text:
In terms of academic careers, does the department type matter between Computer Science, Engineering, or Information?
One of the oddities of working in an interdisciplinary field is that PhD programs - and ultimately departments where you would like to work in the future - are often offered under different departments. For my personal example, my field is Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and I have the option to join a PhD program in (that is, have received admission offers from) departments that are housed within colleges of Computer Science, Engineering, or Information. "Rankings", to the extent that anyone cares about them, exist separately for each classification, and so they are all "top 5" within their own classification and have a good reputation in the field.
My question is: in considering a plan to seek future academic jobs after earning a PhD (especially as a professor at an R1), is the name of the home department/college that hosts their program something that one should weigh in their decision making? How might the type of department that one gets their PhD from effect one's future career?
Bonus: If department type impacts availability of internships (especially those valuable to an eventual faculty application), or just having the alternative to go into another area of industry/consulting, that could be important for a person to know and consider. "Plan A" is primarily positions in academia, so an answer need not address this to be a good or accepted one.
Note: The  focus of research, topic, equipment, and even coursework will be largely comparable, faculty working in every program have degrees in widely differing topics (including some in Psychology, Art/Design, and Business/Management), and current faculty even often publish in the same conferences.
For example, if you've been involved with a hiring committee in Computer Science, have they evaluated applicants differently if their degree was not specifically in "Computer Science" and instead in Information or Engineering? Or similarly, do Engineering hiring committees have a preference for people with degrees from other Engineering departments? Issues at the administrative culture level? Have you found that informal cliches or hierarchies form between groups?
Ultimately I'd like to know if this a distinction I need to seriously consider in picking a program, or if I can instead focus on the dozen-other factors one should consider to compare options instead.

+1, I have been wondering the same thing about theoretical physics and applied mathematics.

Are you looking to stay in academia or move to industry?

@eykanal An answer considering either, or both, would be good and welcome, as I'm sure others will have different goals. Personally, Plan A would be staying in academia, Plan B would be industry research, Plan C would be product development directly in industry, Plan D consulting - but even as Plan A I'd like to work closely with industry as part of my research. So if consideration of the program would be especially important for internships, working with industry, or non-academic careers, that would certainly be important to know and consider. I'll edit to be clear.

An important difference later down the road would be the tenure process, which can have quite different expectations under different departments.

The name of the department and the branch of the university don't matter in the long run.  But do look at the program's requirements carefully, and why not visit to absorb the culture before choosing? // I figured out what your question is by reading your profile, but I think you could edit your question to make it clear that you are poised to choose among several departments where you would do grad study towards a PhD, and you are wondering what the long-term career implications might be.

@aparente001 I've edited to clarify that this is a question of choosing where to go to obtain a PhD (in my case after receiving admission, but this could help other people in choosing where to apply in the first place). And I will certainly visit in person and spend a few days at each institution, regardless - I just strongly suspect I will really like more than only one, and want to make sure in the end I consider all of the most relevant factors.

Brian - this sounds like what I have heard called a good problem!

My short answer is that if you're staying in academia, it probably doesn't matter much at all. If you're considering leaving, then CS > "Engineering" > IS (for many tech companies, at least), to a mild-to-moderate extent.
My longer answer is that it depends how you sell yourself. The material you learn will likely be very similar, but different communities will focus on different aspects of HCI. This will probably be most evident in the research coming out of each group. To that extent, I recommend taking a good look at the research coming out of each program. The focus of the researchers will give you a good idea about the differences between the programs.

Regardless of the field it can be hard to get a full idea, as a PhD applicant, of what a given department will really be like once you are there, and of how you may be perceived compared to those in similar departments elsewhere once you are nearing the end of your program and applying for jobs in academia or industry. Schools paint a certain picture on their web site, in recruitment materials, etc., but it's not always a completely honest one and may miss particular facets that will impact your career. Outside of aparente001's recommendation of site visits in the comments, if there is time to do so you might consider contacting current or recent PhD students at each of the schools you've been accepted to who seem to share your interests, to talk about their own experiences, perceptions, and career plans. You may then be better able to assess whether your intended career plans and research interests within HCI would be a better fit with the information school, or the computer science school, or the engineering school.
More generally, my own sense (as an information science PhD graduate with some HCI knowledge, albeit it was not and is not my focus) is that information and computer science schools are probably a little closer together when it comes to how they treat and perceive HCI, whereas most engineering schools would take a different tack. Of course, even within information schools with a focus on HCI not all are as appropriate spaces for the same kinds of HCI research, nor do they necessarily have the same perception on the job market. Of course, this isn't an absolute make-or-break decision; if you find a department and PhD program that is a good fit for you, based on the best assessment you can provide, then you should be able to sell yourself appropriately (as eykanal answered) as you get near the end of that program to academia or industry. Good luck!


