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Is there a difference in academic writing styles between engineering and women's studies?
Coming from engineering, when you write a paper, the goal is to be objective and analytical.  We use references and try to define terms for a clear understanding.  The goal at least is to provide facts that support a hypothesis in as unbiased a way as possible.  I think there may be some difficulty in always remaining unbiased, but recently I came across an article that seems to be written like an opinion piece more than a piece of academic work.  After going through it I looked up the author, who is a professor of women's studies.  She writes about robotics being sexist.  Does women's studies have different goals in academic writing than engineering?
To be specific, it is these types of sentences that confuse me on the intent of the academic writing in women's studies:

Enter HRP-4C, a new-generation gynoid that was unveiled in the spring of 2009 as a body double of and for (or to replace?) the average human female.

Why would a journal allow the publication of the unsupported rhetorical question "or to replace"?

The android wears his maker's unfashionable beige shirt, dark trousers and black windbreaker jacket."

Is it professional to call a world-famous robotics researcher "unfashionable", and why is it necessary?

. . . exact body consists of silver and black plastic molded to resemble a Barbarella-like custome, which accentuates her ample breasts and shapely, naturalistic buttocks."

There is no supporting information of how the square, minutely curved metal is purposefully making the visual the author interprets.  But what I don't understand with this is instead of referring to the robot by its name or the paper, the author continues to refer to it as "robo-Barbarella."
Did I just happen to come across a unique piece of writing, or are there very different styles of writing in academic disciplines?

Objectivity despite being a core assumption in science, does not mean it does in fact operate in ways that are totally gender neutral. Many feminists do question the notion of objectivity in science itself and try to deconstruct the ways science has been constructed and gendered.

Speaking of academic writing: it is "women's studies", not "womans studies".  ("Womans" is not an English word.)  Concerning your question: Is womans studies have a different type of goal in academic writing than engineering?  Not all women's studies papers have the same or even similar goals to each other, and their goals are probably more divergent from each other on average than the goals of two engineering papers from each other, on average.  But having said that...obviously the writing styles in these two fields can be very different, yes.  Is this a serious question?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewha_Womans_University  Sorry I was confused about "Womans" since they use it.  Also this is an online forum not academic writing, but I have corrected the mistake.  Yes It is a serious question, which is why I gave examples and am not trying to make some wild assumptions

I also would like a reason why its downvoted... i thought SE was the place these questions, which places like wikipedia dont have the answer to, could be asked

Well, if you were serious in your inquiries about women's studies, one might imagine that you would read more than one paper on the subject.  What is stopping you from reading several women's studies papers and comparing their writing styles to other academic papers?  Or, otherwise put, what are you expecting in the way of an answer?

I think this is a good question. It appears that the goal of the question is to understand the differences in writing style and approach between two very different fields. It then provides examples from the secondary field that disagree with the OP's presumably primary field. Better would be to include both examples of CS and WS styles and trying to ask a slightly more focused and constructive question. That said, the question doesn't seem to deserve to be down voted into oblivion.

BTW, this is a chapter in an academic press book, not a journal article.

@mkennedy no that is different (http://bod.sagepub.com/content/16/2/1.short), this is a journal.

@user1938107 - Very interesting! I found the chapter by searching the quotes you posted from the journal article.

@mkennedy i assume either after publishing the journal the author was invited to contribute a chapter on a similar subject, or vice versa

This kind of writing reminds me of the Sokal affair.

Many academic fields work on the premise that you examine the evidence and present an unbiased analysis of that evidence. There are fields (e.g., creative writing and the arts) that take a very different approach. That said, many fields that take an objective unbiased approach to the analysis focus on the readability much more than in the sciences. For example, the use of "robo-Barbarella" seems much more informative that the clinical/objective HRP-4C. Had the original creators of HRP-4C called it robo-Barbarella, there would presumably be no issue. In terms of the fashion comment, I am not sure "maker" refers to the actually person who did the welding, soldering, and programming, but rather the stereotypical fashion sense (or lack thereof) of CS people in general.

And then (as @socialsciencedoc pointed out above) there are fields for which the notion of an "objective unbiased approach" is explicitly analyzed and problematized.  Women's studies is (often) such a field.

I understand the aspect of creative writing and the arts, but I thought that creative writing itself was not published in an academic journal, but the analysis of creative writing was.  In context the 'maker' is the robotics engineer that created the robot (it is in his image).  I appreciate the explanation!

CS and WS are each concerned with a different kinds of questions, and the language their respective practitioners use simply reflects this difference.
This is familiar to me, given that I've been on both sides of the divide (English Lit as an undergrad minor, cognitive science for my PhD). I got a glimpse of why it exists many years ago when I was in a course with a bunch of Lit Crit majors and we were discussing a certain poem by a certain contemporary poet. The Lit Crit people where pointing at a specific part of the poem and going "Is this an allegory for his lost love? Is this a metaphor for the senselessness of  war?", and so on. Then, in a youthful display of naivety, I said "hey, the guy who wrote this poem is still alive, why don't we try to get in contact with him and ask him what he means?". The lecturer leading the discussion looked at me very sternly and said "that is not the point".
That was very illuminating, I think. I'm sure that the poet in question had something specific in mind when he wrote the poem (and we'll never know what it was because he's dead by now), but the Lit Crit guys don't care about that. The intended meaning of the poem is irrelevant to them, what they care about is the meaning(s) that others might extract from the poem. In the same way, in the passages you quoted, the author doesn't care about the android in and of itself, but rather about how others feel about the existence and characteristics of the android, and how these feelings affect other feelings and beliefs we might have about related issues. That is what allows him/her to make judgments about fashion and other things.
In comparison, people in the sciences care about "objective truth" (for lack of a better term), not about how other people feel about stuff. If I write in a paper "stimulus A caused neurological response B (p < 0.01)", asking about the Marxist/feminist/whatever interpretation of this finding is about as pointless as trying to get to the "objective truth" underlying a piece of poetry.

Your Lit Crit example actually shows an attitude which is a lot like science. Literature might not lead to “objective truth”, but it is also not solely about the person doing the analysis. The Marxist/feminist/whatever interpretation is relevant to literature because that's what literature studies, just like the temperature and pressure readings are relevant to a physics experiment because that's what physics studies.

Addendum: here are two recent cases that highlight how Lit Crit people work:
"Writer Ian McEwan describes the odd experience of helping his son with an A-level essay about one of his novels, Enduring Love, and finding his son's teacher disagreed with his interpretation of the novel." [http://tinyurl.com/powfyfz]

(continued)
"I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel The Human Stain. The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. [...]
I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement [...] my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator” that I, Roth, was not a credible source." [http://tinyurl.com/nbyoua7]

Ignoring the author's intent, as you describe, has been a matter of debate. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism, "In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work." They also debated the relevance of reader's feelings. So I'm confused by your prof.'s dismissal.

Yes there are differences in writing style between Women's studies and Engineering, just as there are between Engineering and Science, Science and Mathematics, Law and History, and so on. The purpose and objectives of each department are different, as well as their intended audience. It would be more surprising if there were very similar writing styles between different departments.
You do not say where the article was published but this also affects the style. More narrowly focused journals will normally restrict themselves to papers written in a certain style. So technical engineering journals would normally publish technical papers, while such papers would not be accepted for a Women's studies journal, or a general science journal.

”Such [technical] papers would not be accepted [by] a general science journal.”  I disagree.  My field is physics, and on average, a physics paper in Nature may have a catchier title than one in Physical Review, but the meat of the paper will be just as technical.

Also, to take the first sentence of the women's science article in question as an example, “In humans, gender is both a concept and performance embodied by females and males, a corporeal technology that is produced dialectically” is either technical (meaning I don't have the background to understand it), or just nonsense …

Perhaps I should have said numerical rather than technical.

I'm going to write the answer that the OP is surely hinting at and that a substantial number of readers are thinking (minority or majority is hard to say).
Yes, engineering and women's studies have different writing styles because they have different aims.  The goal of engineering is to build new technologies and thereby benefit mankind.  Objectivity is highly valued because nature itself is objective.  You can't trick nature.  The goal of women's studies, on the other hand is about identity politics.  Its aim is to further the power wielded by a subset of the population.  Power is determined by people and people can be manipulated.  As has been confirmed in numerous psychological studies, people respond to emotion far better than reason.  Hence, the most efficient way to further its goals is naturally through subjective persuasion rather than objective analysis.
I find it ironic that someone would write about a roboticist being sexist while throwing out sentences like: "The android wears his maker's unfashionable beige shirt, dark trousers and black windbreaker jacket."  But it isn't surprising if you keep in mind that the goal isn't objectivity, but rather to promulgate dogma, since the success of the field is entirely determined by how many people buy into its core edicts.
One of those core edicts, incidentally, seems to be that men and women have exactly the same distribution of innate intelligence (mean, variance, probably all higher moments).  There is not any room for discussion on this point even though it seems self-evident to me that this should be a purely empirical fact, and that especially now with full genome sequencing, biology would have a lot to say about this issue.  How you respond to this answer likely correlates heavily to your view of the following incident in the math community:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/on-the-recently-removed-paper-from-the-new-york-journal-of-mathematics/

Any empirical evidence for your claim that you speak for a somehow silent majority?

