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Is it ethical to become a volunteer teaching assistant?
There is a negative attitude towards volunteering in academia.
I am about to graduate (currently an undergraduate student). There is a 6-month gap between my graduation date and the matriculation date at another university. I have planned many things to do during the period (to be productive). One of them is to become an unofficial teaching assistant.
I will no longer be a student at the current university. For this reason, it will not be possible for me get a job as an official teaching assistant. However, I have no intention of taking TA jobs away from other potential candidates. Instead, I will only target some courses that 1. do not need TAs 2. need some improvements in the teaching materials. (e.g. rewrite the code in another programming language which is consistent with the degree program; provide new toy examples). I will not do any teaching session. I also have a good relationship with the instructors of these courses. One of the courses had an unofficial TA this year.
I want to do it just for my own academic interest. Is that an ethical decision?
PS: TA is probably not the right term, but for the question you can take it as TA

Graduate from what? Undergrad? I have doubts, actually, that it would even be possible, though I don't know about Australia.

"There is a negative attitude towards volunteering in academia." I am seriously questioning this premise, given that academia as a whole seems to be built on a mountain of unpaid reviewing, unpaid conference organising, and unpaid mentoring. If anything we habitually do too much volunteering for jobs that somebody should get paid for (your proposal sounds like one of them).

Hmm, if it is not ethical to become a volunteer teaching assistant, is it ethical to volunteer and answer this question?

One ethical aspect that I haven't seen you or any other commenters bring up (although I may have missed it) is that by volunteering in a career-adjacent position, you are exploiting your excess disposable income for CV building. When looking for an academic job, this may rank you higher than a candidate with equal (or better!) potential, but whose financial situations or non-work duties prevent them from spending 6 months performing unpaid work for networking and exposure. This is one of the many, many mechanisms that keep people from less privileged backgrounds from contributing to academia.

If you're ever concerned about ethical questions in a university context: They have ethics boards explicitly to answer these questions. Bonus: If the board gives their approval, nobody at the university can fault you

I believe volunteering is ethical for both the person doing the volunteering and person/organization "receiving" that volunteer work when:

No actual or hypothetical paid position is affected

The volunteer gets a benefit equal or greater than what they put in

I believe these principles apply even if the volunteer work is for a private company or powerful university. Volunteer work for other causes can also be ethical even when these principles are violated, though.
You write:

I have no intention of taking TA jobs away from other potential candidates. Instead, I will only target some courses that 1. do not need TAs

which appears to satisfy #1, though I think some would be reasonably concerned about devaluing TA labor more generally - this is not something easily measured, and I think you want to consider the "hypothetical" job and not just the actual one.
I think you'll have to make a determination on #2, it seems, though, that you do see some benefit, so you'll have to weigh that against the costs.
My recommendation would be to approach this not as looking for a volunteer teaching position, but asking for some mentorship in developing your own teaching resources. You'll need to figure out what exactly you are asking for in this relationship; what it seems you will be providing is access to the materials you produce. It'll be up to the individual instructors to decide whether their time is worth what you provide. I'd suggest that if they spend as much time mentoring you as they would spend if they created similar materials on their own (not necessarily equal to the amount of time it takes you), that seems ethical to me. If they're going to spend almost no time mentoring and get some teaching materials for free, well, I'd suggest you're undervaluing your own time and should consider how to better balance the relationship.

Great that you mention "1) No actual or hypothetical paid position is affected" it is an interesting point, that i have to think some more about.

I don't understand your #1.  Am I assuming too much to think you're saying that if someone does volunteer work which lessens the need for some paid position that it is somehow unethical?

@DeanMacGregor I'm giving sufficient conditions, not necessary ones. I think most of the onus is on the person doing the "hiring" rather than the worker, but I do think that people willing to work for free should consider how that will impact people who normally get paid to do that work.

Great answer, volunteering in and of itself is not anywhere close to being an ethical problem.
Institutions, however, have to deal with a bunch of other things that might make volunteering not a simple process, but that is a problem the institution has to deal with, not OP.
So, if OP wants to do it, he can go there and submit his wishes to volunteer to the institution (through the instructors, maybe?), afterwards the institution might allow it or not and establish the ground rules on how this will work.

TLDR: It is ethical by default, unless someone gives a compelling reason why it is unethical (and I have not seen such a reason being put forward so far).
Detailed analysis:
Your proposed volunteering has the obvious potential to do some good for the university where you’ll be volunteering and for its students. It will also benefit you by giving you useful experience and tbe satisfaction of doing good.
The argument that the volunteering is unethical, as explained in @AzorAhai’s answer, relies on a belief that your proposed action can also do harm by devaluing the labor of paid workers and creating a temptation for universities to rely on volunteer labor. In a context in which many university workers already feel exploited, this argument has significant emotional resonance with a lot of people, which is why, as your question states at its outset, “there is a negative attitude towards volunteering in academia.”
Now, even if this argument has some merit, it's important to keep in mind that that does not automatically mean the action is unethical. Many ethical actions have a mixture of good and bad consequences. E.g., when we get on a plane, we contribute to climate change — does that mean flying is unethical? Surely that's not always the case. One needs to weigh the benefits against the harm, and factor in other contextual factors.
In your particular case, the benefits are very tangible whereas the harm is intangible and very difficult to quantify. The strong reaction from @AzorAhai is in my opinion more indicative of the general sentiment of many people in academia that they are exploited than of a cold, rational analysis. It may well be true that there are vulnerable groups of workers in academia that are exploited or mistreated, but the relevance of that fact to your situation is unclear and potentially nonexistent.
I am therefore inclined to agree with @BryanKrause's analysis. In the absence of any specific information that your volunteer work will displace some paid worker, your action should be viewed as ethical.

Is it ethical to volunteer at your local Subway to teach them how to make better sandwiches?
No, you shouldn't do this. Teaching and research can be noble pursuits, but we don't live in a money-free society. The university offers courses in exchange for money - either tuition or tax dollars, doesn't matter - and if the university needs labor to improve them, it should pay for it.
Volunteering should flow down from you, as Dan Romik suggests, to something like SPCA, which helps animals in need, or perhaps to disadvantaged students. It should not flow up from workers to things like universities, which are institutions (perhaps of the state), where people like professors enjoy high status. (Or at the very least, sideways, to members of your community, like at a local library, like Buffy suggests.)
This only encourages universities to keep sucking up labor either for free or below market rate.
Perhaps there is a "teaching specialist" role you could be hired in, especially since it sounds like you aren't looking for a full-time job doing this.

+1. Really curious if the -1 could explain their vote, but there is no explanation they could possibly give that doesn’t ultimately boil down to not valuing the full worth of labor. Support your fellow workers, -1-er, unless I guess your class interests do not align… perhaps the -1 was a board of trustees member.

Well, this answer certainly confirms OP’s premise that “there is a negative attitude towards volunteering in academia”.  If you were trying to discourage someone from volunteering for some evil for-profit corporation (by, for example, I don’t know, giving your labor away writing answers on Stack Exchange or something similarly outlandish none of us would ever consider doing for a second), I could perhaps see the logic in it. But why is OP’s suggested form of volunteering any less ethical than volunteering at SPCA or any other non-profit organization? This answer doesn’t explain.

@Eric I'm guessing the -1 are from professors who want free labor

@DanRomik I never disputed OP's premise, so that's fine with me.

I'm guessing you are wrong about who is downvoting your post. I don't want free labor, for example, nor even co-authorship on my student's work (former students, actually, as I'm retired.

@Buffy Well your answer states you didn't vote my answer down, so there's no contradiction

@DanRomik Added some justification.

You do seem hostile to the idea that a university provides for the common good and is a fundamentally selfish organization. With that, I disagree.

@Buffy Neither of those points are relevant to my answer.

I try to limit moderating on other answers when I've posted an answer myself, but I would like to just step in quickly and everyone to step back a moment and notice there's a lot of tension and strong feelings here and think about what might be better expressed by supporting your own positions in your respective answers vs. as criticism of someone else in the comments.

I voted down, because I completely disagree with the ethical framework put forth. If I felt like volunteering at a sandwich shop, I'd see absolutely no ethical problem in doing so. Being allowed to something for money but not for free just seems absurd.

@Arno An argument against volunteering might be that, say, you need research experience to be admitted to graduate school, so people volunteer their time to labs to get that experience, and so labs don't need to hire any students for pay. That means that only people who have extra time to spare as volunteers get research experience, and people who cannot afford spending time as a volunteer cannot gain the necessary experience for graduate school or may need to go into debt to do so.

@BryanKrause I agree that that would be an undesirable situation, but I don't think the volunteers would be to blame. My preferred fix would be to provide a sufficient amount of scholarships to make the problem go away. If forbidding stuff is necessary, I'd forbid the labs to accepts volunteers, not the volunteers to volunteer.

@Arno You're using very strong language, "[not] allowed," "forbid." I am not a chair deciding to ban undergraduate volunteers; OP asked for an evaluation of whether their very specific plan was ethical. You are quite right that it is unethical on the university's part to accept; however I don't see these relations as unidirectional, it doesn't make sense to say the OP's plan is ethical, but for the university to accept makes it unethical.

