialisms. It is only proper nouns that are capitalized.
Upvotes: 0
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2021/10/13
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<issue_start>username_0: I recently received some reviewer's comments on a paper I have under review.
One reviewer (out of three) in particular has raised a large number of points. Some are very clear and target specific weaknesses in the paper (like 'do uncertainty calculations there' or 'are the findings robust to alternate choices of paramets *x*', etc).
However, a number of issues stand out in variations of the following ways:
1. They don't address weaknesses or omissions in the paper, rather they ask for additional explorative analyses that are outside the scope of the original paper.
2. They are open-ended, in the sense that there's no clear conditions under which the issue has clearly been addressed. Often they are downright 'rabbit holes' that can't pausibly be 100% exhaustively explored.
3. The paper is fairly clearly scoped in the issues ask for highly labor-intensive analyses outside of that scope, without arguing that this is necessary to answer the research questions.
In short, some of issues seem more like additional research ideas that actual issues with the paper. I'm uncertain how to best handle this. Can I just plainly state that while interesting to persue in future work, that is outside of the scope? Or would I be better off doing some short analyses (that I fear will only raise more questions, cf. point 2 above)? Or some third options? What are your experiences and advice regarding this type of situation?<issue_comment>username_1: >
> Can I just plainly state that while interesting to persue in future work, that is outside of the scope?
>
>
>
Yes.
In your rebuttal letter, acknowledge that the reviewer's suggestion is interesting but you don't have time/resources to investigate right now. If you want to quantify the extra work you can ("would require hiring three additional post-docs and purchasing $1 million of new equipment" or whatever) but you can also just say "out of scope", or "too labor intensive". Then, add a few sentences about the reviewers suggestion to your future work section.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> Can I just plainly state that while interesting to pursue in future work, that is outside of the scope?
>
>
>
Yes, if proposed experiments are not possible or would take as much effort as the rest of the paper (that is, it's asking for a whole new paper in addition), it's fine to say it's out of scope.
>
> Or would I be better off doing some short analyses (that I fear will only raise more questions, cf. point 2 above)?
>
>
>
Sometimes, reviewers ask for new experiments that you've already done in some fashion, though, or you can offer other data to support the same lines of inquiry even if it's not the "ideal" approach. In those cases, it would certainly make sense to do some brief analyses of what you have and present them, even if it's not quite complete. I find it common to see "half-done" analyses added to papers that make me speculate that they were added last-minute by a reviewer suggestion; generally, you can frame such things as exploratory and if they're added in the midst of peer review they won't typically raise deeper scrutiny, as long as they don't add wild new conclusions. You can also ask the editor's advice/preference.
>
> Or some third options? What are your experiences and advice regarding this type of situation?
>
>
>
A third option, related to the first two, is to explicitly *discuss* these possibilities, rather than doing them. Add the proposed experiments to the discussion section, possibly supported by preliminary analyses in that direction.
I've certainly had reviewers ask for some relatively ridiculous (in terms of cost and scope) add-ons, and some utterly ridiculous ones too (such as proposing experiments that would never ever be ethically permitted in humans; I think this is a case where a busy reviewer briefly forgot which primate was being discussed); editors are familiar with these requests and will respond accordingly to your response.
Do consider, however, that sometimes there is a big hole in your work, and the added experiments are really the only way to address it. Hopefully that doesn't describe your case, but know that it also isn't necessary to address every possible avenue for criticism; it's simply not ever possible to do so, there's a reason that research progresses incrementally.
Whatever ends up fitting your paper best, do be courteous and appreciative to the reviewer in your response. I think seeing some next steps indicates a reviewer is rather excited about your work and sees the future potential in it, too - these are good things.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: Just the normal reminder that when your write your rebuttal to the review, your doing so to the editor not the referee. While the editors will take on board what a referee says, they are also human. So if you explain carefully why something would be inappropriate for inclusion in this paper (be it the time needed to complete, out of scope, or just a plain misunderstanding of what you did) then the editor should take that on board.
That said its also usually makes things easier to give a little ground even to inappropriate suggestions. Like adding some citations or a few sentences discussing future work. Just so it doesn't look like your completely ignored what the referee asked for (they presumably think what they asked for was appropriate).
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: I want to apply for a PhD in Canada. The webpage of the university says that I have to submit "transcripts for all current and previous post-secondary study". Does that include high school transcripts?<issue_comment>username_1: No. Post secondary is undergraduate and beyond
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: No. Secondary refers to grades 7 through 12 in the US; Canada should be similar. It's called secondary because it comes after the primary grades K through 6. Junior high is usually grades 7 and 8. High school is typically grades 9 through 12, so post-secondary is after high school, meaning college and graduate school and any vocational or certification training.
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: While your high school studies count as secondary study, if you did AP classes (especially if you used them towards your degree) or vocational classes that gave some kind of trade certificate (especially higher level ones) they are "post-secondary" even though you did them before finishing secondary study, so the university probably wants them officially documented.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/14
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm reviewing a scholarship essay for a younger cousin. In the essay, she has taken a tone that I would consider too "casual". I don't know if "casual" is the right word, but it is a style of writing that I was taught not to use when I was in school. In her essay she uses many of the following kinds of phrases:
* "Well, ...."
* "Nobody tells you, ... "
* "..., to put it lightly."
* "Let's face it, ..."
Whenever I've come across this style of writing in an academic or corporate environment, I've always assumed that the writer didn't recognize the amount of room between what they submitted and what I would consider "better" writing. If I see a comma splice, I can send a link to a thousand resources calling that out as improper. I have a harder time making an argument that using colloquialisms like the above are "wrong" and I'm afraid of stepping on the writer's voice. I've found resources on [academic tone](https://www.antioch.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Academic-Tone-for-Formal-Writing.pdf), but I'm afraid those suggestions may be too formal. Are casual phrases appropriate for a scholarship essay or would alternative word choice be advised?<issue_comment>username_1: If you want some less formal suggestions, as well as some explanations about why is that so, may I offer you some notes from [the ThesisWhisperer](https://thesiswhisperer.com/2021/05/05/how-to-make-your-dissertation-speak-to-experts/) (do check "more posts like that" as well). In short, it is absolutely acceptable in informal communication (blog posts, SE answers and such) but falls short wherever a certain jargon is needed. These "formal-sounding" verbal constructs are a part of it, they are needed to help conveying certain nuances. In particular, two of the arguably
biggest quirks of academic writing - use of passive voice and avoidance of the common SVO order - help avoiding the writing sounding subjective (not desirable when communicating scientific ideas!).
I've also seen/written "Well, ..." and "..., to put it lightly" in reviews but not the actual papers, FWIW.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: I've helped a number of undergraduates apply for, and get, scholarships.
It is absolutely OK and desirable to be informal, but the examples you've given are colloquial. Your cousin needs to get rid of them. You can help her. The difficulty will be to get rid of the colloquialisms while remaining informal. Avoid the passive voice and under no circumstances use phrases like "the author..."
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/14
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<issue_start>username_0: After completing my phd, my advisor changed his behavior with me, starting to keep a certain distance, avoiding conversations like the ones we had throughout the phd. About 6 months later, he intimidated me with a video call and then removed me from the position of first author of an article we were writing, one of the results of my thesis. About 10 months later he published the article without my name.
After about a year and a half of defending the thesis, he repeated this, excluded me from authorship for not agreeing to cite the first paper and another result of the thesis of another student. Then he published a new article, also a result that emerged in the already published thesis of his student.
Prior to these two articles, he had published another result of my thesis hidden from me. But I found out and he was very angry with me, even offending me by email.
In this way, he stole the top 3 results of my thesis (perhaps the only ones at the publishing level directly), published them in high-impact journals in the field, intimidated me by email for the questions I asked when I was participating in the preparation of articles and acts like a gangster with his students, robbing and intimidating those who find out.
This fact happened (and currently happens) in Brazil, a country with a high history of corruption, in a renowned university, with a very influential professor in his area, but with several dubious scientific attitudes and postures. During the relationship I had with him, I identified other cases of abuse and improper attitude from him toward his mentees.
I would like you to help me know how to proceed. Do you think it's worth going through local legislation, any international organization that can assess, or divulge his e-mails to the community with the threats and nonsense he said, and even expelled me from the authorship of the works?
Brazil is going through a difficult time in government, being very difficult to have a position as a researcher. I am thinking of continuing the research on my own, but I would not like to open up the results, nor let this be repeated for other researchers in this area. This greatly harms science, a posture like this is not acceptable, further in times as difficult as that of the pandemic and the current Brazilian government (a fascist that has greatly harmed science in Brazil).<issue_comment>username_1: Nothing is going to happen if you don't report the behavior. The two obvious places where you can report things are:
* Your former institution: Your previous adviser's department head, dean, or if there is one the university's ethics office (in the US typically located in the office of the Vice President of Research or similar).
* The journals in which the papers in question have appeared: Typically with the editor-in-chief or the publishing board of the organization that publishes the journal.
From your description, publishing papers without your name sounds like a pretty obvious breach of professional ethics. Assuming that you still have emails and/or early drafts of these papers, it should also be quite clear to prove what happened.
Whether reporting these issues is actually going to lead to action is a different matter. Cynics may attribute this to those in power protecting each other. Realists might say that it is just such an unpleasant thing to deal with: It's going to take a long time to read through all of the evidence, and the outcome is going to one where nobody ever looks good, including the people who did the investigation; as a consequence, nobody is excited to take on this kind of job. But, if you don't try, nothing is going to change.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: ### Contact the journals the papers were published in and ask for them to be retracted.
It is standard academic ethics that papers are not to be published without the consent of all of their authors, and that everyone who has contributed to a paper is to be credited as an author; papers that fail to do so shouldn't be published.
Being unilaterally removed from authorship of a paper that is then published without your consent is grounds for retraction, as is modifying your thesis into a paper that is published without your authorship and consent.
I would not bother with any legal process; I would simply contact the journals where the articles were published, inforn them of the unethical behaviour of your former advisor, then request that the paper be retracted.
Upvotes: 1 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/14
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<issue_start>username_0: In this situation in which Person (X) was approached by Person (Y) with a project idea, which is to be published as a research paper.
Person (X) has written the entire code, collected the dataset, ran all tests and prepared the outputs for the project. The time taken for this was around 2 months (approx.)
Person (Y) prepared the manuscript for the paper (only text) where as the algorithmic details, flow charts, outputs were provided by Person (X).
In the first draft of the paper, Person (Y) gives himself first authorship on his own. The point to be noted here is Person (X) is not backed by any academic gains in form of LOR from the academic guide of Person (Y), Person (X) contributed as an independent contributor to the paper. Now, Person (Y) claims he'll consult about this with his academic guide, who's the third author of this paper.
My question here is:
1. Who has more contribution in this paper (which is basically a practical/project paper) the one who has written the code (X) or the one who wrote the manuscript (Y)?
2. How to raise this dispute if it is not resolved with mutual discussion?<issue_comment>username_1: You pose two different questions here.
However, there is a big assumption in your thinking:
>
> The point to be noted here is Person (X) is not backed by any academic
> gains in form of LOR from the academic guide of Person (Y)
>
>
>
No, it has not be to noted at all, the point to be noted is not that one. Authorship is not an exchange of favor. From how you write it, it transpires as a possible outcome of collaborations in your conutry/cultural environment, however it is despicable (no offense intended, we are all small cogs in the big university systems ... but the sooner we realize what is wrong, the better).
Back to your questions: it is difficult to estabilish 1., about 2. you can resort to having explicit mention of who did what in the Acknowledgments section (I have seen papers having contributions from authors added there).
You did most of the practical work, but who had the incpetion for your work and who draw the conclusions from all your work is Person (Y). Your work took 2 months. What if Person (Y) thinking to define experiments and to analyze your reults took 6 months? what would you think?
Person (Y) without your work would have not written the paper, but would haye you thought about the idea presented in the paper without Person (Y)?
Final line for the casual reader: main authorship is overrated [EDIT] but please please sort out authorship BEFORE starting working on a certain idea. If you really care about discussing authorship, please note that such relevant discussion has already been published ([Riesenberg and Lundberg, 1990](http://doi:10.1001/jama.1990.03450140079039)) and cited plenty of times .
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Both of your contribution is significant. One might argue that X's did all the work of the paper as they acquired the results necessary for the paper to exist anyways. However, without proper body and discussion, the results would mean nothing.
I think, both deserve first authorship and you can submit to a journal as co-first authors (equal contribution). Since X has done all the leg work, they can be first name. But order won't matter as both of you are first authors here.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_3: Just as it is impossible to objectively compare the intrinsic work of two pieces of research in very different fields, there is no objective answer to which author has more contribution in this case. This might appear unfair, but is based on the following objective reality:
(1) Writing a manuscript is a very significant part of the research process. It may be reasonably argued that research communication is as important as conducting experiments or analyzing results.
(2) A general rule of thumb in many disciplines is that the first author has conducted the experiments, written the manuscript **and** is able to justify any part of the manuscript. (Exceptions of alphabetical authorship etc. are ignored here). So, the writing and the conduction of research are not divorced. The supervisor (in an academic setting) essays important roles of guiding, ideating, correcting, and editing. The remaining authors are placed in order of importance of their contributions.
This should make it adequately clear that X entered this research effort without understanding the roles and responsibilities. Y may or may not have acted in bad faith by not making X aware of these (assuming that Y is a senior student and X is a junior or an intern). I am inclined to lean towards the former, unless X independently chose to do all this work without the knowledge of Y.
Redressal will depend entirely on how X was involved in this research project; whether they contracted by Y, Y's supervisor, or whether X and Y jointly ideated and initiated the work.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/14
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<issue_start>username_0: I am facing extreme anxiety and not enough sleep. My group always wants results. Every two weeks, you must have new results. Being sick is not accepted. I feel so drained and tired. There are constant messages, many ideas, and lots of collaboration. I know it may sound a good thing, but as an introverted person, I feel so drained. I am distracted by the many ideas. Also, it seems my work is not recognized or understood. I am trying to elaborate each meeting but it seems not clear even with data although I am passionate.
I feel physical and spiritual pain. I have migraines and back pain all the time. I cannot sleep. The director doesn't understand any excuses. They need everything fast, even when there are problems with the machines.
They encourage comparisons, and there are rivalries between each other sometimes. I know they want publications, but I am feel pain because there are many things to juggle: writing, experiments, communication. I tried to bring this to a discussion but their tone is always dismissive. I don't know what I can do. I cannot sleep or eat properly<issue_comment>username_1: I was like this at one point and then I just stopped meeting their standards. I slept at 10 every night, did not work until noon, basically prioritized my own health over work. Nothing really changed as far as my research went.
My supervisor did raise their voice at one point over progress, then I was just like, in my head "its either me committing suicide and tarnishing your reputation forever or me working and suffering over the holidays while you are on your vacation, so why are you getting mad at me?"
You are the boss of the research publications that they put their names on.
What is the worst thing that can happen to you?
The worst thing that can happen is you getting kicked out.
But just note that most people who are working only has Bachelor's degree and they apparently have higher employability than master and make more over a lifetime than PhD and have higher life satisfaction.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: First, talk to a medical professional about pain and migraines.