I literally said in the first sentence that I don't know if it's a minority or majority.  Maybe you're questioning if it's even substantial?  Of course, I can't prove I'm the only one on stack exchange that thinks this.  But I suspect I'm not.

Fair enough. I misread.

Still, now that I think about it, it's highly likely that academia.stackexchange skews strongly against me in this matter.  It probably doesn't come as much of a surprise that I'm not a particularly big proponent of diversity initiatives.  If you just look around at what's happening at universities and large tech firms, it's pretty obvious that my view is the minority (but not negligible by a long shot!)

Honestly, I just posted this because I felt this viewpoint needs to be voiced more often.  Subconsciously, I probably realized a lot of people here would disagree.  But what's the point after all of saying things everyone already knows and agrees with?  Diversity of viewpoints right?  Or...well let's not go deeper into this.

Its true, the answer does read like advocacy.

Sorry, but you don't have the first clue about Women's Studies. Like other fields in the humanities it is about knowledge and understanding, not advocacy. It isn't about "politics" but about understanding a complex world, just as is History, or Philosophy. It is a much more complex world than engineering, in fact. The complexity of the world may lead to necessarily different writing styles as the nature of the evidence is not the same. If you haven't studied the humanities yet, perhaps it is time you do.

To be clear, I have the highest respect for literature and philosophy.  I don't view all of the humanities as a monolith.  I think denying that Women's Studies is political is a bit disingenuous.

Take a look at the description given here: http://www.augsburg.edu/womensstudies/about/

I quote:
Research-driven: Though Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies is inherently political, it is also based on decades of research across many fields of study. Our research methods are quite diverse, including surveys, film analyses, ethnographies, oral histories, literary analyses, and even instant messenger interviews.
Activist: At the heart of Women’s Studies is the firm belief that academic analysis must be connected to our actions. In this way, Women’s Studies is deeply connected to Augsburg’s commitment to be involved with the Twin Cities community and with the broader world.

@norfair but this applies also to economics, parts of political science, some branches of philosophy, literary criticism...


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How can I get all my papers under the same Scopus profile?
I have recently searched my publications in Scopus and I have found that they are all scattered around. The reason behind that maybe is because I have a compound last name. The situation has gone pretty weird also in one of my papers, where they have put one of my last names to another author that I do not even know.
The question that I have is how I can make to put all my papers under a same profile, and also delete that "ghost" author from one of my papers.

Have you tried clicking on "contact"? There's a function to suggest fixes to the database (missing citations, wrong titles, authors to merge, and so on).

As Federico indicates, the contact form (“Ask a question”) has a field for suggesting correction to the index:

You can directly send them the papers in question:

Please attach a copy of the missing or incorrect document, this is essential for us to verify the changes and make the corrections.

While I don't have any direct experience with Scopus in that area, they are generally serious and I think they will act on your request. I have once contact another index provider (Web of Science) with a correction, and they updated the data within a week.

An easier way would be to "request to merge".
Let's say that both 2 and 3 in the attached screenshots are you. Just mark the checkmark and click the "Request to merge" link.
You might want to click "Show Profile Matches with One Document" before you look up all of your entries.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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Why are computer science related degrees at some good European universities not ABET accredited?
I was wondering why some good European universities in the field of Computer Science and related careers, I mean:

Computer Science
Information Systems
Software Engineering

Their faculties do not really put information about if they are accredited by some entity like ABET for example. I know that these faculties rely more on research outcomes, quality of their staff and also to have a very dynamic curricular scheme that is not so fixed from time to time.
So is it that for these universities the accreditation is not important? and if one faculty has to choose an accreditation entity which one would be the best for the aforementioned careers?
I ask this because I found, for example, that some faculties are accredited by ACISCS or other entities, but according to what I found on the web there were a lot of rants against these accreditation types.

I have not found much value in accreditation; it may serve to identify poor-quality schools, but most decently ranked departments sail through accreditation without any of their real deficiencies being exposed.  The process is thus little more than a bureaucratic checkbox for government or company sponsors of students.
If you want to gauge the quality of a department ... look at where its
graduates go.  What companies hire them, what universities accept them for graduate school/academic positions, what are their successful graduates doing 10-15 years after graduation?

European employers don't care, so students don't care, so universities don't care. A quick search on a leading UK IT job site finds about 100 mentions of BCS (the main British accreditation body), compared to "1000+" for mentions of specific skills (e.g. SQL, Java). The vast majority of the BCS mentions are actually about non-graduate technician registration, so the actual number of jobs that require degree accreditation is noise.  Employers assess ability directly through skills tests, put a lot of value on student placements (the "year-long interview"), and/or rely on some shonky 20-year-out-of-date idea about which universities are the "top ones".
Furthermore, most European countries have a substantial (some would say excessive) quality assurance regimen coming from national or sub-national governments. To be allowed to award degrees at all, or call your organisation a university, requires vast amounts of checks and inspections. So, the role that accreditation plays in some parts of the world—distinguishing the substantive universities from the two-bit college in some rooms above a shop—just doesn't obtain.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Moving from government research to academia
I am a mid-career scientist at a government research organisation, and I am considering a move back into academia. My current employer is looking after me very well and I know I am valued, but I have a hankering for more intellectual freedom and more opportunity to work with students, especially graduate students. I've enjoyed the little bit of teaching that I have done.
I have 15 years post-PhD experience and have reached a fairly senior level - equivalent to a level D academic in Australia (perhaps equivalent to a newish full professor in the US). But I have much less teaching experience and a lower h-index than I would expect from an academic at my level. (My h-index is 14 and I am in the environmental sciences). Instead, I have spent a lot of time working closely with clients and government departments, managing people and large projects within my organisation, and working to demonstrate the real-world impact of my applied research. In short: my current employer has asked slightly different things of me than a university would. If I move back into academia, will these things be valued, or should I expect to take a demotion initially?
Finally, I am considering applying for a fixed-term (3 year) full professorship that I have recently seen advertised in a nearby research-intensive university. This would be a promotion if I were successful, but would come with a loss of job security. How would this be viewed on my CV if I were looking for another academic position in 3 years' time? Better or worse than staying where I am for those three years, and getting an internal promotion later?

I don't understand why someone would vote to close this question (as of this writing, I see one such vote). It seems to me that the question is a valid and nicely formulated question (+1), which fits well to Academia.SE. The only suggestion that I have for the OP is to emphasize the sub-questions either by separating them from the background text, or by using bold formatting style (or both).

Thanks for the +1 and suggestions on how to improve my post!

It's my pleasure!

I've never heard of a "fixed-term full professorship".  It may well exist.  But if you're in the US, almost any 3-year position amounts at most to a sort of prestigious postdoc.

@DavidKetcheson to add a little more detail: the position is an industry-funded chair with teaching, research and adminsitrative responsibilities (leading a research group). It's 3 years because funding is not guarranteed beyond that time-frame. The salary package comes to the equivalent of US$140K/yr. Does any of this make a difference, or would you, looking at it on a CV, still see it as effectively a fancy postdoc?

In the US fixed term contracts for senior positions are rare while in the UK, and presumably AU, pretty common. This makes judging them difficult for Americans.

In the US, it is highly common that researchers move back and forth between national labs and universities in almost all the fields I know or know of. Sometimes national lab jobs are also considered a good starting point of one's career than a usual tenure-track position that comes with lots of teaching, administrative duties and stress of getting the tenured in the end. National lab jobs being non-teaching positions by default gives more time to get serious research done during the early part of one's career. Hence he or she can project themselves better for a senior level (associate or full prof) positions at universities after 5-10 years. The national lab jobs are also usually permanent right from the beginning (I am not talking about postdoc positions or other junior and non-permanent positions at national labs), hence one can escape the tenure-track process for 5-6 years and usually can enjoy better work-life balance. Again all this is arguable from both sides of course. I believe this should also be true in Australia up to certain extent. However, the tricky thing in your question is the '3 years position' in academia. In this case, most things would depend on the possibility of transferring this position into a permanent position after 3 years. Such a position indeed looks good on cv specially if it is an endowed chair level position as you mentioned to get the next job. However, I am not sure how the job market in Australia is in your field. The good looks of the cv matters if there are jobs available to which you can apply.