No one behaves perfectly ethically. Maybe OP is fine with behaving slightly unethically out of boredom.

Thanks for the justification, but I think it’s a weak argument, sorry. The SPCA is an organization with resources, and a president and other high ranking officials (who I’m guessing also enjoy “high status” like professors). So I don’t really see why it’s more deserving of volunteer labor than a typical university. Also, arguably the SPCA too should be better funded by the state instead of having to rely on such labor, so your argument about volunteer labor distorting the economics of a workforce applies equally to them as far as I can tell.

@DanRomik Because volunteering in that case immediately benefits homeless, innocent animals. The fact that people are employed to make that sort of thing happen is immaterial. I agree, it would be great if animal shelters (the point isn't SPCA specifically) had enough funding to pay people to walk dogs. OP's suggestion to volunteer to improve teaching materials immediately benefits a professor by doing labor that the professor is paid personally to do.

@AzorAhai-him- But doesn't it also immediately benefit the students?  I don't think you can operate under the assumption that this work would otherwise be done by a professor as they do have many pulls on their time and this work may very well languish as low priority for years as many students pass by without that benefit.  I'm not sure that immediate benefit (even flowing down vs. up the socio-economic ladder) is a sufficient means of distinction.

@AzorAhai-him- I also don't think I'm following why you think the ethical evaluation should always be symmetric.

@BryanKrause ah, yes, someone has made that argument, thanks! The main problem I have personally experienced with unpaid internships is that they provide an unearned "foot through the door" for the wealthy and confident; the unfair competition with paid staff is (in my experience) not as problematic because, with internships in the order of months, most interns consume more time being supervised than they provide in unpaid labour.

Phenomenal that across all the people who are opposed to this answer, not a single one is disputing the devaluing of labor, they’re just essentially arguing it’s not that bad to them (in so many words). Seriously, y’all need class consciousness. You would do much more good in the world to support your fellow workers, not least of which doing so benefits your own standing. The only way supporting workers doesn’t also support you is if you are one of the few with vested capital in a university (like, e.g., aforementioned board members).

While I disagree with the answer of Azor Ahai -him- I won't vote against it as I realize opinions can differ. However:
Under certain circumstances, yes, you can volunteer your services. One requirement I'd have is that the college/university be a non-profit. The second being that you gain something of value for whatever you do, though it need not be money.
I don't think that every interaction in life needs to be transactional, and especially not a financial transaction. That seems to me to be mentally and morally impoverishing. I'm happy to volunteer to speak to students without pay (retired now). My spouse volunteers weekly at our community library. Like a college the library isn't there to make money for anyone, but to provide a valuable service while balancing costs against revenues.
If you learn something from the experience it would be of value. If you support a long term relationship with a professor or two, it would be of value. If you have fun while waiting for other opportunities, it might be of value.
But a relationship as a TA might be out of the question. There are many reasons, one of which is that if you have contact with students then the university is potentially at risk of malpractice suits if you mess up and so need a formal relationship with those who do it. But aiding a professor on course materials might be open and you might learn something. You might be able to observe their teaching, giving you insight into whether you want to do that as a career.
I doubt that a university would use you as an excuse to deny someone else a paid position. Your contribution is small enough that it has little impact on budget or employment. Professionals in many fields come to speak to students without pay. That enhances the education and doesn't seem to deny employment to others.
One can be generous in life. That isn't an issue. But one should seek opportunities in which they get some value even if it is only satisfaction. No one pays me here for any contributions I try to make and might occasionally succeed at.

There is a surprising lack of ethics in these answers to a question about ethics! Is X action ethical is always a quagmire, and it is nearly impossible to separate it from your personal values. We can use different ethical frameworks to examine your actions, but ultimately the impact of those frameworks depends on what you already see as good or bad.
Ethics
First off, from an official university perspective, I cannot fathom any way that you would be violating a student/employee/researcher code of ethics by volunteering your time to develop course materials. If that is what you're asking, then consider yourself vindicated. Go volunteer with a clean conscience! If you're interested in actual ethics then read on.
Aristotle's virtue ethics usually considers virtue to be the mean attribute that lies between two extremes (vices). By practicing virtuous actions and emulating people we know to be virtuous, we cultivate our own virtues. Volunteering is usually considered a generous action, and generosity is often recognized as a virtue that lies between the extremes of selfishness (a nothing-is-free mentality) and being prodigal (a sort of naive mentality of giving everything away to anyone who asks). I think this is what the very good answer by Azor Ahai -him- is getting at: is giving your time and energy to the university a worthwhile endeavor? Are you giving foolishly, or wisely? This is really a question that only you can answer for yourself. Azor Ahai -him- provides some arguments for people who see this as a foolish (and therefore not virtuous) use of your time and energy.
On the other hand, we could examine the problem from Kant's categorical imperative: if you could make a rule that describes your behaviour, would applying that rule to everyone else result in a world you would consider better or worse. (This is a simplification, please do not crucify me in the comments for misrepresenting Kant). How would we formulate a rule for this behaviour? Perhaps "Students who want to improve their teaching portfolios and build an academic interest in the material of a course must volunteer their TA services for free." Almost all grad students want to improve their teaching portfolios (if they continue in academia), and many are interested in the course material that they teach as TAs. So then most TAs should be working for free. Does that result in a better world or a worse world? Or "Students who can afford to not be paid must volunteer their TA services for free." Why would I hire a poor student to do this work when a rich student will do it for free? Better world or worse world? Of course this depends on many other factors: are graduate students relying on TA money for their living expenses at your institution? I cannot answer these questions for you. The crux of Kant's ethical viewpoint is that maybe one person acting this way has a minor impact on the university, the other TAs, and/or society as a whole, but if everyone acts this way then there could be serious consequences. Kant invites us to consider these consequences in a structured way.
The final ethical framework in the trio of frameworks taught to undergraduate students is Utilitarianism. This framework looks at whether the action you take maximizes the good results (or sometimes minimizes the bad, depending on the flavour of Utilitarianism). You volunteering your time seems like it would make you happy and satisfied (good!), it would probably make the instructor that you work for happy and satisfied (good!), it would probably make the university administrators nominally satisfied that they don't have to pay anyone (good!). Maybe your volunteering has a minor contribution to depressing TA wages (see Ben's answer) (bad?). Does the good outweigh the bad? How do we measure that? Again, only you can answer this question for yourself based on your personal morals regarding what is good or bad.
TA Unions and Conflicts of Interest
Something else that I am not seeing much in other answers is the teaching assistant (TA) labour legal situation at your institution. At my institution, TA positions, lecturer positions, and non-faculty course instructor positions are unionized. What is or isn't considered unionized work is very clearly defined. Developing and improving course materials is considered either TA work or course instructor work at my institution, though this will vary from place to place. In some departments at my institution, TA work is a mandatory part of the graduate student funding package (graduate students are required to do TA work if they want to receive the full student salary from their department). By volunteering to perform this work for free you personally are not necessarily doing anything wrong, but the university would be opened to grievances (legal action) against them by the union by accepting your labour for free.
This is the de jure reality at my institution. However, the de facto nature of TA work often sees TAs working longer hours than specified in their contracts, or performing extra unpaid duties. Many TAs are graduate students working for professors in their department. Maintaining good relations with these professors is often crucial for the future academic success of these students, especially if they are working as a TA for their research supervisor. Many professors at my institution expect TAs to put in a little off-the-books work when they demand it. A TA who is by-the-book, with a that's-not-in-my-contract mindset will likely sour these relationships. Note that unlike an independent contractor-client relationship, TAs don't get to pick what professors they work for at my institution. They do get to indicate preference, but ultimately they will be assigned wherever TAs are most needed. As a result, whether intentional or unintentional on the part of the professors, TAs can feel coerced into "volunteering."

I'm going to give the (slightly-simplified) perspective of a neoclassical economist on this one:

Every labour-supply curve includes natural variation in individual supply: In any labour market, there is going to be variation in the amount of money that different people want to do a job, and the overall "supply curve" for labour in an industry/job is determined by aggregating this over all people who are willing to work in that industry/job.  A person who is willing to "volunteer" (i.e., work for zero wages) will shift the supply curve and reduce the price of labour, but this is not fundamentally different from any person coming into the market who is willing to work the same job for less money than any other person.

Every person who is willing to work for less depresses wages, but that is perfectly normal: Ceteris paribus, if a person comes into an industry willing (and able) to do the same job for less money, this shifts the supply curve and reduces wages.  As a common example, this occurs every time there is substantial immigration of poorer people into a wealthy country; the incoming migrants are usually willing to work for less than the domestic population, and this depresses wages in industries they move into.  This phenomenon regularly leads to objections that incoming migrants are "taking our jobs!" and controversy over this has been a regular feature of industrial action for generations.  (For a rather uncharitable ---but funny--- take on this, the boys at South Park have helpfully summarised this objection).

