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Are academic groups allowed to use grant funds to hedge against exchange rate changes?
If an academic group receives a multi-year grant denominated in a currency different from that that they pay salaries, can they use some of the grant to hedge against changes in the relative value of the two currencies?
Some years ago I was a member of a group in the UK that received a substantial five year grant from the US.  Between the awarding of the grant and the time we started employing staff the pound dropped against the dollar, meaning we could have employed more staff than we originally estimated.  However, because of the risk that the exchange rate reversed over the time of the grant the "bean counters" did not let us take this option.  In the end the pound remained somewhat low and we had excess money in the grant in the final year.  The project could have been much more productive if that money had been spent on more staff in the beginning.
If this was a private company they would have the option of hedging the risk, ie. taking some position on the currency markets such that whatever the exchange rate does the money available would be roughly similar.  Is an academic group allowed to take such a futures position in the forex markets?
While I am not in this situation at the moment, considering the substantial drop in the value of the pound that has occurred since the July NIH funding round I suspect many people are, and the magnitude of the change is much greater than has occurred in recent years.

Ask your funding agency.

I have never heard of a funding agency which would allow 'bets' on the currency markets (or stocks, bonds, etc). Not to mention it would need to be the organisation holding the funds to make these transactions. So either the funding body or University would need to have an account with access to the money markets and be willing to manage these investments (with the associated administrative/tax implications).

Profit and non-profit endeavors have different goals, money management and corresponding regulations. It is not only about “i wish i can do this or that”.

I am sure you would have complained against public "bean counters" being unproductive if the project would have incurred a loss because of GBP getting stronger against the USD.
Reg "If this was a private company": you are welcome to focus your question to the numerous american universities that are private bodies.

Think of the headlines if your hedge loses.  "Rogue academic squanders taxpayer funds speculating in currency markets."  In such a case, the grant agency would want to be able to say to the public "that was totally unauthorized and we are suing them for the losses, oh and by the way banning their institution from receiving grants for ten years".  So no, I don't think they'll allow it.

@NateEldredge You do get that in the proposed if case your hedge loses your salary/grant award "wins", and the project is in the same situation as if the hedge had "won", or if it was a wash.

Most comments and the first answer miss the point that the proposed hedging is not a plan to invest and hope for an increase in funds but to eliminate the risk of changes in the currency exchange rate (up or down!) This is a common thing when one has costs in currency X but gets paid in currency Y. https://www.rbcgam.com/en/ca/learn-plan/investment-strategies/what-is-currency-hedging/detail

If I had to guess, I'd be pretty sure that this won't be possible/allowed. But any answer should address the actual plan and not argue against speculating with grants to turn them into bigger grants. The specific issue are 1) Such a hedge will cost money (just like buying insurance). Where will the money come from? 2) Logistical/legal obstacles to actually implement the hedge.

@user2705196 Your analogy answers your own question. Insurance is certainly a legit expense and may even be required by law (i.e. employee and public liability). The money comes from the indirect cost slice of the grant, just like say, toilet paper for the bathrooms.

@user2705196 sure, but this does not match with OP sentence "The project could have been much more productive if that money had been spent on more staff in the beginning.". That's not "hedging", that is "the free lunch exists only when it is to my advantage" .

@EarlGrey If the currency have changed enough between award and hiring for you to afford say 6 more FTE/years if the rate stayed low, then one could hedge the risk and employ 1 FTE for 5 years without a risk of running out of money.  The way it happened to me was that there was money left over in the final year when employing 6 FTE's for one year was neither possible or useful.  It is exactly as user2705196 states.

@User65535  "say 6 more FTE/years". Let's not speak about spherical staff or other unrealistic assumption, please. A posteriori is easy to say "if the rate stayed low". How likely was the rate to stay low? how do you weight the risk? there is no way that you can conflate "hedging currency risk" directly with "having more money to hire staff". I am sure if those were OP's money on which their living depends, OP would not come out with such an idea.

@EarlGrey This is exactly what I would do with my own money, and it is what many rich people and businesses do with their money.  It is common practice to manage the risk of forex changes.  The likelihood of the rate staying look is decided by the financial markets, the bet is structured such that the money available is the same whatever the exchange rate does.

I think a lot of the people responding here are getting hung up on your use of the word "bet". A hedge is a financial transaction made to reduce your exposure to some risk rather than to increase it; it is not a bet, nor is it generally imprudent in the way that betting, gambling or speculating is generally considered to be. You might get better responses if you remove the word "bet" from your question.

In this scenario you have enough money to employ more people, and you risk losing that money, so insuring it is perfectly responsible (though that doesn't mean the funding body would necessarily allow it). From another perspective, the reason you have more money than you expected to have is because you were exposed to exchange rate risk, which could have gone in the other direction and crippled the project, so one might say the project's finances were being mismanaged by not hedging the exchange rate risk sooner.

@User65535 please stop using the word bet if you are talking about financial risks. It shows a deeply wrong attitude. On top of that, I do not care about what rich people are doing, nor about being rich, because here we are not discussing how to preserve wealth, but fundings to run projects, which is more similar to investing on the first of the month the money you need to pay rent&food on the last day of the month, not your savings.

@EarlGrey That is a perfect analogy.  If the exchange rate was likely to change significantly between one getting paid in a currency and paying your rent in another currency then taking a futures position in the forex markets (more characters than bet ;) ) to hedge the risk would be a rational decision.

@User65535 " If the exchange rate was likely to change significantly" All good, thanks for the discussion.

Honestly this is a pretty good idea whenever research groups deal with grants not of their native country. De-risking the grant money is a very different intention than merely speculation.

As usual, it is impossible to answer questions of the form of "is XYZ allowed with grants?" with certainty - the answer to any question like this will always be "that depends on the rules of the organization providing the grant as well as on the rules of the organization receiving / managing the grant".
That said, for this specific question I feel fairly confident to say that universities will generally not allow you to speculate with grant money, or invest them in the financial market in some other manner. Grants are given for specific purposes (this makes them different from, say, donations) - sometimes these purposes may be abstractly formulated, but never sufficiently abstractly that "invest it in some other company" would be covered. At the end of the day, if an organization gives you money to (for example) hire grad students you actually need to hire grad students - not invest the money, hope for higher returns, and then hire even more grad students (or alternatively hire less or no grad students if the investment goes bad).

However, because of the risk that the exchange rate reversed over the time of the grant the "bean counters" did not let us take this option. In the end the pound remained somewhat low and we had excess money in the grant in the final year.

Realistically, stories like this are the exact reason why grants (even personal grants) are usually submitted to universities to manage and not directly to researchers - the "bean counters" as you call them are sufficiently experienced (and sufficiently disinterested in the outcome of any specific project) to make objective financial decisions that do not get the project, university, or PI into troubles, whereas we scientists may sometimes get a little carried away with positive possibilities without considering the risks.

Hedging is the opposite of a speculative "bet"; see user2705196's comment under the question.  My understanding is that with hedging to cover the risk of the exchange returning to the old value, in the worst case they could still spend more GBP than if they'd effectively converted all the grant money at the start (at the worse exchange rate).  If the exchange rate goes back up, their hedge "wins" and provides the extra GBP.  If not, then it loses but the favourable exchange rate means they still have enough GBP to cover it + salaries.

-1 The question is effectively just asking whether the researchers have to convert USD to GBP immediately, or whether they can wait until they need the money.

@user253751 Usually you don't "have" that money beforehand, though. You get it in tranches, either at the start or the end of a year. So the university would need to buy the respective amount of USD at the beginning of the grant period. I'm not sure why that wouldn't be, or at the very least be perceived as, a forex speculation. That you do  it to hedge some other risks will not make a real difference, in my opinion.

Hedging is equivalent to being concerned your lab may burn down and buying insurance against that event. Would it be inappropriate to buy insurance with grant money?

@RichardTingle Yes, it would, because the institution already handles such insurance arrangements. For all we (and the OP) know, they likewise have some sort risk mitigation plans for exchange rate fluctuations.  If they do, then the last thing they want is for individual PIs to be buying their own, likely redundant, insurance, especially if those PIs don't have any particular expertise in such things.

Though I'm in the US and not the UK, my impression that in both places academic groups do not handle money, their institutions do.
US government grants, in particular, are always to the institution. The PI and other staff don't have any authority to spend the money directly, it's up to the institution to manage the money. In your case, the institution decided to be conservative and did not let the group spend more pounds early in the grant than were originally budgeted. An alternative might be to make exchanged funds available on an annual basis (or whatever schedule the funds are actually received on). I could see that as a potential challenge if you work in a place where the employer has restrictions on when they can release paid staff: if you can't drop an employee tomorrow that you're paying today, you have to be sure you'll have the money to pay them tomorrow, too.
Large universities have their own financial clout and though there may be some restrictions on those operating as public entities (which would vary by jurisdiction), academic institutions manage their money much like a company does, through investments and relevant hedges in their endowments, retirement funds, etc.