I can only answer for the situation in Germany (where fixed-term full professorships indeed exist). There are two different situations:

In engineering your route is basically the default route to a full professorship. You do a PhD, go working in a company for five years or more and then apply for professorships. (You may also do a postdoc before working at a company.) In other fields it is not very common to return from outside academia (the only field I know for sure is mathematics and there I don't know anybody who returned back to academia).
For professors at "Fachhochschulen" (often translated as universities of applied sciences) it is similar but not only for engineering but also for other fields. Do a PhD, work in companies, apply for professorships at Fachhochschulen. In fact, for professorships at Fachhochschulen it is even required to have working experience outside academia. However, Fachhochschulen are not exactly research institutions but focus more on higher education in science and technology, preparing people to work in companies. For example, they do not grant a PhD (but this may change in the future).

I know this is a bit old now. However as you have mentioned Australia in the title -I will gove you an Australian perspective.
Don't leave a full-time continuing position in Australia for a contract position (even at professor level). You are likely to be out on your ear after the three years, unless you can bring significant dollars through the door. Given the behind the scenes cut-backs that take place in Australia government funded research, you will be struggling to get any funding if you are new to the system.
Cheers

Good perspective, however a continuing position in Australia is no guarantee, either. Too many colleagues made redundant recently!


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How to help a successful high schooler who is failing in college?
I've received an email from a student [name changed for privacy] that goes like this:

My name is John Hershey and I am in your Biology 101 class. I am here at this college on a soccer scholarship. I am the oldest of 4 and I am from Southern California. I am not intelligent. I understand that high school is easier than college. But I was a straight As in high school and I want you to know that I'm a hard worker.
After I failed the first exam. I did all I could to improve my grade by getting a D on the second exam. I don't know what else more I can do.

Do you think he is just trying to emotionally manipulate me by mentioning he is the oldest and is attending college due to soccer?
Based on the email, do you think the student understands that college is not as easy as high school?
I have a tendency for being too direct and sometimes blunt. How can I explain to him that being a straight A in HS doesn't guarantee As in college and show some empathy at the same time?
EDIT: It turns out John was not trying to manipulate me. We met and I gave him many suggestions. He studied hard and got an A on the 3rd exam! He only missed 3 questions in a 30-question exam. I'm very proud of him.

Cleaned up the comments; some were worried about the name but it's now clear in the text that OP used a pseudonym. The rest were answers posted as comments.

Does it seem like he is genuinely distressed and worried, or is he suggesting that maybe athletes have traditionally gotten a little bit of leeway in terms of grades? If he's having issues with Bio 101...he's in for a rough ride. If he's really asking for advice, doesn't the college have non credit classes for note taking, studying, general student success?

In High School I had an English teacher, Mrs. Rose. She was a small woman. She told us she once taught college English. After the first class, a bunch of football players - big and intimidating - went to her and told her that they were assured they'd easily pass the class, but that it seemed she really wanted to make them earn their grades. She responded with "Give it the old college try!" and somehow they were surprised enough at the response that they didn't give her any more trouble. Not an answer, but this reminded me of that.

That is very good to hear that he got an A after retaking the exam! Congrats to you and him

He didn't retake the exam. He failed the 1st and 2nd and finally got his act together in the 3rd exam.

I don't read this as an attempt to manipulate. I also don't read this as if the student is not aware that having As in high school does not mean he should have As in college. Quite to the contrary: it sounds to me as if he's acknowledging that his As mean little now, and were maybe due to his work ethic primarily.
It sounds to me that he feels at the end of the rope. Having relied on hard work, he realizes it's not enough because that only allowed him to score a D. There might be additional fear because athletic scholarships can be linked to GPA. Being the oldest of four, and declaring yourself to be not intelligent, sounds to me as if it's a hint that their family is probably also not academically inclined, and so unable to advise.
Of course it might also be attempted manipulation, or a reference to being a jock who the school should support. Impossible to know. But given that there is at least a chance that this is a desperate student, I'd start by writing something empathetic, and maybe suggest hiring a tutor, working with friends, and seeking out whatever support your university offers.

I read it the same way you did fwiw.

Yes, the part about not being intelligent seems odd (wording, perspective), particularly if the person got straight A's in high school. Reading the wording of the whole thing a few times, it may be that the person is not a native English speaker. In any case, consulting a counselor seems to be the appropriate path for them.

Cautiously assume the student is genuine for now, and point the student to academic resources that can help them. Their personal information is likely just a result of panic, I think. The student may not have fully internalized the differences between high-school and university yet, but there is good news for them: it sounds as if they're learning this critical lesson very early on in their education, and are thus well on their way to seeing the light on the other side of the metaphorical tunnel, before anything too bad catches up with them. If they can get some assistance through help centers, tutoring resources, etc, then they can recover.
The most gifted high-schoolers very often make the worst college students at first, having never been challenged and thus they never learn how to learn. The primary struggle of the gifted student is to humbly learn that AP classes are emphatically not university-equivalent, and any of their intellectual advantages will vanish overnight if they don't quickly learn the proper study skills that their peers learned through difficulties during high-school. Almost every struggling student I've ever advised was a formerly straight-A student who's used to everything being easy.

This is slightly opposite to my experience... IME high school often rewards brute force effort and college less so. IME the students who did well in high school but struggled in college are ones who didn't necessarily find school easy but put a lot of effort into repetition, memorization, etc.

@CTeegarden - And the main study skill (in my observations) that gives people problems is note taking. You can get through high school while taking hardly any notes.  Knowing how to take notes in a way that both reinforces learning and produces something that's useful later is one of those critical skills that can turn your whole college trajectory around.

@bta Even more critical: read the textbook. In STEM especially, 90% of struggling students have never once opened the course text. Many students even have a transformative (almost spiritual) experience once they learn this, having never learned that university texts are actually quite good, with the better ones being curated over decades to pedagogical perfection. This one tip yields more reward per unit effort than anything else. I may edit this into my answer, even.

@Jerome indeed, in my experience many students assume that it's enough to just listen passively to the lectures, and then take the exam. Then they get confused whenever the lecture didn't follow the book to the letter.

It's worth pointing out that many high school curricula (including AP courses in general) are based on memorisation, and making the shift from regurgitating information to thinking critically from multiple perspectives will be hard for many students. Thank them for being proactive and seeking support, and advise them to:

Read thoroughly over the course outline and materials.
Recognise that effective study consists of using the right strategies (the Feynman technique etc.) instead of pure hard work
Encourage them to learn and think independently using multiple sources of information.

Let me elaborate on point number 2: John's clear belief that just working harder will translate into higher grades. While hard work is a prequisite to success, this is is only true if their effort is applied in the right direction. Studying for chronically long hours is only going to accelerate the risk of burnout and inhibits the brain from learning effectively.
So I would follow up with the student (face-to-face if possible) on strategies for them to get proper support on their learning. This can be achieved in two ways: 1) making sure John gets feedback on their learning so that they can have some direction and 2) in the long run, allowing John to try out a range of study techniques so that John has autonomy over their own learning. The first method can be achieved quite reasonably: encourage John to ask questions in lectures, and develop a plan for them to ask questions during their tutorials. Suggest that they view feedback on their written assignments as information on how to improve and not as reward and punishment, while also using office hours wisely. Regarding the second point, collaborating with other students, such as splitting up the work and then feeding back to each other, is also a great way for John to not feel as alone and adapt to a new learning style that involves independence, asking for help (which he already does), and eventually metacognition.
Avoid any remarks that might signal you mistrust the student: they are most likely desperate, confused, and stressed at this moment. Most importantly, detach the process and the experience of learning from the grade and support them in using their own intellectual curiosity to think around and sideways through the material. De-emphasising grading, as educators Ken Robinson and Alfie Kohn have done, will help create an open and trusting environment, where students are more interested about learning, rather than worrying about failure or limiting their learning to what is on the test.
Most importantly, encourage John to use their support network. This will enable them to be resilient enough to overcome these challenges and feel like they belong.
Ultimately, remember that John wants to do well and that his behaviours are a reflection of the lack of support and guidance he has experienced during college. A great professor or TA like you can really make a difference in students' lives.

I would like to highlight two main points that I have made in my answer: trust and autonomy. These two are of course related: John can't learn effectively without a safe environment, and a safe environment is one where they are treated as a free person, with respect and with dignity. Ultimately, whether John chooses to try to improve is their decision. However, you can treat John like an adult when they try to figure out what choices and strategies are the best for them, while also providing support (being present and showing that you are there), and give them a nudge in the right direction.

I'm not sure that Biology 101 requires "thinking critically from multiple perspectives" -- it is probably a lot of memorizing organic chemistry. The more you already know about it, the better, of course: With an existing framework, new information falls into place. Without it, everything sounds French and is overwhelming. Given the vast differences in high school standards across the U.S., that is probably the case here.

The greatest thing about this approach is that sincere Johns will benefit from it while manipulative Johns who just hoped to get the grades up without any work will suffer from the "support" and back out as soon as possible.