Second, find a way to schedule breaks in your day. Working more isn't the same as working better. In fact you can actually inhibit clear thinking if you try to push on a problem too hard. Your brain has a way of putting things together during periods of "rest".
Third, make some of those breaks exercise - especially aerobic exercise. The brain needs oxygen.
Fourth, if your lab is dysfunctional either find a way to leave it or work with your lab-mates to set a more reasonable pace. At least try to find out whether you are alone in your analysis. I suspect that you are not.
Fifth, many of us are introverts. You can still be effective in public/social situations. It is a skill to be learned. Introversion is not a disability. For many scholars it is a superpower.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: An abusive situation does not stop being abusive just because it has nice academia/workplace words like "schedule" or "group" or "manager".
You are in an abusive workplace. I've been there too.
Your workplace culture means it will stay abusive, and you probably don't have any realistic ways to change that. That means, in my book, it failed. Not you. You didn't fail. You just don't like being abused. Nor should you. That's good.
It can be hard to move in a niche field, but try to.
Otherwise, assume that they will carry on this way. Why wouldn't they? From their perspective, it works. You might break and be seriously ill, some time in future, or cry every night, but they get results because they insist and make you feel bad if you don't, and in the end they can always get a new living cadaver to fill the slot if you die or go.
Treat this situation as if you are a married woman living with a guy who every two weeks punches her and tells her what trash she is if the house isn't perfect, meals aren't perfect, and it's never good enough, so it's always punches. Would you say to put up with it forever? I wouldn't. And neither should you.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: ### Talk to a medical professional. Then talk to the disability office.
It sounds like your work is causing you physical and psychological harm, and this is manifesting in physical harm. The migraine headaches, inability to sleep, and such that you're feeling? In basically every developed country, that legally counts as a disability, and they're legally obligated to provide reasonable accommodations for you.
As such, I would recommend that you talk to a medical professional, and get a diagnosis of whatever's wrong with you, and get them to write it up along with any suggestions they might have regarding treatment in a letter that you can take to your employer.
After that, I'd say to take the letter to your manager (if an employee) followed by the disability and/or human resources office, or straight to the disability office if you're a student. They should work with you to provide you with accomodations that will assist you with resolving this issue.
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/14
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<issue_start>username_0: I am researching machine learning models for predictability, and I am doing a literature survey/review right now.
Can I use research papers from **non** computer-science journals in my proposals?
For instance, I am using machine learning to predict X. The reason why X should be predicted and the 'state-of-the-art' research related to predicting X is not to be found in computer science journals, it's mainly found in economy/econometrics and marketing journals.
So in summary, is it normal or O.K to use references from non-computer science journals in a computer-science related research proposal?<issue_comment>username_1: Why not? Even if it was not ML/AI-related, it'd still be perfectly valid.
But *especially* with ML, most of the time, the motivation for the study lies in the subject area. It makes sense to look for similar problems (if only in formalism) in other domains, too, and see what has been done to solve them. So yes, perfectly normal to end up with something like "we are doing a research in economics and this is why it is worth studying but a superficially similar problem was solved to some success in seismography, let's see if we can draw from that experience".
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: This is perfectly fine. You are now doing interdisciplinary research. [Defined by the NSF:](https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/additional_resources/interdisciplinary_research/definition.jsp)
>
> Interdisciplinary research is a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]
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2021/10/15
| 1,852
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<issue_start>username_0: What benefits do faculty members get by supervising PhD students?
What happens if a faculty member with many years of experience has never supervised a PhD student, but has supervised many masters and undergraduate students? Does this faculty member lose some benefits?<issue_comment>username_1: At an American research university, supervising graduate student research is a significant part of a professor's job (especially in the sciences). Not working with graduate students will hurt a faculty member's job evaluations, just as would not publishing enough research or getting teaching evaluations. How many graduate students is an appropriate number can still depend a lot of the institution and the specific field.
Usually, graduate student supervision will be part of a holistic evaluation of how well a faculty member is doing. However, there may sometimes be specific requirements—such as, in my department a faculty member cannot be promoted to the rank of full professor without being the primary supervisor for at least one Ph. D. graduate. More generally, when faculty members are up for tenure or promotion, quite a bit of attention is paid to whether they have worked with or are working with graduate students. Masters students are certainly worth something in this regard, but not nearly as much as doctoral students. Similarly, when it comes time to be evaluated for merit raises, among the evaluation criteria are whether a professor is successful in advising Ph. D. students.
For faculty who do not show a record of involvement in graduate student training, this will count against them. Since supervising graduate students is a part of a professor's teaching responsibility, if someone rarely or never works with graduate students, they may be assigned a heavier load of classroom teaching to make up for that absence.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: **Note:** Academic positions vary in the expectations for the role, and some academic positions do not include an expected supervision component (e.g., at some teaching schools with small or no PhD program). I will assume you are taking about an academic at a school that has a PhD program, in a role where there is a supervision component.
---
There are a number of benefits to supervising PhD students, and it can be a rewarding relationship in good cases. As a starting point, PhD supervision is part of the academic duties of an academic, so just as with teaching responsibilities, failure to supervise PhD students would count against the academic insofar as they are not performing one of their expected duties. Aside from this basic necessity, there are three main benefits to supervising PhD students:
* One benefit from supervision ---which depends a lot on the quality of the student--- is that the academic will probably be able to **generate joint publications** with the student, which counts towards the research output of the academic. Publications undertaken by a PhD student are often supervised by their supervisor or broader academic panel, and it is usual for this to lead to co-authored publications. Since the student does most of the "legwork" on these publications, the supervision role is usually a smaller role, but it often leads to co-authorship (depending on the contribution).
* Another benefit from supervision of PhD students is that ---as with other teaching roles--- it helps the academic **learn/solidify teaching and management skills**. Supervision of a PhD candidate involves deep-level one-on-one teaching and supervision of a research project, plus general assistance with management of the student. These are all good skills to learn for a starting academic, and are useful practice for more experienced academics. Supervision of graduate students is one of the early ways that academics gain general management experience.
* Another benefit from supervision is that it acts as a **marker of seniority and experience**. Academics who have successfully supervised several PhD students (who have graduated successfully) demonstrate they are experienced in the field and have a track-record of successfully training new researchers. Supervisors often act as references for future job applications for successful PhD graduates, and this also acts as a marker for seniority. This is inherently beneficial for an academic career, insofar as it demonstrates supervision and managerial experience. (It is a bit like with other jobs, where management responsibilities and supervision over a team is used as a marker of seniority and experience.)
* Finally, an important ---but sometimes overlooked--- benefit of PhD supervision is that it is **psychologically rewarding to pass on your own research skills** and help another person become trained to a level where they can work unsupervised in an academic capacity. Supervisors usually form a good bond with their graduate students, and it is a lovely feeling to see your own students successfully publish papers, get their PhD, and (hopefully) go on to a rewarding career.
With regard to your second question, if an academic spent many years in the field and didn't supervise any PhD students, it would make it hard for that academic to advance their career. Failure to supervise PhD students would probably be an issue in annual performance reviews (unless the school doesn't have a PhD program to supervise or this is not part of the role) and it would be a deficiency on an academic CV when applying for positions at mid-to-high academic levels. An entry-level academic is not expected to have supervised graduate students, but most mid-to-high level academic roles expect evidence of supervision experience, including successful supervision of PhD students.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: Faculty members usually supervise PhD students because they have to. Usually faculty memebers apply for projects, projects carry money to the faculty members and their departments, but faculty members are too expensive to perform all the duties paid by projects.
In fact PhDs carry on the most menial tasks in research, effectively concretizing the ideas and testing the concepts developed by the faculty member, ideally developing some sort of independence along the time spent doing this tasks.
PhDs therefore provides:
* data;
* methods;
* quality control;
* fertile soil for new ideas;
* publications & citations;
* money (indirectly, usually when an academic applies for a project has to define who will do the job and receive part of the fundings ...);
These things are delivered even by the *worst* PhD, even by a PhD quitting after a couple of years. Because the PhD is spread over 3 (or 5) years, how effectively these things are delivered are "just" a matter of planning by the supervisor.
Supervising master/undergraduate students you obtain an infinitesimal fraction of the benefits above listed, because they are not committed full-time nor for a long span of time, as a PhD student.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_4: Certainly in biology, it is PhD student who, under the supervision of a faculty member, conduct research. Faculty have little time for experimental research themselves. Faculty have classes to prepare and teach, committees to attend, admin roles to fulfil, grants to write, paper to review and more. Experiments can take days of fully focused attention, and faculty members just don't have this time. I'm lucky if i have 2 or 3 clear days in a month, and then not together.
Think of a faculty member as the CEO of a research organisation, and the PhD student and postdocs as the employees of this research organisation. The faculty member provides the strategic direction, advises and trains the workers and provides the funding. The PhD students and postdocs do the experiments and analyse the results.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_5: Depending on the country, it may be a requirement for the faculty member to actually get their **title**.
This may for instance be a requirement for "advanced PhD" (a title in some European countries that formally makes you an independent researcher), or a professor title (as opposed to "position").
Upvotes: 0
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<issue_start>username_0: In recent years, as a PhD student in West Africa, I have helped several undergraduate and PhD students who were stuck with some particular problems to the point where they were barely to leave (I can't go into more details for obvious reasons). Sometimes, I had to spend weeks with their particular problems at the expenses of my own work. However, every time one submits his/her Master thesis / publish an article they never include me in acknowledgements but I never told them to do so because I thought that's obvious. Or maybe because I don't like to appear like an arrogant/rude person.
Now, I know this behaviour will never stop. How can I ask for credit whenever I help someone; should I ask him before or after helping him/her?
Some of the PhD student have finished and working as post-docs in Europe. I didn't finish my PhD yet for several reasons: because I have a very toxic advisor. Now I am fighting with huge depression, what next?
Thank you<issue_comment>username_1: You raise several issues beyond the main one.
For depression, see a health professional. It can make a big difference.
For advisor issues, if not resolved, consider finding a better one. It might move you from an impossible path to a possible, if longer, one.
But the larger problem, not just for you but for academia generally is that people aren't adequately taught academic etiquette beyond the bare bones of ethics. Yes, you acknowledge help in a visible way.
I don't have a general solution to this, but you might be able to make a change at your institution by taking some action. One potential way would be to bring the problem to the attention of the administration. One way to make it easy for them is to, along with peers, write up a one page description of responsibilities that can be given to new students, or put on some web page. Utopian that I am, it might have some effect, but at least it moves the conversation from a complaint to a solution. It might be something that advisors could give to new students when the take them on.
But, health care first.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Whenever you collaborate with someone on a project, it's good to start an early conversation about authorship and other credit. Nothing has to be especially polite about it: remember that this is **someone else asking for a favor from you** (even if it's a bit of a coerced favor when your advisor asks you to do it). "No." is a complete sentence.
It's perfectly reasonable to answer with "Yes, I can help you with that, but it will take a lot of effort and I'd expect to work together on the paper and share authorship". If you don't think your effort rises to the level of authorship, you can say similarly "Yes, I can help with that, but please give credit to my effort with an acknowledgement in the manuscript", or afterwards "Here's that analysis you asked for. I don't think this work warrants coauthorship but I would appreciate if you would include an acknowledgement for it." Acknowledgements cost other people almost nothing - it shouldn't require any level of groveling to obtain one, but you do have to make your expectations heard if you want other people to meet them.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: When looking for online lecture notes, I notice that most of the time you have to be a student and login in using your institution information to get access.
Why would a professor not show the lecture notes freely for anyone who is interesting in learning?<issue_comment>username_1: Surely 'cuz you're not paying the tuition for the class... To put it bluntly, that's what tuition is for: to give you access to class material and instructor time.
I doubt having coursework material password-protected is uniformly a decision of the instructor: certainly where I work my notes, assignments (including solutions), exams are on a university platform which is accessible only to students.
I ask my students NOT to distribute my notes because they're full of typos, contain images for which I have not sought permission to reproduce, and are just not ready for prime time. I would not want such notes to be publicly available, and I do not foresee making them available until I have thoroughly reviewed them.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: In practice, the decisive questions for an instructor posting their notes online are:
* Are you, as a writer, sufficiently proud of your own notes that you won't be embarrassed to see them circulate widely?
* Do you have a personal website or care enough (and have the time) to build one? (Even the easiest options, like Github Pages, take half an hour or so of getting used to. As some commenters have noticed, it's much easier to just push the notes on your institution's learning management system, provided that you're used to that.)
* Do you mind if the open availability of your notes will make it harder to publish them commercially as a book afterwards? (This is not a very serious issue in maths nowadays, as most publishers are fine with building on OA material, and some are even fine with the accepted manuscripts of books being OA. But it might be an issue in other disciplines.)
Zero's answer is not representative. All instructors I know have the right to freely distribute their notes; unlike patents, copyrights by regular faculty do not default to their institutions (I even recall this being explicit in American universities). Copyright issues around pictures and long quotes are at least theoretically relevant sometimes, but to my knowledge they aren't a decisive factors, as authors don't seem to care that much (I've seen my share of freely available or even OA lecture notes that, strictly speaking, are giving away what isn't theirs by quoting pages upon pages of textbooks).
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: UK-focused perspective: universities are heavily subsidized by the taxpayers. I find it very hard to justify not sharing the notes these notes with the people who payed for it (ie making them generally accessible in the UK). So I think the answer is, that **the uproar about this issue** (taking taxpayer money and not sharing the thing which was produced using it) **is not sufficiently high enough to put enough pressure on universities to share these notes.**
I personally share my notes to whoever asks for it. I haven't made a website where I put it there to anyone who isn't even asking for it, but maybe I'll in the future.
A related post: [How much money is spent on students' above their tuition fees in the UK?](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/176762/how-much-money-is-spent-on-students-above-their-tuition-fees-in-the-uk)
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: Where I've worked, making teaching materials available on the password-protected digital learning environment was compulsory by university policy, but making them available on the public internet was at the option of the individual faculty member. I never did make mine publicly available, because they contained third-party copyrighted material for which internal distribution was protected by the educational "fair dealing" exemption in UK copyright law, but public distribution would not have been.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: The reason seems obvious to me as a software engineer.
1. Professors are provided with a learning management system (LMS). They are highly encouraged to post their lecture notes to the LMS. Usually no one is telling the professors they can not post content outside the LMS. However, if a student has to leave the LMS to get higher quality content (e.g., the "real" lecture notes are posted on other site) and quality is in the eye of the beholder: the professor should either post exactly the same content or a clearly inferior version outside the LMS. It is not a lot of work, but the professor will get at best 0 credit for it. (If the content is not clearly inferior the professor will be reprimanded for going outside the LMS.)
2. The LMS could provide for free non-student accounts for reading lecture notes. Someone like me would have to engineer this process. Invariably, it would not work right - at least at first. Someone would have to pay me to do this work. Over time, people will become unhappy and want changes. Someone will have to pay me to keep on it. Why would the LMS commit to this?
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: So in Germany, everyone else here is wrong.
**The reason is Copyright.**
The lecturers, as educators, enjoy a very broad and free exemption from copyright, and therefore can create their slides/handouts etc. without much thought to ask for permission for this graph or that figure. They simply see something they think would help student understand the topic and paste it in there (with proper citation mostly).