Professional "bean counter" aka "research administrator" here with 12 years' experience at top US research universities, having managed funds at more than 20 US Federal agencies and dozens of industry sponsors and foundations.
Your question sounds inflammatory, but it actually is a good question on how income is allowed to be handled. There are regulations in the US about how income is allowed to be distributed (i.e., can the institution get it up front and also keep it). I have seen some private agencies allow us to keep the interest on our income, and at my institution it goes back to the PI when the grant ends. I know of one foundation that required us to refund the interest to them and any interest we received on unused funds! (Why did we accept such a stupid grant??)
The way the feds get around this entire question is by not giving the money upfront. Because Uniform Guidance pushes the cost reimbursable model, there is no interest to worry about.  There are however federal accounts that also give fixed price, often via SBIR/STTR mechanisms.
The way many academics handle uncertainty in funding is to run a deficit upfront, but this carries certain risks. Let's say you have a startup of $1M.  You can overspend year 1 funding on many (most?) federal grants knowing the deficit carries forward nearly always. However, let's say your contract is with IARPA and they aren't interested in Phase 2 funding. They cancel the project and you are out of pocket on your over-expenditure. Not a lot of PIs can gamble on such levels, but it happens at top institutions from time to time.
If you need to start spending before a contract is in place, many institutions call this an "advance account". Depending on funding this may or may not be controversial. I work with CS and Engineering right now and with MURI funding I always run a deficit to ensure we get our next increment and expense for the costs we have today. I usually am more worried about underspend than overspend. This is frequently because PIs don't ramp up their spend right away, we end up behind enough to lose the next increment. Most agencies want less than 25% remaining to award more. I can implement this strategy because I'm at a top school. Other places can't do this and uncertainty is a real problem, sometimes with no solutions.
My request to all PIs with US federal funding is to read all terms and conditions (NIH has the Grants Policy Statement; NSF has the PAPPG) including the larger federal Uniform Guidance for grants and FAR for contracts. If researchers took an interest in the rules, my job would be much easier. A lot of these questions are answered therein. Look into "carry forward" or "carryover" rules. Running a deficit is an actual strategy if your institution allows it (see above-mentioned risk).

Explicitly hedging as in financial institutions? No. I would be surprised if any grant funder or fundee would allow that.
Are potential currency fluctuations taken into account when writing and executing on grants? At least sometimes, if they are done well and involve multiple currencies.
This could include:

moving work between partners

e.g. having a UK group do an expensive experiment and the US lab doing a cheaper one

bringing expenses forward or back in time

e.g. buying equipment now even if it won't be used immediately

changing currencies of purchased goods and/or services

e.g. paying a subcontractor in a third country to build a website with dollars instead of pounds
e.g. moving a conference/meeting venue to a country with a favourable currency

That's not "hedging" in the forex sense, but it is building options into the structure of the project to react to future currency movements.
Even without currency fluctuations, research is by nature uncertain; the 1000 Genomes project ended up with about 2,500 genomes for example, partly because the technology got cheaper to run faster than expected over the course of the project (and currency was probably a part of that).

Any organization that accepts a grant receives a check or transfer from the funding organization.  The organization has rules on how that money is to be spent.  Indeed, grants are considered projects.
The institution is effectively saying "in exchange for this much money, our investigator will do the research described in the grant."  Either periodically, or at the end of the contract, the funding institution checks up on things to make sure things are going as planned.  If the institution has real problems with interim reports, the next check may never come.
Obviously, research being research, not all of it works out, and institutes are fine with this.  Institutes will not be fine with a report that says "yeah, I know you gave us $250,000 USD, but we tried to leverage that into $350,000 USD by speculation, and it failed, so we were only able to spend the $125,000 that we were able to recover". The institute does not expect you to spend money they didn't give you (unless part of the contract was matching funds, or some such), but they expect you to make reasonable efforts to spend the money they do give you the way you said you would.
Taking the money given to the Uni and putting it in some account for speculative pursuits is most likely not allowed.  In fact, I suspect criminal charges could be the result.
Let's take this out another step.  Say you have $250K in an account for a grant.  You think "Wow, I can speculate with that money, make a ton, and then return the $250K!!"  I suggest this isn't all that much different to a prosecuting attorney from your original scenario.
UPDATE:
FWIW, such costs are unallowable for NIH research grants:
From https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps/html5/section_7/7.9_allowability_of_costs_activities.htm

Contingency Provisions
Unallowable. Payments made by the NIH awarding
IC to the non-Federal entity's "contingency reserve" or any similar
payment made for events the occurrence of which cannot be foretold
with certainty as to the time or intensity, or with an assurance of
their happening, are unallowable under non-construction grants.
Contingency funds do not include pension funds, self-insurance funds,
and normal accruals (also see Reserve Funds in this exhibit). (See
also Construction Grants-Allowable and Unallowable Costs and
Activities in IIB concerning contingency funds under construction
grants).

Indemnification, though, is permitted under some circumstances, which I'm not sure would be met here.

Hedging is the opposite of a speculative "bet"; see user2705196's comment under the question.  My understanding is that with hedging to cover the risk of the exchange returning to the old value, in the worst case they could still spend more GBP than if they'd effectively converted all the grant money at the start (at the worse exchange rate).  If the exchange rate goes back up, their hedge "wins" and provides the extra GBP.  If not, then it loses but the favourable exchange rate means they still have enough GBP to cover it + salaries.

@PeterCordes -- it still "some bet on the currency markets", in the asker's own language, and can certainly lose value when you bet the wrong way.  Change the example I used of $250K becoming $125K to $250K becoming $225K, and the story is largely unchanged.  "Hedging" in this case still means gambling with other people's money.  If a university feels like they can find a way to make that work for them, God bless 'em.  If I found out about a faculty member to do this on their own, I'd be on the phone to the relevant chairs within moments.  People get fired over stuff like that.

Sure, that comment is a reasonable answer.  It's a lot less obvious than the way your actual answer is written.  i.e. that hedging isn't a perfect guarantee, and in the worst case you can still lose some.  That sounds like the key point, instead of talking about wild speculation or leveraging hoping for a big gain.  Also, it's ongoing funding, not a lump sum of $250K already sitting in an account; the whole point is that the future years of funding are already in a different currency from the salaries, and the exchange rate could fluctuate whether you hedge or not.

What if it was "Yeah, I know you gave us £200,000 worth of USD, but we didn't exchange it straight away and it was only £100,000 by the time we exchanged it"?

The amount of a typical NIH RO1 is about a quarter mill a year, when you count indirects, and every year, a quarter mill indeed gets put into an account, so that number was carefully chosen, and not in the least hyperbolic.  Further under audit, it won't make any difference which type of approach the investment attempt uses.  The unauthorized use of the funds can still cause a world of hurt for the people that made it happen.

Money is fungible. If my grant is $250k, it gets stuck in a big university-wide pot. The gains from that pot become unrestricted funds. On the other hand, losses from that pot can be made up with unrestricted funds (endowments, general donations). Or perhaps it gets covered by other people's money which hasn't been spent yet, much like a bank. As long as, in the end, $250k was spent on allowable expenses, the government can't tell the difference and is satisfied.

@user71659. That's not universally true.  My school holds the funds quite separate, and there are expense categories the grant accounts cannot be used to pay.  I think many US schools use such practices.  Also, money earned by the endowment may or may not be unrestricted.

@ScottSeidman You're getting two things confused: while schools may have "account" codes, and allowable expenses to charge to each code, there is absolutely no requirement not to commingle unspent funds. Obviously, your institution is holding the cash at some bank or in investments, and that's the "pot". This is like a bank, you have an account in your view, but all your money is commingled with other customers' at the bank's account at the Federal Reserve, and a large fraction of the money doesn't even exist as cash.

@ScottSeidman: Currency hedging is not an "investment attempt". Typically one purchases a contract that basically says "Bank X agrees to change up to N dollars into pounds at rate R% at any time over the next Y years". While one should definitely clear the purchase of such a contract with both the institution and the funder before entering into it, it is in many cases prudent step, in much the same way as having insurance, and hence the institution and funder may consider it a good idea.

@psmears: But like insurance premiums, there is a cost to purchase such an option contract.  And "purchasing option contracts" is likely not one of the permitted use of the funds, so some other funds would have to be allocated from some discretionary/flexible pool.

@BenVoigt: Right, that's why I said you'd have to clear it with the funder & institution. (And if the funder's not happy but the institution is, then using other funds available to the institution would indeed be a solution.)

@BenVoigt "Forex trading" is also probably not one of the permitted uses of grant money, and yet you're allowed to exchange it for your own currency...