@Peter - unless things have vastly changed since I took it many years ago, Bio 101 wouldn't be expected to have very much (if any) organic chem.  It's an intro course, and should be a general overview of the field, not digging into serious subspecialties.  That being said, it's going to be a great deal of memorization and much of the material will probably be unfamiliar.  I was crap at this when I went to college, and it took me a while to come to grips with good practices.

@Peter My point is that learning how to learn and think for one's self is an inherently valuable skill, even if it might not be immediately useful in the short run. Biology certainly has a lot of memorisation, but biology is also like any other subject where there are patterns and connections between different topics, and a broad exposure to physics, mathematics (statistics), psychology, and even sociology will enhance their understanding. Just memorising will hurt John in the long run if they understand everything at surface level and cannot apply their knowledge to unfamiliar situations.

To add to the first paragraph: my (anecdotal) experience is that AP classes are a detrimental trap for a great many students, and the false confidence it gives them outweighs the possible benefits. In particular, my teaching experience has taught me that AP calculus is a borderline-dangerous class, often leaving students worse off than they were before. They're then absolutely baffled as to why they're now struggling, as they were led to believe such classes were representative of university: if they didn't have to study then, why would they have to now?

@Jerome - and yet my BC calculus class 40+ years ago was fabulous and more than prepared me for what was needed for an Ivy League engineering education. Yes, also an anecdote. Perhaps heavily dependent on the teacher and the student body (my fellow classmates also went on to science and engineering careers).

Like others, my interpretation of that email is that it is probably genuine. A lot of new students struggle with transitioning from strategies that worked in highschool to strategies that work in university. In all universities I worked at we had courses aimed at helping students make that transition. Maybe such a course also exists in your university, and you can direct that student to that. Sometimes there are also other resources available, like counseling aimed at effective study habits organized by the university of as selfhelp groups.

I would discount the "not intelligent" comment, myself, for a number of reasons that are not particularly important.
The key thing is that this student is doing the correct thing in asking for help.  That's very hard to do even in high school, let alone college.
I had no trouble in high school; I did the homework during class and goofed off a lot.  When I went to college (a year early) I drowned.  I couldn't keep up and came within a whisker of flunking out.  I thought I was working hard, but I was doing the wrong sorts of things.  Memorization can be helpful, but if you can't bring up the memories when you need them, it's wasted time and effort.
What I eventually learned was how to take notes - do a rough copy at the time, and that evening rewrite it all into a separate study book.  That let me see where the holes were and add supplemental material that would help me remember and understand it and its context later on.  Everything is clear in class - it's 2 weeks later when you're doing last-minute studying that it might as well be written in Martian.
I also learned the benefit of office hours by TAs, as well as the absolutely critical benefit of study groups.  Everyone is different, and a group lets us all benefit from different angles of view and different lines of attack.
I was never a great student in college, but I got to where I wanted to go; I suspect that John can do better than that once he learns where to put his hard work.

Try briefly going over their submissions in the last couple of exams and see if you can figure out why they're failing, and maybe some targeted advice can be offered there.
e.g., are they failing basic memorization tasks (dates, names, this-means-that)? Intro courses often involve a fair amount of regurgitation so is the problem simply that they are not reading and memorizing relevant facts? Or are they apparently getting the memorization but failing to connect the dots or not understanding how to apply the knowledge?
Just spitballing here but while the other suggestions have good general ideas, you are in a position to really look at their answers and make a targeted guess as to what they are specifically failing to understand. Identifying the key weakness may help them get more specific tutoring.
(I think the personal details were meant to help understand where they are coming from. Oldest of 4 means they are probably used to being the mentor, and not having to get one. I take it to mean they really have no idea why their efforts are failing or where to turn for guidance. A good tutor can definitely help but the exam giver/grader may have some unique insights...)

Looking at recent performance is a good idea, an experienced tutor can tell a lot that way. One of the faculty on my undergrad course used to send us each an end-of-year summary of our performance compared to the complete 3-year scores of all students from recent years. There was a clear minority of students who started strong, declined slightly in the first year and dropped badly in subsequent years - and seeing that group's trajectory persuaded at least one of us that we should change our habits despite doing "OK" so far.

I think it is impossible to know whether this is genuine, but I do think Ivan has quite a few points, despite all the downvotes. The red flag for me is the soccer scholarship and the "I am not intelligent" statement, together with the completely irrelevant statement about being the oldest of four siblings for pity.
There is an expectation among students on athletic scholarships that their primary task is sports, and passing classes is a mere formality. Many colleges are all too happy to play along, since this generates a lot of revenue for them. I've known quite a few TAs in my time who were more or less told explicitly to pass such students.
The student might be hinting that you are failing to play along, dressed up in the "I so want to improve" trope. The latter is because the student does not have a full-ride athletic scholarship (as evidenced by taking your class), so his enrollment hinges on his academic standing, officially. Asking for special treatment explicitly is obviously out of the question.
Also, even though college is harder than highschool, and grades go down a bit, I do find it hard to believe that a straight-A student would completely fail Biology 101, even at a top-tier university.

There's a distinct possibility that this student has undiagnosed ADHD and should get that looked at and get helped.  Doing well in High School and then crashing out in University once outside motivations are removed is a pretty classic scenario.  Low test scores is not always a symptom of this (it tends to be missed smaller assignments), but if the subject matter is difficult enough they'd need to know how to study when their brain is screaming to do literally anything else (which they wouldn't have learned in High School) it could still be the case.

I think this student is at a loss. He was good at high school (and worked hard for this, perhaps), but now he is in trouble, no matter how hard he tries.
The reason? Perhaps he has just chosen the wrong subject.
It is a common mistake to think that somebody who is good at high school will be successful in every field of study. Everybody has special talents, and is less talented in other fields. Perhaps you do not realize this at school, but you do when it is getting more difficult.
Some students chose a subject because they think they have to (their parents want them to be a lawyer or doctor), some chose a subject because they want to work in a field with good prospects (bad at maths, but studying computer science), or they just want to do something where you can earn a lot of money, no matter what it is. These are often the students that fail. You cannot deal with a subject on an academic level without talent or at least some interest.
I would encourage the student to find out where his talents are and perhaps chose something else. Tell him that he is not stupid, but has perhaps just taken a wrong decision.

I'm creating an answer here, that doesn't apply to this student, but might to other students that fit the description from the title:
Find out if they are neurodivergent.
Many neurodivergent people are very successful in High School, but fail at College. Especially highly intelligent people with ADHD and/or autism can have straight A's in HS, but fail hard when it comes to College/University. They might need medication for ADHD, or they might need different strategies to study. But learning that they are neurodivergent can make the difference between failing and excelling at higher education.
This does not at all seem to be the case with the student that OP describes, but if others find this question based on the title, it might apply in the situation they are dealing with.

You're being manipulated.
Every single line of that student's statement contains some sort of appeal to pity or other trope.
The whole thing is a red flag large enough to mount to the back of a CCP motorcade.

I am here at this college on a soccer scholarship.

Casually mentioning financial hardship...the corollary to humble-bragging.

I am the oldest of 4 and I am from Southern California.

Implied dependency: won't you think of the children? They'll be so disappointed if you let me fail!

I am not intelligent.

Self-deprecation: disarming tactic meant to lower your expectations.

I understand that high school is easier than college.

Classic! Telling you exactly what you want to hear is what puts the "con[fidence]" in con-artist.
I've seen Reddit grifters angling for some chump to send them a new iPhone try this too-- "I know I need to be more responsible with [whatever], but..."
GoFundMe is also rife with this sort of rhetoric. Despite raising thousands of dollars for cat chemo or whatever, the money always goes to a bunch of other unaccounted-for nonsense that's totally beyond their control-- and now the grifter starts a second round of funding to deal with the cat. "For real this time, guys. Anything helps."

But I was a straight As in high school and I want you to know that I'm a hard worker.

Fall from grace, and a disingenuous one.
He's clearly a new student and presumably part of the COVID generation, where teachers struggling to adapt to remote-teaching handed out As to students who bothered to show up to Zoom meetings. This is no fault of his, but grade inflation may have inappropriately qualified him for admission. He is not above exploiting it nonetheless.
He says he's a hard worker. His grades so far suggest otherwise, but the only evidence in his favor is "just trust me, bro."

After I failed the first exam. I did all I could to improve my grade by getting a D on the second exam. I don't know what else more I can do.

Desperation. "All I could"? "What else more I can do"?
Sparse on evidence/details, so immediately suspect omission. Ex: a statement like 'I spent twice as long studying' might be factually true, but omits the fact that he went from studying for 5 minutes the night before the test...to 10.

