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1500 questions
54
votes
6 answers

Visit to a different university - is it OK to bring my girlfriend along?

I am a PhD student, and I was recently invited to visit a university which happens to be at a very attractive touristic location. It goes without saying that the purpose of the visit is purely scientific, and any other matters are tangential. On…
Jakub Konieczny
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6 answers

I've been admitted to multiple PhD programs, how should I choose between them?

I've been admitted to more than one PhD program, and I'm having a very hard time making a decision. The programs I'm accepted to have advantages and disadvantages with respect to one another. How do I weigh the relative importance of difference…
ff524
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54
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9 answers

Is there such a thing as fraud in mathematics?

Can you commit fraud in a mathematics publication? Or is this a privilege of empirical sciences? If a mathematician jumps from one bit of information to another that does not follow logically, from more basic principles, then, that's not fraud, but…
Quora Feans
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54
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6 answers

How to screen out candidates for faculty jobs who don't know the subject

I teach physics at a community college and have been on a number of hiring committees for tenure-track jobs. Usually we interview about 6 people for such a position, and of those, usually something like 3 of them show a lack of knowledge of the…
user1482
54
votes
7 answers

Profs who have done a full year sabbatical overseas with a family: How did you make it work?

I'm curious to hear from any American professor out there who has successfully done a full-year sabbatical overseas, with his or her family along for the ride. How did you make it work for you financially and personally? For context: I'll be…
Robert Talbert
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54
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5 answers

How to handle not having my PhD advisor as a reference?

I received my PhD in 2009 and my adviser will not provide a good recommendation for me. This is mostly because we have fundamentally different approaches to science, and in retrospect I see that I could have avoided a breakdown in our relationship…
Abe
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54
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12 answers

What to do with students coming to office hours asking to check their homework?

As a teaching assistant (TA), how to handle the situation where a student comes to office hours asking to check their homework? I.e. the student hands in their solution to the homework and ask the TA to check for any mistake. Assume homeworks are…
Franck Dernoncourt
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54
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10 answers

What do I do as a depressed and incompetent TA?

My mental health is declining and as a result I haven't been a good TA. For example I let my students out of section early because I was too tired to present some of the material, and I did not understand some of my section notes because another TA…
Jennifer
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54
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4 answers

How to teach a class that I've never taken?

I have the opportunity to teach an undergraduate class in statistics. However, I've never taken statistics and the material and concepts are a little foreign to me. I'm concerned, as a graduate student, that it may take up a lot of my personal…
Paul
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5 answers

Are relationships allowed between students and faculty?

What sorts of restrictions do universities place on romantic or sexual relationships between faculty and graduate students, and what are the underlying issues that motivate these restrictions? For example, suppose the student has previously taken a…
klaus
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6 answers

Towards a Stackexchange-like comment/reputation system for research papers

We have had quite a few discussions on how to gauge the quality of research papers and academic journals. The consensus is that it is tough to identify a single metric which could reveal this quality factor. I had an idea in this context. In the…
Bravo
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4 answers

How to identify predatory publishers/journals

What are the best strategies for assessing if a journal is a "vanity" or "predatory" journal that should be avoided (both for publishing in and reviewing for)? For example, how would one go about determining if a journal/publisher belongs on Beall’s…
StrongBad
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54
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4 answers

How to get rid of unwanted and annoying co-author?

I'm a 2nd year PhD student in a computational field. I'm about to submit my first paper on a new optimization algorithm. I've been working intensively on the problem for the last 2 years and finally managed to get the result. Besides the professor,…
neil_mccauley
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54
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6 answers

Is using the phrase "... is left as an exercise for the reader" considered good style in academic papers/theses?

Possible arguments: Pro For brevity for trivial deductions Contra Looks like the writer could not be bothered to write an extensive explanation Definition of what is trivial to which reader and what not
Jan
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54
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8 answers

Should teachers be entertainers?

I keep coming across general wisdom of the type, "A teacher has to be a clown". This attitude is gaining traction, e.g. as in this TED talk. This leaves me quite baffled. Thinking back to my own teachers, the ones I admire most and feel I learnt the…
wsaleem
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