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Is it possible to accept a PhD position I previously turned down?
I rejected a PhD position five months ago with a gentle email due to unbearable family conditions at that time, that I explained to my supervisors and they understood (and maybe were bothered).
However, the position is still available, but I am a little bit puzzled if I could write to them and express interest in taking the position?
The truth is that I do not know how my profs who recommended me felt when they heard about my rejection. What are your thoughts?

Hi, welcome to Ac.SE! I cleaned up the English in your question, please make sure I haven't done anything wrong. In what country is this position?

Related and possible duplicates: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/131397/latest-time-to-reverse-a-declined-phd-offer https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/130802/asking-for-reversing-my-decision-after-declining-a-phd-offer https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67162/i-regret-declining-a-really-good-phd-offer-can-i-ask-if-i-can-accept-the-offer https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/134020/i-regret-declining-a-phd-offer-and-accepting-another-phd-offer-what-should-i-do

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

You can only ask them - you cannot get the position if you don't ask.
If they understood your situation back then, they will understand that things have changed over time and that you are available now. They might be glad to hear from you, and I would think your chances are good, since they must have thought you were capable back then, and they haven't found another candidate yet (unless they do, and haven't announced it yet, or only wait for administration to finish their stuff).

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When applying to a university do you apply to just the college or only the specific program/major you are interested in
For example: Do you apply to NYU or only Stern specifically (if you're doing business). Stern obviously has a lower acceptance rate than NYU itself.
Same for Wharton and UPenn.

check the university's admissions website

Are the people voting to close for out-of-scope assuming undergrad admissions despite the tag?

@Anyon - well, this varies from situation to situation, so depends on individual factors.

@JonCuster which is why I (and probably yourself) voted to close for depending on individual factors, not for being out of scope.

Every university in US sets its own policies with some exceptions for state systems. The early part of the admissions process is primarily administrative, collecting documents, and such. So, it depends on how they want to organize it. I'll let you explore it for specific examples as you can do it as easily as I.
Ultimately, though, the decisions are made at the department level, probably even below the "school" (i.e. Stern) level. The decisions are made somewhat based on capacity, faculty availability, funding, and such.
But, since most places now use web systems for applications, starting at the posted address will get you to the right place. For a university divided into "schools", as is NYU, you might look first for the web page of that school (Stern) and see what it says about admissions. If you don't find anything, look to the university web site. But any link you find should take you to the right place for your needs.

Decisions are made at the department level for graduate admissions, but not for undergraduate admissions.  It's not clear to me what the question is about.

@AlexanderWoo, I depend on the tag [tag:graduate-admissions]. Yes, undergrad is different.

@AlexanderWoo - although even undergraduate admissions can be determined at a lower level. Where I did my undergrad, one had to supply additional materials to apply to the engineering school.

what about for undergraduate admission? How different is the process?

It might be the university level or (a bit less likely) the school level. But the online system will take you to the right place. Departments will give a general admissions system their needs and constraints and it will then be handled outside the department except, perhaps, in extreme edge cases (say, a 12 year old genius). But, again, every U is different in US. The system is also probably more based on numbers (GPA, ...) than the grad system.

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how to insert a GitHub linked data for my experimental results in a research paper?
I have wondered about the policy of insert a GitHub link in my technical note to make the all benchmarks results available. Is there any license required ?  or a specific format?
example:
https://rana-elkhouly.github.io/poblemname/
Field: Operations Research/Industrial Engineering

This is probably going to be field dependent, can you name a field?

A github.io link, like in your example, is simply a web page. Why do you need to treat it differently from any other web page? Or did you mean a GitHub repository link?

A link ending with github.io is a GitHub Pages link, and is their static website hosting service. It simply allows hosting any web pages you want. A GitHub repository, on the other hand, is code that is hosted (e.g. by you) on github.com.


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Is it mandatory to give four references in post-doctoral positions?
I have just started applying for a few postdoctoral positions in mathematics. Sometimes through a particular university portal and sometimes through the job portal mathjobs.
But the problem is that sometimes it is asking for four references, and the referees will receive email links in order to upload their letters. I have managed to get consent from four professors. But if I apply for 20 positions, suppose, then they will need to upload their letters 20 times, which seems very disturbing to those busy professors. This is why I am planning to give 2-3 references alternatively so that their task gets reduced. So:
Is it okay to give three references instead of four? I guess it should be optional
How would postdoctoral candidates manage such situations?

For the positions through mathjobs: ask the referees to upload a “generic” letter, then select that on each job you are applying for. So each letter writer receives just one link total. For mathematics postdoc applications your letter writers will almost certainly not personalise their letter for each position.

Interfolio also has an option to ask for a generic letter.

@AruRay, thanks for the information.

I would guess that you reduce your chances slightly if you do this. Some, not all, might wonder why you didn't submit the "expected" number. It might even be an unconscious bias.
Let your letter writers know how many places you will be applying to so they have a "heads-up" on the situation. They can manage, possibly, in some cases, with staff help.
If you are applying for a lot of positions, I recommend that you don't use "boilerplate" applications, but tailor them to the institution. More work for you, but, again, you want to maximize the chances for consideration.

Most of the US math postdoc positions I saw during my application season in 2019 request some variant of 3, maybe with some leeway up to 4 for a teaching letter. My point is just that 4 research letters seems like a rare request that doesn't so much matter at this level.

@leonos In mathematics it isn't expected that letter writers adjust their letter at all. I have been involved in multiple hires, and seen well over a thousand rec letters, and I believe only one of them was tailored.

@leonos The latter. For e.g. an NSF postdoctoral fellowship or for a recommendation for a nonacademic job, letters should probably be tailored at least somewhat. But for academic jobs this is not expected, even superficially.

I've even been on TT hiring committees where we still consider a good applicant missing a letter. Though we just send out a request for it. Anyone else have that experience?

Don't do this. There is no significant difference between having to upload a letter 20 times and having to upload a letter 15 times.
You would in fact be doing your references a disservice: they spent their time writing what they hoped would be an effective letter, and your proposal is to go and make their effort possibly go to waste by needlessly shooting yourself in the foot like this. If I spend my time writing a letter for you, the more mileage you can get out of it the better (even if it involves spending a couple of extra minutes on my part uploading it).
If the position asks for X letters, just upload X letters and don't overthink it.

Seriously, yes.  Particularly at the post-doctoral level people writing reference letters are generally positively invested in the success of the former students they are writing for.

How would postdoctoral candidates manage such situations?

What I have seen, in mathematics specifically, is candidates using Interfolio as a dossier service to manage their letters. As a writer, I then only have to upload to Interfolio, and then the candidate can have it sent wherever they wish.

Some universities use interfolio but many use other systems, like UC recruit, etc.

@MoisheKohan I haven't used Interfolio as a candidate, so I don't know precisely how it works on their end, but my understanding is that it can be configured so that Interfolio sends the letters to UC Recruit and so on.

Interesting: I also used interfolio only as a letter-writer and I did not know they work with other systems. I will check this out.

@academic, if I understood well, interfolio recommendation letter means a pre-prepared generic letter by a referee which he/she will upload to the system generated link everytime. Is it? If yes, i already gave such ideas to the referees.

@learner It does mean a pre-prepared generic letter, but the writer does not need to upload it every time. I'm afraid I don't know the technical details, but as the applicant you do something on your end, ask the writers to upload to Interfolio once, and then you are able to do all the tedious scut work and not ask your referees to do it.

@academic, I get it. You are right. I just saw that one of my referees has uploaded a generic letter for one position, and it is automatically switched to other applications as well. It is solved now.

Does interfolio work with mathjobs?  I think in math, most positions in the US still use mathjobs.

@Kimball No, so when I say "upload once" I really mean "upload twice". ;) Although it seems that, in math, an increasing number of universities don't use mathjobs. I assume this is invariably at the insistence of administrators, over the objections of math departments.

@Kimball Well, contrary to what I just said, I think Interfolio will work with mathjobs, but my advice to OP would be to ask letter writers to submit to both, as that's what candidates seem to do in practice.

I would advise you to reach out directly to the head of the group. Write a short but informative email with your view on the subject, if the position comes from the grant, maybe a sentence or two why your skills/PhD fits the grant subject etc.
It is always better to "put your foot in" instead of being 76th person that sent a generic request.
Making a connection might also help you explain why you are not able to provide necessary documents/references (without the bias that other answer wrote about).
If you have published in similar topic, they could have cited you and that would open another avenue. I'm on my second postdoc and in both times they were familiar with my work already so this improved my chances significantly.

Thank you for sharing the information. Can you please share your experience? I mean, how many positions did you apply for before getting an offer?