It's well-crafted enough to tickle your sympathy nerve without telling any outright lies you can hold him accountable for later. He's even cautious enough to not ask you for anything specific-- he's fishing to see what you're willing to offer.
This is a bad time to extend charity or sympathy to anybody under the age of 25. An entire generation that's had years to rehearse these acts are now bringing them to production outside of high school. Some of them make it as far as the workplace, where they eventually cross my desk.
Do not give in. You'll be expected to do so again in the future (for him, if not the friends he'll direct your way for easy negotiation), and when you finally put your foot down, you'll find yourself on the receiving end of a (false or exaggerated) discrimination or workplace violence complaint.

I don't disagree, but I also don't think it's helpful for the OP to get into a sincerity vs. bs detection arms race with students. (I find that worrying about sincerity just upsets me and doesn't actually solve any problems.) IMO it's better to simply ignore the sob story and treat this exactly the same as you would treat a student who has no special circumstances but is sincerely struggling with the class, i.e. offer office hours, point to other resources, etc.

@user3067860 - Agreed 1000%. It's also exhausting! The story itself is irrelevant to academia and nothing but drama comes from calling anybody out on lies (I just tore it apart here for demonstration). Sincere or not, the circumstances should not matter to the OP, and any disabilities (like "lack of intelligence") the student has that interfere with their performance need to be documented through the proper channels-- OP taking it upon themselves to make concessions for this student's story could easily lead to discrimination complaints when s/he is less moved by the next one.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Etiquette in asking for funding proposal example
I'm a postdoc and I have never submitted a research proposal.
There is a funding project at my current University open to postdocs. I have a list of past winners and I'm tempted to ask for their proposals to give me some guidelines in writing mine. Obviously I can just ask and I know that professors share winning proposals, but usually, they know each other. But I've never met these people and the only thing I have is their contact information.
What is the correct way to ask for sample proposals and is it considered good manners to ask such a thing?

Note that for many government funding agencies (e.g. NSF, NIH) you can obtain the proposals from the agency directly under freedom of information laws.

@Thomas: This was previously discussed in https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8111/foia-request-for-full-nsf-awards-proposal-and-report, with several people feeling that this would be considered rude or academically unethical.

@NateEldredge Good point. But it's still worth noting that the possibility exists.

First: Good approach to looking at successful proposals first. You cannot write a winning proposal if you don't know how winning proposals look like.
Second: Most people will probably be loath to share their proposals with anyone they don't know. But at the same time, most professors will (or at least should!) share their proposals with those they mentor in one way or the other. In fact, they may also take the time to walk you through the process, look over your proposal, give you feedback, etc. So ask your superiors, your department head, or others in similar position who look after your career development to help you with proposals that have been funded.

My advisor is really open and I'm sure he will share with me his winning proposals. For this case though, I think in asking people at my level as this proposal is open specifically to graduate students and postdocs. As I said I have a list with the past winners and their contact information. How to approach them is my issue.

Go to their office, introduce yourself, talk to them in person. But also talk to your adviser when you write yours. He may have reviewed such proposals in the past.

One of the reasons people loathe to share their proposals (or other non-public documents) is the feeling that they lose control of where the document may end up next. So if you get a copy, be sure to treat it as if you feel as if you do not have permission to further distribute it. (If someone else wants to read it, they should contact the original author).

If you have awarded proposals available from your advisor, but still want to get input from other post-docs, one way to approach this would be to reach out to the postdocs who have awarded proposals and ask them to meet (offering to buy coffee helps) and talk about their experience with the grant program. That is less pushy than flat out asking for their proposal. You can ask for tips on preparing your proposal and ask about feedback they received from reviewers. Some of them may have applied more than once and can tell you what they did wrong and how they improved. If the meeting goes well and they feel that you are sincere and trustworthy, they may feel comfortable offering to share their proposal at the end of the meeting. However, if they don't, you would still have examples from your advisor to help you.

Plus one for suggesting the softer way. Indeed, being less direct can often help.


text:
Is it reasonable to not publish data from research for fear of undermining previous work?
I am a postdoc working in a lab where we are finishing a large project with multiple measures (psychological, behavioral, etc). Some of the measures didn't turn out to have significant results (primarily for methodological reasons I believe). I suggested to the Lead Investigator that we write up some of these as "we tried these measures and didn't get the results we expected for various reasons: here are some lessons we have learned". The reply was:

My immediate response is not all that positive – especially if it undermined our published papers ... if you’ve published a result then further publications shouldn’t raise more limitations that should have been mentioned in the original publication.

I don't believe the results will undermine anything but, that aside, is his reasoning for not publishing results valid? Also, to be clear, we haven't yet published anything from this work.
I understand him to mean that he doesn't want the results published because they might go against previous work and completely object to such a thought. Have I possibly misinterpreted his words?

@PeteL.Clark I think the results are negative because we were doing something novel and some measures weren't as discriminatory as we might have expected. There is also an issue of recruitment for one of the measures. All very logical and reasonable explanations and, I think, good lessons for others wishing to do similar work.

I agree that negative results are a "hard sell" for many journals. I was completely prepared for a response along the lines of "No, I don't think the effort of an article is worth it; perhaps we should look at a conference abstract or publishing the results with others to tell a story". What I feel I got was "No, we shouldn't publish this because it might not look good" - or have I misinterpreted things?

I put the above comments as the first two paragraphs of an answer and went on to address your second comment.  (Short answer to your question: your less charitable interpretation seems reasonable, unfortunately.)

Your recent edit puzzles me a little.  If you haven't published anything related to this project yet, to what does the "original publication" in the quoted passage refer?

That's why I added it. It's confusing to me also - there are two possibilities that I can think of: 1) we are drafting a paper at the moment; 2) previous work the group had done using similar measures in different contexts.

If you simply don't understand what someone means in an email they send you, asking other people who don't know nearly as much about the situation as you do doesn't seem likely to lead to a satisfactory answer.  If ever there was an email to motivate you to pay your Lead Investigator an in-person visit, this is it.  I understand that you probably can't do this until Monday at the earliest, but until then I would advise you to just stop worrying about it and do something more pleasant and/or more productive.

Thanks Pete. The issue for me is that I think I understand what he means but don't want to. I will certainly be having a meeting with him. I thought bouncing it off impartial minds might help develop an alternative view form. This has only strengthened my fear that his comments are either not well thought through or genuinely suggesting something that might not be most ethical. I really appreciate your and Peter's thoughts and time! Thank you both - these are difficult issues.

Here is an interesting piece from the Economist which highlights the problems with the general reluctance to publish negative results: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble

@MarkMeckes Thanks for that - an interesting read! It makes me even more upset about the LIs response. I hope to speak with him tomorrow and am struggling to see his comments in a positive light.

The statement you quote sounds terrible. It points in a direction where things approach the unethical. Publication of negative results are less common that positive although, I suspect, negative results ARE more common than positive. Since I am in an experimental field, I have never obtained the perfect results and always end up describing what went wrong; and I am not alone. Anyway, I think your idea of writing up your experience is good. Naturally, I cannot judge the merits of the experiences in terms of publicability.
So I think your intention is very sound and the reaction of the lead investigator suspect (or at best narrow-minded).
To me " further publications shouldn’t raise more limitations that should have been mentioned in the original publication" (if verbatim from the lead investigator and with my emphasis) sounds as if limitations were not included on purpose in the original study. So, if that is true then I can understand the nervousness. It sounds almost fraudulent.

+1: Especially, your last paragraph addresses something that I hinted at in the distinction between errors and limitations, but you've hit it right on the head.  If the LI feels that the OP knew about the limitations at the time of the original paper, then he would have every right to be upset.  However from the OP's post it sounds like this was not the case.  Possibly there is some miscommunication here.

Thanks @Peter.Jansson, those were his words verbatim from an email so hard to know emphasis. We haven't published from this work yet and I am relatively new to the group so it's hard to know exactly what previous work he's referring to.

In verbatim, this interpretation is correct. However, in mailing between colleagues, people do not always mean exactly what they say, so let's not get all witch-hunty too quickly. The PI may very reasonably also mean that publishing a "see what unsuccessful thing we did" paper may undermine the reputation of the group (and hence question previous publications).

@xLeitix I understand the foibles of email. Thank you for another perspective. Could I ask you to please clarify your position, please. I still see that not wanting to publish for fear of questioning previous publications is wrong. I was clear in my proposal to him that we publish a "what we tried that didn't work as expected: here are the lessons" paper.

@EddieSanders My main point is that I don't have a "position". I think it is wrong to jump to any sort of conclusion based on an excerpt from a private email convo. Go talk to your PI in person, and things will become clearer.