Adaptation of the labour market to new entrants is economically efficient: From an economic perspective, and with some stipulations and caveats attached (that I will not go into here), this is a natural part of the supply-demand mechanism and it is economically efficient for workers willing to do the same job (at the same quality) for less to drive out those who are unwilling to work for less.  One can certainly sympathise with those who find that wages in their industry drop, but the overall social effect of adding willing workers is usually positive, particularly in the long-term.

Based on this, there is no ethical problem with volunteering: If you take the above view of the labour market, essentially based on neoclassical economic theory, then you will conclude that the addition of a willing worker (at zero or low wages) is a net positive for society, even if it may cause some temporary dislocation of other workers.  This removes the only major ethical objection to volunteering that I am aware of, so I would conclude that there is no ethical problem with volunteering.

A slight caveat --- young people are sometimes naïve about the workforce: As a slight caveat to the above, I would say that young people who have not had long periods of experience in the workforce may tend to overestimate the value of volunteer work to their career and this overestimation can allow institutions to "take advantage" of the free labour provided by young volunteers.  Older people tend to be pretty averse to working for free for institutions that profit from their labours, unless they hold the social value of those institutions in very high regard.  It is possible that a systematic bias towards overestimation of the value of volunteering (by younger people) could lead to some overall inefficiency in the labour market, as the realised value of volunteering falls short of expectations.  That probably doesn't rise to the level of an ethical problem on the part of the worker, though it may give rise to an ethical issue on the part of the institutions that seek them out for employment.

Nicely written and interesting answer, but your view of ethics as being synonymous with economic efficiency isn’t something that I think most people would agree with.

@DanRomik: Thanks Dan.  To be clear, I'm not suggesting that ethics is synonymous with economics (though I do believe that a good system of ethics emerges largely from cooperative game theory).  I'm just pointing out that economics tells us some causality here that would appear to dispose of the only ethical objection to this issue that I'm aware of.  If there's some other ethical objection to volunteering (for which perhaps an economic response does not dispose of it), I'm happy to hear it.


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How To cite a Youtube Channel in LaTex
I am currently writing a research article and I need to cite a Youtube channel in my (LaTex) references. How can I do that? I know how to do it with a single video. But how to do it with the channel as a whole, like this channel?

You really shouldn't cite a complete channel. You also wouldn't cite just an author name without specifying which article or book.

Thanks, @BrtH Actually I am using the content in the channel in the research, so may I can cite it as a URL?

Does this answer your question? How should I cite a website URL?

This sounds like a technical LaTeX question which would make it off topic here. I presume that OP understands what information to communicate to readers (such as channel name, URL, etc.)

A Youtube channel is uniquely defined by the channel url, so you should probably cite that. (See for example this post on the TeX stack on how to do that.) You'll need to think of something to enter into the "author" field, which, depending on the channel, may be hard. For "title" you should probably enter the name of the channel. Or use the name of the channel as author and use "Youtube channel" as title.

I would prefer the second option: name of the channel  as the author and Youtube Channel as title. Unless you refer to a particular video of the channel.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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How to politely ask my thesis advisor that I want to work independently as the meetings are not productive for me?
I am a master student, my advisor gave me a topic he is not an expert at, a new field to him.
The point is he is not an expert in the field he threw me in. He doesn't even give me technical advice in the topic when I ask. He is very old and lazy and the topic is a bit different than what he used to publish in so he doesn't understand much of what I am saying. Partly because he doesn't have a background in the field, our meetings are not productive. I stopped visiting and now he blames me in front of his colleagues!
I am very irritated as I am not benefiting from the meetings. Why should I waste my time when I am fine working on my own?
How to politely tell him "your meetings are not beneficial and I will work on my own"?

There is lots of other types of advice you can get from an advisor that doesn't directly related to the nitty gritty of the task you're working on. Are you sure you don't just have a conflict of expectations rather than truly getting nothing out of it?

The goal of a master's degree is (among others) learning the first steps of doing research. Most master students are not great at that yet. That's what your advisor is for. They are the persons that can help you to become a better researcher, on how to structure your thesis, on what your priorities should be, how to approach people who might be experts in this field.
Another thing that this advisor might be able to help you with is your communication. You say that he doesn't understand what you are saying because he does not have a background in the field. I've heard/read (forgotten the source) an idea along the following lines:

If somebody doesn't understand what I am explaining, it doesn't mean that they are not intelligent enough to understand, it means that I should explain it better.

This only holds up to some degree, but given that this is an academic advisor, you should be able to explain your ideas and thoughts in a way that they can understand.
Abandoning the meetings doesn't sound like a way to handle this where you end up with a good thesis. Your advisor will be grading you and it is your best interest to make the thesis in such a way that they understand and are comfortable reading.

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


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How much should I tidy up code before I share it?
I'm about to give my first conference presentation, in historical linguistics. (In case it matters: I'm an undergraduate presenting at an undergraduate conference in the UK). My presentation and results are the result of corpus analysis using Python and pandas. I want to share my code (in a public Github repo), but at the moment it is fairly rubbish - messy, disorganised, and full of half-working things, tangents I abandoned, etc.
My question is: how far should I re-organise my code before I share it?
Should I:

Write a reproduce script, which draws together the different bits of different files (e.g. .py files, Jupyter notebooks) that I ended up actually using, and spits out the results I discuss in my presentation. Not share the previous versions, attempts, unused scripts etc.
Leave the repository as is (i.e. with the results for different questions coming out of different scripts in a somewhat disorganised way), but delete unused code and write a README which explains which script does what.
Leave the repository as is, including all the guff. Write a README which explains which bits do what and which bits are guff.
Do something else entirely.

My initial thought was option 1, but then I read this question and specifically this article which suggest that the right thing to do would be option 3 - including all previous versions etc.
It's worth noting that it is not massively complex (it's a corpus linguistics study, not computational linguistics/NLP, and probably only runs to about 300 lines in total, most of which are applying regexes and looking at frequencies of particular patterns in the corpus), and I imagine not particular technically impressive to future graduate applications committees or employers :)

Related: Should I share my horrible software? A different question but some of the answers discuss some of the points in your question.

The article you linked does NOT in any way suggest that you should not do #1.  Why do you think it does?

Good book on the subject of writing good code: Code Complete by Steve McConnell.  https://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670/  I wish I had this book when I first started coding.

I want you to imagine yourself in a few years from now. You're writing up your PhD thesis and need to check that result you presented in that undergraduate conference back in 2023. You can't really remember what you did, so you want to reproduce the calculations. You also want to remake the figures with nicer formatting. You comb back through your Github, find the repository, and, with bated breath, open it.
What would you want to see at that moment?
Is it a) a repository full of random, messy files with a script that reproduces some of the old work; b) a repository with a few files and a README that explains what some of them do; c) a repository full of random, messy files and a README?
Hopefully your answer is: d) none of the above.
Messy, undocumented code is of no use to anyone; and since chances are you're going to be the only person using this code you're shooting yourself in the foot by leaving it that way. You've got a big job ahead of you to clean it up. In future, you will know to do these things as you go along instead of at the end of a project.
My advice:

Sit down and structure the code with a pen and paper. Which scripts/classes/functions depend on each other? Which order are they executed in? Which parts do what?
Remove defunct/unused parts of the code.
Add docstrings to all classes and functions. These should explain very clearly what each class/function does, and list all the variables in the functions and their types.
Add comments to any line of code where it's unclear from the code itself what it's doing (if you have good variable and function naming conventions this shouldn't be too many).
Commit the changes to the repository little and often. Much better to clean the code incrementally than do it all in one go and accidentally delete a vital script.
Related to the above, in future make sure you know how to use git efficiently. It sounds like you could have done with making some branches for those tangents you abandoned, rather than leaving them on the main branch.
If you really want to work on it, see if you can synthesise your code into a proper package rather than a collection of scripts. Your idea for a "reproduce" script would be akin to a Run() class for the package.
Write a Jupyter Notebook which reproduces every result the code spits out. Take advantage of the markdown cells to write a few sentences/paragraphs about each one. Commit the executed notebook to the repository.
Share your nice, clear code with the world without shame.

With these steps, the original, messy version of the code will still be visible in the commit history. But the latest version will be clean and well-documented. This means that it should work out of the box three+ years down the line, but you will also be able to go back and look at those deleted tangents should you need to.
A good way to learn how to write nice, well-documented code is to look at the best piece of public code in your field and examine its structure, documentation and commit history. When you write code in future, follow that example. An even better way is to starting modifying such public codes e.g. to add new features, and submitting pull requests so that other people will review your changes, and in the process, your code.

This is exactly the right approach (+1).  Always write for your future self (who has forgotten everything you did).

You should do number #1 if you can.  Doing #2 is better than nothing.
A combination of #1 and Number #3 is something you should do for your own records,  but you don't need to share. Think you this as a computational lab notebook.


