text:
Potential Postdoc advisor giving exams (assignment) as part of hiring process
I will be graduating with a PhD from a US institution in computational sciences. I have published 10+ papers in peer reviewed journals in the field I am applying for jobs.
I have been interviewed by some PIs, and after interview, I have been asked to submit a few hours of tasks for further evaluation. I was wondering if it is normal these days in hiring process to assign some work/test to evaluate the candidates on top of interview presentation. Anyway, I found the assignment interesting and have decided to work on it.

I don't understand why you plan to submit the report. A postdoc is a collaborator, supervision is minimal...if that's how this PI choose a collaborator, it's a major redflag.

@Emilie, I think that the level of supervision is probably something that differs by field and place.

Yes, this happened to me recently, and I was applying for a somewhat higher ranked position.  However, the exam question was very thoughtful so I decided it reflected positively on the employer.

I would avoid that PI like the plague, sounds like a micromanager who will never be confident of your ability. Definetly a big red flag!

If the PI already has a candidate in mind for the position, but has to publicly advertise the position (e.g for funding reasons), they might add a test to the recruiting process that would favor their candidate.

I've seen this done but at the job interview stage and "on the spot", i.e. asking a job candidate to write a small bit of code to do this or that, or a candidate given a small bit of code and asked to find the error.  This usual was a 5-minute thing (at most).

I'm guessing she was tasked with reviewing this papers as a referee for some journal, and she delegated the work to you. Maybe to others as well. Not a red flag in my opinion, but just keep in mind that if this is the case, it will happen again and again. As long as it is kept to a minimum and to papers within your research interest, I'm guessing it is okay. If suddenly all you do is review papers she should be reviewing, even some that you don't care about, then that is a red flag. There the possibility that she is just testing you, you can find this out after you deliver your reviews.

I've interviewed CS PhD's, with publications, that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. I work in industry rather than academia (except for adjunct positions), but this doesn't strike me as unreasonable. It's an exam. If you can do the work, what's the big deal? I've also met people whose publications, source, etc. were generated with a lot of undocumented assistance. An exam is a good way to detect that.

I work in a professional field, not academia. I don't know if you've ever heard of "Smart and Gets Things Done" by Joel Spolsky. It was based on an earlier blog post titled "The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing."
The title of the book says most everything that you need to know. There are lots of people in the world who are smart, but lots of them are not capable of getting much done.  The person interviewing you has no way of judging how productive you were with your time when you were working on your 10+ papers.  By giving you this task, she'll get an idea about the "gets things done" part.

It's important to remember that while you may list many things on you CV (and some of those may be easy to check for validity), not everyone tells the truth on their CV and so the institution may have decided this step is necessary to avoid CV fraud, particularly if they've been bitten in the past. In one of my former jobs, we brought someone in who, on paper, was excellent, but actually they were a terrible researcher and had just been lucky with getting first authorship on some papers.

It is highly unusual. As you note, the PI has plenty of "standard" information (publications, recommendation letter, CV, etc.) that can be used to assess your potential as a collaborator and independent scientist. This is what most PIs will use in the hiring process. Some will ask you to give a seminar or do an interview by phone, video, or in person.
How the PI evaluates you as a candidate will reflect how the PI evaluates you once you are an advisee. This is especially true if they ask you to do something unusual, which is certainly the case here.
You are being told that the work you have done in the past, the good credit that you have earned with your previous advisor, your attendance and interaction at seminars... these are unimportant factors compared to whatever skills this "exam" is testing. It sounds like you do not agree with that attitude. That is reasonable, and if true, I suggest that you and this advisor may not be a good match.

I don't know that presenting a seminar to a potential employer is any easier (or preferable for the applicant, even if easier) versus doing some data analysis.

Good point, but the academic world does generally judge people and work on the basis of seminars and presentations, not technical exams. My point was about whether the applicant and PI agree on the relative importance of these assessment methods (not which is more fun for the applicant).

"Some [PIs] ask you to... do an interview."  A postdoc is a job. I've never heard of anybody being hired for a job at anything other than a tiny organization without having an interview.

@DavidRicherby I definitely agree that it seems like a good idea! But whether it is done seems to be field-dependent. For instance, I submitted my postdoc application by email and was accepted within 12 hours without any questions. In my PhD lab (chemistry), about half of the ~20 postdocs were interviewed in person before hiring, and the others were not. Many of the latter brought external funding and had excellent recommendations from prominent scientists. I would have still interviewed them because none of that says anything about whether they would, for instance, be toxic personalities...

@ASimpleAlgorithm It's not about how easy or difficult the given task is. It takes so much time to read a paper even from a slightly different field of research and the PI was asking to read 2-3 papers, analyze the data and write a report which I think could take up to a week. That is too much I think.

@DavidRicherby The question raised here is not about an interview, but the assignment that takes intensive amount of time and labour.

@MAPK I'm fully aware of that. That's why I posted a comment addressing this answer specifically, and quoting the exact part of the answer that I'm talking about, rather than posting a comment below your question.

I find it a bit intriguing, actually. Though unusual. And, of course, if you object to it, move on now without another thought.
But perhaps she just wants to know how you will attack a new and fresh problem without the support you may have had in your studies. Or perhaps she and you are in a field in which a lot of opportunities pop up and there are threads of potential research that need a quick study and overview.
I don't find it offensive. Painful to comply with, perhaps, but that is up to you. Once she is paying you such things might become a requirement, not a request.
And I don't agree that she considers your accomplishments unimportant. But if the competition for the position is fierce, she will want every bit of information she can gather on candidates.
There is no reason to do this, unless you want the position, and no reason not to, but for the time it takes, if you do.
You choose.
Not everything that is weird is necessarily bad.

I'd love to hear from her why she does this. Maybe I'd be appalled.

I will graduate in May 2020 and there are other PIs who want me to start this December as they need somebody to start immediately which I could not, but I wanted to confirm a position so I could start immediately after graduation. There are lots of jobs available in my field and the PI is from medical school ranked between 15-25 in the US, so  it is not "Harvard"  or "MIT". Also, I am graduating with a PhD within three years timeline and she was raising some concerns about my university's policy for letting someone graduate in just 6 semesters. I think I would not want to deal with such a PI.

No problems then. Just move on. But it might be useful for your future to send a note. "Thanks for the opportunity, but I'm exploring other options." No need to give reasons.

My former PI used to give assignments to candidates he wasn't sure about but thought they might have potential.  They would generally be small problems that he would then have one of his current students evaluate to see if 1) the general approach was reasonable and 2) how realistic their evaluation of their own progress was (e.g. knowing your results were poor was more important than getting good results).
He did this because his lab was relatively prestigious and got a ton of applications.  He didn't want to limit his search to "only people from top 10 institutions" or "only people with publications in top journals" and he felt this approach gave talented people from diverse backgrounds a chance.  It also made a sort of filter where if the borderline candidate didn't care enough to do the project, he didn't have to care enough to evaluate it.  Since this PI expressed concerns about the amount of time you spent in your degree, they may have a similar mindset as my former PI.
Personally, I didn't find the projects that useful, at least for the candidates I evaluated.  Maybe I was just a tough judge, but I generally found the candidates were less "passionate" and more "desperate" as the results I got back were generally higher effort than was being requested with an overly optimistic evaluation of their own progress.  Still, it may have paid off for a talented person with a middling CV who wanted to make the move to a top tier institution.

In the professional world there are plenty of interview processes that contain one or another way of skill assessment. That's pretty normal and not a way to devalue your general expertise but a matter of establishing whether your skills do fit the exact needs of the company and typically also if your way to apply them fits the company culture / type of person the company is looking for.
Whether an exam/report is the right and (e.g. wrt time investment) fair way to check how well you match for the given position is certainly debatable and definitely uncommon in the academic world.
However, note that this does not mean your other qualifications do not matter, they are the basis on which you get to the test level. Whether the job is worth the involved effort only you can decide.
On the other hand, isn't it a bit odd, that you want to complete the report while you don't want to take the position either way? That wastes your time and that of the potential advisor who will likely read it. Then again, if it is so motivating to do for you, maybe it is the perfect check whether you bring the right kind of motivation with you for the job. And it can also be valuable to you if you know the kind of stuff you would later deal with on a daily basis...

I don't think the third paragraph is needed, but this echoed my thoughts pretty well. Even with publications and a PhD (which OP doesn't actually have yet), in industry OP would still probably have several rounds of tests.

@MAPK While I meant the kind of task not the person, judging the personal fit is of course also an aspect and totally up to you. However, going over github etc and still wanting additional testing in some form, small project, interview day with tasks etc is totally in the normal range in the professional industry world. Indeed not so much in academia, where typically it's more giving a talk. But that alone doesn't indicate any kind of psycho mentality, if at all more an industry-like mindset. Of course the task can be way too time-intense, that doesn't seem to be the issue for you though.