If I understand you correctly, what you want to publish doesn't "go against" the previous work.  It's fully consistent with it, but what is being added is what are often called negative results: namely, the discovery that a certain plausible method or established theory cannot be used in a certain manner to solve a certain problem.
In every branch of academia I know of, it is -- unfortunately -- very difficult to publish negative results.  In the abstract, most people agree that this is a shame: convincingly arguing that researchers should not go down a certain path is obviously a service to the community.  However, in a competitive publication system negative results are somehow not very, um, competitive.  So trying to publish these results may not be the best use of your time unless you package them carefully -- very crudely, you will probably need to bundle them with "positive results".
The above is a relatively benign interpretation of your Lead Investigator's comments.  It is alas also possible that he is saying that you should not try to publish your negative results because that information will reduce the prestige of your previously published paper.  I agree that this sounds ethically dubious, yes, but depending on the field it is not clear that you are ethically required to publish further work explaining the limitations of your previous results.  Here I would make a distinct between limitations and errors: errors are things that you should have known better than to include in the original version, and in many fields it is appropriate to print a retraction, erratum or corrigendum when you learn about them.  On the other hand, that a publication contains ideas that are not completely definitive and whose future value is the subject of informed speculation....well, that's how research works.
I would say that the ethical issues become more acute depending upon the reaction that your published paper has received.  If your paper has been very influential to researchers and is causing them to spend a lot of time exploring what you know to be a blind alley, then formal publication or no, it seems ethical to relate this information to them.  If your publication has present nonacademic ramifications -- e.g. if you are in some kind of bio-medical field and your publication has resulted in patient protocols that you know to be suboptimal -- then you should be thinking about how to get the word out ASAP.
Anyway, it sounds like you need to have a conversation with your Lead Investigator about this.  Find out what he meant and why.


text:
Is there a general way to propose research to the community?
Basically, I am working on a project which is scientific/scholastic/academic by nature, but I am not in a university at the moment. I mainly just want university affiliation so I can access a research library, plus some minor other things, such as Research Gate only allowing you to join if you have an “institution” email address.
I know some good specific places and ways to suggest a research proposal for some kind of official acceptance from a university.
I was curious, is there any general way? It would be interesting to have a single “marketplace” where people could suggest research seeking supervision or backing, or someone could suggest a topic they would like to get a researcher for. Ideally, it would be global, sort of like Fiverr freelancing, a place for researchers to connect and find partnerships.
What’s the nearest thing to this?

such as Research Gate only allowing you to join if you have an “institution” email address --- FYI, I haven't had an institutional address since July 2005, and yet I archived an unpublished manuscript at RG a few years ago, and I don't recall having to jump through any hoops (unlike arXiv, where I originally wanted to put it). In fact, as described in my comment to this question, I didn't even initiate trying to get an account with them, but instead I finally decided to do this after several months of getting "spam emails" from them.

See if you can find a researcher in a local university in your field (look on linkedin or university websites), and e-mail them a polite letter asking to sit down for coffee to discuss your ideas. Most professors love nothing more than to talk about their subject. Of course, try to be humble - they speak to a lot of misguided students and have seen a lot of proposals, so they have a good idea of what will do well and what won't.
That being said, they won't be able to get you an institution email adress, thats limited to members of the institution for financial reasons (uni pays for it)

You don't mention what is your industry affliation. That can be a good way to introduce yourself to the local university, as some researchers enjoy the industry-academic partnerships. If you are looking for people that are doing research in your idea, look at the bibliography section of papers you read that are close to your research idea.

@gns100 That’s a great idea, thank you. I currently see myself in computational linguistics with entrepreneurship. By establishing a sole proprietorship and small business entity identity, it may be a good way for universities to be interested in joint work of some kind.

There aren't really any legions of bored researchers waiting for some idea to work on. Moreover, if you do indeed have a promising, sufficiently specific research idea, you'd want to reach the tiny, tiny fraction of people with just the right expertise - no chance for any automated filtering systems here.
The options that are available to you:
a) You seek the relevant guidance to learn how to carry out your research project yourself.
This is what a PhD programme is for. Ideally, you even get a scholarship for this, and then you can spend a couple of years getting paid to learn the skills you want from a specialist in the area.
b) You have plenty of money, and you just want someone to work on the topic you care about.
You can offer a research grant. While most of these come from government organizations, also companies and charities often offer research grants. You would invite researchers to pitch how they'd address your research challenge, and then give money to the most convincing team. Depending on how expensive the research you have in mind is, you may already be getting somewhere good for £100000.
c) You have money to spare, and you want control over the project.
In the grant situation, the researcher would execute the project as they see fit. Alternatively, you could hire a researcher on a consultancy contract and just get their input/contribution to the parts you really need help on.
d) You know your stuff, but you don't have much money to spare
If your situation is such that you can genuinely contribute to the project you have in mind, but that you just cannot do it all alone, you may try and find a collaborator who is also genuinely interested in it. Attend the relevant conference in your field, talk to people. Maybe there is a matching research group at your local institution, and they'd welcome you at their seminars? There isn't really a shortcut here, but hardly anything in the way academics usually start their collaborations with one another is dependent on being affiliated with a university,

Thank you! Couple follow up questions. A - PhD - bothers me because it feels constraining and not general. There have been scholars in history that changed fields, like Joseph Needham. I thought a PhD was more like a certification than an “excuse” to research a topic. (Especially since you generally only do one.) C is not really my thing because I’d like to be the researcher myself. B + D - looking for a research grant or finding a collaborator - is more my style. My question could be simplified - is there any central hub/organization for that, or searching around is just how it is?

@peters I think you're wrong about the PhD-part. There is no hub etc. Searching around, making connections etc, is the way to go.

@peters IMHO the most appropriate way to think of a PhD is as a "research apprenticeship" - there are certain skills useful to do research, and most of the world has decided that the most appropriate way to obtain them is effectively in a "master-apprentice model" by doing a few years of research with someone's assistance and guidance until you're ready to do independent research and get the degree after demonstrating that. And if you already are ready to do independent research, usually there are ways to get a PhD certification based on that research without the studies.

"Affiliation" means you have a job with or work as a student at that institution. There are some special cases like retired faculty maintaining university affiliation, but otherwise, no, there is not a way that you can just "affiliate" with a university based on a research proposal.
Research Gate is poorly viewed by every academic I know. It might have had some potential, but their tendency to spam in particular has given them a scammy reputation. You don't need a Research Gate account to do research.
Library access is a separate issue, which you've already asked about at What is a direct and universal way to affiliate oneself with a university (library)?
Research is hard, and almost all people require mentorship and training to be at all competent as a researcher. If you don't already have a PhD, I think the best path towards doing research would be to look at applying to PhD programs.

RG is, like any social network, heavily community-dependent. FWIW, I've seen a fair number of good researchers there in some fields like genomics or spectroscopy, but HEP people and mathematicians seem to be non-existent (and I might be wrong on that also). Spam is bothersome for sure; I personally view RG like many view Twitter: it is bad, but its usefulness can be hard to deny. Overall though, great advice!

@Lodinn The issues most people have with RG are their spam and pushiness, which originates from the site itself and is not community-dependent. But yes, whether the value the site provides is worth the cost may depend on the specific community you're involved in and whether people from that community use the site.

Researchers aren't seeking research proposals, they're proposing

someone could suggest a topic they would like to get a researcher for.

As a rule of thumb, almost every researcher has far more interesting research ideas than they have the capacity to pursue. The main competition of research ideas is prioritizing which ones to work on and which ones to postpone or abandon. Researchers do take on supervising ideas from e.g. students as a "service activity" or a job requirement (i.e. to facilitate the training of those students), because doing that is useful to others at the expense of the researcher's time, who has their own research priorities and interests. Researchers do work on ideas of others if they are paid for that, so the way of suggesting topics is through institutions (academic or commercial) who fund research; but in general researchers apply for resources (often highly competitive, with low acceptance rates) to try and fund their own research ideas.
Research proposals are evaluated based on execution, not only ideas
Usually "research proposal" doesn't mean proposing an idea, but rather proposing a project - i.e. a specific plan for specific activities by specific people with a specific timeline and outcomes. Purely saying "hey, this would be neat, somebody should do this" is something you can effectively do as a side remark in a research conference filled with relevant people, but a research proposal should be far more fleshed-out.
The organizations evaluating research proposals (in general, for purposes of assigning funding, and thus researchers' time) do not evaluate the idea in isolation, as a major factor (IMHO far more important than the idea) is the specific research teams' ability to execute that idea. Ideas are important, but there is an abundance of good ideas, the ideas are discussed in public in the research community, and whenever it is clear that an idea is worth pursuing it could (and perhaps should!) be pursued by multiple teams, so the question of "are you the right person/team to do this" is as relevant as "is this worth doing compared to other options".
Research organization is decentralized

It would be interesting to have a single “marketplace” where people could suggest research seeking supervision or backing

Research is heavily decentralized. Almost all opportunities for research backing are limited nationally or regionally (e.g. EU funding), and opportunities for research supervision are evaluated by people and organizations who are willing to offer that (e.g. research universities or various industrial contests).
There are some efforts to summarize (and in some cases globalize) the available options (e.g. various mailing lists, special-interest-groups, etc), but those tend to be split by research areas, because those are the communities in which researchers work, communicate and self-organize.