I've sent 4 applications for my first postdoc and about 20 for my second (because I wanted to stay in the country where I was so I applied to groups that weren't a very high match). Sending references was usually the last step and more of a formality, when it was more or less decided that I'll go to this or that place.

thank you for sharing your experience. It gives me some motivation


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What are the best practices for writing a letter of recommendation for an absolutely excellent student?
I’m writing my first recommendation letter for a student (for grad school) who is excellent. I’d like to, thus, write a very good recommendation letter. Are there informal guidelines for writing recommendation letters so that my letter does not come off as insincere and reflects the student’s quality?

What country are you in and where are they applying?

"This student is so good that I asked a question on academia.stackexchange.com to learn more about how to write the strongest possible letter for this student."

Obligatory: https://www.vox.com/2015/6/6/8738229/john-nash-recommendation-letter

@user220704 That letter is also mentioned in one of the answers; just to repeat my comment on that answer, while this letter is a classic and a great story, on the off chance someone reading is reading this thread very literally, don't actually write a letter like the John Nash one for someone if you want them to succeed. That only works if you are extremely well-respected in the field and you never call anyone a genius, and might not even work in the modern world with the amount of competition for jobs and the needing to be able to justify hiring decisions objectively.

@AzorAhai-him- : USA and MIT/Stanford

Since you've never seen such letters, you don't know what they usually contain. Ask one of your senior colleagues for examples of letters, imitate them, and then ask that senior colleague to give you feedback. Mentoring is one of the jobs of senior faculty.

Yes, getting advice from experienced people about letter-writing is the only way to get the benchmarking/calibration right. :)

While this is certainly a good idea, I think the premise of this site is that people want our advice, and have probably already considered asking their contacts.

@cag51 No length of answers can replace a conversation with a colleague.

Because this student seems to be a bit out of the ordinary: Would you recommend to add something special? Like "I recommend this student more than any other this year. Fee free to call me any time for more information" or anything like that? (The OP is asking, I think, because they find this student special, so they need a bit more than a blueprint for just the normal recommendation.)

@Peter-ReinstateMonica "In my X years of teaching, I have seen roughly Y students at this stage in a career, and I can state that without a doubt, the student is among the Z best I've had. In other words he/she's in the top A% at the universities I have taught at."

@WolfgangBangerth you are a senior faculty too right? Can you post one such letter?

@Allure It's a bad idea and unethical to publicly post a confidential letter about an actual student. One could try anonymizing letter so it does not contain identifying personal information about the student. But I imagine that this would necessarily mean removing or obscuring the useful parts of any good letter, which are going to tend to include identifying information since they will talk about that specific person's accomplishments in detail.

@Allure Andrew hits the issue on the head.

If you can write about what the student has done, rather than just the grades in courses, it is a plus.
Any special projects? Any leadership actions? Are they self directed? Do they have insight? Are they helpful to others? Have they done independent study, alone or in small groups?
Would you take them on for a research project without qualification? Can you confidently predict their success, in school and beyond?
But itemize actual actions when possible.

May I ask what you mean by "leadership actions"?

@JochenGlueck, I don't have an example, but there are a lot of possibilities. I'd intend academic leadership. Perhaps organizing study groups, inviting scholars to talk, or even suggesting such. Big world.

Thanks for your explanation!

@JochenGlueck I've once seen leadership actions close up, just once, in a 45 year career. I was running a large group of RF engineers, and a new student came into the group. Within 3 months, he was organising a small group of said engineers. Experienced engineers were deferring to him and he was de facto running them, organising their work and their use of internal and outside resources. Three years later, he left and became a Technical Director for (admittedly) a relatively small company, and just went stratospheric from there. Not a repeatable example, but you'll know it when you see it.

@NeilUK That's god level leadership. :) But on a more mundane level, taking point on some issue which affects more than just yourself is worth mentioning for a starting point.

Think about how you know the student is excellent -- what sets them apart. In particular, if this is the first recommendation you've written, that suggests you may have a limited basis of comparison (to other students you've worked with). The difficulty you have in conveying your opinion may be related to an underlying difficulty in justifying your opinion.
A useful guideline is show, don't tell. Here, this means it is much more convincing to cite distinctive, concrete, factual observations about the student than to pile on generic superlatives. For example you could note if they are going above and beyond course objectives, are doing research-level thinking, or are "the only student in our department to accomplish X in the last N years".

Quantify their rank
I'm in a hard science field, so the answer may be less relevant to humanities letters. I have found that the strongest letters highlight specific interactions and anecdotes about positive qualities, but most importantly rank the student relative to a distribution. For example

I have been teaching Physics 101 and Engineering 305 for the past 4 years, and this student is easily among the top 5 of the ~200 students I have taught.

If you've never written a recommendation letter before, you probably have a smaller pool to compare against. In principle that might weaken your letter some, but really that's important information to your reviewer. A letter ranking the candidate top 5 out of 20 years of experience vs 2 years is legitimately more weighty.

You could always emulate the style of Richard Duffin when he wrote a recommendation letter for John Nash.

This is a classic letter, but since sometimes people read things literally on the internet, of course you should not actually do this. The reason this example is so striking is that it isn't a standard letter you'd write for a strong student. This only works if you are famous and extremely well-regarded with a long track record of strong recommendations, and you only get to do it at most one time in your career. (I'm not even sure this would work in the modern era even if you were recommending a genius, it has a little bit of an "old boys club" feel to it)

-1 for the same reasons as @Andrew, plus the fact that this letter is only remarkable in hindsight. Had Nash not achieved so much, this letter would have been gross hyperbole without substance. Letter-readers need more than just your word.

The main thing to remember is to explain the basis for your evaluation and give a sensible comparison of the student relative to the cohort.  It is not necessary to give detailed information on grades (since that will be given separately), but you should give some underlying objective information that explains your assessment that the student is excellent.  What have they done that excels relative to what you expect for students of that cohort?  What skills does this student have that other students in the cohort do not have?  Etc.

I think it's important to show and not tell. While most people simply use adjectives to describe, it would be great if you can show concrete examples, past interactions etc that you had with him/her, which can drive your point across better.
Do also say, what difference did he/she make. What could not have been done without their attributes ?


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How should I approach a researching professor as an undergraduate? Should I go humble or confidently?
I'm a third-year CS major undergrad at a not so research-oriented campus. I was looking through a list of research professors (given some professors only do lectures), I found a professor leading computer vision researching, and this is something I seriously wanted to dive deep into. I do not have a research background except for reading interesting papers myself fetched from two-minute paper videos on youtube.
Reading through several Q&As from Quora and SO, some say go for it while some say I should approach people who work with them first. I've decided to approach the professor directly. While most say I should approach with humbleness, and after drafting an email and sending it to my friend in a research-oriented University, my friend says I should remove the humbleness (he would say: remove "If my lack of experience refrained me from being considered as a candidate, are there any specific papers, concepts, or directions that I can look into?") and go straight to the point stating what I can do for the professor instead. He said most professors are too busy and would not even read or reply to my email if I talk about lacking experience or writing a multi paragraph email. Which approach should I take?

why not stop thinking about how to act and just be yourself in the most honest form?

This may be country specific -- if I received such an email with extreme niceties I would probably delete.  Just say you are a student with an interest in computer vision, and ask whether you can be part of any project.  That is sufficient.

The answer is highly dependent on culture, so can you tell us where your university is located?

I'm in a California, US, University.

My 2c, approach with humbleness but enthusiasm. Having specific questions about a recent paper of theirs might be a good start. I agree with your friend that you should take out your line about lacking experience and asking for papers though.

Welcome to Ac.SE, Joe. Please only ask one question per post -  I  removed your  coauthorship question as it's totally unrelated. If you have a concrete question that isn't already answered here, please do ask it separately.

I won't answer because I CV'd as a duplicate, but yes, you are unlikely to get specific feedback from a cold email. I would drop that. I also hate reading annoying sycophancy. If you need to tell me how underqualified you are, why are you even reaching out?? You can be humble in the sense don't open with "I'm the next Elon Musk, I'm going to write four papers this year," but you don't need to grovel like you're about to become a human sacrifice.

Thank you all for the input.

(I am a postdoc in research university in the US, regularly supervise undergrads and phd-level students)
The most important part is to be brief. Nobody has time or energy to read more than few sentences. If they have time for any student they will likely talk to you in person to figure out details. If they don't have time for students right now, they will likely ignore you. It doesn't really matter what you write, as long as you match your skills with the projects.

Hi Prof___, I am an CS major at [University] and would love to work with you. My main skills are [Python] and [Computer vision] and I want to learn more about your projects like ____. Do you have time to chat about possibility of joining your group as researcher for [time period you'll be available]?

Expectations from undergrad are pretty low, everyone knows that you are there to learn. Also expect to be ignored, but follow up in a week or two.