How does this project fit with the PI's research goals? The answer may be surprising.
Do you think this project would lead to a publication? Is it possible this project would lead to a note or other short submission? If so, go for it. Even if you don't get the job, you can submit a paper.
If it is a throw-away project, I would avoid it, unless you need the job.
And don't forget that you may be the top candidate!


text:
Do any universities, other than Pontifical (Vatican) universities allows for presenting a thesis in Latin?
What, if any, universities, permit candidates to put forth their thesis in Latin (classical or ecclesiastical)?
For this question, I would like to exclude any Pontifical Universities.
In other words, I would like to know if any other universities allow a candidate to put forth their thesis in the Latin language, at the present moment in time.

If memory serves, Cambridge allows PhDs to be submitted in Latin, but no one actually does. Not putting it as an answer because this is half remembered in my years since being a PhD student there.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Citing source of a theory?
Is it required to cite the source(s) in the cited works list if you mention a known theory like for example Maslow pyramide of needs?

Are you writing a paper as a course assignment or writing a research paper for publication?

Ah yes. Good to capitalize Maslow.

You don't need to cite things that are "common knowledge". But this depends to a pretty big extent on the audience. If you were writing for me, you would need to cite it since this is the first time I'd be likely to see the term. If you were writing for a psychology audience it might be different (I can't judge, obviously).
However, while it may not be required to cite, it might (in many circumstances) be polite. If you err, then I suggest doing so on the side of over, not under, citation.
On the other hand, you are unlikely to be accused of plagiarism, specifically, if you use an unfamiliar term.

Unless you are doing a historical examination of a theory, you don't always have to cite the original source of an idea.  Some ideas have entered the literature to such an extent that authors may just give some key citations to major works, which may not have been the original works on the topic.  Academic papers will sometimes briefly discuss the genesis of a theory, but often they just cite some major works confirming the existence of the theory and then they get down to business.
When you have a theory that is named after a person (e.g., Maslow's hierarchy of needs) you will sometimes cite the original paper just so that your reader knows where the name comes from, but this tends to be the case only if the theory is not well known.  Many named theories are so widely known in the literature that they are commonly cited without going back to the original source; e.g., when statisticians use applied Bayesian methods we do not usually cite Thomas Bayes.

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


text:
My undergraduate supervisor is giving me very little help
I am a  student in my final year of an undergraduate programme. The majority of the credits going towards my degree are weighted on a lab based thesis which is supervised by a very time constrained professor. We are supposed to be working almost all day in the lab under instruction from our supervisor.
However they are always close to an hour late whenever we are supposed to meet. When they do arrive, they are so rushed they say something small to do and give very little explanation and then leave. There is no structure and the majority of the time I am left without work to do.
The thesis is hugely important to me as I would like a career in the field.
I don't know how to approach them. I want to start progressing more with my project but it is difficult trying change thing someone who is partially grading my thesis and I am unsure of the best way to go about this.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Let me suggest polite collective action. Have a group of you, maybe three, go to the prof during some scheduled time and just present the case that you need more direction and ask them to find a way to provide it. Or alternatively, a way to be a success without it.
Try to present it as a need, not as a complaint. The prof may also be dissatisfied with the amount of supervision they can give. You are generous in your assessment, and this will help. But the prof does owe you proper supervision under the circumstances you describe.


text:
Is it difficult to return to Europe after doing a postdoc in Saudi Arabia?
I am applying for postdocs and one of the offers I have received is from a university in Saudi Arabia.  Although the research which they do at the University is good as far as I can tell and regularly gets into top-tier journals, I have been warned that doing a postdoc at a university in Saudi Arabia is perhaps not advisable, because although it is relatively to easy to go there, it can then be hard to return to Europe afterwards.
Is this a genuine effect which can happen or anyone with any experience of having studied at one of the universities and had trouble applying for jobs afterwards?  Is it a ''black mark'' to have spent time at KAUST or a university like that, or are they reasonably well-regarded?
I have spoken to two people who are from nearby countries and they have suggested that this should be a last resort.  Also I heard a story of someone who had articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was struggling to get a job in Europe after having done postdocs at Qatar.

Not sure of current status, but a decade+ ago the general feeling in my field was they had bought great equipment and done little with it. Find likely post-docs from 5-10 years ago and see where they are now.

Certainly many people, academics and others, might wonder why anyone would voluntarily go to a place with human rights problems, absolute monarchy, strict religious law, etc., if they had any other choice.

You may find of interest this question and the (possibly controversial) answers therein: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/117524/20058

There is nothing to do with a country. All you look into research profile of your supervisor and research group in that University. If your supervisor has good publication, then you must go there. Because at the end of the day, people will judge with your research publications not the institution.

@Tom One of my friend's son graduated from KAUST and now he working in USA. My son also visited KAUST and he told me that the environment there is close to European and different from rest of the country.

@imtaar when you say working in the USA, do you mean in academia?  By wish is to continue in academia after the postdoc at KAUST.

@Tom No. He is doing some other field. OK. I talked to my son. He says that to go to academia, you need either a top university or top professor or both. KAUST is not considered as top university in Europe. So you can find a top professor in KAUST (with many publications and still active in research). The professor will have many contacts and he can refer you to other places for job. By the way, KAUST offers $4000/month (tax free) + free housing + health + children education. My son says that to get a good job in academia, you need more than one postdoc. So you one postdoc from KAUST + 1 more.

@Tom So you can do one postdoc from KAUST and make money then do another postdoc from a top university.

In the end, what matters are your research activities i.e., your publications, patents, conferenced attended etc.
In the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), you will have a lot of opportunities to expand your research experience.
I recommend that you take the chance.

would you mind if I ask where you are from?

I will second this. KAUST is an excellent institution, and is well known in the research community. The people there are well connected to Europe and North America, and so are their postdocs.


text:
How Much Weight does a Conference Paper carry compared to a Journal Publication?
I am working on some stuff for a paper.  I have recently seen an advert for a conference calling for papers and I feel like I currently have enough stuff that I could submit it to this conference and get it published.
However, it looks as if the paper would be published in the 'conference proceedings' as part of a series by Springer.  Does this mean that the publication would only be classed as a 'conference paper' and do conference papers really carry the same weight as journal publications?   (It's worth mentioning that the paper would be peer-reviwed if I sent it for the proceedings of this conference). If not, my idea would be to wait until I have added more to what I am working on and then send it to a journal.
Edit: I am aware that there are other questions asking if a conference paper should be compared to a journal article.  I am asking if in this case the publication can be listed as a journal article as it will be peer-reviewed by experts and published in Communications in Computer and Information Science, so I am wondering if this allows a work-around for me to class it as one of my journal articles.  The link below provides more information: I would like to know if I can list it as a peer-reviewed journal paper or if I will have to call it a conference paper, as these are not the same to me.
https://www.springer.com/series/7899
Second edit: To make it clear the paper would be a physics paper on the subject of quantum mechanics and would only be published in CCIS as it represents a surprising application of a particular piece of computer software.  My issue is that I don't want to see the paper as a novelty item when I have been thinking about and working on the physics going into it for years.  The use of software in it is really just a matter of convenience as there is a bit where it it easier to use software to generate a numerical example illustrating the general theory I have been talking about in a concrete case.
Third edit: Turns out the publication could only be classed as a conference paper so I will add to what I have got and send it to a journal, as I don't regard a conference paper as being equivalent to a journal publication (or at least, not in physics).

Possible duplicate of Should a conference paper in a journal be considered a journal article? In addition, there have been several other questions here about conferences vs. journals. If this question doesn't answer yours I suspect another one will.

This would probably depend on who will be reading the CV. In CS there wouldn't be an issue, but if it is for Physics employment or similar it will be decided by physicists who may have different ideas. And, of course, you might think about two papers. One for the CS novelty issue and the other for the physics. Different stress based on the same basic ideas.

@Buffy My gut is telling me now to just leave this and develop the physics to send it to a physics journal, if I send it to this CS novelty thing I am going to have to emphasise the software I have used for the purpose of the conference and talk about when I have used it, maybe even include the code snippets I have used: as I view it as physics paper and not at all as a computer science paper I really don't want to do this as the software is of no importance to my physical arguments so I think I am going to hold fire for now.

Sounds like a plan.

@Buffy I've checked and it's not classed as a journal so I would only be able to list it as a conference paper.  Waste of time, I think what I have is better than that.

The weight given to conference and journal publications is completely determined by field. In a few fields, such as CS, they have essentially equal weight and the vetting process is similar. This is partly due to the fact that the field itself is less mature and fast changing and many breakthroughs in subfields are first introduced at conferences.
In other fields this is quite different and journal publications may have much more weight than conferences - even if the conference paper is published in a proceedings.
So, it depends on your audience. You may need advice on this from someone in the field who represents that audience. For doctoral students the advisor is usually a good guide for such things.
And, of course, there are low-quality conferences just as there are low-quality journals. Beware.

It might be worth mentioning that the place it would be mentioned 'Communications in Computer and Information Science' has a H-index of 40 in the category of Mathematics and Computer Science, although I am aware this might not really mean anything, but it does seem to be the case that 'Communications in Computer and Information Science' is a journal, but maybe not the best one or not the best or most relevant that I could be publishing in.