Wonderful, your answer augments my accepted one excellently. Thank you.

One idea would be to approach a potential collaborator (call them Professor X) at a local institution who has some expertise in the area you want to work on. If the proposal is promising enough to support and this person has some extra time and money, they may be able to hire you as a staff scientist or consultant (or something of this nature); that would lead to you being formally affiliated with that university as an employee of Prof X, without necessarily being a PhD student or applying to be a postdoctoral researcher and so forth.
I want to point out that there are a few big obstacles here, mostly because time is a limited resource in academia and there is no shortage of good ideas worth collaborating on. Is the proposal well-written enough to read quickly or is it tempting to dismiss it? Does Prof X have time to spend on advising? Does Prof X have money to spend on a new hire? Is it promising enough for Prof X to think it will be worth investing time and money into? I'm flagging these for you so that you're aware of what it's like on the other side. If I were in Prof X's position these would be my primary concerns. Depending on your specific arrangement, some of these could be surmounted --- but rightly or wrongly, it's easier to ignore people emailing me ideas for research, chiefly for the reason that I simply don't have time to engage with them (even if they are good ideas!). Nonetheless I wish you good luck. You can increase your chance of success by finding someone who you know will be interested in your work, perhaps someone who has done similar work in the past.

A situation where one just performs good research in their spare time is exceedingly rare, at least before retirement.
One does not have to be affiliated with an university to do so, although an input from "professional" researchers could help. There is no shortage of research done in an industry setting, especially in the modern ML/AI landscape. If this is, indeed, your case, the easiest way would be to either contact a local university (similar to what Dalton suggests) or just do the research on your own entirely. You do not have to be employed by the university, either - one option would be to invite an university researcher as a consultant on your project, as per Arno's third suggestion. More specifically, they would help you with access to literature and provide insights about the field from an academic perspective. I have found these arrangements to have good potential, they are also not uncommon.
Some industry labs are better equipped to do certain kinds of research than universities these days, and universities are always open to proposals that are money-neutral for them at least. If you are not hiring professors as consultants or fresh graduates as regular workers, your "sales pitch" instantly becomes weaker.
One other major thing you can lure researchers with is providing them with access to unique data they would not have otherwise. If you are performing large-scale experiments they could only dream of in an university setting, that is enough for a collaboration: they make sure the design is sound and get to play with the results; win/win. To achieve that, you could just show up on their doorstep with a proposal (well, not exactly, you just e-mail them asking if they have relevant expertise to help you with the project which they often would). This cross-pollination often happens at exhibitions and conferences, so make sure to participate in those, if applicable. Does not take that much to register and attend, and many cities/universities host local events.

There are some ways (in NAmerica at least) of getting “adjunct”, “affiliated” or “honorary” status in a department, which would usually get you access to most university resources.
Presumably different units have different requirements, and those are laid out in some policy somewhere.  Many units, especially in smaller institutions, will often have adjuncts as a way to broaden the research or course options for students.
Typically, you can expect to have to show how getting such status will benefit the unit, and “getting in” is highly dependent on precedents and the history of the unit.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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How to Address a PhD Student in an Email: Mr. or Dr.?
I am preparing to send an email to a PhD student and am unsure of the appropriate title to use in my greeting. Is it more appropriate to address them as Mr./Ms. or as Dr., considering they are still in the process of completing their doctoral studies? I want to ensure that my communication is both respectful and correctly formatted according to academic norms.

Please avoid posting answers in the comments. Instead, please vote on the existing answers or add another answer if you have something to add. Comments are for suggesting improvements to the question, or asking for clarification.

In what country do they reside?

He is from the USA. @AzorAhai-him-

Someone in a doctoral program is a student, not a doctor. Unless they have completed a doctoral program (technically graduated from one) it isn't appropriate to call them "doctor" or use Dr. in a title.
Some people compromise a bit between having the dissertation accepted and the official graduation by calling the person Doctor, as graduation and the conferring of the degree and title is usually just a formality then.
Even having graduated from a medical program it probably requires that they be called Mr. or Ms. or similar until they are licensed (most places). Licensing of medical practitioners is separate from graduation.
I'll note that some people here write "I'm a PhD" meaning not that they have completed a degree, for which this would be appropriate, but actually meaning "I'm a PhD student or candidate". But it isn't a PhD until you complete it.

I think it would be taken oddly if you insisted on referring to an MD who hasn't been licensed yet as "M[rs].," but you may be technically right.

"I'll note that some people here write "I'm a PhD" meaning not that they have completed a degree …" This may be a language thing. Around here (German university) you are either a "doctoral/PhD student" or a "doctor" once you are done. As a result, "I'm a PhD" is meaningless aside from being a lazy short form for the former. And people love being lazy.

In an effort to communicate as inclusively as possible and to not assume anyones gender or prefered way of being addressed, I would suggest to neither use Ms./Mr. (which also avoids the sexist can of worms hidden behing Ms. and Mrs.) nor Dr. (as a PhD student will in the majority of cases will not have obtained their doctorate yet, as others have quite correctly pointed out), but rather address them as

Dear Firstname Lastname, ...

This gender neutral address should be perfectly fine in any occasion (that is not only for students) where a more formal address like professor or Dr. is not applicable.

I'm inclined to point out that, while this works in English, it tends not to work in languages which require gender specific flexion of adjectives (such as, for instance, French or German).

@JochenGlueck, of course that is true, English does make it comparably easier than the more gender-heavy languages, yet even in German or French a "Salut/Bonjour Firstname Lastname" or "Guten Tag/Hallo Firstname Lastname" still works, although probably slightly less formal than the gender specific "Liebe/ Lieber Firstname Lastname"

@Sursual: Yes, in German I also sometimes go with "Guten Tag xyz", though it feels slightly off in some contexts.

Many Unis nowadays (including mine) actually ask PhD students/staff to declare their preferred pronouns; and the OP sounded pretty confident that they are getting in touch with him as opposed to her. Regardless tho, I do think your suggestion would work quite well

If anyone emailed me calling me Mr/Mrs when I was a graduate student, I would feel that they were after something, so I'd get suspicious of them and probably wouldn't respond. If they called me Doctor, I'd think they were clueless, so I wouldn't bother responding either. Just go with "Dear John," "Dear Mary," "Dear whatever." It's more personable and effective, I'd say.

It is worth to mention that this is culture-dependent. But I'd agree in the context of the US. I personally prefer even more if I receive "Hi First_Name".


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Choosing a Master's program with less than one semester time for thesis
I want to apply for a Master's degree in computer science in Italy. I noticed that some Master's programs in Italy give you less than one semester to work on your thesis.
My goal is to apply for a Ph.D. program afterward. Considering that your thesis and having good publications are very important for Ph.D. programs, is it a good choice for me to choose a university in Italy that gives me only one semester to prepare my thesis? In many universities, in the second year of a Master's degree, you don't have any courses, and you only work on your thesis, which means you will probably prepare a better thesis and have more time to publish a few papers.
Now you might say why I am asking a question when I know the answer. Because I came across a few universities with an excellent overall rank and computer science rank, but if I choose them, I'll have less than one semester for my thesis. If I want to choose a university that offers a whole year to work on a thesis, I cant choose the universities I mentioned earlier.

Where do you want to do the PhD? In Italy/Europe as well, or for example in the US/Asia?

@Jeroen Maybe in Canada, University of Toronto or University of British Columbia. Or maybe in Switzerland, EPFL or ETHZ.

Do you have examples of universities in Europe in which you have only 1 year of coursework for the MSc? In my experience that would be uncommon; I think this is a cultural difference between American and European practice.

As far as my experience (including Italy where I work, but in Stats/Math not Computer Science) goes, only very few applicants for PhD programs manage to publish during their regular MSc time; the majority don't have publications at all, others did them through Research Internships or other experiences (those who have most publications are usually simply those who are older and have done other things than just straight studying). Publications are not generally a "make it or break it" criterion, as there are good reasons why some don't have the time to do them, and others get their name on stuff to which they have contributed little. Furthermore the thesis itself is looked at, but people don't have an advantage just because they have more material in it because they had more time. A short thesis done in a limited time span can show your insight and ability as well as a longer one for which you have longer time. So I wouldn't worry much about this just regarding a later PhD application. Our criteria for PhD admission even apply to people who didn't have to do a thesis at all in the framework of their program (and there are rules at my university and maybe all over Italy that say that they should not be discriminated against based on this).
It may be that in CS it's different though (because it may be faster to get stuff published).