This exemption however, is limited to material that they share as part of an official course/seminar etc., as part of their job as educators. Sharing this - regularly copyright-violating - material outside of this narrow scope would leave them wide open to all the lawsuits and other trouble that come along with copyright. This is also why most of them absolutely don't care or even low-key encourage uploading the files elsewhere: because then it's not THEM who did the copyright violation but the uploading student.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: In my observation, this change is a recent epiphenomenon that is tied to the widespread organizational deployment of [learning management systems (LMS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system).
Thirty years ago, course notes were not generally online, because even in leading universities the Internet hadn't taken hold sufficiently yet. You got your lecture notes on paper, typically by picking up handouts at the classroom door each lecture or by going to a university office and buying a cheaply bound booklet of such notes at the beginning of the semester.
Twenty years ago, it was easy to set up a course webpage and point students to it, but most universities had ad-hoc systems not designed for online course management. This meant that professors could stop worrying about handouts and start sticking a PDF online on a course webpage. The professor generally put that webpage together themselves, and restricting access to material they posted would take a lot of extra work. These was no real incentive for a professor to put in that effort, and thus a large volume of class notes became freely accessible to the general public as a side effect.
Class notes are only one part of the story, however, and a good LMS also helps a professor with managing and reporting assignments, tests, and grades (which can be a big benefit both to individual professors and to universities overall). In most systems, these materials are considered confidential information and must be protected. Thus, any material posted in an LMS is restricted by default. As a result a professor now needs to explicitly decide that they want to post material openly and take extra steps to do so, including considering all of the concerns that have been raised in other answers.
**Bottom line: widespread freely accessible lecture notes were a temporary side effect of the technological transition to online course material.**
Upvotes: 5
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<issue_start>username_0: I am a high school sophomore and have been studying Sanskrit for 6 years. Recently I started studying Pali (similar to Sanskrit) and translated some classical English poems.
I am in India, and luckily there are many professors of Pali in universities here. Considering how there are barely any instructors available, I was wondering if I could write to the professors about these poems. I have a few questions:
1. If I request them to go through the poems, and advise me about the grammar, etc., how would I word the email? Would an introduction followed by the poems and request for advice be okay?
2. Up to what extent is it acceptable for me to ask them for help (I don't want it to be like I am taking tuitions from them or using them as translators)?
3. Is there anything else I should be aware of while contacting them?
Thank you.<issue_comment>username_1: It may not be a good idea to send the translations upfront; rather try to email them about your interest and seek their advice on how to proceed. Seek their permission to share your work; don't assume it beforehand.
There is a good chance that some of them will appreciate the interest and respond favorably. The extent of their support is entirely upto them, and it is best to let them propose it. Once they respond, you will have a better idea on how to proceed.
Good luck!
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Find out if there are some societies , organizations or literary groups working in Pali. You may get to know some writers or poets. These people are very dedicated to the promotion of the language. Make someone highly capable as your Ustad as is done in music or other trades and request him to guide you. Take part in literary activities of Pali.
Professors are helpful but mostly to the students in their class. External students are not encouraged.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I am looking for a LaTeX CV template similar to (of possible identical to) this one. Let me know if anybody has it.
[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~nika/files/Nika\_CV.pdf](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/%7Enika/files/Nika_CV.pdf)
Thank you!<issue_comment>username_1: That looks like (or at least very similar to) the kinds of CVs one can generate using the [moderncv package](https://ctan.org/pkg/moderncv?lang=en). There are various templates available for that package, e.g. [here](https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/modern-cv-and-cover-letter-2015-version/sttkgjcysttn).
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: This looks like the popular [modern CV package](https://ctan.org/pkg/moderncv?lang=en). It's a bit too popular to make you stand out, if you ask me. But then again, what makes a CV stand out is its content, not its layout.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: So, I just finished my master's in Computer Science, and I plan to apply to some PhD programs later this year.
The review process works in 2 phases: during 1st phase the paper goes to a group of reviewers, and if all reviews are sufficiently negative, the paper is rejected. Otherwise, it advances into the 2nd phase, where it is reviewed by another group. According to the conference, approx 55 % of papers pass through 1st phase, and 25 % pass through 2nd phase. This is a strong conference, and there were initially approx. 7k submitted papers.
I'd like to know if merely getting my paper to advance in this type of review process would help in some way if mentioned in a PhD application, even if the paper gets rejected after 2nd phase. For context, my field of research is Artificial Intelligence.
Edit:
I'm going to apply to PhD programs in the US, and perhaps Canada, if that matters.<issue_comment>username_1: Probably not.
My outsider impression, which perhaps would differ if I knew something more specific about this conference, is that the first phase is a step to just weed out the "complete junk". "I made it to the second phase of review!" seems roughly equivalent to saying "my work isn't absolute trash!" Perhaps the phrase [damning with faint praise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise) applies, especially if the paper is in fact rejected in the second step.
I'd still note on your CV that it's submitted to a conference, but I wouldn't stress or emphasize it. Showing work is in a submitted stage is just a way of communicating that there's a project you've taken to (near) completion.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Well, it just so happens that today, I received a message from AAAI, one of the top conferences in my field, informing me that my paper had survived to the 2nd phase of their reviewing process. You may be in a similar situation as I am, so maybe you can benefit from my assessment of his situation.
The message stipulated that papers had been reviewed by at least two reviewers. Papers moved to the next phase if at least one reviewer awarded it at least a "weak accept" judgment. Also, if reviewers didn't put in a review such that at most one review was in for my paper at the relevant moment, my paper would survive into the next round too.
So either at least one reviewer didn't think that my paper was total nonsense, or enough reviewers for my paper were lazy enough to not do their job. I don't think that this is enough encouragement to put this information on a resume.
Upvotes: 3
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2021/10/16
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<issue_start>username_0: I have a friend who is a PhD student in a program at a major US university. He will graduate this year, and he knows me. I am trying to ask him to indirectly recommend me to his supervisor who I am interested in as well so that I can improve my odds for PhD admission, given I satisfy all requirements. Is this okay or even recommended to do if possible?<issue_comment>username_1: You can ask your friend, of course, and he can recommend you to his supervisor, but I don't recommend it. The supervisor can't really do anything with the recommendation unless you are already admitted and usually only if you want to work with them.
It would be seen as improper for the supervisor to try to go around the admission committee's normal process and insert a piece of information into the process that isn't open to all students.
The committee process is broad based and well defined. Permitting "side" recommendations is improper. Supervisors are normally chosen (most fields) only after admission and usually after some coursework.
Don't do what might be perceived as improper and won't make a change.
---
Think for a second about a conversation between a professor and a colleague on the admissions committee. "My student recommends a friend of his for admission." Now replace it. "My son recommends a friend of his for admission".
If a university in the US permits such things as actionable, then you don't want to go there.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: This is probably situation dependent.
If you have worked with your friend professionally before, they have a very strong opinion of your work, and they have an excellent relationship with their supervisor, then it is probably reasonable for your friend to recommend you. Though if your work is really this good, you would probably be competitive on your own merits in any case, and the recommendation won't make much difference.
On the other hand, if this is just someone you go fishing with, then they might not feel comfortable recommending you. Even if they did, a recommendation that says "user17071408 is my friend and they are a good fisherman" is not going to have much impact.
So, you'll have to consider all the individual factors to decide which of these cases is closer to your situation. But note that in both cases, we concluded that the recommendation did not make much difference either way. So, I wouldn't stress too much about it.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: Recently my paper was accepted for a conference and I presented the paper without any problem. At the final stages the publication committee is raising concerns my paper has significant plagiarism. However, the major source listed as plagiarized was my master's thesis from which I adapted my paper. So, does this count as a plagiarism since the paper was adapted from my thesis - is it a proper flag? Please let me know your thoughts!<issue_comment>username_1: Yes, it very much might be self-plagiarism.
Take a look at [this text](https://ori.hhs.gov/avoiding-plagiarism-self-plagiarism-and-other-questionable-writing-practices-guide-ethical-writing), specifically the guidelines and the reasoning behind calling self-plagiarism an ethical breach. Rule of the thumb: do not *publish* the same thing twice. Reusing lectures you're giving? Sure, go ahead. Conference talks? Better not (personally, I find it completely acceptable to do that in case of "in-house" conferences adjacent to larger ones but in that case the committee is fully aware of it and is giving the green light).
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: No, this type of reuse is not a problem. You (with the help of your thesis advisor, most likely) should push back.
Essentially there is an exception to rules around reuse of materials between theses/dissertations and published articles or conference publications. Typically the duplication is handled via a footnote on the first page.
Upvotes: 1
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2021/10/16
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<issue_start>username_0: The process of paper writing is intended to communicate our proposed model to a peer. The peer is assumed to have solid knowledge of the particular topic.
If one comes up with a state-of-the-art model on some task in a domain, then the contribution is evident to the peer.
Then what is the purpose of writing the "related work" section?
For example, if I come up with an algorithm that can solve the Traveling salesperson problem in less time than all the previous algorithms, then the contribution is evident to any reviewer.<issue_comment>username_1: From my point of view it has to do with availability. Science is supposed to be a accessible to each and everyone, not only to an elite group that already knows all the background and details of your work.
While the main audience of your paper is people working on the same or related subjects, a more broader audience should principally not be excluded from accessing the contents of your paper. For that purpose, it is typical to provide some basic introduction to the methods you are using and the purpose of your work as well as a thorough review of the previous literature. The goal for this is not to explain things to your peers (that they probably already know) but to provide some degree of self-containedness to your work.
Of course, in practice it takes a lot of work for a potential reader to go through all of the previous literature and understand the relevance of your work. But keep in mind that every paper could be someone's first entry to a new topic and I think it's worthwile to provide them with the necessary ingredients to value your contribution.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: The purpose of the related section is to establish context, within which your work is to exist, and against which it represents an advance.
That context is highly individual-specific, and varies greatly even across researchers working in the same field. It is unlikely that any two researchers will have exactly the same knowledge, context and approach to a topic, because they are likely to have engaged with it differently and had different journeys while exploring it. This could have different perceptions of the same idea.
Therefore, the stated assumption -
" The peer is assumed to have solid knowledge of the particular topic. " - is not very meaningful, because knowledge does not have neat boundaries.
Further, articles are written for posterity: a reader who uses the work after several years will need to know the context within which the work was carried out. State-of-the-art is constantly changing, and it is necessary to describe it for that very reason.
@Greenstick has correctly pointed out that this part of a paper can also facilitate the writing of literature reviews of different kinds (topical, systematic) subsequent to the publication of this paper. This would be a service to the community, at the very least.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_3: If you published a paper with an algorithm substantially improving performance on the traveling salesperson problem, I'd be really interested in that paper myself.
I know next to nothing about the state of the field there, though. Related work would be very important for me.
These days there are so many papers published that it's difficult to keep up with all of them. Even in a narrow field, people generally sit on different edges of that field and bring in distinct background knowledge. Solutions to one problem may be motivated by solutions to other problems that are not so intimately related.
In a typical paper I read I doubt I've read more than 10% of the other papers it cites.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_4: >
> The process of paper writing is intended to communicate our [results] to a peer.
>
>
>
No, not to a peer. To a wider audience than your peers. Which is why you are expected to provide some context.
Also, a "related work" section helps both your peers and other readers clearly identify the novelty in your results: "Smith & al. formulated a model of phenomenon A, in this paper we present a model of the related phenomenon B"; "Smith & al. formulated a model with accuracy alpha, in this paper we provide a refined model with accuracy alpha/2"; etc.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_5: While other answers already noted that the related work section is targeted at an audience much broader than peers in your field of study, I also want to note that the related work section could be essential for peers with "average knowledge in your field" as well.
At times, it happens that a specific problem in field A is best solved via techniques from field B. However, when applying techniques from other fields, perhaps with some modification, it can be difficult to determine whether this application is still a novel result. The related work section can provide the context in order to determine this.
Another purpose of the related work section is an indirect argument for the *relevance* of your results: if you are studying the same problem as all those other published papers, then a priori it seems your paper would also be relevant if it adds something significant that is not already in those papers. (Of course, all of this depends on context. It is possible some other recent result renders the entire field, including your paper, obsolete)
Finally, a thorough discussion of related work can be valuable on its own. It can give an brief overview of a (sub)field, like a mini-survey. Sometimes, there are papers which I primarily read for this discussion, if there are no good survey articles or PhD theses.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_6: Let me interpret the question as "why do many papers cite irrelevant or barely relevant works"? The answer is: because citations are the currency of bibliometry-based career systems.
There is no good reason for each paper to do a complete review of the literature in the field, but there are perverse incentives to do so.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_7: One reason not yet mentioned is "crackpot detection". :-) Some areas attract attention from "motivated nonexperts". One item in the "crackpot detection checklist" is "does the paper cite relevant related work?". If it does not, that may be because the author (tends to be solitary) does *not* know related work, *prior art* so to speak. Then, how did they get to their result(s)? It is suspicious.
Also, a well written related work section does not just mention other works, but rather show *how* they relate and compare, how they are different. Precisely for an expert who knows such other work, this may be the key element in the paper. A "delta" from previous work, if you will.
Thirdly, your paper may be so good that someone else may read it, such as a student working on their thesis, someone working on an application, or some expert in a very different field which at the time was not related but know a connection was found and both fields are now related. And so on.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I received a PhD in the US a bit more than a year ago. Recently I interviewed for a postdoc position. The interview went very well, and I think there was a great match between the planned research topics and my experience. Unfortunately a few days later I received a vague email rejecting me from the position.
The timing struck me as far too fast. They had asked me for phone numbers for some references before the interview. I did not put down a former supervisor of mine because they have declined to provide me a reference and they would not provide a good reference. I called one of the people I did put down as a reference and they confirmed that they never heard anything about me applying to that position. They were sympathetic and speculated that my former supervisor was called and that killed my application.
I have applied to a large number of postdocs and have noticed a pattern: The interviews and presentations go great, but I never get an offer. I would like to ask my former supervisor if they are responsible for the rejections. How can I bring this topic up productively? I have no direct evidence that my former supervisor is responsible. If they are responsible I would like them to stop what I view as defamation. (It may be worth pointing out that I do not defame my former supervisor.)
If this topic can not be discussed productively with my former supervisor, what should I do instead?<issue_comment>username_1: Many places, sabotaging a student would be a highly improper act and the attempt to do so rejected. Unless the advisor has especially wide reach I doubt that it would happen frequently and I also doubt that a respected academic would tarnish their own reputation in an attempt.
However.
A weak positive recommendation can be interpreted as a negative one. "Damn with faint praise". This can be unintentional, actually, as happened to me once, due to a misunderstanding of language.
Also, times are very competitive in many fields. You can come across very nicely in a meeting, but your other materials don't back up a prediction of success. There seem to be many more candidates than positions at the moment and COVID has messed up many things.
I can't think of much you might do directly, especially based on a suspicion.
But indirectly you have some control over the other materials in your application package. If they are very strong then it puts you in a better position.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: There are so many applicants for each postdoc positions that it is practically impossible to know why you were not selected. Unfortunately in something like this there is no prize for second best.
I would be amazed if a hiring committee were to contact your supervisor if said supervisor was not one of your referees; it might in fact be illegal in some jurisdictions. Omitting your supervisor will raise questions for most committees, but the most common way to clarify this is that someone from the committee would ask *you* first what is behind this omission.