I would not say that journals and conferences are equal in computer science. Conference are generally far more prestigious.


text:
Co-author keeps rewriting the article in poor English
I am writing an article with a senior colleague.  Although English is not their first language, they keep re-writing the entire article in their own words.
I would not normally care, but the way he re-writes it is semi-grammatical and very hard to comprehend, so that I feel I have to change it back to something grammatical after I have figured out what he means.  A week or two later, I will find that he has gone back to certain sections and re-written them so that they are in semi-grammatical English again.
I understand that language is not the main priority of a scientific article so as I say this would not normally bother me, but it is having an active effect on the ability of the paper to convey its results, as well as causing me work having to read and understand it to translate it back.
What is the easiest way to get around this issue without coming across as rude?
Edit: Unfortunately the manuscript was rejected by our first choice of journal and the referee comments suggest that the unclear writing style introduced by the supervisor was a contributing factor in this.  I'll have to think carefully about how to re-write the manuscript when submitting to a more specialised journal.

Does "senior colleague" mean another faculty member or an advisor?

It's an advisor in this case.

'...language is not the main priority of a scientific article --' -- are you sure?

The best way is to refer to grammatical rules or refer to a book on good academic writing.   I understand your 'pain'.  I used to work with a senior colleague who had poor writing practices.  I only wrote one paper with this person, and that was it.

Are you actually sure that the scientific content is the same of your and your co authors rewrite? There might be some subtle differences.

Are you native or with higher language fluency than your co-author? From the question it could be both, but answers might change with this context.

Another point to think about: what you consider "semi-grammatical and very hard to comprehend" may in fact be just the style, grammar, tone of voice etc. used in your particular sub-field. Some fields may require for a more formal speech than you may be writing, or something like this. And what may be even more difficult, your colleague's edits may non-grammatical, but close enough to the required style, while your edits are grammatically correct, but do not match the style needed.

I once went over a paper for someone and there were dozens of errors.  I'm not particularly grammar-orientated but they were obvious errors and changing them did not affect meaning.  That said, one has to be sure that any changes do not affect meaning.

I appreciate the comments, but I really mean that the changes affect how comprehensible  the statements are.  For example, he will just take a sentence and then re-write it so that the meaning is the same as before but now the word order is wrong, abstract nouns are inserted where they should not be or deleted.

Have you considered using a grammar-checking tool, such as Grammarly or that in Microsoft Word?  Personally, I don't have a particularly high opinion of them, so I will not post this as an answer, but if you find that they are flagging the same constructions as you regard as poor, maybe your co-author will find that more persuasive than 'just' your opinion on the matter.

Is the advisor officially a co-author? (And if not, why are the rewriting the paper? Is that common practice?) Is the paper critical for graduation in your program?

"A week or two later, I will find that he has gone back" What do you mean exactly? Did he literally undo your changes and go back to a previous version of the document? Or did he try to improve on a section, adding new bad grammar as a side-effect? If he went back to a previous version of the document, it might be either because of bad management of file-versions, or it's a weird passive-aggressive back-and-forth, akin to two room-colleagues opening and closing the window repetitively. If he tried to improve, but added new bad grammar in the process, you can simply fix the grammar.

Get a third party that is respected by this senior colleague to read  the draft, and hopefully they will point out to their senior colleague that their English might be a bit "old fashioned".

This is what version control really excels at.

This depends a lot on your analysis of their personality. If they are reasonable, then suggesting that you edit the final submitted version will improve the English and make it less likely that the reviewers would ask for corrections should not cause blowback.
"Hmmm, prof, maybe I can improve the English a bit for the final version." If they are primarily committed to the ideas, and not to their "obviously brilliant" exposition, it should be fine for a reasonable person.
But, it is dangerous to offend some advisors. It isn't a question of being rude, but for some, just being honest is enough.
In the former case, I'd raise the issue. But in the latter, just let it go at the end and see what the reviewers say.
You may be wrong about how language is less important in science, actually. Clear writing is needed. For some things, even more needed.

+1 for the last sentence.

I want to add: it could also be that the co-author is trying to include a subtlety that your edit is missing. Maybe you can try talking to them why they keep reverting your changes?

@Dhara I supsect, that may be exactly the point. Especially in mathematics, some formulations might be nicer but could introduce tiny undesirable (let alone wrong) changes in the meaning.

@YYY: I suspect you're wrong. When was the last time you saw a mathematician deliberately revert something grammatical into something ungrammatical multiple times? Sensitive mathematical detail are generally found in the symbolism, not in the grammar.

I agree with the advice, but would add: make very sure that you are correct about your grammar being better than his. The mere fact that you believe so is not evidence. Show both versions to someone you trust as a good writer to get an objective opinion.

@user21820 I don't have a guess one way or another, but many important technical mathematical details are explained in words, not just symbols.  Most of mathematics is not just formulas and equations.

@Kimball: That's correct, but I was talking about sensitive detail. Most recognize when grammar has been improved, and would work around the improved grammar rather than chucking it all.

@user21820: I think the concern here is that English is already formally ambiguous even when it is used correctly (because it is not lojban or a similar language). When you throw in grammatical errors, it is entirely possible that OP has "corrected" some poorly-written mathematical exposition in a way that actually rules out the correct interpretation. If there is a communication barrier between OP and their colleague, then the colleague might decide to "just put back the text I [think I] know is right."

@Kevin: Of course I know that that's a possibility. However, I've never seen that happen as a result of grammatical errors. Every single instance of editing to the point of error I've seen was a result of the editor doing it for stupid reasons (e.g. changing all lowercase "p" to uppercase "P",which resulted in conflict because "P" was already used for something else). If you can explicitly name a personal incident where only English incompetency led to a botched edit in mathematics, then I'll buy your concern. =)

@user21820 " Sensitive mathematical detail are generally found in the symbolism, not in the grammar". That has not been my experience at all. A famous elementary example is the definition of uniform continuity, where changing the order of a couple of words in a seemingly innocuous manner completely changes the meaning of the definition. In my experience math is littered with such examples

@DenisNardin: That's not an example of deliberate repeated change in phrasing from grammatical to ungrammatical. Please read the context.

@user21820 I did - the point is that the the colleague might be trying to restore a mathematical subtlety, however introducing grammatical mistakes in the process due to their unfamiliarity with the language. Usually when there's an edit war both sides have some reasons, and the best way to stop it is to actually talk to each other about what's the point of these edits...

@DenisNardin: Just to be clear, nobody disagrees that the solution is to discuss the edits. But I've never seen what you claim ever happen ("the colleague might be trying to restore a mathematical subtlety, however introducing grammatical mistakes in the process due to their unfamiliarity with the language"), and your example is completely unrelated. That's all I'm saying.

@user21820 It happened to me more times than I can count, and I played both roles at different times. I cannot point you to any example becase the ones I know about we always caught before submitting, but I'm sure my experience is not unique...

@DenisNardin: I'll take your word for your experiences, but I still don't feel that's the issue in this case. =)

The article was rejected from first choice journal, due at least in part to the manuscript being written in an unclear manner.  I've never had to deal with this situation before as all my previous works have been written by me only and I am a native English speaker.  I'll have to have a conversation with him where we discuss the poor writing as a contributing factor in being rejected by a good journal.

I have refereed many articles and reading poor English is very unpleasant. It's hard enough to understand the ideas the article is presenting without language making it harder.
Also, I have had several advisors and many bosses and uniformly they all valued opinions in this order:

opinion from a so-called expert
opinion from someone outside the organization
their own opinion
opinion from a crazy homeless guy on the sidewalk outside
my opinion

I've had this experience with advisor/bosses that liked me and thought highly of me. This dynamic is probably at play with you and it is exceedingly unlikely to change in the (hopefully) short time you have to work with this advisor.
Another dynamic that could be in play is that the senior colleague feels a need to put their mark on the paper. This need can come from many places. Maybe their way of writing makes more sense to them. Maybe they feel like they didn't contribute enough to the paper, and this is their way of contributing. Maybe it's a pure dominance play.
Edit: [ Two more dynamics that could be at play. (1) It could be that the colleague is an immigrant and is sensitive about his English because he has been treated poorly by natives. If the original poster is a native, this makes the situation delicate. (2) Some cultures/individuals are much more hierarchical than others. If the colleague leans towards hierarchy then he may need signals from the original poster acknowledging who is in charge.]
I don't think there is a simple way of resolving this conflict. But one way or another, you should have to have a discussion with your colleague. At a minimum, you need to understand where your colleague is coming from. You'll have to be very polite and fawning. His ideas and inspiration are great. Clearly, he is the more learned and knowledgeable party. But please, you're begging: could he allow you to clean up the grammar a little here and there?
Edit: [ I use "fawning" as hyperbole and it may be too strong. but a sincere effort should probably be made to acknowledge the colleague's strengths. ]
If he truly feels that his writing style makes more sense than yours, then you are at an impasse and you may have to go to plan B: wait for the referees to come back with comments.
Good luck

Did you inquire whether that crazy homeless guy might be a Fields-medal laureate or something?