When you start MS program, by the middle of first semester, you will know the faculty and their research interests. Then you meet the professor of your choice and request him to be your advisor for thesis. By the end of first semester, you could have decided about the topic of your research. Then you can start collecting data, papers and other related information. When it is last semester, you may have finished major part of your thesis.

It's true that you can start early, but by the end of the first semester you will only have seen in your lectures a very small part of the faculty.

For lectures, you see a small part of the faculty, but otherwise you know all the faculty of your department and their research interests in first semester.


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PhD transfer application issue
I'm currently a first-year PhD student in the US (in the middle of the first semester). However, I'm not satisfied with the program here and want to re-apply to other programs. While doing that, can I simply exclude the current PhD program in my CV?  Will it be a serious problem of credit? (I have not had any course grade, nor am I asking for recommendation letters from any professors here)

How would you explain and discuss your activities during the period from starting the old PhD to an interview without talking about the PhD?

Please don't vandalize your question! We like to leave it up for other people to see too.


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Can a Peer-Reviewed Article Claim Novelty in Something Introduced in a Preceding Phd Thesis?
My PhD thesis has been available online on the university website for 3 years, and also listed in my Google Scholar profile. Although I have plans to publish multiple papers from my thesis, I have not done so yet!
The question is: can someone else publish a peer-reviewed article claiming novelty in something introduced in my PhD thesis since it is not "published" ?

Practically you can go. Rewrite everything. In many hard-core disciplines, nowadays basically all thesis and papers overlap or are various arrangements of the same pieces of work. Often thesis claim originally too. It would be easy to pass the thesis after the papers, this is through. But the scope of journals is dissemination, and your thesis in a Web page doesn't contribute much.

Of course, they can claim novelty -- and of course, this would be not true. It would also not be true if you published e.g., in a blog. (And of course, if they are aware of the thesis, they are not behaving ethically.)
However, if your PhD thesis is not very visible (most thesis are not), it could be that they are not aware of the thesis and the referee is also not. Most likely, you cannot do much then afterwards to change the claim in the paper -- if you are very lucky, the writer posts some kind of erratum on their homepage.
Many peer-reviewed papers were forgotten and ideas rediscovered afterwards. Of course, this could also happen with a PhD thesis.
Wouldn't it be a strange world if it was okay to take theorems out of a PhD thesis and claim them to be one own's theorems?

And, of course, it is plagiarism if not cited properly.

@Buffy: Indeed.

A thesis being online makes it as discoverable as, but less attractive than, a random cat video. The real question might be why 3 years have passed without getting articles submitted.

@JonCuster: Not a theses are fully avaiable online in English. This makes results often less discoverable.


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Effect of offensive speech online on grad student life
I have a friend who has been accepted to grad school who posts stuff on line on social media that would offend many people.  The person is not racist, homophobic, or anti-semitic but someone reading it might think so.  Do you think this will have any effect on their life as a grad student, working with an advisor/professors or future career?  The person just enjoys being provocative and apparently doesn't like to self censor.

What country is your friend going to grad school in? I suspect this is something that varies tremendously across different cultures.

The person is not racist, homophobic, or anti-semitic, but... Hmmmmm.

Some people like to be offensive just to be offensive; they even may get very far, and without hurting them (see preshack, coughident elections). However, for most, the internet exposes you to everyone on this planet as direct neighbour. Traditionally, one needed only one difficult neighbour to poison the atmosphere for, say, ~30 people around them. Now, any sensitive/righteous/oversensitive/self-righteous person from the planet becomes one's neighbour and a potential career destroyer. Freedom of speech is accompanied with massively enhanced freedom of getting one's career obliterated.

If you seriously offend your boss or coworkers, yes, you can expect consequences.

It's hard to answer without knowing the specifics of what they post. However, it could be very damaging if it comes out. There's a large amount of online mob mentality that has the potential to ruin anyone's life. It doesn't help that many news sites are more than happy to write a story about minor Internet drama, which often gets even more people to talk about it.
I can see two ways this could be damaging to your friend's graduate career:

Professors will want to protect their own reputation and might avoid working with your friend if they're seen as provocative or "bad" by others. Being someone's graduate adviser is an important relationship and some people will avoid associating themselves with your friend.
Some students might avoid taking classes from someone they see as "unsafe" or antagonistic. If they complain, your friend might not be given any TA positions by the school.

Could it be damaging to their post-graduate career? Certainly. There are countless articles about people who made one mistake or had a joke take out of context and now find it hard to find a job. Take a look at this article about a girl who took a "funny" picture at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier:

Life was inundated with emails demanding their jobs, so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the car park and told her to hand over her keys. “Literally overnight, everything I knew and loved was gone,” Lindsey said. And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year.

One bad Facebook joke and she loses her job. You also have "Donglegate," Michael Richards, Justine Sacco, etc. The Internet is a scary place.
Or maybe your friend never gets caught or no one ever cares and it all turns out fine. Who knows?


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How do you get back into teaching after being overseas for 10 years and lacking good computer skills?
This isn't about myself, so kindly bare with me. I'll try to make this question as generic as possible.
I already read U.S. humanities professors: Can you get back into academia if you leave? and Does taking an academic job in Asia or Africa make it difficult to get a job in the US or Europe later?  but they aren't a good match for my question.
A friend got a PhD in mechanical engineering at 2000 from a tier 1 university in US. Then he moved back to his home country and started teaching there. Now he is back in the US. His computer skills and knowledge of industry related softwares are limited. He just taught core mechanical engineering courses with 2-3 national papers published. His English is very good though. No problem there.
What are his best options of teaching? I initially thought that he would be able to teach in (community) colleges, but then most colleges are teaching CS, social sciences, economy, healthcare, math or at best chemistry. Most of them don't have anything related to engineering, let alone mechanical engineering
i.e. thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, etc.
Currently what I'm thinking is that his best option is to just teach math in colleges. Are there any better solutions?

Some community colleges have pre-engineering programs; perhaps this could be worthy of looking into?

@MadJack 1. I'm a bit confused. I googled its definition. Do you mean something like the 'mechanical Engineering' mentioned in this page? or it's not always as specific as that? 2. FWIW the job doesn't have to be in academia, any job that is related would do fine. But huge preference with academia.

Here in Connecticut, there are several community colleges that offer associate degrees that can lead into mechanical engineering bachelor's degrees at other institutions. See here or here.

@PeterK. Nice. Thanks. (I'm using Google) Is there any easy website that helps you to filter out B.Sc. and M.S. programs or list programs? Or google is the only way?

Do you mean something like the 'mechanical Engineering' mentioned in this page? No, Oregon State is not a community college. Look for community colleges with pre-engineering programs.

@MadJack and based on the details I gave, it's difficult for him to find a position from a non-community college even for pre-engineering right?

@Honey I just used Google too, but I used Mechanical engineering "community college" as the search terms to ensure that "community college" together appeared in the results.

You haven't mentioned whether or not your friend will require visa sponsorship.  Many institutions are unwilling to sponsor employment-based visa for instructors, so this could be a limiting factor.

@BrianBorchers no visa required

How is your friend's English speaking?

@scaaahu very good

This is not an answer because I am not a professor in US. Your friend has PhD from a tier 1 university in US, has some national papers, very good English speaking, already have green card (your comment says, no visa required). They should have no problem finding ME teaching job in universities, may not be R1 university, but a second tier university should not be a problem. This question is two years old, did they find a teaching job yet?

@scaaahu tldr; no. But he didn't really try.

Some community colleges have pre-engineering programs in which someone with a Ph.D. in engineering could be an instructor.  The engineering courses offered in these programs are typically very limited.  Courses like thermodynamics are not typically offered at the community college level.
Most community colleges have rules for the required academic background of instructors.  For example, a fairly common rule is that instructors are required to have 15 credit hours of graduate-level coursework in the subject that they are teaching.  These kinds of rules might well prevent your friend from getting a job teaching mathematics, chemistry, etc.
Your friend might also consider applying for a job as a full-time instructor at a four-year college that has an engineering program.


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Get notification from the papers in the conference and the calendar
I work in the computer science field, and I would like to get notified when papers from conferences are available so that I don't have to be always looking to the conferences' webpage to see if they are available. Is there any service that do this?
My goal is just to find the latest CS papers to read. How people normally do? They are all the time looking for the conferences' webpage? They use google alerts?
I also would like to have a full calendar of the computer conferences that are available. Is there a webpage that shows this info?

Not all CS conferences offer their accepted papers in their web pages for download, since they are published e.g., by Springer, IEEE, ACM and so-on. Or are you asking about the announcement of the accepted papers?

I just want to get the latest CS papers to read. I am looking for an easier way to do it without having to look into the conferences webpages. I don't know if google alerts can help.

Yes, google alerts help. Follow your favorite authors and yourself (new papers AND citations) and when someone uploads a paper that cited them or you, you get an alert

That is two seperate questions. Please ask them in separate posts.