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UG Research Advisor Not Willing to Write LOR to support my transfer application. How to proceed?
This post is related to my situation Dropping Out And Applying Somewhere Else
. After explaining to my undergraduate research advisor that I withdrew from my PhD program (1 month in) and that I decided to apply to Thesis-master's program Which better fit my career goals, he told me he is not writing me a letter. I am not sure if this deems all my research work in undergrad useless. I have the work documented as a credit course on my transcript with a grade of pass and one grade of -A. So I am not sure if I should mention my work with him or just focus on work I have done in my courses.

Do you know why they won't write you a letter?

He explicitly told me that I had a chance and did not take it so he told me to ask someone else. Unfortunately, even before applying (last year) he was not interested in writing the letter, untill one of his grad students who supervised me had to convince him.

It is fine to mention your undergraduate work. You did it and you received graded credit for it. Talk about it! (In a statement of purpose or something).

What did you do?
What did you learn?
How did it inspire you?

True, yes, your undergraduate advisor would not write you a letter of recommendation. There is no need to mention that. If you have other people who are willing to write you a strong letter, you should be fine. When I sit on admissions committees, there are a few things we take into account:

We are only seeing a portion of the student's profile. We don't know the whole story (either way).
Sometimes professors are hard to get along with in regards to grades, authorship, LORs, etc.
Students are going to school while life happens around them. This means that sometimes the circumstances of life will affect their decisions and opportunities relative to school.
We do not expect a masters student to come in on day one and have the skill set of a master's student at the end of his or her degree. We are looking for potential.

Overall, I am more interested in learning about what you, not an advisor, did. If you are competent in explaining your research, that is going to bode better for you than having a LOR from someone who grudgingly has been forced into writing you a LOR.  I would not spend too much time trying to make this donkey (the undergrad advisor) pull the cart (LOR) he does not want to pull.

Should I remove his name completely from my application? or should I just put his contact information on my CV and that is it.

@GahamDel Keep his name on the CV. He did advise you and it needs to be acknowledged. I think it would look stranger to not list him at all.


text:
Accepted letter for Ph.D. in February, but now they say they don't have funding! Is that possible?
My husband received an acceptance letter in February to get his Ph.D. in History. We are in the US. When he e-mailed to the funding department asking what else he needed, the funding department said they had everything.
Now in April he e-mailed to the Department where he supposedly is going to do his Ph.D. to ask about registration, start day, etc., and the president of the department answered saying he is not hopeful about securing his fellowship line at the moment, and the funding they have now will cover the currently enrolled students and if he has something left, he will not know until august.  But classes start in August and we have to move 700 miles away!
Is there something we can do after my husband has been accepted but with no funding?

Did the offer letter he received mention a funding guarantee at all?

Not, it doesn't say anything about guarantee. We thought when you were accepted it was because they had the funding for you. :/

@ANA: That's unfortunately not the case. Speaking from personal experience in a different field (but same country) only, in their acceptance letters most programs in that field offered funding, only 1 did not at all (maybe just to me), and 2 had a nasty "we'll fund the top/top 2 students after year one" policy. It's important to look for this early on, and factor funding into your decision which offer to accept. Similarly, look if you are offered a fellowship or an opportunity to work as an RA/TA (those opportunities are often not guaranteed either).

He still waiting for 3 more schools to answer, but he wanted to get into that one, it was a perfect match for him.

@ANA Unfortunately, if there isn't an explicit funding guarantee in the letter then they are under no obligation to fund you. The department head is probably being honest, there is a slim chance that there will be leftover funding but it's doubtful. If you want to attend, you will have to plan to pay your own tuition and living costs out-of-pocket.

Did they send you a letter describing the fellowship award or the funding?  Did they send you an email?  Do you have a promise of funding?  The situation will depend heavily on the specifics of exactly what you were promised, and how you were promised.  We can't answer the question without that information -- please edit the question to provide these kinds of additional details.

If they did not say they had funding at the time of the offer, then it is quite likely they do not have funding now. This is especially true in the humanities. Cases where the offer include a statement about funding generally mean the department has funding, but it is not unheard of for things to happen. Generally statements about funding include lots of conditional clauses protecting the department in case things fall through. In the humanities funding for a PhD is much harder to get. It is worth asking about the possibility of teaching.

You note that this involves a humanities department at an American university, so my answer is that this kind of bare-bones offer is unfortunately all too common -- especially at state universities.
At these places, your letter of admission is just that -- admission into the graduate program. Your admission letter has to explicitly offer a financial package which might include:

a waiver for tuition and fees
a graduate stipend (independent of teaching, or tied to teaching)
offer of teaching or research fellowships (either guaranteed or ad hoc)
internal fellowships

If this isn't the case, you would be liable for not only your own living expenses, but for any tuition and fees that are charged. At some places, this might be quite a lot of money given that you might be treated as an out-of-state student and charged tuition and fees accordingly.
At this stage, it's difficult for any of us to recommend what to do. It seems you have several options:

Accept the situation and prepare for the financial difficulty of doing graduate work while working at the same time or taking out loans.
Withdrawing from the program (and perhaps reapplying to the same or other programs next year in the hope of a better offer).
Waiting for the other offers and either accepting an offer with a better package or trying to leverage them against your original school for more money
Writing to the graduate director or your prospective advisor and plead your case.

All of these carry very real risks, so proceed with caution.

Just a clarification for some of the above answers, from an American faculty member in the humanities.
Funding in the humanities (like everywhere else in the academy) is a contractual matter. In my experience, all funding offers are processed by a graduate school or other university-level office, not the individual department. Letters are sent early in the admissions process, signed by a representative of the university. Once the student signs and returns the contract, it will not be withdrawn (assuming you are dealing with a respectable university).
Department admissions committees make decisions about who to offer funding to. It is frequently true that there is less funding available in humanities and social science departments than other graduate programs in many state universities. But we do not make funding offers without actually having the funding lines available. Obviously, that would be highly unethical because there is so much at stake for the student, as the OP notes.

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text:
How often do professors regret accepting particular graduate students (i.e., "bad hires")?
How often PIs have to deal with "bad hires" in their lab/group? I sometimes hear the PI/trainee relationship be compared to marriages, where half ends in a divorce. There are also posts like these that reinforce this.  Is there actual truth to this? I think most of the PIs (principal investigators) I've met have handled this situation professionally, but I do wonder how they actually feel.
Specifically: how often does it happen that professors regret hiring particular grad students? How is this typically dealt with? What is the typical nature of the problem?

You could also ask "How often do graduate students regret accepting particular professors?". I've seen a couple of PhD students who have certainly felt like this!

The nature of the problem is that half the hires are below the median.

I've discussed this with a few line managers, I've hired a few people, and I've checked with headhunters. We all come to very similar numbers**.
Once you're doing the recruiting well, you can expect that for every five people you hire, on average one will be an extremely good hire, and three will do the job well enough. And the fifth will be regrettable, through some combination of lack of will, lack of ability, an absence of a shared understanding of what the role requires, & personality clashes. You can try moving them to different roles, get them more training, work with them to find out what they need. Sometimes one of those things will work. Sometimes, none will.

** My primary dataset is academia. I got similar answers from the wider market for professionals (not manual workers)

Is this for academia or the general workplace?

@RoboKaren - It has been my observation and opinion that the distinction between the two is not as strong as those who live solely in either domain have led themselves to believe.

I've only had a handful of PhD students and postdocs. Of these, only one turned out to be a "bad hire" -- he did almost nothing in his year of candidature, and I caught him lying to me and to others more than once. After trying everything -- offering alternative projects and easier starting tasks, offering time management and planning training, directing him to free counselling services -- I and his co-supervisor implemented a performance management plan, and discontinued his scholarship when he did not respond. For me, this was a lesson to vet references carefully before taking on a student.
I also regularly host visiting Masters-level students for 3-month internships/research projects. Some of these work out better than others. Some are a little lazy or not quite intellectually up to the task, while others are fantastic. With so little at stake, none have been disasters and all have accomplished something in their time, but not all of them would have worked out as PhD students, had that been their aim.

It sounds like you went above and beyond to me.  I wouldn't fault an adviser for parting ways with a graduate student after doing less than you tried.

From the people I have talked to (i'm a postdoc myself) it happens and it seriously sucks. Firing postdocs or throwing out students is very difficult and even if you succeed it will likely take so long that the project would be nearly over by the time the wheels of beauracracy finish grinding.
Add that to the fact that most projects only have a small number of PhD students and postdocs and it can be very difficult to salvage a research project where bad people were hired.


text:
How to gracefully step back from academic administration duties during the pandemic?
I am a tenured professor who holds some administrative positions (e.g., graduate director) in exchange for teaching reduction. I had previously asked about the administrative tasks consuming all my time, and this community helped me reprioritize my efforts.
The trouble now is the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the exceptional situation, my management work has increased exponentially. This is not "what I signed up for." I am burned out from administration and want to step back from this position and focus on my research (i.e., quit my leadership position while retaining my professorship).
My concern is that if I quit my leadership position abruptly in the middle of a pandemic, it could reflect poorly on me and burn bridges. I am thinking of announcing my resignation now, but sticking around for 3-4 months to ensure a smooth transition. Is this reasonable? Are there other things I could do to ensure a smooth transition? Or should I just force myself to finish the two years left in my term?