Don’t get me wrong: it might be that *one* hiring committee reached out to your former supervisor, but this would be the exception and not usual practice. Thus, by observing that you are often “close”, you are *de facto* reducing the probability that a single unnamed referee will have sunk you.
One way to understand the culture of your subfield when it comes to contacting referees would be to discuss your perception with one of your referees, and in particular ask if they have ever been contacted by hiring committees when not on a referee list.
Finally, remember that in most circumstances, you will have very limited (if any) information about the other candidates, and how well they did, so even if you think things went for you they might easily have gone better for someone else. The decision of the committee can sometime depend on trivial factors; the *very last* option is to think your supervisor torpedoed your application.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: As others have noted, in most fields postdocs are very competitive. For the lab director and/or hiring committee, there is also a lot at stake. Choosing poorly can mean the postdoc "flakes out". At best, a slot and resources are wasted. At worst, a promising stream of research goes nowhere. The topic may become stale, experiments or analysis may be flawed, or completing the work carries baggage (an unproductive, unsatisfied (co)author to cart along) so harder to get someone else to finish it off.
What this means is that **directors or committees are pretty risk averse, and pretty likely to shy away from candidates with something strange in their file, like silence or a weak reference from their advisor**. That's expecially the case if someone else is in the pool whose file is more normally complete.
Therefore, without knowing specifics of the situation, my Occam's Razor hypothesis is not that your advisor is actively torpedoing you in some way. Merely that **the absence of their strong recommendation, with no countervailing clear evidence of your brilliance obviously visible in your file, *indirectly* turns you into an also-ran** in the post-interview deliberation.
Made-up but plausible committee dialogue:
>
> As you know, X's file is a bit strange. There's no letter from their advisor, though their other references are OK. We brought them in, and their interview went quite well. Personable. Pretty good talk. But you know, it's weird with that advisor. I wonder if they'd fit in? Then we had Y. A more normal file. Their advisor, Z, wrote a very nice letter. Other references good. Personable too. OK talk; probably not quite as good as X. But maybe they were nervous. Z's letter explains how significant their results are and that they're very independent. ... ... ... You know, Y's just a safer bet.
>
>
>
*If* this is true, you're not sunk, you just have to **work really hard to make your file stand out**. Have great publications/conference presentations. Be a super presenter. Get one of your other references to really advocate on your behalf, i.e. be your **advisor stand-in**. You just need to be super on other dimensions to make others overcome their risk aversion.
If my Occam's Razor is dull, i.e. your unphoned reference's speculation that your supervisor was called anyway is true, it is also unnecessary to assume your supervisor actively torpedoed you by saying something bad. They merely may have damned you with a factual (i.e. not at all "defamatory") statement like:
>
> Yes, X was my student. They completed the degree requirements. Yes, it is true I did not send in a letter of reference. X and I discussed it and I felt others could probably write a more enthusiastic reference letter. No, there was no significant problem, they completed the degree requirements satisfactorily. I don't really have anything else to say.
>
>
>
The solution for the future is still the same. Excel elsewhere in your file, and find a reference who can be a supervisor stand-in. Proactively (writing a letter, calling up the committee, whatever...more than waiting for a call that doesn't come.)
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_4: >
> If this topic can not be discussed productively with my former supervisor, what should I do instead?
>
>
>
When you've had an interview but aren't selected, you can always ask for feedback. They may or may not be willing to provide feedback. If they're willing, the feedback may or may not be useful. But in the end, you have very little to lose in asking (nothing terrible can realistically happen by asking politely). The times I've asked for feedback after an unsuccessful interview, I learned I had been ranked second, which by my interpretation meant my application was pretty good, but I just had bad luck someone else was a (slightly) better fit. Knowing this helped my self-confidence for the next application (plus, I received some precise answers on my weaknesses and even interview tips too).
Upvotes: 3
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<issue_start>username_0: As someone who has been offered a position with <NAME> as an associate scientific editor, I am unclear about the career progression in such an industry?
I am currently a 2 year postdoc in chemical engineering in the US.
Is it possible to shift to an industry other than publishing after reaching a senior position or if this doesn't work out after a year or two?
How about returning to a research position (tenure track) or research associate position after one or two years?<issue_comment>username_1: Yes you can change industry afterwards. Even as a technical person, although the more you are in publishing, the less likely it will be.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: In math, in the U.S., if you did not already have tenure, this might be a bad thing. That is, although it might be a useful activity, it's not directly about research or teaching, and somewhat indicates less interest in those aspects of academe.
After tenure, taking a year or two leave to do such things, or to work at the National Science Foundation, is considered legitimate service... but it's not a strong point toward tenure, at least in my observation. You'd want/need to continue research output during your time there, which might be difficult due to commitments of time and energy, even apart from Chem E lab needs...
Upvotes: 3
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<issue_start>username_0: Suppose, hypothetically there is a group project. We can either meet in person or online. The choice is not democratic though because according to the university guidelines, everybody must agree on meeting in-person but if just one person feels too shy and intimidated by meeting real people, we must do it online. This is year 3 undergraduate. We're all in our twenties so technically, we're all adults.
This has nothing to do with COVID. If you're timid, you can hide and never leave the house. I don't know if I chose the right place to ask this but we're not allowed to discuss this subject becuase it's perceived as tantamount to harassment. Is university not the place where people should overcome such personal hindrances?
And I hate online meetings, I think the world is split in this regard but if you want to meet online just to avoid stress then what makes you think you're qualified to obtain a university degree?
And good-luck trying to produce a publishable report in these conditions.
Am I being too harsh? If you get stressed easily, you will never improve if you always run away from it.
EDIT: I didn't mention that I am slightly autistic. I have aspergers. I've been struggling all my life. But I won't let my autism hinder me. Nor should anyone. I would like to apologise to the people I offended. Noone should be forced. You should force yourselves. I forced myself and I discover new worlds. (For example I was afraid but went to university nevertheless).
Not a single person agreed with me though. I'm confused.<issue_comment>username_1: Making judgements about other's reasons and intentions isn't a positive trait. Trying to coerce people into changing their decisions is even worse.
While I'm a big advocate of having shy (introverted, say) people learn how to come out and act in public without denying who and what they are, external coercion isn't going to "solve" any problems for them. It is a long and difficult process as I know from personal experience.
People might have a lot of reasons for avoiding in person meetings. Extreme reluctance in the face of a pandemic is rational, actually. There can be other reasons that you don't know about. Don't assume what you don't have evidence for.
The rule that you shouldn't discuss it among yourselves is probably wise to avoid any hint of coercion.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> Is university not the place where people should overcome such personal
> hindrances?
>
>
>
No. University is the place where you can work to obtain a degree or other higher qualification. While for many it's an opportunity (expected or not) to grow as a person, this isn't a pre-requisite for earning a degree.
>
> And I hate online meetings, I think the world is split in this regard
> but if you want to meet online just to avoid stress then what makes
> you think you're qualified to obtain a university degree?
>
>
>
A person's competency in their chosen subject has nothing to do with how they choose to manage their stress. Let me use a concrete example: [<NAME>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Starobinsky) is a famous physicist who has made many contributions to the field of cosmology. However, he almost never attends conferences because he speaks with a stammer and finds giving talks and interacting with others verbally to be very stressful. This does not diminish his contributions to the field in any way.
Furthermore, someone may actually work more effectively when they have taken steps to look after their health -- for example, choosing to work from home during a pandemic -- than if they are forced to work in stressful conditions. And a situation which may be fun or relaxing for one person may be very stressful for another. It's not up to us to debate other people's personal boundaries.
Lastly, why do you think it's impossible to "produce a publishable report" while staying at home? The vast majority of researchers managed to do exactly that over the past two years.
>
> Am I being too harsh? If you get stressed easily, you will never
> improve if you always run away from it.
>
>
>
I agree that to increase one's comfort zone one has to step outside it from time to time. But again, it's not up to us to force another person to do this. They have to come to this realisation on their own and take their own steps. For example, perhaps the person you are talking about *is* already working to improve, perhaps by having a friend over to their house or meeting a single person outside. Maybe in a few months they will be comfortable having a group meeting in person. Or maybe they won't be. Either way, as username_1 says, you should try to be supportive rather than coercive.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: While I broadly agree that, for most people, introversion or shyness shouldn't be a reason to avoid all meetings, I think you're focussing on the wrong thing. The rules for your course are what they are, and from your description of the situation it doesn't sound like they're going to change.
What you should focus on instead is that here is an opportunity for you to overcome a "personal hindrance". You appear to think that it is impossible to execute a project to a high standard when meeting only online, as you write:
>
> And good-luck trying to produce a publishable report in these conditions.
>
>
>
But, as the large amount of remote work done by many people in the last two years demonstrates, it is in fact possible. The fact you think this to be impossible, despite evidence to the contrary, suggests you simply don't know how to do it. So here is your opportunity to learn a very useful skill.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: The purpose of any assessment or exercise is to learn knowledge and skills that are associated with the degree/module program. To the best extent possible, the assessement should base its grade on ability in those skills/items of knowledge alone. In pedogogical terms, we call this "constructive alignment".
A person with either a mental health issue or simply a personality trait that makes this difficult may get lower grades, or even fail, for reasons that are related to the nature of the assessment, rather than any lack of ability at what is supposed to be being assessed.
So, if the aim of the assessment to to assess an indeviduals ability to research things from the literature, or write reports, then to base a grade on their ability to interact face to face is clearly not properly following the precinciples of constructive alignment.
Now, if an ability to work with a face to face team is an explicit stated goal of the course, then it is fair to assess this. There are situations where this is appropriate. But more often group excercises are set for other reasons, like they encourage active rather than passive leanring, they encourage students to interact with primary sources/research, and they are much less work to grade for the professor ;). In these situations, it is not fair to grade on the basis of ability to interact.
This is no different to allowing dyspraxic people to type exam answers, blind people to use screen readers, and providing transcripts/subtitles to deaf people. What one person calls "shyness" could be a debilitating social axiety disorder (diagnosed or undiagnosed), and the idea that such people can just "get over it" is simplistic.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: What would be the consequences, for instance, if the reviewer just rejected/accepted whatever paper they got, with a trivial or even nonsensical justification for it? Does the reviewer avoid doing that solely out of concern with the conference's quality?<issue_comment>username_1: They wouldn't be invited to participate in the future. Someone else would probably have to cover for them. But, beyond that, nothing is likely to happen other than a possible stain on their reputation. The program committee would see the results and they tend to be pretty connected in the field.
Reviewers tend, in my experience, to take reviewing quite seriously, both in an attempt to have a quality conference and to aid authors in improving papers.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Positive incentives:
* Building a positive reputation: This is especially relevant for early-career researchers (ECRs) who are not known by everybody in the field yet. ECRs that left a positive impression might be considered for future service roles and cooperative efforts. However, more senior researchers might still want to be perceived as being "good citizens" of the community.
* Some conferences give out "best reviewer awards" - That is a nice token of recognition and CV entry.
Negative incentives:
* Avoiding a negative reputation: Particularly poor reviews might lead to reputational damage, both for the reviewer and for the conference who let the poor review go through. Most people, to some extent, care about their reputation.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: There are no serious incentives here, people do this mostly for non-incentive based reasons. If you see yourself as a responsible person who cares about your profession then you’ll do reviews and try to do the best job you can under the circumstances. I’m not saying incentives never matter, but they’re not the only thing driving human behavior.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: I've been a program chair of an ACM conference before, and my take is that yes we sometimes do get reviewers who act this way. It's not a great look and it's a fraction of our total reviewer pool. Others have mentioned incentives, so here's what we've done (modelled off other conferences) with our bad reviewers:
* Papers with one poorly-written review and two well-written reviews and that are borderline enough that we aren't sure (i.e. if the two well-written reviews disagree), we would tend to assign an extra reviewer.
* There is a list prepared for the next PC team on all reviewers that wrote poorly-written reviews *or* for those who ghosted on their responsibilities, so they can be excluded.
* Senior PC members and program chairs read these reviews. We're in the same field as these reviewers, so we now have a bad impression of their scholarly rigour and seriousness in exercising their responsibilities.
Some conferences have also started doing a "Best Reviewer" or recognition program for a handful of their most-dedicated reviewers. I think that's a good approach as some reviewers go above and beyond.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: I think the question is wrong because it talks about "proper acceptance or rejection" as if proper were universally understood and agreed upon.
Instead of one universally agreed upon definition of proper, every conference can have its own understanding of proper and choose reviewers that mostly agree with the conference understanding.
You do not have to agree with the conference understanding, but if you disagree a lot then maybe you should choose a different conference.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_6: The main thing that prevents that is that reviewers usually self-select into the role. There are a few cases where conferences require you to act as a reviewer if you are an author of a paper, but aside from that, if you don't want to do a review, you just don't do it. Reviewers therefore tend to do reviews out of a desire for professional service more than anything else. It would be extremely unusual for an academic to elect to act as a reviewer but then (intentionally) give a vapid or nonsensical review. There is not any particularly effective incentive against this; it is just that there is *no positive incentive* to do it in the first place.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: Nobody has mentioned yet that a single reviewer doesn't make the final decision. At least in top Computer Science conferences, each paper is reviewed independently by at least three different reviewers, then there is a discussion and the final decision is made by someone above them in the hierarchy ("metareviewer, etc.").
So not only would a reviewer look bad trying this, it wouldn't even work. They would be ignored or overruled by the other participants in the review process.
Upvotes: 0
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<issue_start>username_0: I have accidentally found myself in a dual submission situation. I submitted it to one journal over four months ago. A few weeks later I sent another email inquiring about the status of the article. After waiting a further few months I assumed I had not been successful and there had been an error. At this point, I should have sent an email request to remove the article from consideration. I did not. I then submitted the article to another journal (around three weeks ago). I am now aware of how serious submitting to two journals is. I have since received an apology for the delay and confirmation that my article has been received by the first journal, informing me it has been sent for peer review. I immediately responded apologising and asking to remove my article from consideration.
Is there anything else I need to do in order to correct this mistake?<issue_comment>username_1: No, you have taken proper action.
Assuming it wasn't in the system was an error of judgement, but your withdrawal has corrected the problem.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: First journal: I am not sure what they claimed, but 4 months without communications seems a long time. They are at fault. But they can live with harming your interest, you are "just" a client, golden rule for a succesful business is "you cannot please all your clients".
Second journal: I assume they asked you (via submission forms and the like) if you submitted or if you were planning to submit the same material somewhere else (or similar legalish gibberish). Depending on what you answered, you are at fault. You have been careless and you harmed yourself doing your job, luckily your job is not "truck driver", so for the moment the damage is only on you [1].
However the first journal has a history of poor communication, ask insistently confirmation of the cancelled submission. Apart from the copyright, there is the larger issue of people already doing peer review (free work) without any use.
Additionally, if your research field, or at least the pool of experts regarding your paper topic, is small enough, you put yourself in a dangerous situation: what if the two journals sent your paper to the same reviewer? If I were the reviewer (let's say I am reviewer A), I would immediately contact the editors that sent me the paper for review.
In a theoretical world, the second submission may be invalid (we do not know what you declared during submission), so you should withdraw the second submission and submit it again to another journal, openly declaring to the editor all the submission history with the previous two journals, so the editor can properly present your paper to the reviewers.