This is indeed probably the correct analysis. I don't understand why many others try so hard to avoid saying what is most likely the case: Ego. The one thing I do not agree with in your post is to "be fawning".

@user21820. If, in fact, Ego is a large factor, then fawning may be the only strategy that doesn't get the senior colleague's hackles up. Maybe "fawning" is too strong, but a sincere effort should probably be made to acknowledge the colleague's strengths. There's another dynamic I just thought of: if the colleague is an immigrant and the original poster is a native, it could be that the colleague is sensitive about his English because he is often treated poorly by natives. In that case, the original poster may have to work very hard to establish a trusting relationship with the colleague.

I agree with the second sentence of your comment. I do not condone falsehood if it can be avoided, including boot-licking (which is even worse than fawning). It is much better to simply show respect and acknowledge the good points of the colleagues, than to engage in any form of pretense (which "fawn" conveys). If you replace "fawning" by "respectful" and change "the more learned and ..." to "a learned ...", I would upvote your answer wholeheartedly.

Maybe you should have a joint session. Both of you sit side-by-side in front of a computer and make the final edits together. You two can discus every formulation. The advantage is, you get a better feeling of what your advisor wants to express, you can help him finding the right words, and you can let it go once you sense anger or other negative vibes.

Another alternative is to submit some excerpts with "semi-grammatical" issues to a second opinion of native language and with at least some knowledge on the field and compare with your version of the text.
No need to mention the whole situation, just ask which version is clearer/correct. If it happens that they agree with you most of times then explain with all due respect the situation, otherwise consider that can be your limitation.

Overall agree, though I agree with @Buffy that OP may need to pick battles here depending on the personality of the advisor. But this is a good first check to make sure OP isn't missing something before considering whether to confront their advisor.

Plan B: do nothing (since the co-author is more senior) but offer to work on the revision after the paper has been submitted.
Any self-respecting editor/reviewer will point out the issues with language.
By offering to do the work on the revision following the reviewers' comments, you will have the last say on the language used in the paper (after all, language is the only thing you disagree with your co-author).

The Pros:

You're the last to work on the paper
The changes to the language of the paper are motivated by third party input (the reviewers), it's not you that's saying that your co-author's language is bad. You can always pretend to be happy with your co-author's work to save everybody's face
Since the co-author's version was submitted, and the language is likely to be pointed out by the reviewers, you're here to the rescue

The Cons:

Some things need to happen for this to work

The paper being accepted despite the potentially bad language
The co-author being happy for you to do the revising
The reviewers pointing out the bad language

You're planning to fix the issue at the very last point in time, which is generally not very prudent
You're wasting the time of the reviewers and make their work more difficult (as pointed out by some commenters)

I agree but my experience with referees is a bit variable.  Sometimes they point out the language issues, sometimes they don't.

Also, sometimes they will give a bad review of paper because the language is so bad that they don't understand it and you will lose your chance for acceptance in that journal.

Additionl Con (for the reviewers): Reviewing a paper which is poorly written is a nightmare.

Instead of officially submitting it, maybe you can convince someone the senior professor knows to do an unofficial review, focusing on language?  Some other way to get a 3rd-party opinion on language, without wasting as much time for as many people reading a paper you know is hard to read, and putting them in the position of being expected them to be reviewing the context as well as the language.

Since you say senior colleague, Im assuming this is not your professor. If it is there may be little that you can do.
Complain to your professor and explain what is happening, he is unlikely to want you wasting your time on this kind of nonsense. If he doesn't step in immediately he is not doing his job.
If this doesn't work (unfortunate) then explain the situation to your department chair. When I did this the professor quite literally got yelled at by the chair.
Remember that too frequently "senior" colleagues are simply people who have failed to get a professor job, and hence seem to like picking bones forever more.

Senior colleague? I'd leave it alone. He wants it that way, so it goes.
If there's an issue later, deal with it.
Perhaps he's laying claim to a particular point of the publication, as in, "that sounds like Dr. Joe's voice" or something.
"I understand that language is not the main priority of a scientific article"
True, but we do USE language to clearly convey ideas to one another. If it's not getting in the way of clarity, leave the errors alone, just out of respect.
You could address it straight on, asking, "you've changed this passage back. My editing seemed clearer to me? What do you think?" and then read both excerpts of each instance of this.
Especially if it's quite minor, and DOESN'T impact the conveyance of any crucial detail, you're fine.
Just leaving his errors in, you could be said to be irresponsible, not looking out for your senior. Buuut...you edited...they went in and CHANGED IT BACK! Not the same.
Definitely novel situation. Play it by ear and go by how it feels. Depending on the dynamic between you two, it may not really be an  option to discuss, unless he's open to it as well.

Unfortunately the manuscript was rejected, in part because the writing style was so unclear.  Not sure what to do next, I'll read these comments and think about how to approach this so we do not rejected even by a more specialised journal.  This is a novel situation for me, so I have to think carefully about how to proceed.

There is one very simple solution to your problem. You have to refer to facts not to your own opinion. Such facts could be, for instance, a passage from a respected book in the field. Or an automatic grammar/spell checker such as Grammarly.
You can say, I was not sure about my writing, therefore I checked the text with Grammarly. Here are the mistakes.
In order to effectively argue against this defense, one has to be very knowledgeable about English grammar and style. This program is very strong.

Grammarly is a nice tool, but unreliable by itself.


text:
Lead author has added another author without discussing with me
I have been collaborating with another person on a paper which is almost complete.
Today I checked emails and they asked if I could share the Overleaf with someone to check calculations.  I did that assuming that they were doing this so that the person could help out and check some elementary but long calculations in the appendix and that it was easier this way than sending them a PDF.
However, I then noticed that they had been added to the list of authors without my consent and without discussing with me beforehand.
I looked the person up and they have one paper from 2022 as far as I can see and is a PhD student at the same university where the lead author did their PhD, so it has slight vibes that they are helping out a friend who needs a paper.  I cannot see anything that this third person is contributing apart from checking some working.
I have emailed my coauthor saying ''I noticed that X has also been added as a coauthor to the paper, could you advise what their contribution will be to the work or is it only to check calculations in the appendix''?  Hopefully, they will have some very good reason why this third person is necessary or will improve the article.
Is this the correct thing to do?  I don't want to ''stir things up'', but I feel like there is some etiquette that you cannot just add someone as an author to double-check some calculations, especially as there is a risk of sneaking in gift authorship or using the article to help someone out who ''needs papers''.
Edit: They answered and said the person is an expert in the area and will help to explain the physical meaning of the figures, not just calculations in the appendix.

Are you the lead author's supervisor?

I am not their supervisor, we basically just met up at a conference or something and agreed to collaborate and write a paper together.  Does that mean I have to allow them to make this decision?  They contributed more to the paper.

Does that mean I have to allow them to make this decision? I didn't say that, but your relationship to the lead author is important context. That said, you are taking an oddly combative attitude to this whole thing.

This sounds very dodgy, even if the person ends up contributing in the end this is not how co-authorship is meant to work. In particular adding people without discussing first is unacceptable. If you can do the calculations as well and the physical explanation then there is no reason to add this person.

I feel like there are a lot of questions like this.  Should we have a standard one?

You have done the right thing. If I were you, I would not probably continue this collaboration beyond one paper.

From what you write I'd guess that this is a judgement call and that the lead author is probably in a better position to make the call. It would have been better had they discussed it first, which is a bit of a problem though a separate one than the authorship itself.
I'm depending on your edit here, that the third person will provide more toward the paper than just checking.
I hope you don't come to fight about author order if that could become an issue. But authorship is valuable no matter where you are in the list. You may need to re-think future collaborations if you wind up fighting.

I don't believe author order is an issue here, simply I was just a bit annoyed at not being told beforehand.  I sent them an email politely asking if they could in future let me know before they add another author to a paper we are working on, which seems like a fair request.

Yes, I agree. Open communication is best.

In my opinion, the lead author is not being professional. They do not have the right to include additional co-authors without checking with you. You are right in raising the question.
Having said that, keep the bigger picture in mind - sometimes one has to take such things in stride. Don't need to burn bridges on this matter.
I was forced to cite a number of irrelevant papers in my research papers by my supervisor to grow their H-index. I was not happy about it, but complied with it at that point as I was just finishing.
Academia like any other profession is filled with such acts of cheating which have become norm, unfortunately. For future collaborations with the lead author be careful.

I would like to add to the last paragraph: Cheating is not the norm. Look for people that do not take short-cuts and force others into agreeing to wrong behavior. Lead by example and do not repeat other's mistakes!

The hard fact is that in Academia since stakes are lower such acts of cheating are rampant.