Potentially an interesting question here, but you had attracted several downvotes and close votes, so I made a "major revision" to the text. Feel free to re-edit if I botched anything.

Are there any particular factors that make this role more onerous for you than for anyone else who might have to take it on?

The only part of this that is on-topic, and not a matter of personal opinion, is "Are there other things I could do to ensure a smooth transition?" As for the rest, you need to ask yourself how you weigh various things: your dislike of the workload, your desire to focus more on research, how much you care what others think of you, how much you care about the overall wellbeing of the department, etc. I don't see how anyone else can do this in your place. (Your questions are all very good ones, and it's certainly a tough situation.)

I have to admit to some ambivalence about the issue -- which may be what many of your colleagues might feel as well, and that might affect how they see your decisions.
On the one hand, I think we all sympathize with your situation, and your desire to go back to be a "regular faculty" with a life that revolves around teaching and research. I get that a pandemic is not what you had in mind when you took the job of graduate coordinator, and that the resulting upheaval in all things academic (and non-academic) lead to a workload that is not what you thought it was going to be.
On the other hand, however, you did get a promotion and (I assume) a pay raise that reflects your increased level of responsibility and leadership. By accepting these, you are also accepting the fact that your job becomes less predictable and that you become a more direct subject of the whims of the higher-ups wanting you to respond to this or that. That's really no different than nearly any other promotion: If you work at McDonalds, you can have a low-stress job by flipping burgers Monday through Friday 9-5; just don't accept the promotion to shift manager, because then you have to deal with workers not showing up, unhappy customers, etc. So while you say "this is not what I signed up for", I'd argue that in a sense you did actually sign up for it -- maybe not in such explicit terms, but the uncertainty comes with the job, and it is rewarded in certain ways.
So while I assume that your colleagues will have personal sympathy, they might also ask you why they paid you more (or gave you teaching reductions) if you jump ship when showing leadership is actually required. I suspect that it might also be difficult to find someone to replace you during these times, and that might also factor in how your colleagues see your decisions. A department actually needs its graduate director, so not having one is going to be a problem.
In the end, talk to your department head and your colleagues how they see the situation. You might also discover ways in which you can lighten your workload somehow, and become happier with your role. For example, if you find that during the day, you stomp out the really urgent fires and in the evening at home deal with the mundane and boring stuff, consider whether one could hire a student worker to do at least some of the work that mucks up your cogs. Delegation is often possible, and your department head might recognize that it's going to be cheaper and easier to find ways to make your more comfortable with your role, than to replace you.

(+1) Excellent answer. But my third stint as my department's grad program director happened because the department head told a colleague that they would be the grad program director. Said surprised colleague declined, so I volunteered (third time's a charm). The next 8 months I was associate head, grad program director and undergrad program director. I also taught a large enrollment gen chem section. No promotion or pay raise. That was what finally burned me out: I dumped all the administrative duties and was much happier and more productive.

Have you ever worked at McDonald's in a "low-stress job"?!

@user111388 Fair enough, but you get the point: Maybe high stress but low unpredictability, and when you're off work you're off work.


text:
Online publication system for a journal
I'm looking for solutions to help modernizing the publication of a scientific journal on the web. Since 2004 we are using a simple but cumbersome method of publication, by crafting html/css files from templates, with a bit of php/mysql to maintain the authors' database. We now have the opportunity (time and server access) to upgrade the hosting software system.
We (extensively) tried OpenJournalSystems, but it's too comprehensive and cumbersome for us, we have a simpler paper review and publication process. I haven't found any other solution like OJS that's also free and open source (the journal is open access).
As of today, I'm envisaging two types of solutions :

a classic CMS (like wordpress) with a "journal" theme (like Annotum ?)
a handmade PHP/MySQL system using a PHP Framework (CakePHP, CodeIgniter, ...).

Anyone has some experience to share ?

In addition to the OpenJournalSystems (OJS) software, I'm aware of the following free and open source solutions that you might want to consider. They are similar to OJS in terms of functionality, but, perhaps, simpler:

DPubS (Digital Publishing System);
EPrints.

While I would strongly prefer open source software, just for completeness, below I will mention some commercial hosted solutions:

Atypon's Literatum;
bepress' Digital Commons.

Finally, a few words on alternative solutions that you consider. In my opinion, the CMS solution is feasible, but, you will likely to lose some features found in specialized open source solutions, such as DPubS or EPrints, for example, document workflow, flexible user rights management and more. I would be very cautious about and, actually, don't recommend the handmade MySQL/PHP system (or any other handmade solution, for that matter) due to various reasons, including, but not limited to, significant efforts required for creation and maintenance of such system.

Thanks for your input. DPubs and EPrints seems to be complex and not very recent solutions. I think i'll focus my search on the web publication aspects instead of the paper reviewing workflow. I've found some pointers on this post : http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=353:tools-and-platforms&catid=80:articles&Itemid=379

@LaurentJégou: You're welcome and good luck! The post you referred to is indeed interesting.

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text:
How much time does each stage of paper in Elsevier Editorial System (EES) take?
We have submitted a paper to an Elsevier Journal and now I want to know how much time each stage in article lifecycle take?
There is an article in Elsevier site which describes different status of a paper from submission to publication:

Submitted to Journal
Editor Invited (Conditional - this step may not occurs)
With Editor
Under Review
Required Reviews Complete
Decision in Process
Completed – Accept

It also noted that:

Please Note: Most journals aim to communicate decisions to authors within four months of the start of the review process. There are a number of factors that may influence the actual time taken, most notably the availability and responsiveness of the article's referees. In consequence, peer review times do vary per journal. During the peer review process your article will show a status of ‘Under Review’.

But our paper status is Technical Check In Progress. this status is not mentioned in Elsevier site! I'm confused about this statuses. and now after 40 days the status is still in that stage. I want an estimation about time of this steps to see if I should be concern or not.

@EnergyNumbers The stage Technical Check In Progress is not mentioned in elsevier site! that's the confusing part. and now after 40 days the status is still in that stage. I want an estimation about time of this steps to see if I should be concern or not

@sajjadG write to the editor, ask him!

@EnergyNumbers yes, Thanks. I edited my post.

There is no reasonable field-independent answer to this question.  Even within a field, the time for processing different papers at the same journal can vary a lot.

Voting to close for what David Ketchesn said. The only thing that we can answer here is that Technical Check in Progress should not take 40 days.

Each electronic manuscript handling system typically has a set time frame for each part of the review-revisions process. The systems have default values which, I would assume, are what most journals use. It is, however, possible to custom make the different time periods for each part of the process.
1.Submitted to Journal:
This usually does not involve a lot of time and a reasonable time frame might be 5-10 days depending on factors such as workload, time of year etc. The step might involve inspection of the quality of the submitted material, but not necessarily.
2.Editor Invited (Conditional - this step may not occur):
This may again be another 5-10 days and may be affected by workload etc.
3.With Editor:
The main problem that occurs here is difficulty to assign reviewers. The editor may also be overloaded with work. The time frame is likely something like 3 weeks but will vary.
4.Under Review:
Each journal has a time frame and  3 weeks is what I am accustomed to in my field. Reviewers that accept reviews and never return them is a problem here. How quickly the editor tries to assign other reviewers to speed up the process will vary from person to person and journal to journal.
5.Required Reviews Complete:
I am not sure if you actually mean revisions here because typically the author gets about 3-6 weeks to revise the manuscript. This is another point where delays can occur but they are self-inflicted.
6.Decision in Process:
The decision process may require some time since the editor needs to read the revised manuscript and the revisions/rebuttal from the author to make a decision. In many cases there is cause for another round of reviews which would loop back to 4 and 5.
7.Completed – Accept:
7 could be 6 if the manuscript gets accepted after one round (rare in many circumstances).
Once accepted, the manuscript goes to copy editing and type-setting. This may be a quick process depending on the resources provided by the publisher. Journals using LaTeX have the advantage of having print ready proofs basically at the turn of a switch.
To sum up. Each of these steps can take various amounts of time depending on the working conditions at the journal as well as the expedience of reviewers and authors. I think the time frames I have outlined are reasonable but that does not mean all journals will be that quick (or slow, depending on your view).

This is all very field-specific.  Some of these numbers are way off for my field.

@DavidKetcheson - I agree, some of these are one day for my field, and some of them are longer. I don't think its possible to get a field-agnostic, or even journal-agnostic answer to this question.

Could you please list some of the journals these statistics include? Is Pattern Recognition Letters one of them?

@Peter Jansson: when a paper spend 3 days at the status of "with editor" at Elsevier and gets "under review" after that, does it mean that the editor has been successful to invite enough number of reviewers in 3 days, and they have accepted to review the manuscript? I mean, at which stage these times are counted: 1. the time that is taken to select reviewers, 2. the time that is given the reviewers to decide to review the paper 3. the time that a reviewer refuse to review the paper and journal search to find another available reviewer? It shows "with editor" at these stages or "under review"?