Reviewer A receives then the same paper for the third time. Thanks to the short introduction from the editor, reviewer A finally understands the authors had issues with submission to the previous journal(s).
Without the note from the editor, reviewer A would think the authors are exploiting peer reviews and the submissions system, trying their luck to get their work published in blatant disrespect of decency, fairness and consideration for other people works.
[1] Don't worry, Academia (the big one, not StackExchange only) is full of people taking moral shortcuts and having all kind of double standards, so you are not the first, nor the last, but at least consider how serious it is if you lied, even if it was just a "box ticking form on the web".
Upvotes: 0
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<issue_start>username_0: This story happened to me over 30 years ago.<issue_comment>username_1: Strictly speaking, I guess I wouldn't say *asking* is unethical, as they had no power over you (in the sense of approving your thesis, getting you a job), they told you they were offering nothing in return.
However, if they asked you to *co-author* a book, that to me suggests you at least should receive your name on the cover and royalties. Not affording you those is yes, unethical.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Asking isn't unethical, but coercion is. Even offering you an unpaid participation isn't unethical. Academic books always have an uncertain, but generally very small, financial payback. The exceptions are notable.
But if they held something over you or demanded your participation lest they withhold some required service, then that would be unethical. But you don't indicate that such was the case.
So, I'd guess it was poor etiquette not to share, but not unethical.
An explicit acknowledgement should have been provided within the book, but you are a bit unclear if that happened.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: Usually when I write a history paper, I utilize many sources.
Currently I have an article, which will be published, for which citing many sources isn't really necessary. Quite simply, I'm taking a 250-page novel (basically a log book describing an historical expedition in first person), published 500 years ago, and reducing it down to about 3 pages. Other than organizing the information with my own thesis statement and conclusion, it basically presents the same information, just in my own words. I'm simply summarizing a 250-page novel into 3 pages.
Though original work is definitely out of copyright, I'm citing to a translation published about 40 years ago, and so that is copyright of the translator.
Is summarizing a long work into a much shorter form regarded as plagiarism?<issue_comment>username_1: Plagiarism is mis-representation of the work of another as your own work. If you credit the original work and make the relationship between your work and that work clear, it is not plagiarism.
Whether the original is summarized in your own words or directly quoted is entirely irrelevant. Likewise, the question of copyright is also entirely irrelevant to plagiarism: if I pretend a fragment of Isaac Newton's writing is my own, it is still plagiarism no matter how many centuries Newton's writing has been out of copyright.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: As [Oxford](https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism) defines it, plagiarism is "presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement".
Therefore **it's not plagiarism to only use/summarise a single source**, as long as you appropriately credit them and accurately and clearly show what you took from their work, compared to what you did yourself.
But there are other problems with only using a single source:
* Mostly in the context of "dummy" research\*, where the purpose is to teach you how to do proper research, as opposed actually having you contribute to academic literature (typically at undergrad level or below):
**One may be penalised for only citing from 1 source**. This is because you're meant to learn how to do "real" research, and there you're often going to want to look at and compare multiple sources (for the reason mentioned below), and you're going to reference the research for the purpose of *adding* to it (and simply summarising a single source is probably not adding much to academic literature, even though papers simply summarising multiple sources [is a thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis)). Taking information from multiple sources and turning it into a coherent narrative is an important skill in research (whether you're doing so for its own sake or to support your research).
They may also feel that the work you did beyond what you got from the source is not substantial enough to justify a good grade.
Or perhaps they'll penalise you because the marker doesn't know what they're doing or because you were explicitly instructed to use multiple sources.
* **One source may not be an accurate representation** of the topic.
The source may be inaccurate (whether due to malice, bias or drawing conclusions from insufficient data), they may not have a full picture of all the facts even though their account is accurate and, if applicable, the source may not be representative of the topic at hand. For example, if you're writing a paper about World War 2, an accurate account of one soldier who just sat at some base for years during the war without ever getting on a battlefield probably isn't representative of the war as a whole.
Combining that one source with other sources would give you more certainty that you have an accurate representation of the topic at hand.
In real-world research, you're often going to need to cite many sources, in which case this problem wouldn't apply, but you could still look at this from the context of individual data points within your paper. If something in your paper is only backed up by a single source and there are any of the above problems in that source, that could hurt the conclusion you reached, assuming it doesn't just invalidate it entirely. Although peer review helps to avoid this problem and some sources may be trustable enough to stand up on their own.
**Only citing or summarising one source may be perfectly fine** if that's the only relevant research out there, or if the purpose of your paper is simply to summarise the source. Although if you're summarising the source, one might still wonder whether it would provide more value to reference other sources as well (if applicable), to confirm or refute what the primary source claims and to provide a more accurate picture of what's addressed in that source. But this could heavily depend on norms and best practices within individual research domains.
\*: There might be a more appropriate term for this...
---
As a side note, I wouldn't generally think of a novel as an appropriate source for a paper, as this is usually written for entertainment purposes and they can take quite a few liberties with the truth, as novels aren't generally held to the standard of academic literature.
But there may be some exceptions (such as a factual log book) and I am saying this with a technical background (technical papers usually cite other technical and scientific sources, which a novel generally isn't). You might want to get a second opinion on that, if this is for a paper that's particularly important to you.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_3: To answer your literal question first, no, relying on just a single source isn't plagiarism, as long as you correctly cite that source and attribute any quoted or paraphrased material to it, so that a reader can clearly tell which parts of your paper are your own ideas or interpretations and which are merely summaries of what the source claims.
Also, plagiarism actually has very little to do with copyright violation, except that the easiest and most blatant way to commit both at once is to copy-paste a large block of text (or an illustration) without attribution from a source written by someone else and try to pass it off as your own work. But once you get into less blatant examples, it's quite easy to commit plagiarism without violating copyright or vice versa. So your mention of the translation being under copyright is mostly a red herring.
---
Aside: Copying a block of text or an illustration from another source *and attributing it* is usually enough to make it neither plagiarism nor copyright violation, at least as long as the copied amount isn't truly and needlessly excessive. But the reasons for this differ. The reason why copying with attribution isn't plagiarism is simply that, by correctly attributing the copied material, you're no longer trying to take credit for it as your own work. The reason why it's *usually* also not a copyright violation is that copyright law in most parts of the world has a pretty wide exception — either codified into statute law or established as a form of "fair use" or "fair dealing" by courts — for *quoting portions of copyrighted works for the purposes of criticism, education or academic research*, which a properly attributed and reasonably scoped quote from a source in an academic article about or building upon the source will usually fall under.
---
All that said, I find it somewhat surprising that merely "taking a 250-page novel […] and reducing it down to about 3 pages", even if bracketed by your "own thesis statement and conclusion", would actually yield a *good* history paper without relying on *any* other sources.
Are you really planning on:
* taking your sole source 100% uncritically at face value, and not comparing it with anyone else's account of similar or contemporary events;
* basing your thesis statement and conclusion on nothing but the source text itself, without relying on any other information about the time, place and events covered in it;
* trusting the translation you're using to be 100% faithful and accurate (it never is!) and not comparing it with either the original text or other translations; and
* not contrasting your interpretation of the primary source with anyone else's analysis and interpretation of it?
If not, to any of these points, then there *probably* are at least some other sources that you should cite. And if your answer to any of the points above is "yes", then I would strongly suggest you at least think twice about it. A good academic paper is generally not supposed to just uncritically digest and regurgitate its primary source material, but to analyze it in a broader context and to illuminate aspects of it that an uncritical modern reader of the original work might otherwise miss, misinterpret or be misled by.
Unless, of course, your "history paper" is really just a "Cliff's Notes" summary of the original text. Although even Cliff's Notes™ generally include some critical analysis and background context.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: [username_1’s](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176824/1277) and [username_3’s](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176861/1277) answers make several excellent points. Just to add one more point: In many contexts, there is some kind of **expectation of originality** — e.g. most research journals, and also most educational assignments. Violation of this is often confused with plagiarism, and there’s certainly a large overlap, but it’s helpful to explicitly distinguish the two. As the other answers say, you’re not in danger of committing plagiarism since you’re acknowledging the relationship with the source clearly. But you should also make sure you’re fulfilling whatever kind of originality is required by your plans/intentions for the paper — and I guess this is part of what you had in mind when asking the question. For most contexts I can imagine, I’d guess you should be fine — summarising a long work into a much shorter one, and making it more accessible to a modern audience, *is* creating something very distinct from the original work. But this is certainly a point to be conscious of — **knowing where you plan to submit/present your paper, make sure you understand and fulfil their expectations of originality.**
Upvotes: 4
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm writing a master's thesis about a novel method. It is a multilayered algorithm with very large number of configurable parts and parameters. Furthermore, it involves machine learning and big data, which means each testing run is quite a substantial resource and time-consuming process. That's why researching the effect of every single parameter of this method (or worse, the combinations of possible parameters) would have been an enormous task for a single person with a regular, unrelated job.
Is it acceptable then to omit providing data/results for some less significant parts of the algorithm, and just justify these choices with a more or less vague description of why they seemed promising or "good enough"? Should I mention limited time as a reason for omitting that data?<issue_comment>username_1: Omitting anything is rarely a good idea; consciously not doing some of the experiments and giving some reasoning for that is perfectly fine and happens all the time in research.
Citing limited time as a (personal) reason is likewise a terrible idea, IMHO.
Good:
* With 37 hyperparameters, the search space is enormous. Parameters
$\alpha$, $\kappa\_1$ and $\kappa\_2$ are of special interest, as
indicated by prior research (Claus, 2019). In addition, $\lambda$ is
pertinent to the problem because of the Moon phase constantly changing. Other
parameters were left at their default values as they were deemed less significant (see
Table 42 for details).
Bad:
* I am working a full-time job and don't have the time to tune all 37
parameters so I toyed with just 4 hoping it's good enough.
The difference here, of course, is that in the first case you refer to some objective truth: experiment would take a long while for anyone and at the current state of research, it is more fruitful to focus on a handful of important parameters and only concern yourself with other, less significant ones, later.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: There are a couple of interesting ways of dealing with this, but mainly consider that you need to enclose or delimit your experiment's reach and expectations.
Since most of the hyperparameters are tuned by hand, stating that your `p1=0.5` for empirical reasons is perfectly fine.
As @username_1 mentioned, focusing on those parameters deemed as important is also a good idea. Since some of them are not that impactful, their analysis is `not in the scope of this work`. You could also consider them as future work :)
Edit:
Clarifying: Yes, it is OK to left experimentation settings unexplored, but you need to provide a reasonable explanation on why you decided to do that.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: Recently, I started sending cold mails to profs for upcoming PhD applications. Two of them replied instantly right after my mail:
>
> Thank you for contacting me, I am planning taking graduate students and I have these two xx and yy projects fits your background very well. I strongly encourage you to apply our program and you can write my name as your choice of PI.
>
>
>
I definetly know that doesn't mean I am already accepted or anything, but at least really encouraged me since now I feel like I have a better chance for admission than I thought at the beginning.
Problem is, they haven't asked for an interview or anyhing. One of them even asked me to apply for his theorist collaborators too (I'm working experimental and it's on my CV) to make sure I have a better chance for admission. I replied them both that it would be great to work under their investigation and projects they offer are the best topics I could wish for. (That's not a lie actually, both them are quite on point by my side.)
Now I really feel that something is missing. Should I take any action afterwards? I'm open for all kinds of advice.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> " Thank you for contacting me, I am planning taking graduate students and I have these two xx and yy projects fits your background very well. I strongly encourage you to apply our program and you can write my name as your choice of PI."
>
>
>
As the professor's response indicates, the next action for you is to apply for the Ph.D. program and name this professor as your choice of PI. If there's no place on the application form to do that, then put it in your Statement of Purpose.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: PI's have a limited amount of influence, in many cases, in the application process or acceptance decisions. The action they're suggesting you take is to actually apply for admission to the graduate programs at their schools. Aside from hiring you into a role that has nothing to do with your being a student, this is really all that they can do.
If you apply, should you get in, you will likely be subject to all the same factors involved in any graduate student being accepted into any lab. They don't owe you a slot in their lab, though they may be well predisposed to bringing in a student whose research interests align with theirs.
Upvotes: 0
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2021/10/19
| 902
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<issue_start>username_0: (I am new to the USA academic system, so please apologize if this is very naive.)
In the USA, is it possible to have a full-time job (e.g., industry scientist) and also pursue a part-time Assistant Professor position in academia, with a research/group-leading focus? Have you seen that happen before? Would that be equivalent to Adjunct Professor?<issue_comment>username_1: Yes, anything and everything is possible (but some things are extremely rare and for practical purposes impossible).
I remember a former professor of mine. He was a highly successful alumnus. He was the CEO of a big regional corporation. He was a member of the board of visitors. He was a big university donor.
He was also an adjunct professor. I thought he was a very good one.
He worked as much or as little as he liked. He focused on the things he liked. He had this freedom because he was self-funding.
Can you get a position like that without self-funding? I doubt it. But if you can self-fund, there is nothing you can't do.
The test to see if you are ready for this opportunity is: Your university has screwed up payroll and your salary was not deposited today. Do you
1. Brace for the impact on your personal finances.
2. Not notice it
3. Transfer money to your team members' personal bank accounts so there is no impact on their finances.
If you did not answer #3 then you probably do not have enough money.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_2: I won't be so encouraging as the [answer of username_1](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176836/75368). I don't think it would be impossible, but I think it would be very very rare.
An Assistant Professor is on the tenure track. There are certain expectations that almost always go beyond research, since even R1 universities have a complex mission that includes teaching. Moreover, it is other faculty members (a committee) that is normally responsible for recommending (or not) tenure at the end of the probationary period. I think that a part time person would have a lot of trouble with such a committee unless their research were far beyond the expected level.
On the other hand, I know of some highly respected industry researchers who serve as adjuncts. They don't hold tenure, and serve "at will", but mostly they do it because they want to teach (not research) at the university. They don't mind the fact that the pay is abysmal.
Another issue with such a plan is that for someone hired as an industry researcher probably has some restrictions on what they can publish outside the company. These may be mild, requiring some sign off, or severe. Some industry research requires a high level of confidentiality and the company may not want any possible "slop over" into the public sphere.
A university is almost always looking for full-time long-term employees in the tenure system and would take a lot of convincing to change their minds. One reason is that such a person doesn't really depend on the university and so could leave at any time. This would be a big problem for any students advised by the person.
In some cases, for superstars from industry (or the public sector), a person might be granted tenure via a non-standard path. But they probably wouldn't be considered *Assistant* professors. Someone near the end of their stellar career in industry might have a foot in both camps. But I think it more likely that they would move full time to the university, and retain some part time links to industry.
It would surprise me if the US had as many as ten such available positions. And I don't know how an early career person could even convince a university to consider it.
Upvotes: 3
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2021/10/19
| 2,755
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<issue_start>username_0: Below is an email I received from a student whom I'm giving Spanish lessons to. He took a assessment test and failed it. I received this email (which I've attached below) from him today, and I'm not sure how to respond to it. I would like to encourage the student.
>
> Dear teacher,
>
>
> I participated in your research study today...and failed miserably.