text:
Where can I publish the draft paper of my masters thesis?
I'm Iranian and now working on  a paper related to my masters thesis. Unfortunately, in my country copyright violation is not unusual and some professors publish students' papers in their own name, excluding the student from the co-author list. I want to publish a draft of my paper including both my name and my adviser in the author list so that I can claim partial ownership of the paper if my adviser attempts to unethically exclude me from the author list at a later date.
Where and how can I publish my draft paper submitted in my name and my thesis adviser's name?
PS: I eventually want to post my article to JASSS-Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.

I think this may be related more to ethics than to copyright issues.

The thing to do is to check your target journal's submission guidelines: what you're looking for, is their attitude to preprints - a preprint is a draft of an journal article, made and distributed before publication.
If they're happy that preprints do not constitute prior publication, you can submit a preprint to a suitable archive (making sure you get the permission of your co-authors first), and this will help establish your precedence.
In the case of your target journal, the "how to submit" page says:

Posting a manuscript on a pre-print server such as ArXiv or SSRN is not considered to be duplicate publication.

So in this case you're ok to submit your draft article to a preprint archive, to establish that this is your work and not your supervisor's, and it won't damage your chances of getting published in your target journal.
We have a number of other questions about preprints, and you might find lots of useful related information on the answers there.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How can you best answer when a Scholarship proposal asks for your objectives?
I come from a developing country and I got admitted to a UK university in MSC, Computer Science. As I am not financially strong, I am also applying for a fully funded scholarship. There is an online form I need to submit for the consideration of this scholarship.
There are some questions that I can't answer them in the way the needs to be answered and convenes the scholarship organization. One of them is:

What will be your objectives during the award?

If I answer this question it would be simple like the following:

My main objective during the period is to get more and more knowledge and to learn new technologies that will give boost to my career.

I'm guessing this answer isn't viewed positively from by a scholarship committee.
What content do scholarship committees expect to see in the "Objectives" section of an application?

What is "your career" going to be? What do you want to do for the world that makes you worth investing in? That's the answer they're looking for.

"During the award" sounds a bit strange to me; I guess it means during the period covered by the scholarship. First, I'd be sure to answer the question with specifics, not generalities. Something like "During the award period, my objectives are: 1) to complete the first year with an A average grade, 2) to master programming skills in Java (or whatever) such that I can independently program a controller for quad-power drone aircraft, and 3) ... etc.

Gary, yes they were asking about the time period covered by the scholarship.

I tried my best to answer the question. Please review it. If you find something missing or inappropriate let me know.
"In my Masters program my goal is to expand my mental horizons, detailed understanding of latest tools and technologies adopted by engineering, with the time. I also want to learn technical, managerial as well as behavioral aspects of the field to work in higher positions. I strongly feel that master’s program will inculcate a strong quality assurance and testing component in my knowledge, so as to raise the level of excellence in my work. I came to know that an academic experience is must-to-have component for growth in global field of Computer Science, as well as to make a mark in professional career. From use of sophisticated tools to advanced theories, MS teaches me all that I need to know to enhance my academic experience and qualification."

Wouldn't impress me. Sure, this stuff can be fun, and can be profitable... but why should we support you, rather than the guy who wants to go into smart prosthetics or whatever?

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


text:
How much research experience to include on a CV?
Do I have to include all of my research projects on my CV?  I have worked in ten different labs, mostly projects from undergrad, and most of my projects and publications are completely unrelated to my current field of research. I'm concerned that if include all my research experiences, people will not know what my current field of research is. I'm also worried since I am an early stage PhD student and my CV is three pages long and may be too long.
Should I include or exclude research experiences unrelated to my current field of study on my CV?