@m123 Yes I would say so but I do not know the details of the Elsevier system and if or how much an individual journals can customize their flow.

@PeterJansson: Thanks for your information.

I happened to have recently gone through most of this process with EES in the past few months and can provide my actual timeline (but not done yet!), for what it's worth:

Submitted to Journal: Day 0
Editor Invited (Conditional - this step may not occur): N/A
With Editor: Day 2
Under Review: Day 14
Required Reviews Complete: Day 44, revisions were then submitted back to EES 14 days later (Day 58).
With Editor: Day 60
Under Review: Day 65
Required Reviews Completed: Day 73
Decision (Accepted): Day 75
Final Disposition: Day 76
Sent to/Received by Elsevier: Day 76
Publishing agreement/Offprint order/Color figures forms sent: Day 80
Proofs Available: Day 81

Once the last few steps are complete, I'll add these, but this covers most of the process.  Perhaps if others do the same, a statistical estimate can be made.

That is so cool a smooth process towards a publication! Congrats! And of course +1 for your answer.

Technical Check In Progress refers to the Technical screening which is explained at:
http://www.elsevier.com/editors/technical-screening

To solve the problem of peer reviewers and Editors being overloaded with manuscripts which contain many ‘technical’ problems such as poor English, Elsevier introduced a Technical Screening process for all journal submissions

This process shouldn't take too long. 40 days sounds too much to me and you may want to email the editor asking for an update on the status of your paper.
UPDATE: I just realised from your profile that you are Iranian. The delay might also be caused by the sanctions implemented by Elsevier against your compatriots.
http://elsevierconnect.com/trade-sanctions-against-iran-affect-publishers/
http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/05/scientific-journals-adapt-new-u.s.-trade-sanctions-iran
A shame, I would say.

your username seems like boycottElsevier! This is not a new issue. The sanction against Iran banned Iranian publication in IEEE before but that was solved and this is new. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iranian_scientists I wonder if this just applies to Elsevier and not IEEE?

@sajjadG I see. Indeed, that was my intention at choosing this username. There is a huge, but paradoxically not too influential, movement called "boycott Elsevier". One of the pioneers of this is Tim Gowers. Elsevier's journals are among the most expensive journals which creates controversy since they only administrate the publications. This thing about sanctioning countries goes against the roots of science. I don't know about the status of the problem with IEEE.

There's a question regarding Elsevier's implementation of the sanctions.

@BoyCodElsevier I asked them about the sanction and they said it's not the reason. The sanction affects US editors and Elsevier has Editors all over the world.

I found this link that describes The Life of an Elsevier Editorial System Manuscript. I think it may be useful to others. It is a real-life report of the editorial process from the beginning to end.
(Answer edited to increase its length in an attempt to avoid future vandalism attempts.)

I have many publication in peer review journals and I would share my experience with manuscript submission. When the manuscript is within the scope and of high quality, one should not always expect that an Editor would be willing to pass it to review. There are many reasons. It is most likely that an Editor would not challenge other recognized authors and, in order to avoid complications, he/she would not take a responsibility to publish it. So, if you receive later something like "the topic is too broad or too narrow and the Editorial Board has decided to reject your submission", - do not be surprised. The most of Editors are fair enough, but sometimes strange thins may happen.

Most of the time will be spent “under review”. That's the limiting step: sending the paper to reviewers, and waiting for them to review it. In some cases, the paper might also take some time before that (“with editor”), if the editor has a hard time finding willing reviewers.


text:
How can I increase my chances of being accepted to a top 20 MS CS program?
I just graduated from one of the older IITs (Indian Institute of Technology), majoring in EE and have a GPA of about 7.8 / 10. I want to pursue a masters degree in computer science from a top 20 university in the US. I have a paper published in an international conference on machine learning and have good test scores(GRE / TOEFL) but I'm worried that my grades could affect my chances. I have some experience in competitive programming, my team finished among the top 10 among 300+ teams in the ACM ICPC regionals and I have a decent Topcoder rating. Not sure if this matters though. I have also made contributions to open source projects and have open sourced some of my projects, some of which have been downloaded thousands of times.
I've seen people from  unknown colleges with higher GPAs getting in to places like Stanford, UIUC, Cornell, CMU etc. Realistically, do I have any chance of getting admitted in a top 10 or 20 program. If not, what can I do to improve my chances within a year?
UPDATE: Well, I guess grades do matter, I didn't get into any of the good schools I applied to. I'll have to give up my hopes of grad school now.

I'll have to give up my hopes of grad school now. — [citation needed]

Realistically, do I have any chance of getting admitted in a top 10 or 20 program.

With a publication in an international conference?  Definitely!
Of course, I'm assuming that you mean a good publication in an internationally recognized conference (not just a conference with papers from more than one country), ideally indexed in DBLP and available over the web.  I'm also assuming that you will have strong recommendation letters describing your contributions to the paper, in specific, personal, and credible detail, as evidence of your research potential.  Ideally, your letters will make direct comparisons with other IIT graduates who have succeeded in strong graduate programs.
I'm also assuming that you have a compelling statement describing your research experience and interests, written in flawless English, and that those interests are a good fit for the faculty at your target departments.  Be sure to describe your ongoing open-source projects.  (The contest stuff?  Meh.)  As Daniel suggests, focus on the work you want to do, not the ranking of the department.
And of course, I do mean you have a chance, not that you have a sure thing.  Graduate admissions is a random process; you have some influence on the distribution, but someone else rolls the dice.  Machine learning is a particularly competitive area, so if you want to continue in that direction, you should apply broadly.  In particular, you should not limit yourself only to programs that appear at the top of some list in some stupid magazine.  Rather, aim yourself at departments whose faculty and students have similar research interests to your own.
(I regularly serve on the CS grad admissions committee at UIUC.)

+1 for this "you should not limit yourself only to programs that appear at the top of some list in some stupid magazine"

Well, I guess grades do matter, I didn't get into any of the good schools I applied to. I'll have to make do with MOOCs now :(

While your question is not a duplicate of Maximizing opportunities to be admitted in top schools or How do you get a bad transcript past Ph.D. admissions?, since in general MS admissions is different from PhD admissions, they may be helpful.
As I said in another answer, your approach is wrong and will be a hindrance in maximizing your chances for acceptance. No school wants to accept someone who only wants to go to their school because of its ranking. You need to tailor your application to demonstrate why you want to go to the particular school.
If the MS programs you are interested in have a research component, you need to identified some potential supervisors, ideally one of your recommendation writers can introduce you. You then need to build on that relationship. Talk to them about how your work fits in with their past and current work. As your relationship with the potential supervisors builds, figure out how they fit into the department. They will likely have the inside knowledge needed for writing a really good application.
For purely taught programs you need to identify what it is about the courses they offer that make the program unique and a good fit for you.

You don't have a chance of getting into a top 20 university because you don't have enough GPA for that. Top 20 universities are for students getting  GPA of above 9.5. But in your case, excluding the GPA you have a great chance of being accepted to top 40 universities like University of Virginia but Cornell, Stanford and all ... You can't just dream of that. So please try for the university which you can afford mentally, academically and financialy.

This is just wrong. There is a nice blog post by JeffE about his experience (on both sides of the table): http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2005/03/re_phd_with_low.html


text:
Seeking PhD students on traditional job sites
I am considering seeking my first PhD student through a job site (indeed, etc).
I am starting an assistant professorship,hope to attract a PhD student this fall, and lack the name recognition to have students banging on my door. I would, nonetheless, like to have a certain amount of choice.
Edit: I should clarify here that I am an Engineer, but also have training in the social sciences. As such, my students will necessarily be interdisciplinary.
I have seen postdocs advertised this way. Thoughts on doing it for a Ph.D. student? Tips from those that have done it?
I am also curious: if this idea bothers you, why? Practically, why is this not commonly done?

In my experience, it's better to recruit students from one's university or any universities in which you know the system/standard.     Students coming from other institutions tend to be a mixed bag.   Also, people on job sites have other motives; e.g., they can't find any other jobs.

Sorry, but that thought makes me a bit itchy. Maybe I'm just old.
Building up your reputation and visibility is a good thing, though. You might be able to do it with a university sponsored web site on which you have at least some control. Showcase your work and interests there. Publish links to papers if appropriate.
It is also a place to say that you are "accepting PhD candidates". If you have funding available be sure to say that as well as what topics you would be interested in supervising.
Another way to potentially find students is to attend conferences at which you are likely to find a good number of undergraduate (or MS level) instructors. Use the social contacts there to spread the word. You might possibly even get to meet a student or two. If you can get on the program, you also spread your reputation. These may be educational focused conferences, such as the SIGCSE conference of ACM in Computer Science. Most of the attendees there are educators and many are also supervising graduate students.
But, maybe you are just a bit bored. If you have the possibility (and are at a large enough place) you can associate yourself with working groups of other professors on topics of mutual interest. It may be that the group itself attracts potential students and you might benefit from that as well as the synergy of joint work.
I'm still thinking about your question and may add more as it occurs to me. I'd warn you, however, that with an advertisement you will likely draw a lot of responses that you will find entirely inappropriate and yet have to deal with. I'm thinking mostly of the ill-prepared who have little idea about what is required.