Most often, we think authorship should mean that a person made meaningful contributions to a paper's final version. However, this has many possible definitions. It will always be hard to judge by itself, but if that person finds a possible mistake in your calculations, it can drastically change a reviewer's vision of your paper.
Regarding the correct thing to do, I would say that before starting a project, it is always nice to talk about the expectations of each author in the work and who the corresponding author is. So, these things can be avoided. Authorship might be a touchy subject to some and a breeze to others. If you see yourself working with that person more than once, getting these things out of the way before they become something bigger is always preferable.


text:
Acceptence of cross-major master application in Germany
I am planing to apply for a Master of Computer Science in Germany, as an undergrads with a major in Physics. Although I have taken a bunch of CS courses covering core concepts such as programming languages, data structures & algorithm, networking and databases, with an additional exchange experience with its major in CS, transferring from a theoretical science to a applied engineering is still not a minor gap. Some people are saying German universities are rather harsh compared to Americans in terms of openness to cross-major application. Therefore I would like to know it is really so difficult?

@Roland Get acceptance or admission

In such a case, I would not just apply, but talk to the faculty or institute before.
Find out (e.g. through the website) who is responsible for the Master program and contact them. Give an overview about what you have done in your undergrad studies and ask them if admission is possible. It may also be the case that you can get admission with additional requirements, like additional exams on undergrad courses.
Also check the language requirements. Even if the Master lectures are in English, undergrad lectures may not be in English and you might be required or at least advised to take some of them.

It's certainly possible to do and this answer gives good advice. For some anecdotal evidence: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16013/what-is-the-best-way-to-take-missing-courses-before-applying-to-ms/18194#18194


text:
How to properly describe experience in exchange program in Statement of Purpose in Master Application?
I went to the international exchange program in a top CS university in Hong Kong, during 2020 spring, when the world was suffering from the pandemic. The Covid-19 affected the exchange program and made it much less exciting - most of the time the courses were taught online and I didn't have any research experience with the professor. But I indeed learned a lot from the coursework and the touch with foreign friends I met in campus.
I am currently drafting the SoP of CS Master program, where I would like to mention the exchange experience in Hong Kong. How should I describe it in an appropriately? Although Covid-19 is something unavoidable in description of the experience, how can I adjust my narration so that the exchange program appears to be still valuable and rewarding?

Actually, the SoP my be the wrong place for this information. The Statement of Purpose should be looking forward to your academic and career plans, not the past. The CV and other introductory material form a retrospective on your past.
Don't waste word in the Sop on things that aren't about future plans. The exchange program would only be appropriate there if it causes some change in your plans looking forward.
But a line or two in the CV would be a better place to mention it, with some simple phrasing (or not).
If you wind up in an interview, you can bring it up then. But give the SoP the impact it requires.

Thank you for your reply. I am an undergrads from Physics Major and I was in the dept of CS in exchange program. So does it add extra necessities to put the experience on SoP ?

Make the SoP indicate you will be "great" in the future. Talk about how great you have been up to now elsewhere. Don't mistake the purpose and don't lose track of what readers will be looking for when reading your application. You normally have limited space for these elements. Use the space wisely.


text:
Should I mention a cancelled research summer internship in my document?
I got the admission from Mitacs Globalink Research Internship last year, a research internship initiative in Canada, but it was cancelled due to Covid19. Now I am applying for my Master program in a different major (My research program is physics but I am applying for Computer Science Program), should I mention it in my application document (like CV & Statement .etc)? If it is feasible, how to describe it properly?
PS: I contacted my instructor after the cancellation if it was possible to conduct it in a remote mode, but after the consideration he rejected it because of the difficulty of doing research remotely. So I have not done anything about the program
Many other people must have encountered the same cancellation in various programs, and some of my peers in the program have the same questions. I hope to hear a good instruction on the issue, thanks.

Does this answer your question? Cancelled Summer Program due to COVID-19

You were still awarded a competitive internship.  Just indicate

Mitacs Globalink Research Internship at such-and-such (not held because of COVID)

or something to that effect.

@Buffy Mitacs Globalinks is not a “program” in the academic sense so you’re not “admitted” to it.  It’s a program in the sense that Mitacs funds some internships and runs the process of selecting the interns in partnership with hosts.


text:
Should I mention an informal research intern in my CV?
I was doing an informal research intern in a research institution more than a year ago, and it's probably the only experience related to the scientific research during my undergraduate time. Basically it's on a specific topic on AI, and I read papers and did the experiments under the instructions of graduate students of the institution. We submitted a paper where I was one of the co-author to a journal, but it was not accepted.
The word informal means:

I didn't sign an agreement with the institution and thus I didn't get the certificate from the instutution
I was doing the work with graduate students instead of the faculties of the institution. I even didn't see the professor (the supervisor of the graduate students who guided me). And it's almost impossible to get a letter of recommendation from the professor of the institution)

If I don't mention it in the CV, I will be the applicant with bare research experience.
If I mention it, without a letter of recommendation from a professor related, I will probably lose the credibility of the research experience.
PS: I am applying for a Master Program of Computer Science. I have other interns in tech companies but they are not for scientific research.
What should I do?

It's common to list submitted but not yet accepted papers in applications, especially for early-career researchers who haven't had time to accumulate publications. Publishing can be slow and everyone understands that.

You have scientific research experience relevant to the position you're applying for, so explain that experience in your application.
You can mention that you worked with graduate students and you could even ask one of them for a letter of recommendation. You cannot mention working with a professor, because you didn't, nonetheless, they may be willing to write a letter of recommendation that mentions that you worked with their graduate students and they could perhaps quote one of them for the details.

I don't understand the downvote. But as long as someone (preferably a professor) can attest to your statements it should be fine to include them and likely a mistake to exclude them. I doubt that you even need formal letters. Other letters might be more important for your case, actually.


text:
Why do Computer Science degrees contain a high proportion of mathematics?
About 17 years ago I attended a top 10 UK university to study for a degree in Computer Science.
Mathematics had never been a particularly strong point for me. However I (just) had the required A-Level qualification to be accepted for the course without any issue.
After two terms I dropped out and switched to another top 10 UK University to study for an Information Technology degree. The reasons I dropped out from the former were simply because I found the Mathematical lectures unbelievably difficult. The university did not (in my opinion) provide good support to people who weren't strong in this area. However I also never understood why this level of mathematics was being taught in the first place.
I recently looked at some lecture notes provided on the former universities website for the current year. And sure enough, the level of complexity seems the same.
When I switched to doing an Information Technology degree part of my logic was that the outcome would be a more practical/useful set of skills to actually develop software, along with the logical thinking required (which in my view requires little mathematical knowledge). For me this has worked well as I've had a good career as a software developer since graduating. I've never found any of my work requires much maths, beyond that of a GCSE/A-level level of complexity.
Interestingly, looking on LinkedIn, a huge number of people at the former university went on to be software engineers or similar roles. The salaries at the organisations these people work seem commensurate to the role I am currently in.
Given this, I'm wondering what the end-goal and purpose of teaching that complex maths is on CS degrees? I understand some people will go into roles working with hardware, or even producing software where there are complex mathematical elements. But this seems to be in the minority - by a very big margin - in terms of what people actually end up doing. I have also spoken to people about careers they've gone into as opposed to just looking on LinkedIn etc.
It seems to me that CS courses are teaching skills which - whilst relevant - are not as relevant as they might once have been. If this is the case then why has nobody addressed it? It seems absurd.
My experience of this is based on two top 10 UK universities but having looked at some others (in the UK and USA) this seems to be a general case.
If people are going into roles which require that level of mathematical knowledge, what are those roles? Because I can't see a lot of evidence of this actually happening after people have graduated.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Comments posted below this one should request clarification from the asker only (as there is no mechanism to move future discussion comments to chat, they risk being deleted)

Another guy cannot distinguish the difference between SDE and CS. SDE is for coding and engineering, while CS is more for doing research and science. The origin of computer is actually a mathematical thought but not a programmatic organism. But it's not your fault, people always do that. Lots of CS students don't have the ability and/or interest to go further in CS after undergraduate and then switch to SDE to develop stuff and make money. But it's not what CS means at the beginning.

Oxford University’s overview of their CS degree says it all:

Computer Science is about understanding computer systems and networks at a deep level. Computers and the programs they run are among the most complex products ever created; designing and using them effectively presents immense challenges. Facing these challenges is the aim of Computer Science as a practical discipline, and this leads to some fundamental questions:

How can we capture in a precise way what we want a computer system to do?

Can we mathematically prove that a computer system does what we want it to?

How can computers help us to model and investigate complex systems like the Earth’s climate, financial systems or our own bodies?

What are the limits to computing? Will quantum computers extend those limits?

In other words, the language of computer science is math, not C++. If you were looking for vocational training in computers then CS Is probably an inappropriate choice.

The part about vocational training could be more prominent. That's what the op seems to have been looking for.

"Will quantum computers extend those limits?". Lol, nope. Same computability / different computational complexity tho. Why do they use an open question to teaser students when the answer is essentially "Nope, computers can't do that".

@BlueWizard the limits to computing can also be taken as the practical limits. If a task would take eons with traditional computers, it is beyond those limits, despite being theoretically possible.

"If you were looking for vocational training in computers then CS is probably an inappropriate choice" - words I wish someone had told me at the start of my attempted degree in CS.