> It’s as if I didn’t retain anything at all! I want you to know,
> however, that I’m not giving up. I’m going to double down because I
> have dear friends in Florida who, although quite bi-lingual, speak
> Spanish frequently and I would dearly love to be able to communicate
> with them in their native language. I’m preparing even now for round
> two, and I sincerely hope to be successful.
>
>
> Yours linguistically,
>
>
> Sara
>
>
> P.S. You have a fantastic system, which is why I’m double chagrined.
> But don’t give up on me.
>
>
><issue_comment>username_1: I would suggest writing something like this:
>
> Dear Sara,
>
>
> Your attitude towards adversity is commendable. I'm sorry that you didn't achieve a better result in your first try, but if you convert the motivation that your message displays into study effort in the next round, I am sure that your success is just around the corner.
>
>
> Yours sincerely,
> X.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: Actually you need to do more than [suggested by Wetenschaap](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/176863/75368), though that is good. It isn't enough to just encourage them if they have poor study habits. I learned that a lot of students reach university not really knowing how to use their time and other resources effectively. I've had to take time out in CS courses to teach people effective note taking (and summarizing).
More isn't necessarily better in studying. Cramming for assessments is almost always counterproductive. You want them to study *more effectively* not just *harder*. Harder is good for pounding nails.
I was once in your student's place, having failed the first exam in a Physics course. I eventually got an A in the course, but it was only by changing my study habits.
One thing professors often neglect to do, often because they don't see it as their job, is to teach their students how to learn effectively. Presentation of material and assumptions that students know how to deal with it isn't effective.
You might actually need to meet with them and ask how they went about studying for the assessment. Perhaps you can make suggestions about a better study plan. You may be able to do this with email, but it will take some thought and maybe a couple of iterations.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_3: Keep it short; your time is precious, and this email isn't really communicating critical or subject-matter information. I'd likely do this:
>
> Thanks for the kind words about my system. I'm sorry to hear you were
> disappointed in the test result, that sounds frustrating. It's a good
> sign that you're thinking about this as a signal to make more time for
> studying. Good luck from here on, regards,
>
>
>
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: >
> How should I reply to an email from a student who took a test and failed, and promises to do better?
>
>
>
Don't reply. There was no request for information, and any information that you volunteer carries risk of misinterpretation.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_5: Many times a communication like that (esp. the "hear is why I'm motivated" part) is from a student hopelessly behind. If that turns out to be the case, let them know there's no shame, esp. attempting to learn something with lots of "just getting it" like a language. Suggest that instead of beating their head against a wall in the rest of the class, retaking it later and focusing on their other classes might be better (students seem to rarely fail one class while easily passing others). How will you know, because...
But either way, focus on specifics. What parts of the test did they have trouble with (can they bring it next time they see you)? What about previous quizes where they got a "passing" C-? Should they be spending more time memorizing nouns? Irregular verbs? Should they/do they have Flash cards? Or did they simply not understand the format of the questions?
What's the most complex thing they can read or understand or say? Next time they see you, instead of discussing some future plan, can you two practice this one thing *right now*? Do they know when office hours are? Are they finding the assigned readings in the book -- and what problems are they having with it?
Then in this case, they have friends who speak Spanish? Can they facetime them and practice (yes, they will be mocked for speaking school mainland Spanish, but not too much).
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: I wrote this fast the first time, but will explain my reasoning as suggested by <NAME> in the comments.
Exams are unfair. They attempt to extract quantitative information about subjective things, but both students and teachers sometimes forget the subjective nature of this kind of assessment. A teacher will often consider a student weak because he/she didn't do well in an exam, and worse: The student will do the same with him/herself. Exams reflect so poorly the acquisition of knowledge that their results often don't even correlate with the ability of employing what they were supposed to measure.
I can give you an example in my field. Suppose student A did exceedingly well in a calculus exam such as the ones I used to take in my undergrad courses, where you were supposed to differentiate some artificially complicated function in order to assess if you had understood the chain rule. Student B did poorly in this exam, getting virtually all signs wrong, and failed it. Then, while working on a physics problem, student A was completely unable to even figure out what to differentiate, but student B noticed the secant approached the tangent and drew a picture that allowed you to write an expression. This expression could, then, be differentiated. Neither student could solve the problem alone, but A could use the expression from B and arrive at an answer.
The process above describes a collaborative aspect of knowledge that is essentially impossible to assess by an exam (although people do try sometimes). In the end, this is much closer to how knowledge works in the real world. We are not alone, and we have the right to not know. We also have the right to study and not learn. It is fine. In fact, in my personal experience, I have found out that student B in the example above it much more valuable than student A, since any computer can differentiate, but no computer can interpret (yet). In language, the teacher must ensure every student is reserved the right of finding it difficult. Not everyone is good with languages. You cannot blame the French for being unable to speak a proper "r" in English, given that their own language doesn't have that sound. The teacher has no context over a student's background, motivation, personal problems. Even in the subject you are yourself teaching, what you get when you talk to students about their difficulties is only an approximation, because they themselves are often unable to pinpoint a cause for their poor performance. It's not their fault: it is extremely subjective.
There are students who fail exams, and there are exams that fail students. I prefer to always work with the possibility of my exam being unfit for what I wanted, especially when I see that a student is working hard. If they do work hard and have a poor grade, I personally tell them that that grade means nothing. That I don't really know what I'm doing when providing a grade, because as for myself I don't feel that exams capture much. Unfortunately, the alternative assessments demand too much time and effort, and we end up stuck with our poor, medieval methods. In the end, my nightmare is not missing out a bad student and giving them a good grade, but to block a good student from reaching his/her full potential. The former will be corrected by life itself, but the latter is so destructive I cannot allow myself to be the cause.
Thus, here is my suggestion:
>
> Dear Sara,
>
>
> I am sorry about your test result. Unfortunately, it is not always
> easy to understand why we failed an exam. Sometimes we study a lot and
> fail, but the opposite can also happen. In the end, exams are
> not perfect. The most important things you have to ask are: do you
> think you are learning Spanish? Do you feel like you are studying and
> gradually improving? Do you feel motivated in this course?
>
>
> If the answers are all positive, then we must understand why the exam
> didn't capture them. Feel free to drop by my office etc etc...
>
>
> Sincerely, X.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: Most people here have either never written an email, written too many emails or have passive anger issues.
You are thinking way too much about it. Your email is simply supposed to confirm the situation, optionally give some advise and wish positive outcomes for the future.
No human being won everything on their first try, which is why I don't understand the passively angry replies people reply here such as:
* "but if you convert the motivation that your message displays into study effort in the next round" <- So basically this comes off as the teacher having seen zero motivation in the student after n-years. If I was the student receiving the reply, I would think twice opening up to the teacher about learning difficulties.
* "Sometimes we study a lot and fail, but the opposite can also happen. In the end, exams are not perfect. The most important things you have to ask are: do you think you are learning Spanish? Do you feel like you are studying and gradually improving? Do you feel motivated in this course?" <-- Goes on for way too long and even sounds a bit demotivating, maybe even as if the teacher didn't even read the email or know the student at all. Your are beating around the bush and the forest by the end.
* "It's a good sign that you're thinking about this as a signal to make more time for studying". <-- This is the most passive agressive way to say that the student is a lazy... and *finally* starts to take the course minimally serious. I would immedietly cancel the course with such a teacher, clearly not an honest teacher who cares about the students.
* @username_4 you are basically assuming that the student will be interpreting it as such. But you're wrong. The reply will in 80% of the cases come off as => "The teacher is massively disappointed, maybe I shouldn't go to their course and bother them", "The teacher is angry, failure, failure, failure" and lastly "the teacher doesn't care about me".
OP, just say it's okay to fail the exam and simply throw in a positive phrase like second times a charm or whatever and thank for the appreciation of your system (maybe also add something like "we will figure out how to get you through / improve".
The longer the email gets the more it seems like you are too invested in it or deeply struck by the result, as if your ego was pushed down because the student / your put-forth student didn't succeed.
Upvotes: 0
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2021/10/20
| 211
| 878
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<issue_start>username_0: I am based in China and am desperate to find a good email service as a researcher. The university email has suspicious delays and is probably censored. I used to rely on Gmail, but Google is blocked in China, and my emails from my Gmail are often blocked by our university. Are there good email alternatives for academics?<issue_comment>username_1: Outlook is still working, and you can use Outlook Mail to connect to your university mail address through POP, etc. It might be a good idea to automatically reroute your Gmail emails to your outlook address as well.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: I heard that Yahoo must work in China, but some people note about the possible lags. I advise you to register on QQ Mail — it's allowed in China. Well, if you're not afraid to use VPN, you can access all Western email providers using VPN.
Upvotes: 0
|
2021/10/20
| 3,188
| 12,750
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<issue_start>username_0: Summary: My colleague is asking for my help in solving fundamental problem. They are having troubles on basic level, and I don't have time to guide them through it. How I can politely avoid wasting their time AND my time?
---
I am a computer scientist (research focused on machine learning and statistics) and where I work I have a mathematician colleague. He is a bit obsessed with millennium problems (things like P vs NP, SSP, etc.) and so far he has tried to come up with ways to solve these two problems, but his 'solutions' so far are *poor* at best mostly due to his ignorance on the subject.
Now, I admire the interest and tenacity he goes about these things. However, he doesn't know much about algorithm complexity, hasn't given me any indication that he has read about what approaches have been tried/used, keeps trying random stuff and asking me to check if I think his ideas are sound or to verify them, which I find annoying since it takes a lot of time to disprove him or to refute each of his attempts (specially because I don't want to be hostile, since I barely know him).
So, I'd like a polite way to either discourage him from working on these problems because I don't want to dedicate time to this (I need to read and study to enter a PhD program and I also believe he's clearly underestimating the problems) or to discourage him from asking me about it without being rude.<issue_comment>username_1: You describe pretty well in your question what you want to communicate, so use that:
>
> Hey X, while I admire your interest and tenacity for these problems, these are very hard problems and I do not have the time to help you with this.
>
>
>
Simple, straightforward, you commend him for his motivation and do not comment on their skills, you give the motivation to not do this purely based on your own motives (lack of time).
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Like a lot of things, "I-statements" work well, taking any lack upon yourself, which means they aren't out there and perhaps perceived as criticism or arguing points.
>
> You know, I've been thinking about all these problems. These are problems that the best mathematicians on the planet haven't found approaches to solve. They have fiendish subtleties or missing knowledge. They get amateurs regularly convinced they have answers, who have basic knowledge compared to that needed for a serious attempt.
>
>
> I admire the effort, but I can't actually help. ~~If your papers have rudimentary beginner errors, then they don't work, and if they don't have rudimentary beginner errors,~~ **[REMOVED SEE COMMENTS]** I don't have anything like the skill or time needed to check for non-rudimentary errors. Which to be honest, they will probably turn out to have.
>
>
> Half a job is no job at all, and I don't have the skill, and I don't want to make you think I could, even if I had the time.
>
>
> I have to prioritise my own work, and I know how much work a good honest review takes. And you'd want reviews of approaches to problems that have defied giants. I don't have even close to that kind of time available, to track errors down or form any kind of useful opinion. I'm sorry. It's not possible, even slightly.
>
>
>
Pick what's useful out of that lot, and adapt it as needed, but that sort of approach overall.
If argued, you could read, and perhaps tactfully remind him, [what happened with another problem of that level, Fermat's Last Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem). World class mathematician reckoned he would have to dedicate close to a decade to master all relevant knowledge and techniques, asked other world class specialists in the field to check his work - and even then between them, they missed the errors while working on the problem.
You just don't have that level of skill or time. Be honest, say so, and tell him you won't lie to him, about that, or the time needed to check proofs to get an idea if they may work.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: From a comment:
>
> I want to discourage him from trying to solve it while underestimating
> the problem or that he stops bothering me about it.
>
>
>
Okay, so you have something between conflicting or hazy priorities here. First, I'll recommend that you get your priorities straight, specifically: (1) you stop wasting time on it, and (2) your colleague stops wasting time on it. It would be *nice* if you could do both. But failing that, your top priority is to yourself; and after all, you can control your actions, but not another person's, so this is the only feasible ordering.
I'll say that I've brushed up against this kind of thing once in a while, so I know the frustration you're talking about. A few years back I had a student indeed fall into the Collatz Conjecture, despite both the textbook and myself warning him that it's been a time-waster for generations of mathematicians. He was sending me pages of gobbldeygook and asking if he was making progress (this being a community-college student who couldn't reliably prove that 2x + 6 was even for an integer x). I gave him one clear warning that he should definitely stop and focus on our classwork. As he didn't follow that advice, I basically had to wash my hands of him and simply hope for the best.
So in that regard, I suggest a like single attempt: advise your colleague that they should probably not pursue this path, because it's an overwhelmingly deep subject. Do that *once*, period. If you don't do that, that it's entirely possible that you'll be dragged down with your colleague's obsession.
Now, if you really can't find any way to say "I'm not doing this anymore" without sounding rude, you might consider a truthful-but-diplomatic approach, like:
>
> I'm really busy right now, so I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to
> get to this. I'll put it on my tasklist and see if I can get to it
> after other priorities.
>
>
>
Then do that. If you do in fact get some free time a week or a month later, maybe look at it if you're curious. If not, so be it. If he continues to send stuff after that, prioritize appropriately. Maybe next time it takes months or a year before you have space for it.
Another thing to consider is to expect to see some single "big idea" that convinces you he's got a never-before-seen strategy that gives him a leg up that no one else has seen to date, before you spend any time on reading the body of a paper. Avoid getting lost in the weeds of details. <NAME> has written on this in the past, in the context of [P = NP Proofs](https://rjlipton.wpcomstaging.com/2019/04/21/pnp-proofs/); and some of the links there in comments to other sites are interesting, as well.
But frankly just finding some way for you to stop dealing with it should take the topmost priority.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: Here are two useful questions you can ask yourself;
1. "How would I want someone to set boundaries with me if the situation were reversed?", and
2. "How would I approach this same situation if this were my *child*?"
You can never know how someone else thinks, or how they will react to a situation. But these two questions will help give you the best perspective on this situation.
Why? Because the **first** question will help you frame your communication *compassionately* and *respectfully*, while the **second** question will remind you that your goal here is not to solve their problems for them.
It's to support them and encourage them into becoming their best, all by themselves.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: From the comments you say *" if I just let him waste years on this without telling him he could be using his time on more fruitful results".*
So tell him exactly this. Tell him that he may spend 5 years trying to solve this problem, with possible no outcome, or he can tackle other problem with a time-span of 1-3 years. Remind him that money/grants/bursaries for young researhcer are granted on the basis of what has been done in the previous 1-3 years, so he may very well end up with nothing in his hands in 3 years, and no funding possibilities in 3 years.
Then, it is his call, not yours, to judge how they spend their **time**.
When you say, *"I wouldn't be true to my own researcher principles if I just let him waste years on this without telling him he could be using his time on more fruitful results"*
I miss your point. Results are not the goal of science. The way to getting the results is science. So he may very well not get any results (and that is perfectly fine, in research in an ideal world), but the issue is that he is not doing good science, not that he will get no results.
If you do not want to cut him off completely, focus on teaching him how to fish (it will not take you much time), not in providing the fish :) .
By the third time you explain him how to find the relevant literature for his problem, he will either give up getting in touch with you or get on the right path.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: Adding to @username_1's answer, what about something like this?