Related to the second-to-last paragraph, you can let faculty who work on similar topics know you are looking for students. You can ask these faculty to send inquiring students to you if their research groups are full.

@Dawn, indeed. Good point.

However, don't take on the "problem" students of a senior professor as another question here discussed recently. See: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/114143/75368. It is a losing proposition all around.

Thank you, Buffy. My own adviser opposes the idea, but is hard pressed to say why.  He warns that job-seekers will make poor knowledge-seekers. I'm less sure...

@Industrademic, that sounds about right to me. Let his experience guide you here, even if he can't articulate why.

People looking for opportunities on a job website are looking for pay typical of the jobs posted on that site, adjusted for experience level and location.
Only advertise a PhD position on a job site if you are willing to offer typical pay for that site, adjusted for experience level and location.
Advertising average PhD student pay on a site full of higher paying industry jobs just does not make sense to job seekers.

I would not use a job board. Instead, I would use more targeted approaches. Here is the approach I would take (examples for from my own field, yours is likely different).
First, I would reach out to faculty and departments I know and ask them to pass the position announcement out to any students who might be interested.
Second, I would email your graduate student opportunity to professional societies' email lists. I have seen student position postings on email lists such as

The Wildlife Society Biometric work group
Eco-log (The Ecological Society of America's unofficial email list).

Third, I would post on "job boards" that are specific to my field. I have seen this done regularly in the life sciences. Examples include

Texas A&M University's Job Board that posts "Wildlife and Fisheries" positions including graduate student positions (their use of Wildlife and Fisheries jobs broadly covers other types of ecological jobs).
The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry has a Career Center where assistantships can be advertised.

As noted by Buffy, have your own webpage updated so students can see what you're doing as the decide if they want to study with you.

Thank you, RIchard. I've looked at such options in my area (Engineering and Social Sciences). I suspect many intelligent individuals looking at these boards are also looking at job sites, correctly (in my estimation) hedging their bets.

I disagree that intelligent potential students would be browsing job boards. Check out the "Ask the Headhunter" Blog for some good reasons to avoid job boards.


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How should a new professor speak to prospective PhD Students?
I am a new professor, now interviewing PhD students. I lack many of the things they expect: other PhD students to talk to, a clear narrative about my lab's work (as funding is still in flux), and an academic backstory beyond graduate school. How should I help good students to take a chance on me as an advisor?

It would probably serve you well to find a local experienced mentor to work with and learn from. They can help you with what to say, but they can also help you get the skills you now know you lack. They might even serve as a sort of backup for you in working with students over time. Having a more experienced and well-established member on a student's committee from the start can be a big help to everyone.
If the work of the lab permits, it is also probably best to start small. Not too many students and work hard to promote their work so that they will promote you in the future.
But for a more direct answer to the question, I assume that you have established an idea driven research trajectory that you believe has a future. Talk to them about that. Hopefully you are enthusiastic about it, but also have already had some success, if only during your doctoral studies. Try to express your own enthusiasm and what you see as the goals and that you have some ideas about how to achieve them.
They are taking a risk, of course, if you don't have a track record. You need to work, over time so that any risk of failure is mitigated.

In my opinion, this is nothing more than a sales pitch. The first part to getting this right is to know your clientele. They mostly care about two things: (1) doing something that gives them a sense of purpose and (2) doing something that will lead to whatever income they aspire to or close enough.
So, as Simon Sinek would say, start with Why. Perhaps you don't have a clear narrative pertaining to your lab's work, but you can start by crafting a narrative around your lab's purpose. You might think that being a new professor with little real-world experience is a disadvantage, but that doesn't have to be the case. The reason you became a professor straight out of grad school is that there's something interesting about you that an academic institution wanted to see more of. I suspect you might be in this awkward position specifically because you're talented enough to make something out of most research subjects and that there are too many open doors right now to decide which ones to close and which ones to go through. Show them that.
Now for the second point, some students will respond positively if you tell them how relevant the work you're doing or the field you're in is or can be in the job market. When the going gets tough, knowing what you're doing will be relevant professionally can act as an anchor.


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Can I pursue a second CS master's, when I already have one?
I already possess one master's degree in computer science. However, I have now discovered a research idea for which I want to pursue another master's degree in computer science. I am inclined to consequently follow this up with a PhD. I want to do a master's to do initial work to determine the idea's feasibility, and then do a deep dive in my PhD to actually accomplish it. I am in the USA.
My first master's was a coursework/certificate professional degree. I didn't do a thesis and I graduated early.

Is getting a second master's even a good idea? Will my application be even considered?
If so, what specifically are all the questions that my Statement of Purpose needs to answer?
Could mentioning the idea that I later what to do a PhD be a good thing or a bad thing?

3.1 Would it be a good idea to explain that I want to do a Master's to do the initial research to determine the feasibility of the idea, and then followed by a dedicated PhD in this directions?

How can I play this out in a convincing or a reasonable manner?

Why would you not just apply for the PhD directly?  I don't understand the motivation to put another degree in the way of it.

The reputation of the University? Applying for Masters may help me get into more competitive schools compared to the ones I could get into for PhD?

@DeepShrinivasan If you already have a masters, that already gives you a bit of an edge for PhD applications. I highly doubt reputation of the school matters in applications. (For context, I got into one of the top graduate math programs in Texas coming from an institution that just barely started admitting freshmen and sophomores.)

Difference here between "Could I" and "Should I". One way of looking at it, though, is that you already have a taught masters; maybe now, if you can identify the right supervisor, you should be looking at a primarily research-based masters, to do that feasibility work that you mention.

"Applying for Masters may help me get into more competitive schools compared to the ones I could get into for PhD?" This is a bit of a premature conclusion if you have not yet tried applied for PhD programmes. Moreover, if you already have a very specific topic in mind, the key obstacle will be actually finding a willing supervisor who wants to supervise this specific project.

I agree. with your comments about premature conclusion @AdamPřenosil. However, I have seen this first hand with competitive fields like CS.

@SeanRoberson. The thing is, in my case, I simply want to go do a research based masters where I can pursue this idea and determine if this is even possible. Once, I do I want to find a supervisor to help me pursue this idea in a PhD programme.

@Flyto. Thank you that's exactly my plan.

In the US, there would be no need for a second masters almost everywhere and actually no need for any masters (very rare exceptions). The doctoral program in most places is designed to be open to good candidates with only a bachelors.
The question about whether you "can" get a second masters is probably answered "yes, but why". And only an admissions committee can give a final answer. There is nothing in the rules against it, however. And, your coursework masters is probably a plus.
You would be better applying directly to a doctoral program if that is your ultimate goal. You will probably need some class work in any case to enable passing the typical qualifying exams that focus on advanced material.
Once that is done, or nearly done, find an advisor in the subfield of interest and come to a mutually agreed project.
I doubt that a second masters will necessarily be an advantage in getting into a higher rated school. It is a question of things balancing out. The higher up you go, the stiffer the competition. You would have to do extremely well for it to be much of a positive. And, you are delaying a career, most likely.

Thank you for your response @Buffy.

Like I said. Being in the industry, I think I am probably not ready for a full-fledged PhD program. My ultimate goal is to pursue this idea. Which is why I also think that directly enrolling into an PhD without finding a fit (both of my idea and the faculty) in the program  does not seem like a good idea. Therefore, I would like to pursue a research based masters and then enroll in a great university for PhD if I find a fit. i feel like I would be stuck into a long term PhD program if you don't find a fit.
Would love to know if you have more comments on this. @Buffy

Note that a successful doctorate normally requires some negotiation with an advisor on the problem and research area. Coming with a problem you want to work on might work, but it often does not. Be careful.

Thank you so much for your response @Buffy.
I just have one more question and would be glad if you could answer it:
Someone on reddit mentioned for this kind of question that I should first email the university (that I intend to apply to) and ask if they will even consider the application of a student who already has a Masters degree in Computer Science and wants to apply for another.
Do you think it is a good idea? Should I email and ask the university if they will allow someone to pursue a second masters in computer science?
Do you know of any universities who prohibit this?

I doubt it is necessary, but the mail should probably go to the CS department head/chair, not the "university" as a whole. You could phrase it as "Would it be considered a negative that I already hold a MS?".

Thanks @Buffy.
Usually, there is an email for any questions or correspondence beyond/other than the FAQs. Therefore, I am going to use that one. Let me know if you think that's a bad idea.
That phrasing sounds good. Thank you once again.