@BlueWizard, off topic, but classical computers running equation based computation for quantum systems quickly reaches the point of a hard limit, whereas quantum systems run directly on a quantum computer are actually viable. So to some extent, I'd say, yes, a quantum computer extends the limits of (some specialized) computing. Think material sciences, and others where macro behavior is deemed in part due to the quantum effects (like super conductors).

"In other words, the language of computer science is math, not C++"
I don't disagree with this, but I have yet to see a purely theoretical computer science course. Oxford's degree course teaches Scala as part of their imperative programming modules. Haskell for FP. Warwick teach Java and Haskell. These courses are not just designed for students to go on to do research, they all include some practical software engineering content alongside the theory.

@Adam Sure, and personally I find people from vocational courses have a way too strong focus on what's currently en vogue. I couldn't care less if my new employee has never seen Angular before, I want them to understand the basics. You'll have to learn a new framework/language all the time anyhow, if you understand the basics you can do that in a short time. I want them to understand concurrency, data structures, how computers work and the implications and all the other good stuff.

@Voo Agreed, definitely (and especially in the JS world it feels like we get a new framework to learn every 5 minutes). I think a healthy balance is important here: e.g. exposure to common programming language concepts by actually writing code within the course, learning version control concepts as well as the theoretical stuff: algorithm time complexity and data structures etc. I don't think I'd want to hire someone with no prior practical programming experience regardless of their theoretical understanding.

@Adam Absolutely agreed. Honestly any CS program worth its salt should give their students exposure to many different programming paradigms. OOP, functional, logical (sure you'll never use prolog in practice, but there's valuable things to learn there). I mean in practice you do need to understand programming for those algorithm, compiler construction or machine learning courses anyhow, so I think that's not a big worry. If you can write a compiler in some language you surely learn the basics at least there ;)

@AdamWilliams What would you consider “purely theoretical”? The course I’m teaching currently (with the title “Intro to Algorithms and Models of Computation”) has no programming whatsoever. (Also, “theoretical” is not the opposite of “useful”!)

@JeffE I assume students would do more than just that "course" though, right, in order to graduate and get their degree? NB: I think you can safely substitute "program" for course in my comments, because I'm a Brit. I did more than a few modules in my undergraduate degree course which contained no taught programming whatsoever - algorithm design, neural networks, linear algebra etc! These were included in a degree course alongside programming modules though, so there was still very much a mixture of the two. Indeed, the best practical programming modules built upon the theoretical modules.

Nowadays there is barely any area that is left out when it comes to mathematics. And CS involves a lot of that stuff especially if you're going for a higher degree. The reason is that the higher degree means getting more theoretical. This is due to the simple fact that higher degree (Masters, PhD) are directed towards people, who want to go into research, which requires a solid background in mathematics. Of course the real world is different (as usual) from what some academic people think so there are plenty of CS professionals with a Masters degree that keep away from research.

@Voo That's the reason I chose my degree course, at the University of York.  I came out with experience of 18 different languages across different paradigms.  I think only two modules that I took over four years that were not following on from a previous module shared a language.  The premise being that they teach us computer science and not a programming language.  I liked that premise.

Unfortunately, if you search the job boards at any standard company (bank, insurance provider, etc.) they want someone with a "Comp Sci degree, or equivalent". What they really want is someone with the "equivalent" which is an Information Systems degree. IS teaches you how to code and basic business process. The industry has never picked up on this so kids attempt to get CS degrees, rather than the more digestible IS degrees that are more relevant to typical business. You get a degree in IS to write code. You get a degree in CS to write the compiler that will build that code.

@RLH But then you really don't need a university to teach you programming. You can do that much more efficiently and better on your own with the available resources (as if any university would manage to stay on top of the new JavaScript framework every 6 months). Particularly if you learned the basics that underlie all those "new" things (if you understand monads you already understand all of LINQ, Optionals and in a way async/await). That's why I want someone with a Comp Sci degree.

"In other words, the language of computer science is math, not C++. If you were looking for vocational training in computers then CS Is probably an inappropriate choice." Perfect description of the difference. My job is a software developer, what I am is a scientist. A computer scientist.

@Voo There is a scale of learning in the direction of "pure" CS. Yes, you can learn much of that stuff on your own but a degree should give you entry-level validation. Whether you are a wiz-kid who picked up programming on his own or someone who got their start from within their college education, you need to learn the engineering basics to be an effective engineer. I learned that information in my IS degree, though it didn't go into great depths of those mechanics. I did learn basics of assembler and how the electronics work. It was just a survey, teaching principles and it suited me well.

Well, you were in a computer science department and not in a computer engineering department. It would be a reasonable expectation that you would understand the fundamental mechanics of "computer stuff" and possibly continue your studies in research. I am not a computer scientist so examples may be limited here.

cryptography: Beyond understanding RSA schemes there are many interesting research areas and applications. For example elliptic curve cryptography uses serious level of mathematics or homomorphic encryption uses encryption schemes imitating a mathematical concept of morphism to process encrypted data without decryption (for example ordering numbers)
communications theory: Coding theory is heavily mathematical. It has some subfields that require more than a basic understanding of linear algebra. I have heard that research in error correcting codes is quite non-trivial. Their main property is to detect and correct possible errors in communication. This is, likely, extra helpful for applications where communications are more likely to have errors. Consider space, polar or deep ocean exploration. On the theoretical side of coding theory, famously, someone used algebraic geometry to show a theoretical upper bound for an invariant (don't remember its name) was as best as we could hope. (This would mean there are codes that give this exact value for the invariant as the upper bound predicts)
Image recognition and machine learning also uses serious levels of linear algebra. Serious in the sense that the intuition of 3 dimensional vector spaces and ability to multiply some matrices would not be sufficient as you would be comparing vector spaces of big number dimensions. I am sure a more literate person would be more helpful on this point.
Haskell is a programming language based on a language mathematicians call category theory. I do not know benefits of using this Haskell but some people seem to love it. I would say however that category theory is very nontrivial. I would say an average student after completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics would have a very basic understanding of it. It is highly conceptual and its origins and most of its examples are usually graduate school material. Hence it would be really helpful to have a general mathematics background in order to relate what is going on.

Oh gosh, left a comment to the main question, just to immediately notice that your first sentence is basically my comment, emphasis and all :D

@penelope happens to best of us :)

I don't understand your first sentence. Do you really think "computer engineering" degrees are likely to involve less math? That does not fit my experience nor the common use of the word "engineering".

@CarlLeth Computer Engineering is "engineering" in the 19th century sense of the word, not the 21st.

@alephzero what specifically do you mean by that? (I personally have a grudge against calling what most people do computer engineering, since the repercussions for failure are so much lower than other fields of engineering)

@alephzero: Most Computer Engineering degrees I know of spawned off of Electrical Engineering (with more programming than pure EE, often some elements of Computer Science proper), which is heavily physics based. You may not need number theory, but you need a lot of math to handle the physics aspects of an Electrical or Computer Engineering degree degree. Software Engineering may require less math (and is barely engineering in the normal sense of the word), but computer engineering would not.

Nitpicking, but at least for my university, Computer Engineering is not Software Engineering. Echoing ShadowRanger, CE was much more hardware based

@llama I think the repercussions are field/industry dependent, as with other types of engineering!

@llama me too. I've never understood why some computer programmers like to call themselves engineers. Maybe it's to make themselves feel better about their chosen profession? Or maybe it's to make others think that computer programming is difficult and complicated? I shall continue to stubbornly refer to myself as a computer programmer, and annoy self-proclaimed "software engineers" by calling them programmers as well.

Engineering is the application of scientific principals to practical problems.  You need to be able to understand the science and do the maths in order to apply it.  This is as true for computer science and software engineering as it is for physics and mechanical or civil engineering.  If you're not doing maths and science in your computer work then you're probably a programmer rather than a software engineer.

Echo the others, computer engineering requires lots of mathematics, so the first sentence is odd. I'm an EE and regularly have computer engineers in my various classes. They take less math than an EE, but certainly a fair amount, even comparable to a computer science major. I think, as others mentioned, there is a misunderstanding of the term. Computer engineers are mostly EE's but with more of a focus on digital.

@llama Will you please consider what can happen when one of the physical components of a traffic lights system fails as opposed to what can happen when its software fails? Remember that in 2019 almost everything the "other" engineers build is controlled by software and the repercussions for failure are astronomic. Also, you might enjoy this read

@Douwe hence the "most". Embedded systems, medical and the like are worthy of the title. Writing another app to create a market where one shouldn't exist and you ignore all safety concerns to sucker someone into throwing piles of money at you is not.

@llama It's not that those applications shouldn't be high quality, reliable, safe and with warranties. It's just that they aren't, because we kind of don't know how to do that. But that's the whole software development environment; how would bridges look if they were the result of a sales guy selling something impossible to do, and even the technically possible compromise having tenth of the budget you would need, while ten different people push their own global architectural decisions in the middle of the project, with most people not really knowing they're building a bridge?

@AaronF "Software Engineer" tends to pay better than "lowly programmer."  So in principle, I agree with you... but on my resume, best believe i'm a "Senior Software Engineer"

@EvilDogPie There's very little maths or science in software engineering. I'm fairly sure that term came about because "engineer" sounds more rigorous than "builder".