>
> I admire your tenacity at wanting to make a contribution to these problems. If you want to make a contribution in these areas, you'll need to read up on to get the foundation, then I recommend you start reading papers on to get a sense of what has been tried already and what theoretical results have already been proven. That will also give you a sense of any gaps in your knowledge that you will need to fill with classes or self-study. You may even need to go for a (second?) PhD. It's going to be a long and tedious road involving a *ton* of learning (I would expect it to take ), but once you're fully immersed in the background theory of the problem and the work that's been done and being done on it by others, you'll be prepared to begin working to make a contribution on it yourself. That in itself will be a life-long journey, with many false starts and many thousands of hours spent learning, experimenting, and collaborating with others to (hopefully) make tiny gains, but it's worth it to be one of the CS researchers working to advance our collective knowledge on these problems if this is a commitment you're willing to make. But obtaining the necessary theoretical knowledge and learning from others is key to doing any kind of research, and this is especially true for a problem of this magnitude (*if the colleague is a researcher consider rewording this last part as it might sound rude*).
>
>
>
Basically treat them like a graduate student you're advising (though respectful of the fact that they're a colleague). Hopefully they will either decide to take this seriously and become a productive member of the research community working on these problems, or they'll realize how big of a commitment is involved and walk. Either way problem solved.
If the colleague ignores this advice and continues with the "hey check my proof" queries without any attempt at self-study, then I recommend @username_1's answer. And this approach won't work if the colleague in question is a true crank (vs. someone who is just naive about what research is).
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: If your colleague is struggling with fundamental math questions, and he is very enthusiastic in dedicating *their* time, there is a very good solution.
Explain him **once** that any serious attempt at these fundamental questions will need a very formal formulation. Then refer him to [Metamath](http://us.metamath.org/), software and community. In the same email, inform him that you are short in time, and so you cannot provide any timely assistance. Be polite, Be concise. **No justifications whatsoever.**
After that...
>
> So, I'd like a polite way to either discourage him from working on these problems **because I don't want to dedicate time to this** (I need to read and study to enter a PhD program and I also believe he's clearly underestimating the problems) or **to discourage him from asking me about it without being rude.**
>
>
>
If he asks again about these problems: "Sorry, I'm short on time to properly reply. How did you progress with Metamath?"
If he says that is having trouble expressing something with Mathmath, reply: "Sorry, I could not help you with that."
Automate these replies, in email and in conversations.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_8: "I respectfully recommend that you not waste too much of your time on this problem at this stage of your career. And I am afraid that my own free time is too precious to waste on this problem. I am sorry I can't be of any help."
If you try to be more polite, you will be misinterpreted.
Upvotes: 1
|
2021/10/20
| 801
| 3,536
|
<issue_start>username_0: I'm an undergraduate student studying physics and I'm applying to graduate programs in both the U.S. and the U.K. In my personal statement, I tried to explain the research I'm doing and I included the titles of my publications. I wonder can I add the corresponding URL links to the text in my PDF (I've done that on my resume)? I don't know if the admission committee would like that or not, but I didn't find any relevant requirements about that on their website (they only included the length requirement, and what content I should incorporate). Any suggestion is appreciated :)<issue_comment>username_1: You can certainly add hyperlinks to your documents. However, when you add a hyperlink to a document like a personal statement or a resume, always assume it is not clicked. Three reasons for this:
1. First of all, perhaps somebody missed the fact that there is a link at all. A blue highlighted word or a symbol might not be clear. If you do it, make sure that it is clear that there is a link
2. Second, some people still like to print stuff they are reading. Hyperlinks don't work very well when they are on a printed document.
3. People are busy. They could feel like opening yet another document feels like a hassle and don't bother.
So, what you should do is to make sure the document you provide is self-sufficient, without the reader needing to know the contents of the link. Assume they will not read it so prepare your document for that fact.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: username_1's answer is correct, but I want to offer a firmer one: Do not include URL's in your personal statement.
In a resume or CV, you should feel free to link to your own work. But understand how the link may be used: Your readers will probably not follow the link. If they do, they will use it to verify the existence, state, and possibly the at-a-glance level of quality of your work product if they choose. Think e.g. a github link to a software project or a DOI link to a published paper.
You can assume any links in a personal statement will not be followed. Furthermore, you can assume that anyone reading an application will have access to your resume/CV, which should contain links to any of your work products that you are willing to show anyway.
That is to say: URL's in the main text of a personal statement convey nothing to the reader and they have the major drawback of disrupting your writing with a useless token.
I also would not include an inline citation to your own work. Though this is less disruptive to the overall flow, consider that your CV/resume should contain what amounts to a bibliography of your own work already. By referencing your results directly as your own, a reader knows that they can check the resume/CV for details. If you provide an inline citation instead, someone reading the statement may interrupt their reading to consume information that you have already provided elsewhere.
I'd also recommend that you not include inline full titles of work products included in your CV/resume in the body of your personal statement. A sentence that contains verbiage like:
"In my recent paper *On the equivalence of Foos and Bars in Baz spaces*, I showed..."
is going to come across as a clunky attempt to draw attention to the fact that you have had something published. You could just as well omit the title:
"In a recent paper, I showed..."
and the reader will know to look at your CV later if they find the specific details important.
Upvotes: 2
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2021/10/20
| 3,125
| 13,360
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am decent at learning from videos. But poor at learning from textbooks, wikipedia articles etc. Unless the material is really easy to follow, I am unable to learn most of text content. How do I practice this? Last semester, I read 500,000 words to practice my reading, but I mostly learnt by internet pdf slides made by various universities teachers rather than the book itself (I did read the book and highlighted all the important facts and summarized them but I would never reach any conclusion trying to do so), so I am not very confident about my ability to learn from text. Can you share some tips?
This skill is really important once I enter a job as well as I am acomputer engineering student so that is going to be most important as technology keeps changing. I have never found any good advices related to this in stackexchange.
**My issue while learning from textbooks:**
I fail to connect the dots. It seems overwhelming for me to conclude something by reading. Whereas while reading slides/notes, it is easy for me to conclude and connect the dots. I don't get bored or distracted, I remember what I have studied if I understand but my problem is that I don't even understand.
**Did this happen in past?**
I have very light memories. I remember reading textbooks as well but there used to be tons of videos. And most of my subjects were rather numerical(where you need to do calculations), so reading books was easy for me in that case. But here most of my textbooks are literature (computer science so) and maybe some coding (coding isn't really part of most CS subjects contrary to belief). I have a hard time reading theory.
I read [this](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/89482/how-do-you-read-learn-from-and-assess-a-textbook) as well.<issue_comment>username_1: As you describe what you do, it seems very passive. If that is the case, then that is the root of your problem. Reading is a spectator sport. Learning is an active sport. You don't learn to swim by watching others do it. You get wet.
Videos are also too passive.
For learning you need skills, not facts. The skills are learned through practice. For technical subjects it means solving problems/exercises. Lots of them. It also normally requires feedback on your attempts, which is hard to get from using only books or videos. Seeing a solution to a problem is really nothing like producing a solution for purposes of learning.
Think of your brain as a muscle that needs exercising, not as a sponge that mops up information. Even the "mopping" process of the brain requires repetition and reinforcement.
Ultimately you want insight to emerge from your learning. And you want those insights to last. There are very few people who can gain insight from reading and watching, at least until they become experts.
It took Einstein about ten years (up to about 1900) to achieve the insights that led him to discover relativity. That included reading (about past experimentation), but also many many discussions with others.
---
See [this](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/163410/75368) for more, especially the book reference (Zull) at the bottom.
See [this](https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/a/1168/1293) about effective note taking - Hipster PDA.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: There are two things that help me when I’m reading something too obscure or dense. The first is to **teach** it to someone else. Giving a lesson requires you to think of some logical order of presenting the information that you’ve read, and it requires that you digest and understand it. If there’s a part of the book that is clearly important enough to convey to someone else but you’re lacking the requisite skills, then you’ve identified an area on which to spend more time.
There’s a middle step that helps me as well, which is to **talk about (or even complain about) the book.** I find that some sections of a book are so dense that I have trouble understanding them. So, I complain to a friend that is willing to listen. But I don’t just say “I don’t like this book, it’s too hard,” I explain *why*. Maybe the author doesn’t define their terms well enough, maybe they assume knowledge of something they don’t explain—whatever the case may be, talking about the book can help you identify areas where you need more help.
My second thing is to **practice.** It may not seem like it, but you will get better if you keep trying. There is no need to keep doing things that are definitely not working, but keep in mind that learning is a skill, which takes practice. Try not to get discouraged if you’re struggling or not getting it. If you’re making your best effort, then it is doing *something.*
Above all, persevere.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: It is worth remembering that course notes/slides are carefully curated from a lot of sources and painstakingly compiled into a form ideal for students to absorb. It is no wonder that following the material and connecting the dots is easy; it is designed to be that way. Likewise, a video lesson is designed to be followed along.
The drawback of this simplicity is that course notes/videos present a limited perspective, whereas the actual subject may be much more messy. Books often embrace the mess and are therefore require more effort to follow along. This effort is the active learning that @username_1 recommends. Some books are notorious for being abstruse, but can be extremely rewarding once you get through them.
Coming to the main question, of how to get better at learning from books, practice is the key. You can be smart about it though; scaffold your reading so that you start with simple sources and build up to more challenging books. If you've understood something from a video lesson, try reading it up from some books. It should be easier since you know the background already. Reading will help you develop the skills of visualizing, assimilating and really thinking. Those skills will come in handy when you later try to read a new topic. It won't happen overnight, but if you keep working at it systematically, you will surely see improvement. A reasonable amount of research shows that [overlearning](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-power-of-overlearning/) through such techniques does work.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: Personally, I create Anki flashcards for the basic vocabulary, basic notations, and basic diagrams I do not fully understand yet. Then, I'll put the textbook away for two weeks.
Putting the textbook away ensures that there is enough time for the information to automatically get uploaded into my brain using [spaced repetition](https://www.zhighley.com/spaced-repetition-evidence-and-anki-tutorial/).
Then, I can come back to the book and try to read it again. But this time, reading requires much less mental energy because I've already memorized some of the basic jargon and some of the basic concepts already. This strategy is known as [incremental reading](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Michael_Nielsen_re-discovers_incremental_reading_with_Anki).
Then, I'll use [deliberate practice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-sjUoGO250) and I'll do as many practice exercises as I can. Deliberate practice is not the same as spaced repetition, but it's just as crucial.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_5: In addition to advice in the other answers, which is good, I think another approach that helps (especially with self-directed learning) is to **have a goal.** (I like to think of it as my ulterior motive.) Ideally this is some small project you come up with yourself or with an advisor, but could also include a list of homework or test problems you want to be able to solve.
"Learning python programming" (for example) is great in the abstract, but most real day-to-day python programmers don't have or need an encyclopedic knowledge of every feature in the language. Instead, a good approach is to have a project that interests you that requires python programming. Then, you will be motivated to learn the parts of python you need to accomplish your project.
This has all kinds of advantages. First, the motivation section of textbooks can be very abstract. Very few people are amped up about learning about list comprehensions by reading the first paragraph of a python chapter. But if you have a specific problem that you want to solve that you can tackle with list comprehensions, then you are already motivated to read that chapter. It also forces you to *focus* on the parts of a book that are *useful to you.* A textbook is very general and trying to cover many use cases. Having a specific focus lets you narrow down the parts you need to read to the parts you find more interesting. And it will help you to think critically about the text, because in the back of your mind will always be a question about how you can use this information in practice. It also unbinds you from studying one particular text; you are looking for any resource which conveys a particular concept well, and reading multiple sources is a way to increase the robustness of your knowledge. I often find that after several months on a project, I know the particular area I'm interested in as well or better than the way it is presented in any one book. Finally, at the end of your studies, you'll have a completed project, which is a very powerful demonstration to yourself and to others that you *have* learned something.
This approach won't always work, since sometimes you need to learn a lot of theory to understand the problems you are interested in. But more often than not, I think picking the pieces of a textbook that are most relevant to your interest and focusing on those, is more effective than reading a book cover to cover. You will also likely find over time that you will need to backtrack to fill in details that initially you thought weren't important, or you may end up needing different parts of the book for different projects and eventually covering most parts of a book.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: Starting off a bit tangential... You are not alone.
I don't mean I'm like this as well, quite the opposite - it's utterly incomprehensible to me how a person would prefer a video detailing some problem over text description, provided that text is of a good quality (we also have taught courses to help with textbooks specifically!).
However, I find this increasingly common among my students. In fact, very recently I was completely baffled when instead of following a detailed set of written instructions an undergrad student chose to look up youtube videos of another person performing the task (and reading the selfsame set of instructions while doing so!).
So, to me there are two extremes - one is fighting extremely terse explanations in a textbook having difficulties connecting the dots, another is listening to explanations/watching videos, main pitfall here being that perceived competence is usually a lot higher than real. This, and code bootcamps are two major things mass-producing students who *feel* they know how to solve real-world problems yet seem completely and utterly stuck when given one. No, it wasn't all dandy in days of yore, rather this kind of imbalance seemed less prevalent.
Given these issues, what is one supposed to do, then? And the answer to that is tried and true by generations upon generations.
**Combine the approaches.**
It is perfectly reasonable to seek alternative explanations when you don't get something but first, **think about the problem yourself**. Put the book aside and consider how you would approach it. Get back to book. If stuck, ask professor or a colleague or, indeed, find a video. When you feel like you totally understand something, find or invent an adjacent problem and see if you can solve it (or, at the very least, are not entirely paralyzed by it). Finally, connect the dots yourself: a good book would in all likelihood mention why some theorem is important; your brain needs to connect whatever you learn to what you already know. Thinking of possible implications is probably the single most helpful skill in learning.
Consider how something essential like Calc I was structured: theory/textbooks, lectures with explanations, problems, seminars, more problems... It is like so for a good reason. @username_1 is 100% right here: if you don't get your feet wet, you are just avoiding the hard part of the work and it's going to massively backfire a few years later when you find out that your feeling of understanding the subject was very shallow and you haven't really learned to think well enough to solve problems on your own. Unfortunately, this does happen, quite a lot, and this is not the kind of career you want. So if there is no problem provided that you could try solving with that newly-acquired knowledge, invent one!
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_7: Perhaps it stems from less facility for, and/or less practice with, longform text organized in paragraphs. If this is the case, you could try reading denser novels, articles and essays (eg in online magazines for the informed layman). If you already read dense narratives, maybe it gives you a chance to reflect on what is different between them and the nonfiction textbooks and technical articles you want to read more of.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I have a PhD in mechanical engineering and am currently a postdoc. I have been fairly productive in my research, published fair amount of papers during my 5 years PhD and 1.5 years of Postdoc experience. I feel confident that I can keep publishing quite more in the coming years too.
But the truth is, I don't feel the point of any of this. I don't feel that even if I get an academic job, I can survive the constant pressure of securing grants, doing exciting but not groundbreaking research, feeling disappointment when submitting to medium impact journals, being overshadowed by successful colleagues.
When it comes to industry research, the positions in my field are hard to come by. I am an immigrant in the US and most of the positions require permanent residency or citizenship. I have been facing constant rejection for the past year. Also, I feel that my motivation to do fast paced research has reduced significantly since I graduated my PhD in 2020.