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My professor cancelled research for the summer, unsure what to do
Around halfway through my spring semester (around April), I met up with my CS professor for research opportunities and he said he'd be happy to take me on for a project. He sent me papers to read over the course of the month, but also said he wasn't expecting me to finish them all since finals started in mid-May. He also said if I'm in town for the summer I can do research throughout this period.
I told him in May that I can stay for the summer by dorming here and would be happy to continue the research through this time, but my dorm wouldn't open until June 1st. My professor was fine with that and said we could meet starting then.
The first month or so was rather good; we would meet and discuss papers, he would give me more papers, etc. We even talked about me continuing this research in the Masters program if I applied and got in. However, around June 20th he just disappeared. I emailed the PhD Student under him and he told me the professor was out of the country, but he'd be happy to take questions. I went with him for questions for the rest of June, but he ended up leaving town prior to the start of July. I never heard anything back from the professor until July 16, who asked if we could meet at a certain date/time. I told him that due to my summer job I couldn't meet at that specific time , but I could definitely meet at another date/time.
I never got an email back, and with work and all I was too busy to follow up immediately. But I followed up the next week telling him my dorm stay would be coming to an end in a week and I was hoping we could meet before then or meet once classes resumed. He emailed me back saying he decided to cancel the research because his fall/summer semester is too busy and he doesn't think he can advise new students any more, and encouraged me to reach out to other professors for research.
I'm not sure if he cancelled research for another reason, or if he genuinely realized he doesn't have time for the research with new students. I feel for investing time and money for my summer to do research, for him to cancel without at least providing a reason or giving me some sort of advanced heads-up is really unfair. How should I proceed with this issue? There was another student doing research alongside me, I plan on emailing him to see if the same thing happened to him. I told my parents and they were pretty mad and said I should take this up with the school, but I want to at least clear this up on the ground before I do anything like this. I won't get reimbursed and I effectively wasted my summer (although I did make money through a summer job, so there's that), but should I just let this die or pursue it?

It doesn't really matter why he did this, and it doesn't really matter to you that it might be unethical for him to treat you this way. What you need is a solution that will advance your studies.
I think the best advice he gave you is to find someone else. Do that. He may not be suited to advise anyone, and he certainly isn't fitted to advise you.
You have, I suspect, made some progress on the tasks that he gave you. Talk to other professors explaining what you have done and asking whether they will take you on as a student. You can also explore whether any of the work you have done is useful if you work under their supervision. Don't press it, but it is possible you can leverage it. They know what they are interested in, and you want to become part of that, rather than necessarily continuing what you've been doing. But the work you have done can be used to show seriousness of purpose to a new professor.
What you want in a professor is someone senior enough that he or she will have plenty of ideas, but also someone who will have the time and desire to help you advance. Very junior professors are too often working too hard to get tenure to be of sufficient help to students. But someone who advises too many students will have little time for you.
Also, it would probably be a mistake to complain about your treatment by the other professor, except to someone of real authority. As a student, you are unlikely to know what sort of politics there is in the department and speaking out, even if valid, might do you more harm than good. All you need is a solution. Focus on that. If you need to yell and scream, yell and scream at the moon.

Even though you have provided a lot of details, it is hard to answer without knowing all the circumstances. However, for me it sounds strage that you think you can not continue research while he is not available for a meeting. Discussions are of course an important part of research but it is not the task of your supervisor to give you guidance with every single step. So it might be the case that your professor thinks you require too much of his own time and are not able to work alone for an extended period of time.
But this is only one option. The most probable one, though, is that he genuinely has too much to do currently due to a recent event (e.g. he just got aware of a new possibility to apply for a grant).
First, don't try to continue the research with this professor. The circumstances will not change and you will desperately try to schedule meetings with him for years. Also a formal complaint will give you nothing or is there any contract signed by the professor that you can continue your research after the summer?
Secondly, and most importantly, do not think that the summer was lost! I guess you learned a lot and you are now more experienced in reading and analyzing papers. This will help you a lot when you are going to continue a career in research. I suggest that use your gained experience and work through publications of potential supervisors first and show that you are genuinely interested in their work by sharing your ideas about their research. This should easily get you a new supervisor! Good luck with that!

Undergraduates often feel they are not qualified to direct their own research. They don't know (or don't feel they know) what's interesting, how to pose specific research objectives and how to pursue them.

@einpoklum Plus, they often aren't qualified (I say this as someone who did plenty of undergrad research) ... I know this question is about CS, but there's a lot of things I would have done wrong in my field (with human subject data) without help


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Journal for machine learning applied in finance
I have written a new paper where I am proposing methodological improvements to neural network training. I have simulation data and empirical results in financial markets to back up my algorithm. I am now looking for a journal to which to submit my paper. Initially, I have thought of submitting to a finance journal and have tried Quantitative Finance but it was rejected there.
The nature of the comments from one of the reviewers suggest to me that perhaps he/she did not understand my paper. Where should I try next? Should I try other computational/empirical finance journals or should I target an application-heavy machine learning journal?

Do you have coauthors or a supervisor who could give you some ideas? Which journals are the papers you cite most published in?

Thanks for your reply. Most of the papers I've cited are in finance. My supervisors are from computer science or maths so they aren't really experts in this application either

Regardless of your specific context, there are tools that may help you with finding appropriate journals based on your paper's Title and Abstract.
For instance, if you want to publish in an Open Access (OA) journal, you can paste your Abstract here and to get recommendations for topically suitable OA journals: https://ojm.ocert.at/
Publishers likewise provide similar tools, such as:

Elsevier's Journal Finder: https://journalfinder.elsevier.com/
Wiley's Journal Finder:
https://journalfinder.wiley.com/search?type=match
Springer's Journal Suggester: https://journalsuggester.springer.com/

I didn't know about the suggesters, thanks for this.

You may not like this answer but if you do not know which journals are relevant for your work you have not read enough literature and your paper is probably not ready to be published.
You need to inform yourself about what other reasearchers have done already, what the current state of the art is for the neural networks and in the financial market of interest, and add references to relevant articles to place your research in this context.
If it turns out that, for example, 10 out of the 30 references you found are from the same journal than that journal could be a good candidate to submit to.

Thanks for your comment. Most of the references are from finance hence it was the first journal I've tried.


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Responding to reviewer comments in IEEE conference
My paper was accepted into IEEE COMPSAC (a comp sci conference). As far as I can tell, it was a straight accept and not "conditional acceptance". The reviewers had some comments/questions on my paper. However, I can't find a means to reply to comments anywhere on the website and the notification email didn't mention the need/mechanism to respond to comments either. Do I still need to respond to reviewer comments?

You take on board useful comments.   There is no need to reply to comments.  I'm aware of conferences that function more like a journal; not too sure about your conference though.

Thanks for the quick response!

Why don't you contact the organizers of the conference?

There are some computer science conference that have a so-called rebuttal period, in which the authors get a chance to reply to the comments by the reviewers. However, this happens before the decision to accept or reject the paper.
Once your paper reached the "accepted" stage, there is no need to reply to the reviewers. The paper has been approved with the expectation that when you prepare the final version of the paper which will be published, you take the reviewer comments into account in a careful way.
This does not mean that each and every change request by the reviewers need to be implemented. Those requests that you believe make the paper worse can be ignored by you, without a need to mention this anywhere. If the paper changed a lot (for the better) because of detailed feedback, it is customary to thank the reviewers for their suggestions in the acknowledgements. There is no obligation to do so, however.


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How do I deal with failure so early on?
I'm in my first year of a STEM PhD and had to sit some exams as part of an external training course. Out of the two I had to do, I failed the first one by 4 points and I'm feeling really rough about it. I'm concerned I'm going to lose my studentship when the time for annual reviews comes around.
How do I deal with failure/setbacks so early on?

You should talk to your supervisor asap. Not only will they reassure you (I honestly think it's very unlikely your studentship would be revoked due to not passing some external exam) but they will know exactly what the rules and possible outcomes are. Don't wait another 3+ months for your annual review, stewing and stressing. Pull the plaster off quickly and move on.

Failure early on? Reminds me of Linus from Peanuts. "Only four years old and I'm already illiterate!"

Have you ever failed an exam before? No? Welcome to postgraduate education.

As simple or naive as this may sound, the best solution is to learn from your mistakes, but not to dwell on them. You failed an exam and this may have consequences, but you cannot go back in the past and change it. It is important that you try to look at your corrected exam copy, understand your mistakes and learn from them. You can also look at what happened during and before the exam and understand what lead you to failure. Is your study method adequate? Were you at the last minute? What was lacking in your preperation?
Failure is normal, do not feel guilt over it. The important is to be able to move on from failure and to learn from your mistakes in order to succeed afterwards.

Thank you, part of the reason I'm upset is because they won't give me my corrected script back. The only comments I received were "too many errors to pass"

Then those are the rules and you will have to live with them, regrettably. You can try to ask for a meeting with the person that gave the exam in order to discuss the errors you made. Sometimes evaluators will not want to hand over a copy of the exam because they want to be able to reuse the material later on.

Good advice here. Work hard to get some feedback so that you can do the suggested retrospective. If necessary ask for a meeting in which you ask what the main issues are and how the prof suggests you address them. Even if you don't get a meeting (though you should) you telegraph your seriousness.