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Scientific authorship: including a former lab member who collected (unused) pilot data?
I am working on a manuscript of a project that I am first author on, and am wondering whether it is proper to include person X. X has been gone from the lab for 3 years, and none of her data is in the manuscript or really informed the conclusions. However, my experimental design (for one figure out of 8) is very similar to her original plan, although the analysis is different. It's not clear if the original idea was X's, or my PIs (it was a pretty natural extension from a paper we read in journal club). Any advice about whether X should be a coauthor? Does anyone have any examples of this happening, and what was the outcome from each perspective?
Update: thank you for all the input! To clarify:
1. My PI was actually the one who asked ME for my opinion in this situation - I think she was on the fence. But you're right that it is her job to make the final call, she was there when the original pilot experiments were performed.

The experimental tools were not new, they are common/published already. The details of the design (I.e. vary x in increments of 5) were the former student's
Looks like we are planning (at least at the conference stage, could always change when paper is closer to submission) towards not including X

There are two key questions, as I see it.  The first is whether the experimental design you used was originated by the former student.  If it was the PI's idea (or somebody else's), and the student merely implemented it, that the former student does not need to be an author.  If, on the other hand, the apparatus and techniques were truly originated by the former student, there may be a strong case for making them an author.  You should ask the PI specifically about who designed the experiment (as well as consulting them about the whether the previous student should be a coauthor; the PI is likely the best person to evaluate whether the student made a meaningful contribution to the current paper).
If it is established that the old student did originate the experimental arrangement, there is then a second question:  Was this experimental design already used as the basis for a published paper with that student as an author?  If there was already a paper on the older results, then the student has already received credit for designing the experimental setup.  In that case, you can cite the older paper as originating the methodology, and the former student does not need to be an author on papers describing further developments made after they left.

You should ask your PI. Authorship conventions vary drastically between fields and the PI will know information about the following
(1) whether the experimental design was novel, and whether she designed the experiment or just performed it.
(2) whether her data informed anything in your project (you said it didn't inform your results or analysis, but it could have informed other aspects [like what question to ask next], and it could have informed the PI in ways they have not told you)
(3) Whether any of the above means authorship is conventionally expected in your field
A key point though, is whether her experimental design is published in a thesis, report, conference or separate paper. If it is, you quite likely could cite it and potentially not include her as an author (although you should still ask your PI about this). However, if it is not, then authorship could be warranted because you benefited from her experimental design which could be interpreted as a substantial intellectual contribution.

From what I read, you seem to describe a case about the limits of intellectual property, with particular emphasis to ownership of ideas from a previous student/researcher. I will tell you how a similar situation was handled by my former PI:
a) I designed (calculations, CAD, materials and equipment selection, etc) an experimental device needed to collect specialized measurements. I also chose and installed all the equipment (electronics/software) used during the measuring process as well as the analysis of the data. This was part of my work as a research assistant.
b) This equipment was used to collect data for my thesis, papers and publications.
c) Once I graduated, the equipment was given to a different student which used it to collect more data. This student has access to all the documents associated to the equipment. He has collected data and produced papers from this setup. However, he did not put my name in the documents. Although the design was my idea, it does not belong to me. The regulations of my University are clear about this.
Now to your case: Person X has not had direct contribution to your results other than similar ideas about how to proceed on certain topics or design a particular process. My suggestion is that you put his/her thesis as a reference, indicating clearly where the similarities occur. The name of person X should not appear as a co-author unless you are using data/results directly from his/her thesis. If this is your PIs idea, his/her name will be (most likely) on the manuscript as a co-author no matter what.

Your papers aren't even cited for the design/analysis of the data? As in a line like "Bogon densities were measured and calculated as described in DisgruntedDoctor et al. (2015)".

Not that I know of. He simply described the experimental setup.

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


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Do Universities make fully-remote contracts?
I have been working in the UK for 8+ years, partially in academia and partially in industry, with satisfying results in both cases. I have been working fully-remote (from the UK) for the last year and I find this situation ideal for me. I am now thinking of moving back to my home country, Italy.
I know that working fully-remote from the same country of your employer is one thing, working fully-remote "from everywhere" is another, and they require different types of contract.
I can easily find jobs as a fully-remote employee from my country if I am looking for industry jobs. However, I would really like to keep working in academia, and I have not been able to find any University ad that talks about the possibility of a fully-remote position "from everywhere" (or even just a "fully-remote" position from the same country as the University).
Does it mean that Academia will NOT make these types of fully-remote contracts? Or it's possible that this arrangement will be discussed separately once the first contact is made?
Notice that I am not limiting myself to UK Universities. Anything is fine. My field is Machine Learning research so I need nothing more than my laptop (the heavy work is often done on remote servers).
EDIT: Please consider that when I am talking about "working in academia" I am referring to "pure" research job, with little to none educational obligation. If this seems crazy to you, consider that it's what I have been doing for the past year.

The legal requirements may work against you, even if your employer agrees to it. For example, I am a UK citizen (soon to be) employed by a Spanish university. I must be legally resident in Spain (and paying tax there) to be employed there, and I imagine it would work the other way around, too. Brexit has exacerbated these issues, of course.

I don't think you can generalize "academia" worldwide, and will vote to close this question as  "shopping question" for lack of a better option.

What do you want to do for a university that can truly be done fully remote once the world is not in a Covid lockdown? You can't effectively teach fully remote, you can't interact effectively on research fully remote from everyone. Why would a university employ you fully remote?

In general there is some commitment required, since universities employess are public employees.

@JonCuster I can do research, as I have done in the past year+

Yes, you can do research all by yourself - what benefit does the university get from that? Social interactions (students to students, students to professors, professors to professors) are the core of the university's function.

Currently I am being paid through an ERC grant, so I have no education obligations. My question is about how to keep doing exactly that - but fully remote.

@EarlGrey At my institution the only "public employees" would be students taking night classes.

Have you asked the open university? A fully online teaching model might make them more open to this. Plus they do have interest in ML.

@JonSG I am missing your point, may you expand it a bit? I explictly mentioned "in general". Stanford and Ritsumeikan University of course works differently and may as well offer fully remote positions.

@JonCuster a progressive institution would recognize that Zoom calls can fully replace the old school in-person interactions while also making sure people never have to commute or waste money on overpriced real estate near the university. Unless of course the university is providing every employee with free 2+ bedroom living space within walking distance from campus, which I've never seen happen.

@JonathanReez - Zoom calls in no way replace in-person interactions. At my lab we are incredibly happy to be back interacting in person. So much more information gets transferred live and in person compared with video. We may think Zoom is a replacement now since we have lived with it for a year. Just wait until you can be at a whiteboard with 2 other people and talk through things.

@JonCuster I think it depends. I last for four years the weekly Zoom meeting with my ex-colleagues after we worked for different labs. Nobody among us feel Zoom is inferior to in-person meeting. My field is theoretical physics and machine learning.

@EarlGrey While there are many universities who's employees are classified as "public employees", the majority of higher ed institutions (at least in the USA) are private with no "public employees".  An assertion that something is or should be a certain way because university employees are public employees makes no sense in my opinion, at least in the USA. Perhaps it is a different situation where you are located.

@JonSG perhaps the question is referring to the European system, given the countries the OP mentions. I still do not understand what it means "public employees taking night classes". Is it a derogatory expression?

@EarlGrey I missed the reference to the UK in the original post. Thanks for pointing that out. My comment is not a derogatory. Just an observation that at the employees of private universities are private not public employees and thus if there were public employees the on campus they would be there as students attending classes. Most likely at night given they are full time government employees "someplace else".

@JonSG nearly 15 milions US americans people work at night ( https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/01/night-work ). Counting only policemen (roughly 1 milion US american), I would expect that 250k policemen are working night shifts. I expect similar rates among the army "employees" (again, 1 milion person, 250k on night shifts). Your claim about public employees being statistically freer at night has some ground.
But they will be statistically white, too:
https://www.prb.org/resources/a-demographic-profile-of-u-s-workers-around-the-clock/

No doubt there is someone, somewhere, who has a fully-remote contract from a university. However, it is not something I have ever encountered, and I think it is inherently unlikely to be something any traditional university wishes to offer in the near future. A university's 'business model' is built around advertising that their campus is a better place to be than the competition's (because libraries, or labs, or equipment, or people, or sports, or...). Advertising 'fully remote' jobs would simply serve to undermine that message. In addition, having remote (and particularly overseas-remote) employees creates administrative and legal concerns that universities are not well-placed to manage.

I think organizations that overwhelmingly were doing distance learning pre-pandemic would be a counter example. "Our system works so well even our staff aren't on campus."  I know there are at least a few of them in the US, no clue about in the UK.

@DanIsFiddlingByFirelight I think we can say "traditional university" by definition is not remote.  I will leave it as an exercise to the reader whether traditional is good or bad.