@AaronF: The truest sense of "engineer" is someone who uses their mind to create or design. A lot of the intro mechanical and computer engineering courses were wasted on me because I'd already had all that in software engineering. Software engineering includes establishing the exact problem, separating problem statements from proposed solutions that may suck, specifying exactly what product you will deliver to the client, preventing requirements creep, etc. It also includes working as a team, communicating with management, learning to accept stupid (err, different) practices on a project, etc.

Given the rule that "anything which calls itself a science probably isn't", the title of the field doesn't promise to solve anything here. Generally I'd say computer science departments support themselves by teaching programmers (basically technologists who operate machinery according to its manual), so they can pursue fun ideas like artificial intelligence and video games using whatever math methods are appropriate for mathematical formulations of their problems of interest. Occasionally they are able to completely annex the math topics by giving them cool new names.

I made this mistake when choosing my major in college. Computer science is not really about computers, in the same way that math classes aren't really about using calculators or pencils and paper.
Modern computers are just a tool used to make computing (the true focus of computer science) easier and faster. This gets confusing because the things we compute would be incredibly time-consuming, or at least incredibly tedious, to do manually, so we almost always fall back on programming computers to do it for us. This means that you probably will do some programming (maybe a lot) for a CS degree, but this programming won't necessarily prepare you to create and deliver high-quality software.
My degree focused far more on studying models of computation and algorithms than on how to produce software. This is still helpful in software development, as knowing efficient algorithms for various problems is good when you're constrained by time or memory capacity. However, it does mean that a CS degree will not necessarily include training for software development, as that is not the primary focus.

There is a famous quote in one of the greatest programming textbooks of all time, that computer science is about computers about the same as astronomy is about telescopes. (Imagine, astronomy was called "telescope science".) The analogy is even more apt than some people realize, because (just like with computers), astronomers aren't even the ones that are researching, designing, engineering, building, and studying telescopes. So, if you are interested in telescopes, astronomy is the wrong field for you to be in, and the same thing applies to computers.

@JörgWMittag: Oldest source I can find is "Computer Science is not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes" - Hal Abelson, 1986.

I really wish we'd make a push to rename the field to "Computing Science" instead.

@orlp It's usually referred to as "information and computing technology" where I'm from :) Not that it really helps, since it's used for both science and engineering anyway :)

My degree (from Stirling University, back in 1992) WAS called "Computing Science"! Which makes total sense. I was/am only average at mathematics, but some parts have been invaluable  in my software development career - e.g. understanding sets helped me immensely in becoming very good with databases.

@orlp I don't think that would help. First, nobody's going to notice the difference between computer science and -ing science; second, it sounds too much like scientific computing; third, it still has the "comput-" part, so people sill misunderstand it in the same way; fourth, the "science" part is mostly wrong.

Here in Germany, the field "Computer Science" is called "Informatik", which, according to the etymology of the term "computer science", is either a contraction of the words "information" and "automatic", or of "information" and "mathematics"...

As others have already pointed out, there are many direct connections between computer science and mathematics, on different levels:

Linear algebra is important for many forms of modern machine learning: Neural networks are essentially just large matrices - or conversely, a machine learning system is just a large pile of linear algebra ;-). Another (maybe obvious) field is that of 3D computer graphics: All the special effects in movies are just a bunch of triangles and the answer to the question of what happens when light hits a surface
Calculus is essential for complexity theory (which analyzes the running time of algorithms), numerical analysis (which is required for estimating the error of approximations), and many other topics
General (or "abstract") algebra is about structures and rules (or operations) within these structures. There is a strong (and in my opinion, severely underrated) connection of this to Object-oriented programming.
Logic is an important basis for what you might call "low-level" programming, even though the connection between knowing that you can safely turn an if (!(a || b)) into an if (!a && !b) and formal propositional logic may not be obvious. Of course, far beyond that, there are even logic-based programming languages like Prolog.
...

There are many more direct connections, meaning that you come in touch with a certain branch of mathematics when you apply computer science in practice.
But there are also indirect connections: Mathematics is a language for good descriptions. Mathematics teaches a form of clarity, rigorousness, and preciseness that is necessary in order to manage the complex IT systems that we are dealing with nowadays. What may be perceived as "nitpicking" elsewhere is crucial in order to make sure that these systems operate in the way that we expect them to operate. When you have ever written something like a software specification, and missed a corner case, then you know: People will find that corner case. And they will hate you for missing it...

However, from a practical point, I totally agree: The things that most people with a degree in computer science nowadays have to do in their jobs are totally unrelated to mathematics (and also totally unrelated to programming, for that matter). And it's somehow a pity to imagine that many students frustratedly drop out of their university courses (which they might have entered with wrong expectations about the subject) due to their bad math grades. These people could otherwise have been great at what they actually had to do in their jobs.

My view here may be a bit narrow, because I only know the situation in Germany - even though I observed the developments in this area for >20 years now. But you referred to the UK, so the following may still be relevant. I read this quite a while ago, and it somehow stuck in my mind. It's a quote from an essay "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides", by Edsger W. Dijkstra (yes, this Dijkstra) :

The first series of machines —that of the singletons— was mainly developed in the USA shortly after the World War II, while a ruined continental Europe had neither the technology, nor the money, to start building computers: the only thing we could do was thinking about them. Therefore it is not surprising that many US Departments of Computer Science are offsprings of Departments of Electrical Engineering, whereas those in Europe started (later) from Departments of Mathematics (of which they are often still a part). This different heritage still colours the departments, and could provide an acceptable explanation that in the USA Computing Science is viewed more operationally than in Europe.

That could explain it, to some extent, at least...

In spanish is 'informática' , as in 'ciencias de la informatica', and just like in german, there is a clear difference too.

There are two aspects of this and one of them is usually forgotten. The usual reason is that some parts of CS are dependent on knowing mathematics and how to use it. The answer of Boaty Mcboatface mentions some of them. But not all of CS is like that and those working, say, in Human Factors or UI development probably use the math they learned much less than those studying algorithms or encryption.
But the other aspect is also important. The study of CS is enhanced from knowing the way in which mathematicians think and work - the mathematical way of thinking - not just from having facts at your fingertips. Mathematicians tend to be analytical and precise, depending on clear statements and logical demonstration. This way of looking at problems and stating solutions is of use to a computer scientist.
But there are a lot of other things that are also important in CS, so a broad education is valued, not just a math background. After all, many of us try to solve problems for people, not just for others in our own field. So, while mathematics is often useful in helping to develop the how of some solution, it is less useful in knowing why some program should or should not be developed.

Good mathematicians are also very creative, though that quality is widely shared with people of other fields. But becoming good in mathematics takes some work. Both depth and breadth are needed.

Computer science is the study of computers and the underlying theory.
Software development is the use of computers to... develop software.
This underlying theory is largely math... so by studying it, you are essentially studying (a small subsection of) math.  Thus, there is a high proportion of math involved.
To your underlying question, however, academia is an often confusing and misunderstood place.
Only recently have people started realizing that a college degree is in many cases unnecessary, and in fact may be detrimental to your career path - in many fields besides just computer science.  (i.e. 4+ years of tangentially related studying vs. 4+ years of job experience)
For software development in particular, computer science is really only a tangentially related field.
If CS 201 was indeed unnecessary for CS 305, it would not be a prerequisite.  If it did not contain useful knowledge, indeed it would likely be quickly cut out of the curriculum, or relegated to an elective.  It is certainly absurd to think that universities would teach useless things for an extended period of time.
Math is very useful in computer science - regularly less so in software development.

Actually, I'd say that math is used constantly in software development; it's just math that's well-developed enough that most developers use it intuitively, rather than having to have a formal understanding of it. Most programs include at least one function, but a "function," is actually, like zero or negative numbers, a fairly sophisticated mathematical idea, not something that people have always known and understood.

A "function" in the mathematical sense, and a "function" in the programming sense are only distantly related.  Learning about mathematical functions really doesn't help with programming functions.

@MartinBonner It's not that distant. Make the function immutable (and if you're feeling adventurous, take one argument) and you're golden. For bonus points, add proper lambda calculus. The main difference is that most programmers don't really do anything with functions beyond invoking them :)

@Luaan Well yes, but most computer functions are not immutable, and have side effects.

@MartinBonner Yes, but many software engineers will also tell you it's a really bad idea :P It's one of those things that makes software development far less reliable and far more complex than it has any need to be, for essentially no benefit - it's a massive source of accidental complexity.

@Martin Yes, but what is the relationship between the two? And how can we change program functions to be closer to mathematical functions? That's math. Why would we make such a change? Because we can then use more of our mathematical tools to help show (even sometimes prove) that the function does what we hope it does. And that addresses a core part of programming: how do we ensure our programs are doing what we hope they do, i.e., are correct? This is all part of a point that Dijkstra was making (not so very successfully) forty years ago.

@CurtJ.Sampson The answers to your questions are, respectively, "Programmers don't care", "Programmers don't care" and "We wouldn't, because programmers don't care" and "testing".