I have been considering non-academic jobs like data science (bit unrealistic) or software developer (more realistic, after taking a boot-camp or something similar). However, these will not make use of my PhD background and field of study.
Alternatively, I am thinking of going into scientific editing and communication with hopes of transitioning into a business development role. This will somewhat keep me connected to science and my field but away from the bench.
However, one thing that stops me from making a decision is the feeling of guilt and failure to achieve what I had planned when I started my grad school journey. I wanted to be a scientist, innovate, satiate my curiosity, helm a lab and be someone that plays an important part in the society.
Now, I don't know how to move past my feelings. Any advice?<issue_comment>username_1: There is concept in the business world known as "sunk cost". The idea is to avoid the reasoning of "since we have already invested so much into this failing project, we should keep pursuing it." Instead, it is best to view the next decision as independent (i.e., we have $100 to invest, should I put it into a failing project or put it into something new?). Romantic relationships often extend too long for this reason.
In this case, I think you need to ignore the "sunk cost". Instead, take some time to think about what it is you really want to be doing. It's very possible your feelings are related to mental health (pandemic, burnout, poor sleep/diet, etc.) and actually have nothing to do with being a "failure". You may find you'd prefer to run an ice cream shop. If so, I'd start position yourself to run an ice cream shop. Instead, you may realize that mountains are climbed one step at a time, and you may go easier on yourself that you aren't a "top performer" (yet).
My last tip would be to keep a daily journal for the next 40 days. At the end of the day, write three things that brought you 'consolation' (i.e., joy, happiness, etc.) and three things that brought you 'desolation' (i.e., sadness, anger) from your day. You'll likely notice a pattern which could help you make a move.
Good luck.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: Big life transitions are a really good time to meet with a therapist to talk it through. Even if that's not something you want or need to do long term, a month or two of sessions right now could really make a difference in terms of sorting your feelings out about leaving academia now rather than letting it linger. If you're having strong feelings of guilt that's a good sign that there's something you need to talk through to feel better about your decisions.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: You should be proud of yourself for identifying that a career path won't make you happy before sinking more valuable resources into it.
Best of luck finding a path that makes you happy.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: >
> But the truth is, I don't feel the point of any of this. I don't feel
> that even if I get an academic job, I can survive the constant
> pressure of securing grants, doing exciting but not groundbreaking
> research, feeling disappointment when submitting to medium impact
> journals, being overshadowed by successful colleagues.
>
>
>
To be honest, you will have similar pressures outside academia, so general dissatisfaction with things like this is not a great reason to leave academia if you are doing well.
I have 9 years of experience in my field and still haven't been able to obtain a "senior" position, while I see people with a couple of years of experience earning twice as much as I do. It's soul-destroying!
>
> When it comes to industry research, the positions in my field are hard
> to come by. I am an immigrant in the US and most of the positions
> require permanent residency or citizenship. I have been facing
> constant rejection for the past year. Also, I feel that my motivation
> to do fast paced research has reduced significantly since I graduated
> my PhD in 2020.
>
>
>
Outside academia, you will also face constant rejection. For one reason or another, most companies will not want to employ you. But some will still string you along for a long sequence of interviews. Many will ghost you (this is a much worse problem than in academia.)
>
> I have been considering non-academic jobs like data science (bit
> unrealistic) or software developer (more realistic, after taking a
> boot-camp or something similar). However, these will not make use of
> my PhD background and field of study.
>
>
>
That is true, but such jobs will make use of the fact that you have learned how to learn things, which is an incredibly valuable skill! Many people in many fields are not very good at this.
>
> Alternatively, I am thinking of going into scientific editing and
> communication with hopes of transitioning into a business development
> role. This will somewhat keep me connected to science and my field but
> away from the bench.
>
>
>
I did have a friend who went this route after his PhD in mathematics, but he gave it up after a while. I have the impression that it's much less realistic than the other suggestions you make above. So I wouldn't put all the eggs in this basket.
If you are interested in scientific communication, I suggest you begin by starting a blog and see how long you can keep it up.
>
> However, one thing that stops me from making a decision is the feeling
> of guilt and failure to achieve what I had planned when I started my
> grad school journey. I wanted to be a scientist, innovate, satiate my
> curiosity, helm a lab and be someone that plays an important part in
> the society.
>
>
>
Well, this is the sunk cost thing, indeed. I also spent my entire life trying to be an academic, and I still feel guilty about giving it up, 10 years later.
>
> Now, I don't know how to move past my feelings. Any advice?
>
>
>
It sounds like you are doing well in your academic career, so congratulations! I would do a bit of research, speak to any contacts you have in industry (particularly former academics) and try to learn about what their work is like. Take some programming courses if necessary, so you don't feel like you would be starting from zero.
Find out about routes which people took out of academia. Don't be afraid to ask people about their experiences. Most will be happy to help you.
Don't be discouraged by the constant job rejections. It's tough at the moment, and just as bad in industry as academia.
Don't throw money at a therapist unless you really think it will help. Americans think therapy is the answer to everything. I recommend talking to your friends first.
I know people who left academia after a postdoc or two. I also know people who did research on industry, learned some useful things for their Plan B, but ended up staying in academia. Both routes are viable.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: I also wanted to be a scientist, and did a PhD in chemistry. I didn't get any postdocs, and was made redundant from my job in industry after a few years. It was a difficult time, filled with a lot of rejection.
I decided to retrain in informatics, and now I'm a business analyst working on a large data management project in a research organisation. My previous experience is useful to me every day, I'm sometimes surprised how much it helps. I find the work much more interesting than what I was doing with chemistry, and I think my potential to help society is greater now.
Only you can decide if you're happy with your current direction and staying where you are, but I can tell you from my experience that changing to something that interests you more is not throwing away what you have done, and it is not failing. According to the book ["Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by <NAME>](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0735214506), it might not even set you back at all.
Whatever you decide, I hope you enjoy the results.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_6: ### Think twice, rest a little and think again.
**Whatever decision you make is the right one.**
Both paths have positive and negative sides. So there is no right answer, no one who can make this decision other than you, no one who can know the future. And whatever decision you make **is** the right one. (I know it seems to contradict itself but it doesn't really do it). It is important that you are serene about this, because you have to live with it.
**Research is a drug**, and once it gets under your skin, once you are addicted to it, it will be difficult to be without it. But the path you are on now, that you described so well, also gives you reasons to change: the stability of work, besides a right, is a necessary basis for peacefully building your life outside (outside the world of work). And for a balanced life you cannot have only one aspect active, because in the long-term you have to be able to expect periods in which problems arise on some aspect. Having more active sectors guarantees you that somewhere something will go better than somewhere else.
On the other hand, **a job that you really like doesn't weigh in your life**. Never underestimate it.
**Continue publishing.** I would like to lead you to reflect on this aspect as well: you state you can continue publishing by doing another job.
True for the first time, more and more difficult later, because you will not easily be able to keep your knowledge updated up to the level necessary to be able to publish where you aim, and you will find less and less time to devote to this. By making a career (or wanting to make it) your energies and more importantly your time will be focused on something else. Not to mention marriage, children, parents (including in-laws) as they age, home...
**Secondary job**. However, you could also decide to continue the current job and try to do as a **"second job"** the research on the topic you would have liked to do. Try for 4-6 months to read, *digest* and work on what is needed for it, and then you could have the first outcomes to evaluate.
Alternatively, you could try to walk the path you mentioned \_scientific publishing and communication \_ (or whatever) as a second job and see how it goes.
**Final words of warning.** If your soul is bounded to research and you need to sell it for a job, do it for money!
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_7: "feeling disappointment when submitting to medium impact journals, being overshadowed [...] "
*Now, I don't know how to move past my feelings. Any advice?*
You can stop being delusional, you can realize that you are not in the top 0.00001% of the academia that will win a Nobel prize by living in a cave in a remote region of Africa. You may be not even in the top 0.001% that will win a Nobel prize. May be you will not even in the top 0.1% that will get a professorhip in a decent university. Yes, there are people more lucky than you, better at science than you, better at publishing than you.
But then, who cares? you are you, they are they.
Enjoy your life, consider that we are human beings and not machines, we can be productive for a limited amount of time in our life (both in terms of years and hours per week) and do the best you can with this limited amount. You will have whatever impact on society and on science that you can have, no more.
Good luck!
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: Go to industry and find out, that there are cool jobs, too. Even outside of corporate research. Being a project manager, team lead, or recognized expert can be very satisfying. And it might be more healthy compared to academia (depends on job, company, and you).
Looking back, my PhD time was one of the most pleasant times of my life: I was young, did cool research, had a great group, worked for a well-respected supervisor, got a title, met smart people, traveled to conferences, presented my work in talks.
But for me it could not last forever, thus I had to make a move. Now I don't have to think about funding, I have a permanent contract, still doing cool stuff (but completely different), I took over a lot more responsibility, and never wanted to go back.
Your mileage might vary, but I hope to give you some perspective.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: Frankly, this paragraph in your question gave me pause:
>
> I don't feel that [...] I can survive the constant
> pressure of securing grants, doing exciting but not groundbreaking
> research, feeling disappointment when submitting to medium impact
> journals, being overshadowed by successful colleagues.
>
>
>
I think your situation is one where you would profit from a mindset change/improvement. If you were not in academia right now, but in an average IT company, your statement could be worded like this:
>
> I don't feel that [...] I can survive the constant
> pressure of procuring new customer projects, creating exciting but not groundbreaking
> software, feeling disappointment when finishing medium impact software, being overshadowed by successful colleagues.
>
>
>
If you were in a purely teaching role:
>
> I don't feel that [...] I can survive the constant
> pressure of getting assigned to my favourite courses, teaching exciting but not groundbreaking
> topics, feeling disappointment when working with medium students, being overshadowed by successful colleagues.
>
>
>
I hope you see where I'm going. These are just the average, regular, completely normal day-to-day workings of how academia, businesses, schools etc. work. The productive parts of your life are not always grand heroic events...
I would really encourage you to sit back a good amount of time and think about your motivations. Nothing would be worse than throwing away all you have worked on, starting over, and then ending up in the exact same spot (or, likely, worse!) not too far in the future.
>
> I wanted to be a scientist, innovate, satiate my curiosity, helm a lab
> and be someone that plays an important part in the society.
>
>
>
You have many, many years - decades - in front of you. Nothing but yourself keeps you from taking it a step at a time. Changing careers now will place you in the freshman steps again and solve none of your problems right out of the gate.
Your personal network needs time to develop. This would maybe be one thing your could really shift your focus on - start collecting business cards. Learn to know more researchers, but also more companies in your field. Look for industry-sponsored projects (I know, you find this not one of the greatest elements of your work) and actually *do* (or at least manage) those projects.
Find areas with your customers where there is actual chance to improve things that interest you. Eventually you may be a spider in a net of relationships to the industry, to students, and co-scientists and make everything work smoothly towards an overarching goal, really improving the world (or at the least the lives of some stratum of people...).
Even if what you are doing only positively impacts the people directly around you, as a prof you might have the chance to influence hundreds or thousands of people in a positive way. That is *much* more than most other people can claim.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_10: There are "rockstar" or "olympic" professions, where the reward for being among the best in the world is large, and the reward for being not among the best is really bad. These professions are a trap.
This doesn't mean there aren't clever mice who get the food from the trap and don't get trapped. But most of the mice who try to eat from a mouse trap don't get the reward they are expecting.
The most visible members of the profession by far are the "rockstars", those who defeated the trap. So when you look into working towards that profession, you end up aiming for the "rockstars" as the goal.
However, until you put a huge amount of effort into getting better at the profession, you cannot know if you actually are (or will be) a rockstar or not. You don't, and cannot, have the information required to know if you are going to be a rockstar; for every rockstar, there are 10,000s or more people who are convinced they have a chance. Determining if you are someone who has a real reason to know they will be a rockstar, or someone who falsely believes they have this reason, is not something you can *test* without a lot of effort.
Now, you can look at what your past peers in a similar situation discovered after putting in that effort. These peers are people with similar qualifications and similar confidence that they can become rockstars in the profession given their place along the path to stardom.
As an example, suppose you qualify for "Americas Got Talent", and your goal is to be a pop superstar. You can count how many people have qualified for that show in the past, and how many of them became pop superstars, and use that as a decent prediction of your chances of doing it. Probability isn't destiny; but this provides a realistic, tested model of your chances.
So when aiming to join a for a profession, what you need to look at
1. The **median** member of the profession's status, rewards, etc., and
2. The winnowing rate from people starting at your point to being a member of the profession.
For academia, you are someone who has "won" each stage of what could be a path towards becoming a professor multiple times. You probably won at elementary, high school, college, graduate school "winnowing" stages, doing exceptionally well compared to your peers. But the same is true of almost all of your peers, people getting a PhD. In that class, you aren't special; it is best to assume you are typical as a starting point.
You have now gotten to yet another winnowing stage; where some small fraction of people with PhDs get a tenure track position; and only a small fraction of tenure track positions result in becoming a "rockstar" professor. If the odds of that is lower than 1000:1, knowing nothing about you other than you have a PhD, that even if you continue to work towards becoming a "rockstar" professor that you'll almost certainly not become one.
If your goal is to become a "rockstar" professor, you almost certainly won't. Do you want to become a *median* professor with tenure? Reaching that point is going to be challenging, but it is at least a plausible outcome. Now, what is a median professor? It is a professor at a small, liberal arts college, nowhere near a major city, spending most of their time teaching introductory classes to disinterested students. Plus some time for research, a living wage, and some upper level classes with enthusiastic (but not exceptional) students; professors often are educated at some of the best universities in the country, but only a very small number teach there.
For your alternatives you should also look at both the winnowing rates and the median result of passing each winnowing stage.
The rewards here could be financial, social status, or whatever.
If you would be satisfied with the median results of a plausible path (with, say, at least a 5% chance of success), that path is something you should consider. You should still look at fallback plans (what happens in the other 95% of the time), but aiming for that 5% is an achievable goal.
If the chance of success is under 5%, broaden the "success" criteria until it breaks a 5% threshold, then look at the *median* rewards in that 5% success zone. If that doesn't count as "winning" to you, find another path, or find a way to up your chances above 5% (but don't fool yourself!)
This means you shouldn't get a PhD unless the process of getting a PhD (getting years to do some research while being paid to feed yourself) is enough. You shouldn't train for the Olympics unless living the life of an athlete is reward enough. And you shouldn't go on to do an academic career after your PhD unless being a professor at a mediocre school doing median amounts of research in a small under funded lab is enough.
Becoming a rockstar, even after insane amounts of talent, sweat and tears, is winning the lottery. Almost nobody at a stage when they aren't a rockstar knows if they'll get there, because for everyone who is convinced they can do it, 100 are falsely convinced, and those that believe it is beyond them are going to be only marginally less likely to succeed.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_11: Okay, I am leaving academia too. This is the nature of academia in the way you have described. My point is go into data science and opportunities will come and you’ll be more appreciated into the industry.
If you can go in healthcare data science, I assure you won’t be disappointed. I was wise enough to stop my PhD in the third year, started a Msc in Data Science and landed with a job in healthcare industry, in an academic sector. However, after 3 years and a half, I have been offered a job in a corporation well established and will definitely go for it.
Upvotes: 0
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