The largest universities use distance learning, and do not use the model described here.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

I'm not aware of any academic positions advertised as being fully remote. For universities with a sufficient number of online classes (which occurred even prior to the pandemic), it might be possible for someone to work remotely. There are still committee meetings and meetings with grad students that are usually expected to occur in-person, as well as research that might be difficult to do remotely. Some professors choose to live such that they have a long commute (possibly even requiring air travel) and are only on campus 2-3 days per week during which they fit their in-person meetings and classes.
Given that there are many more qualified applicants than positions for academia, there is less incentive for schools to give a fully-remote contract when they have many applicants willing to work in-person.

If you have soft money and simply need a hosting institution, there exist institutions (not necessarily universities) that will host you and allow you to work anywhere. One possible example is here (this was the first I managed to find, and my linking to it does not constitute a recommendation; do your own due diligence before entering into any financial relationship). Or you may be able to find a university department willing to do essentially the same thing.
Some university research staff positions (probably not teaching positions post-COVID unless it's an "online" university) can be fully remote, but realising that potential may require an existing relationship with the department and some flexibility in the department. I live and work 600 miles away from my university, but I worked there first for four years and gained the trust of my research group leader and the department. Our group now includes multiple people that work remotely, one even from a different country, and some that didn't physically work at the university for a time. However, our university is a private institution, which gives it more flexibility than a public institution would, and I can't speak for any institution in Europe.

Thank you, that's very useful. I have a very good relationship with my current University, I think the PI of my project is extremely happy about me, so I may be able to get an affiliation with them. Can I ask, out of curiosity, what is the institution you are affiliated with?

You could try asking your PI if they would be comfortable with you working from Italy. If they say no, you may be no worse off than you are already (though beware burning bridges). If they are open to it, then you can try your department's administration. They or higher-ups in the university might say no, in which case you'd have to pursue an alternative solution.

You probably have at least a couple of options, but I'm not sure any of them are good.

You say that you are currently being paid through an external grant. If this grant pays your entire salary, and you would just like a university affiliation, then you might be able to line up some sort of "Visiting Scholar" position, similarly to a professor on sabbatical from their home university.
However, it is probably impossible to transition to a paid position at the same university, if your external funding disappears.

Universities with a big online presence may hire online faculty. For example, Southern New Hampshire University is known for enrolling a large number of online students, and they hire remote.
If going this route I would expect mediocre working conditions, poverty-level wages, and non-existent job security.

If you want working conditions, job security, and compensation similar to a research university, then for now your plans probably aren't workable.

Would I be right in assuming that 'online faculty' would be predominantly teaching-focussed, rather than doing much research?

Well, I assume that's all you could get paid for anyway.

I am also a machine learning researcher and have worked as a postdoctoral fellow (PD) and principle investigator (PI) at a Japanese university for more than five years.
I am not good at legal issues. So, I would like to mention about the culture of Japanese universities. So, please understand that this post is not related to administrative constraints.
As for the PD position, you may be able to find a position that is completely remote. As far as I have encountered, it depends on the PI's decision as to how flexible they are willing to work. If the PI is looking for someone to publish a great paper, you can say, "I'm willing to work completely remotely."
Of course, the level of flexibility will be determined by Japanese law and the rules of each university. But here, as I mentioned earlier, I am going to ignore them).
In fact, when I was working as a PD, my lab members could join any meeting using remote conferencing tools. One of my colleagues used to come to the lab about once a month.
If you are interested in, you can search for academic positions in Japan at J-REC IN. If a PI who is open to remote work is recruiting PDs there, you may be able to work full remote.
Unfortunately, if you are looking for a full remote PI position (tenure position), it is not possible in Japan.

thank you, a very useful, actionable suggestion! :)


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How do you tactfully inquire why a person wants your reprint?
My boss is first author on several papers, and doesn't want to give a reprint to anyone unless he knows and approves the reason they want it. I know, I know. These reprint requests fall to me. How do I inquire why they want it, with an appearance of collegiality?
EDIT: By "reprint", I mean the PDF of a paper, requested from the author by someone who doesn't want to have to buy it at the journal website.

To answer the title question literally: I don't. It's none of my business why they want it.

If your boss actually intends to arbitrarily deny some people reprints, Soup Nazi style ("No reprint for you!"), then there's no tactful or collegial way to go about it.  On the other hand, he may just want to build a mailing list of people interested in his work (in which case you could ask them directly whether they'd like to hear about future papers) or to find out where they ran across the reference (in which case you could ask that).  It could be worth another discussion with him, to see whether there's a compelling explanation you could add to the request for information.

Is the word you are looking for "preprint" rather than "reprint"?

Or you could direct them to someplace they can get the paper by themselves. (Say, a library, or an online repository of one kind or another.)

To the requester, you could say something like:

For my records, may I ask why you are requesting a reprint?

 Though, I think a good follow-up question to ask here would be "how do I tactfully tell my boss to field these reprint requests for themselves?" :^)

Or "how do I tactfully tell my boss he's being absurd?"

A longish comment with a bit of answer near the end:
Note that the sharing of actual journal-produced PDFs of the article may fall under the constraints of the Copyright Transfer Notice that you guys signed when you published the paper. Now, publishers often do not like it when you post the published version on your website, though most seem to be okay if you e-mail it to a few people here and there. But it is possible that your boss has been burned by an experience before.
For example, if I were to send the e-print that I got from the publisher, which is watermarked with my name and institution on it, to a random Joe Schmoe, who then puts it into a BitTorrent collection and uploads to The Pirate Bay, whom do you think will be blamed by the Journal?
So while I think your boss maybe slightly paranoid, I do not see it as more so than the healthy kind of paranoia that keeps non-profits like the EFF functioning: somebody has to think about the worst case scenario.

All this is to say:

Check your copyright transfer agreement to make sure that  you are allowed to share what the person is asking for.
Check with your boss to see whether his reservations about sending digital reprints also extends to a pre-print (original manuscript before peer-review) or a post-print (the accepted manuscript after the peer-review rounds but before the proofs were prepared). It is quite possible that his policy is based on a quite literal reading of the copyright transfer agreement, and he just wants to prevent commercial use of the reprint. (If yes, go here.) If not....
... check whether the person sending the request is happy with a pre/post-print and if so, everyone is happy. If not, the ball is now in the court of the person making the request to explain why he or she wants the version of record and that only.

In addition to 1.: check the copyright laws in your jurisdiction. E.g. the German UrhG §53 explicitly lists obtaining a copy for personal scientific use as legal, including asking someone else to make that copy for you. In that light, the "correct answer" to the supervisor's inquiry may be "for scientific reasons" as opposed to "for my publicly available collection of papers on..."

Out of curiosity, are there any known cases of people getting persecuted (legally or otherwise) for sharing their own papers?

@tomasz: I don't know of any individuals who have been targeted as such. But there was a case few years back when Elsevier sent mass DMCA take-down requests to Academia.edu. (Though bear in mind that it has been pointed out that the ToS for Academia.edu may violate the Copyright Transfer Agreements.)

@WillieWong: I see. It's just that I think targeting authors personally for sharing their own papers would be terrible publicity for the publishers, likely to induce significant backlash (e.g. more boycotts, or simply people sharing their papers in show of solidarity). I can scarcely believe they would be willing to do that, unless the author does this in an extremely flagrant manner (say, openly taunting the publisher). And even then...

@tomasz: note that most big publishers now allow some form of self-archiving for many journals. You can check out the policies yourself on ROMEO. In any case, significant backlash already exists without publishers going after individual researchers...

@WillieWong: I know about both of these things. My point is that if they had pursued individual researchers, the backlash would intensify, while the benefit for them would be nil. Hence, you don't really need to worry about them doing that. The only real reason to obey is (possibly) personal ethics.

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How to avoid sleeping in lectures?
It's not that I cannot hold my attention - I find it a lot easier to put in sustained effort during research - literature surveys, practising derivations, and coding. I also find myself actively engaging in 1-1 (or smaller groups) discussions over long periods of time.
During lectures and seminars, it is a completely different story. I invariantly doze off within 15-20 minutes, irrespective of the content, presenter and class size. I despise it, and sincerely want to change it. Any suggestions?
EDIT : All your answers made me go through all the possible reasons for nodding off. In my case, it is most likely a case of lack of interaction (Peter Teoh's answer) since I have made through with long hours of both mental and physical work for consecutive days (hence mostly not a case of sleep deprivation). Thank you!

While I sympathize with the question -- a few days ago I nodded off during a (pretty) good talk by (quite) an eminent speaker -- I think that here academia is more the incidental environment rather than the essence of the question.  Would the answer really be different if you were trying not to doze off in a workplace meeting, a concert or performance, in church...?  This seems close to "boat programming".

I used to always sleep in  one of my undergrad CS classes. It was right after lunch. I drank coffee. I moved to the very front of the classroom in an attempt not to sleep. I then became famous as the gal who was always sleeping in the 2nd row of Microarchitecture. I never shook that appellation! So I switched majors. :-)

Try taking notes. Although the notes themselves may not be important, they help you stay present in the lecture.