@David You're correct that those are the common answers. I hope you're not saying that those are good answers! As for the last, Dijkstra yet again: "The first moral of the story is that program testing can be used very effectively to show the presence of bugs but never to show their absence." (We're now only a couple of years from the 50th anniversary of EWD303, yet still refusing to face the same problems. Sigh.)

It is not a new thing to be skeptical of the value of a degree in computer science. It has become particularly obvious every time technology goes through rapid change and the CS degree content becomes outdated. Other professions like engineering are a lot more stable. And there the classes which teach the needed skills require years of fundamental prerequisites (like years of math going from basic to advanced), whereas you can take a programming course as a freshman without any prerequisites.

Because computing science (see below), and even computer
programming, is applied mathematics.
Ed Dubinsky, a mathematics educator who was once a professional
programmer himself, has said:

A person's mathematical knowledge is her or his tendency to respond
  to certain kinds of perceived problem situations by constructing,
  reconstructing and organizing mental processes and objects to use in
  dealing with the situations.

At a slightly less general level, consider what mathematics is. You choose or
create a language in which you can express certain ideas and then do
symbolic manipulation according to a set of rules you've also chosen
or created to come up with to create more valid statements in that
language according to those rules. If you're not careful to do this
correctly, you may come out with invalid statements. The results you
come up with may have some sort of application in the "real world"
(e.g., I can use the language and rules of "integers" to help keep
track of what people owe me and I owe them) or may be just work to
help you better understand how you can use the language and rules and
how they can be helpful to you in further use of them.
In many parts of mathematics we use particular symbols called
"numbers" and have a large library of oft-shared rules and languages
related to this, but there are other areas of mathematics that don't
use numbers at all (e.g., category theory), or, though they can be
applied to numbers, are not really about numbers per se (group
theory, algebraic structures, many more).
Even before you get into the study or use of particular algorithms and
the like, writing a computer program is basically what I described
above. Many of the "simplest" concepts in computer programming that we
use every day, such as the idea of a function, are purely mathematical
concepts.
Now as you've seen, it's perfectly possible to attack real-world
problems with these mathematical tools in a non-rigorous way and get
useful results. Typically the results will not be truly correct (i.e.,
your programs will have bugs), but they will be "correct enough" to do
the job. (For a well written program in industry, you may never even
encounter the situations that would demonstrate that it's incorrect.)
That's what the discipline of engineering is: getting results that
work well enough in the real world at acceptable cost.
But even when you're doing engineering, much of what you do works well
only because someone has gone and done enough mathematical heavy
lifting to give you concepts and tools that you can use to do this.
You may not have a really good understanding of what a function or a
relation is, but your programming language or database system works
because somebody did figure those out.
And the people who did that work are the computing scientists.
All this has been known and seriously contemplated for a long time. I
think it's particularly well demonstrated by a comment in Peter
Landin's classic 1966 paper ["The Next 700 Programming
Languages"][landin66]:

The most important contribution of LISP was not in list processing
  or storage allocation or notation, but in the logical properties
  lying behind the notation. here ISWIM makes little improvement
  because, except for a few minor details, LISP left none to make.
  There are two equivalant ways of stating these properties.
(a) LISP simplified the equivalence relations that determine the
  extent to which pieces of a program can be interchanged without
  affecting the outcome.
(b) LISP brought the class of entities that are denoted by
  expressions a programmer can write nearer to those that arise in
  models of physical systems and in mathematical and logical systems.

If you understand this (which probably requires some at least
intuitive understanding of the of the lambda calculus or similar), you
probably realize that a lot of the problems we deal with today are
still the same basically mathematical problems that were being
investigated back in the '60s when we were first seriously
investigating what a "programming language" really is and means.
On Working Programs
One can also look at this from the more narrow viewpoint of, "I just
want to write a program and make sure it works." Even here this
becomes math if you take as a constraint "I really do want to, as best
I can, make sure it works." Dijkstra's EWD303, "On the Reliability
of Programs," makes this argument in detail. His summary:

Reliability concerns force us to restrict ourselves to
  intellectually manageable programs. This faces us with the questions
  "But how do we manage complex structure intellectually? What mental
  aids do we have, what patterns of thought are efficient? What are
  the intrinsic limitations of the human mind that we had better
  respect?" Without knowledge and experience, such questions would be
  very hard to answer, but luckily enough, our culture harbours with a
  tradition of centuries an intellectual discipline whose main purpose
  it is to apply efficient structuring to otherwise intellectually
  unmanageable complexity. This discipline is called "Mathematics". If
  we take the existence of the impressive body of Mathematics as the
  experimental evidence for the opinion that for the human mind the
  mathematical method is, indeed, the most effective way to come to
  grips with complexity, we have no choice any longer: we should
  reshape our field of programming in such a way that their methods of
  understanding become equally applicable, for there are no other
  means.

On "Computing Science" versus "Computer Science"
Some amongst us, including the University of Alberta, find the
more common name of the discipline slightly misleading and instead
prefer to call it Computing Science. As Keith Smillie said in
"Computing Science at the University of Alberta, 1957 -
1993":

The choice of the name "computing science" instead of the more
  common "computer science" was deliberate in order to indicate that
  computing rather than computers was to be the foundation of the
  discipline.

Thinking about what we are wrangling with as "computing" rather than
"computers" way may help you remember that all the software running
the world today is much more dependent on the mathematical tools we
use to be able to effectively and accurately model our problems and
the world than on the hardware on which it runs.

And to add to the terminology fun, we have the professional society for researchers and practitioners that calls itself the Association for Computing Machinery. (Despite its title, I believe most of its members are actually human beings.)

@jeffB The main difference between computing machines and humans is that humans are more complex and therefore more easily distracted.

Because it's Computer SCIENCE, and pretty much all science depends on math.  Sure, there are things you can do with computers that don't involve much math (if any), like (AFAIK) implementing something like StackExchange.  And you're quite correct that a degree in Information Technology or something similar would probably qualify you for a lot of jobs, without the need to learn anything beyond basic arithmetic.
OTOH, there are a lot of jobs that do involve applying (what might from your POV be) fairly complicated math.  For instance, what I'm doing these days involves applying numerical solutions to a particular class of partial differential equations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eikonal_equation ).  Probably 90% of my career has involved similar levels of math.  So it's all in what you want to do.

Here in Poland there is a lot of math specialist, but very little IT specialists available at universities (due to horrid salary difference I guess).
So you end up having way too many mathematicians who need something to do - and bam, you just over-burden the IT studies with math, raw, unprocessed math, without showing you connections and uses in computer sciences.
And after 5 years of university you get students who had 5 years of analysis, 2 semesters of geometry, another semesters of statistics and can barely program in c++, Ada and some java or python if they were lucky.

I don't see the problem really. The skillsets of computer scientist and C++ programmers overlap to a degree, but they're far from identical. It appears that Poland is lacking vocational training in IT. You don't exactly need a PhD in CompSci to use C++.

@MSalters More importantly, a PhD in CompSci probably doesn't help you use C++ all that much (beyond perhaps getting the sensible idea of running away from C++, fast :D ). You get plenty of benefits from advanced courses in algorithmisation and all sorts of math, but they apply to all programming languages equally - they happen at a different level of abstraction.

I think the key thing that is missing here is the broader point. In the majority of cases, University degrees do not provide training, they provide education. Thus a university degree teaches, in general, not how to do a particular job, but how to think, analyse and assess knowledge.
The vast majority of all students who study for a degree will not go on to a job that directly uses the knowledge taught in a degree. Students with one of our degrees might be more employable as a side benefit, but it is not the primary goal of most degrees. (there are exceptions to this like medicine or law).

All of these answers fail to describe something essential:
Most jobs with writing code are doing the equivalent of fabrication, not engineering, and certainly not science.
If this doesn’t make immediate sense, it may help to understand the equivalent when working with classical materials.  A scientists would study metallurgy and how to make new alloys. In engineering, one would evaluate how large of a girder can be made from the material, or the limits of wear and tear in scenarios. Fabricators would receive the material in the form of pipes, which they assemble to fit the means of things like a kitchen, a bathroom, or maybe a whole house.
A technician, like someone that works HVAC or automotive, would take pre-constructed subsystems and fit them together with a bit of adjustment using fabrication.
Most careers that involve code are doing fabrication, or technician work.  Increasingly, software jobs are technician roles. The jobs require continual awareness of new libraries and frameworks, and how to ensure their ease of assembly and configuration.
But that’s not what computer science schools are out there to teach. You don’t go to oxford, or any other Ivy League university to learn how to be a fabricator.  If you went to a school like that, and learned you don’t have the appetite or ability for science..... that’s the dice.

The same thing goes for Fine Arts schools with concept studio core curricula.

It doesn’t mean that programs teaching legitimate science should do less of that.

Computer science involves efficient problem-solving process, which can be attained through applied mathematics courses. At least, that's what employers and recruiters look for. Most of the time, the algorithm frameworks are based on math logic. If you don't plan to use the CS degree as a designer, an engineer, or other application-approach, you don't need to employ as much math.