Two words: Dark Chocolate :D

@MasonWheeler Really? Does eating dark chocolate help to avoid sleeping?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this question is more about Personal Productivity, not specifically about Academia.

@EnthusiasticStudent: It does.  And it tastes awesome, too!

@EnthusiasticStudent I think it is about academia because it is specifically focused on lectures and seminars.

Go for a jog each morning, take a cold shower, that'll get you concentrated and jumpy.

Narcolepsy? (Periods of sleepiness or low tone brought on by stress) Have you talked to a sleep specialist?

"1-1 (or smaller groups)"? I assume you mean larger? Or were you just talking to yourself?

@k_g : I meant groups with 2/3 people excluding myself, in addition to interactions with only one person

@jakebeal We also have non-academic lectures, workshops and seminars, mostly in industry.

See also the Appendix of this article

@MasonWheeler -- That worked great for me until I realized how much chocolate I was eating! I've since switched to sugarfree (also without sorbitol, dear god...) gum, and since I chew quietly and I throw it away in, y'know, a garbage can, no one's ever been annoyed by it.

In one all-encompassing word:  Coffee!

Sip 5 Hour Energy. It's like NZT. I've fallen asleep on caffeine before, but 5HE works for DSPS also. You can also consider piracetam and like someone else mentioned theobromine (dark chocolate).

My colleague Andy and I have a deal. We sit next to each other, and if one nods off in a boring meeting, the other one nudges him. This keeping watch on the other guy is also helpful, gives you a little background task to keep your CPU ticking over.

don't fight it. go to sleep for 5 minutes and wake refreshed or pre-empt it by going to sleep before the lecture for 5 minutes.

Perhaps you could elaborate a little on why you think this is actually an effective strategy?

I do not think that the latter advice works. Lectures are very tiring due to the way they request your attention and are a very passive activity. If you are sufficiently tired that you can sleep before a lecture (usually when you have just come into the room and have just actively done something), five minutes of sleep won’t make you sufficiently fit to follow it.

You could test your "lack of interaction" hypothesis. Do you invariably fall asleep within 15-20 minutes of watching TV, or sitting quietly listening to spoken radio? Neither of those requires any more interaction than listening to a live speaker. If you don't fall asleep, then it's something more specific about the lecture environment as jakebeal suggests. And it's not the content, since you fall asleep in all lectures regardless of whether you find them interesting or boring.

I can't answer, so I'll comment instead: Always carry a bottle of cold water with you. Maybe two. And when you start to feel drowsy, take a sip and it should keep you awake for the next couple minutes before you need another sip again.

@SteveJessop : No, I don't fall asleep in such situations. While the possibility of the lecture environment being the cause is high, I also wonder if it is myself who am the culprit.  Sometimes, I have observed myself wandering off (unintentional) in thoughts as soon as the lecture begins (again, irrespective of the content). Can something like this be a result of attitude along or the physical environment?

Voting to keep this open because I've always had a harder time staying awake in academic environments than other ones.

Since you invariably falls asleep during lectures, and not when you are doing any other actively engaging/interacting work, I presumed you are not overtired, or lacking of sleep.   Most likely you lack interaction.    Whenever you talk to someone, you will not fall asleep.   So when the lecturer are talking, it is very often I take down notes.   And there are two kinds of notes - just like different ways of talking to the lecturer.
If I already understood what he said:   you can often see me dropping down QUESTIONS which I want elaborate further - likely to be on my own, or with hime/someone else.
If he covered some topics / area which I am not familiar, I will try to understand at a high level (if I were to zoom in understanding every word he said - it is not fruitful), and perhaps summarized as one word or two what he said - which I will explore further after the lectures.
Through these two types of notes, often it can sometimes be overwhelming as I try to concentrate listening + writing at the same time - strike a balance for yourself.
Another way?   In the past I used to use my handphone, mp3 recorder etc to record the lecturer teaching, but that required you to seat in front.
SITTING IN FRONT does help too - as I find myself more likely to interact (with lecturers) through asking questions.
My past lecturer also encourage questioning - intelligently posed, which will score points.   And so all of us are encouraged to engage in actively making remarks, asking questions to further our understanding.   Once in a while some chocolate bars are offered for the highest numbers of questions asked, or best questions posed (some times very subjective, so difficult to judge).
Update:
I used to have lectures at 2.00pm too, and that is after lunch hours.   As I invariably will fall asleep after a heavy meal, I did TWO things:

I jogged at 12 noon under the sun in the stadium, or you can go swimming.   All these is to build up the short period of alertness after exercising.
Since you don't eat before exercising, that's good.   And after exercising, have a small meal - 80% full usually will mean sleepiness after a short while, but 30% to 50% full usually I can stay awake for at least 4 or 5 hours.   Many times I can skip lunch altogether, just to make sure I stay awake throughout the entire lectures.

Another new way for the electronic geek :
Recently, since I had a new Nexus 7 7" tablet with me, I found it extremely useful.   I was listening to a lot of different talks (in a Conference), and many times the technically advanced speaker will mumble something which I don't understand or know of.   Instead of writing down some keywords to be explored later, I entered into Google the keywords, out came the many search results as answer INSTANTLY.   It helped me to understand IMMEDIATELY the outline ideas, but more important - I just enter "star" button and this search results is remembered as a favorited page.   The list of the favorited pages exported out as HTML can be easily imported anywhere to be explored further just by clicking.

+1 for sitting at the front - risky but often effective.

thanks, but why risky?   i thought it keeps you more alert, as you are going to embarrase yourself if you should knock off :-) or get distracted by some other stuff.

exactly - if you still fall asleep - right at the front of the lecture - you will suffer greater embarrassment! :-)

oh i see, i thought you wanted to say "being pointed at to answer some question" - which you should welcome to happen :-).

Make sure the lecturer is OK with taping her/him. Some rely don't like it - for whatever reason - and in some countries it might be considered copyrighted material.

The first thing you need to do in order to address this issue is to understand why you are falling asleep.  Since you say that you do not have difficulty focusing elsewhere, it seems likely that there is something specific about the lecture environment that is triggering your sleep.  The approach to fixing it depends on the cause.
Two likely possibilities:

If you are extremely fatigued in general, then any significant chunk of time where you are entirely passive, like in a lecture, is likely to result in you falling asleep.  I had this experience as an undergraduate.  The only real cure is to start sleeping more at night.  Remember, you are not in a sprint, but running a marathon, and you need to pace yourself at a sustainable level.
Packed lecture halls often have dim lights and/or higher CO2 content in the room (due to how densely packed people are), both of which are sleep-inducing for many people.  If this is the case, for you, a good way to counteract it is to move your body and get your blood flowing.  There are many exercises that can be done while seated, which will not generally be disruptive if you do them toward the back of a classroom.  In some larger lecture halls, it may also be possible to actually stand in the back, behind the seats.

An alternative solution to point one is doing something arbitrary during lectures to keep yourself active, for example taking notes (though this can be distracting) or playing extremely unintellectual games that can be played without thinking (this might sound odd, but it actually works).

+1 You can stay awake through more boring classes after getting a full night's sleep.

@DavidMulder much true. This might look counter-intuitive, but after all, "paying less attention" is still better than "paying 0 attention since you are asleep".

+1 I know several people that had very late or very early shifts on jobs while in school, and thus would have a hard time staying awake in lecture. Standing for all or part of the lecture was always the solution they used. Explaining to the instructor ahead of time what you're doing would probably be a good idea though.

Despite what your math teacher may have said in college, doodling simple non-offensive things could help you stay awake for the rest of the class.

Doodling offensive things will keep you more awake than non-offensive things. Fact.

The link is broken, unfortunately.

If fatigue is not the issue at hand then I have found the following tactic to be helpful in graduate-level courses and research talks.
I take a few notes on paper with the intention of:

identifying three important messages from the presentation;
identifying at least one key question for the presenter.

You don't always have to ask the question but the process of identifying the question helps improve focus.
More generally, I have a small notebook that I carry to all research talks these days and the notes are valuable if I need to go find additional references, etc.

+1 and if you absolutely can't find anything to write down, you can always flip to the last page and start drawing something. My notebooks usually had about 3/4 useful notes and 1/4 drawings of random things. And because I put all the drawings in the back, I could cut those pages out and put the book with just the useful stuff in my archive.

@Sumyrda: Just writing (or drawing) alone might not be enough for some. I have old lecture notes to proof that: Falling asleep is indicated by my handwriting slowly deteriorating into a single straight line. :-) So the additional mental tasks suggested by GSat might matter.

Make sure you get enough exercise. Young people need to do at least 30 minutes of intensive exercise at least 5 times per week. If you don't do this regularly already, you may not have the physical fitness to start doing this rightaway, you then need to start slowly with exercise and gradually build up your fitnness levels so that you can run for half an hour without gasping for air.

"Young people need to do at least [...]" Everyone needs that, not just young people.

The other popular alternative to getting more sleep is caffeine.  Coffee, green/black tea, many sodas, dark chocolate, etc. all contain caffeine.
Just remember that, though it may be socially acceptable, it is still an addictive drug.  So don't overdo it...

Is regular caffeine use actually helpful in the long term?  The study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9586865 suggests that it might not be.

Additionally, Adderall.

According to most studies caffeine does not qualify as being addictive in a sense like alcohol, tobacco, amphetamines and others are. And now I am going to get my 6th cup of coffee for today...

Btw, for the Hipster Academics (or Germans) I would like to add Club Mate, which has lots of caffeine and is especially nice during warm weather.

I had issues falling asleep in some of my classes but I found the link to be that I entered these courses already in a sleepy mindset. For example, classes in which I had friends were much better because I would be hanging out with them before the class, and I'd enter the room in a more active state. Classes where I knew no one or had a long break beforehand were classes I struggled to stay awake in.
I (while completely unqualified to say) strongly believe that your brain can only be so productive throughout the day before you just kind of shut down, so I started to cut back on intense studying between lectures. Instead, I left that for when the day was winding down, so if I got burned out, it was okay.
Between classes, I would be sure to eat well and spend time doing productive things that would not burn me out, such as making study schedules, cleaning my dorm, reassuring my parents that I was still alive...etc. Anything that would take minimal mental energy, but would lessen distractions or otherwise improve my productivity later on.
Conserving mental energy was a big thing for me, as was eating properly and avoiding caffeine dependency. I did find, however, that when I needed a quick jolt to wake me up...nothing would do it like a single sip of Coke. I quickly realize that it wasn't even the sugar or caffeine, it was the carbonation. I replaced it with seltzer and when my buddies in my 8am Physics lab thought I was nuts...well, maybe, but I was wide awake instantly.
This is all very personal fixes to my issues with falling asleep, but I hope some are helpful.

You might want to get tested for sleep apnea.  (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_apnea for lots of information about it.)  The essential point is that you could be getting far less sleep than you think, so no wonder you get sleepy.  I had sleep apnea for a long time before it was diagnosed; once it was diagnosed it was quite easy to treat.
I'd also endorse the suggestion in one of the other answers to take notes, but only after making sure there isn't a medical problem.

Here's my trick: I find someone else who's falling asleep, and watch them desperately trying to stay awake. It's usually hilarious. This, of course, introduces a new problem: not laughing out loud during the lecture.
Generally the hilarity wakes me up enough that I can return my attention to the speaker.

This one can work. I've employed this trick on occasion. It's not 100% reliable, though – you have to find someone nodding off before they spot you!

This simple way to stay awake (but not necessarily alert) worked for me in night school: chew gum.
Even though I was not paying attention, giving me some kind of action instead of sitting completely passive kept me awake more than cups of coffee.

I think the best idea is to sit in the first row. You will have to move your head and eyes a lot more during lectures which will keep you a lot more alert. I'm sure the body also releases stress hormones to prevent the awkwardness of sleeping in the first row, or there is some other psychology behind it, but it certainly always helped me.

Standing instead of sitting is what got me through the lectures in Navy Nuclear Power School.  Note taking was mandatory (your advisor checked your notes weekly) but I could fall asleep while writing.

Although most has been already said in this thread, There is something that gets me through lengthy conferences and/or block lectures, which I did not see yet mentioned. I found hydrating and fresh air and sunlight to be the best friends. Use the breaks to get your blood pumping, so you can stay alert. Also avoid caffeine as you might get pretty soon accustomed to it and then it is not helping any more. When air is not helping, try to have a little power nap (about ten minutes) before the lecture in question.


text:
Does PhD acceptance depend on my current MA's completion?
I applied to PhD programs on my supposedly last semester of my MA. I'm doing thesis, and I am worried I won't finish in time.  I have been accepted to the PhD program I wanted, and it is in a different field than my MA, though it is still somehow related. I did say in my personal statement that I'm completing my MA.
The PhD acceptance letter didn't say anything about conditional acceptance, so I guess it's just acceptance? Does that mean even if I did not complete my MA, my PhD acceptance would still stand?

We can't know for sure, though if the letter of acceptance did not state anything to this effect, then you're probably good. Generally, acceptance is predicated on having completed a bachelor's degree, which I take you already have. Having finished a MA is generally considered a plus, but mainly because it allows the selection committee to see your grades at the grad school level -- whether or not you actually complete the degree may in fact be secondary.
The only way you can find out for sure is to write to the graduate director of the school you got accepted at. If they do care, they'll check on your degree completion when you get there and will find out -- so knowing earlier is better for you. If they don't care, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. So I don't see a downside to just asking.

"Generally, acceptance is predicated on having completed a bachelor's degree..." not always true. In many places, a Master's degree is a prerequisite.

@astronat -- this may be discipline and country specific.

@WolfgangBangerth Are you an American? Much of Europe and Canada follows a very different model where a PhD is 3-4 years and almost entirely or entirely research. Incoming students are generally expected to have a masters degree already, or an exceptional undergraduate (such as a first in the UK).

Yes, I am in the US. The PhD program is at Boston University.

@astronat -- I got my PhD in Germany, but now live and work in the US. So I know both systems. I had somehow inferred that the application was in the US -- which may have been incorrect, but turned out to be true :-)


text:
Is it appropriate to underline key words in an exam answer?
Some exams I have to take involve redacting long answers about a given subject. I know the corrector has to correct hundreds of exams, so clarity in both expression and calligraphy is key to set the corrector in the right mood in order to get a higher grade. I usually tend to be too circumlocutory, but in certain contexts explaining a term requires long descriptions that could make the key word "vanish" among a lot of explanatory sentences. A solution to that is to repeat the key word every couple of sentences, but that would only result in a waste of time (which is of paramount importance, since time is usually the limiting factor for me), and a verbose prose that is precisely what I'm trying to avoid.
In order to highlight such words, I usually italize them when writing a paper, but that looks plain wrong in hand-written texts, where italic letters are not so evident. So I underline them instead. I feel that should make the corrector task easier and faster, since that way they only have to scan the text looking for the key words to make sure the student has commented everything they were supposed to. I even had a teacher who highlighted such words herself prior to give a final grade.
However, I'm not sure how "standard" it is to underline key words, or whether it is regarded as a sign of poor writing style rather than an appreciated aid for correctors. I recently read from a well-known Spanish author that italic words were disrespectful to the reader since they were somehow telling them which words they should focus on, as if they were unable to work that out on their own. People in this post seem to agree it is not a good idea, but their alternative is to write a short abstract to sum up all the ideas they would italize otherwise. However, as you can tell, that's not an option when writing an exam answer.
So, should I underline key words when writing long exam answers?
Is there even a consensus about it, or does it simply depend on the corrector preferences?

Note: The scope of higlighting key words is not to make the correctors notice I've mentioned them, but just to make the correcting task easier.
Note: I'm not a native English speaker and I don't take exams in English, so please don't take this question as a sample of my writing skills. I can do better.

I'd never underline anything in an answer and if a student had in one of my exams, it'd make me upset. Underlining something essentially tells me you're saying what's important in the answer and that's not your role in the exam.

Please don't. Handwriting is already hard enough to read: underlining would make it even harder.

@JohnL. I've underlined the key points in long written answers in a (medical) postgraduate examination marked by multiple examiners I took years back, without any ill-effects (in fact, I was informed by the chief examiner that I had done extremely well). The point (that a current answer has already correctly made) is that there is no consensus with regard to this. If you personally have a problem with it, you really should be very upfront with your students and tell them not to do it. Otherwise, your being "upset" might lead to you marking down a good candidate, and that isn't fair.

Emphasis is entirely legitimate...  although manifestly there are varying opinions about it. :)

I do not believe that there is a strong consensus on use of textual emphasis in scientific writing.  In publications, I have often seen people use italics (and done so myself) to designate the first use a word in its definition; I have rarely (but occasionally) seen them used for emphasizing a key phrase.  Typically, in scientific writing one is expected to make the key phrases clear through prose alone---but of course, there are tricks to improve the visibility of key phrases in prose, such as use of lists, position of a phrase within a paragraph, etc.
In an exam, since things are handwritten and there is little chance to revise, I would expect standards to generally be more flexible.  Certainly I personally might find it a bit odd, but not at all problematic, for a student to underline words or phrases.  Your professors may or may not agree with me---as I said, I do not think there is any strong consensus.

At one point, I was taught to "box" answers on mathematics exams. That is, I would write out several lines of work, and then draw a box around the final answer.