I'm also worried since I am an early stage PhD student and my CV is three pages long. — Sorry? Are you worried that it's only three pages long?

I'm worried it might be too long and contain a lot of distracting information.

What you will soon realise is that there is no one CV to rule them all. More precisely, you will find that you need to tailor your CV for each job application etc, by (de)emphasising various parts of it. Getting a summer internship at McDonalds? Emphasise the hamburger flipping. Applying for a grant, emphasise the research.
Thus how much research experience you include in your CV depends what you are planning to use your CV for. If it were to get a PhD position, I would say "Yes".
Publications stay. They always count.
Gradually, the research projects you did as an undergraduate will become uninteresting for your CV, for example, as you start filling your CV with new and exciting activities.  This always happens. When you are starting your research career, you will be asked to review papers. You can list what journal/conference you reviewed for on your CV. Later you will be on conference PCs or journal editorial boards. Then all of the reviewing experience will become irrelevant for your CV.


text:
How do I check my work is worthy?
I would like to check if my mathematics paper is worthy of publication.
Is there any guide on the quality and form required for paper to be of publication quality?
Is there organization which will evaluate my paper for free?
How should I determine if my work is substantive enough to be grounds for pursuing PhD thesis?

Your edited question has a very easy answer: Ask your advisor.

I am not having any advisor and i am not doing Ph.d. I am doing M.phil and I wish to know about it.@TobiasKildetoft

If you are not doing a PhD, then in the systems I am familiar with, the answer is simply "no" then, regardless of the quality of the work (I am mainly familiar with the Danish system where it is not sufficient to hand in a good dissertatio to obtain a PhD).

Regarding the Ph.D. part of the question, only a school can grant a Ph.D., and no school will grant you a degree if you are not enrolled as a Ph.D. student.  Your best bet is probably to contact the mathematics department at a nearby research university and ask if a faculty member would be willing to look at your work.  If you have really been doing original research on your own, then you can probably be admitted as a student and begin working toward a degree.
Regarding the journal part of the question, most journals do not charge fees to authors (they make their money from subscription fees).  Most journals have web sites that explain the format and process for submitting a paper.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing#Publishing_process for a description of how this works.


text:
Do professors change their impression of a previously bad student?
One of my friends (a math graduate student from my department) didn't work hard during his undergraduate studies, and his GPA was, naturally, low. He barely (and with some luck) got into grad school, where he works harder.
The problem is that as it seems, most of the professors have a very bad impression of him, both because some of them had him in their classes, and because our department is relatively small and professors exchange a lot of information and opinions about students.
Part of the problem is that his reputation is not (just) of someone who is not hard-working (that would have been easier to fix, perhaps), but at least some of the professors simply don't consider him as smart or talented enough, and that is based solely on courses he participated in -- neither of those professors had any actual mathematical interaction or deep conversation with him, except for his advisor (who knows he wasn't serious enough about his studies) and perhaps a few others, who seem to have a somewhat better opinion of him than most.
Is there a way for this student to change the impression people have of him? From your experience, do people really change their impression of someone, once new information is presented (or are they likely to still think of him as not smart enough to be a mathematician, but who manages to go through grad school with hard work)?
This question might be related, How to change the idea that supervsiors got about you? however I find the situation different: First of all, an advisor has a lot of interaction with the student, so he is likely to notice a change. Also, in the case of my friend, the advisor does believe in his potential, but probably doesn't share his thoughts with people since he's not one of those who talk about students with others, and mostly keeps to himself.

Professors are people. You dont need to think of how to make a "professor" change their point of view about you, you need to think of how to make a person change his/her point of view! If you have been a lazy ass, then prove that you are not!

From what you've written it is not sure at all that your assumption on the professors opinion is correct. Recheck if you really have evidence for what you think. If professors exchange opinions like "that student did not perform well in my class" most people I know would take this information as just what it is and not anything more.

Adding to Ander Biguri's answer. From what I understand for people it takes about 10 times as much effort to change an impression of someone than to set the initial impression. So yes, it is possible, but that does not mean it is necessarily practical if you have limited interaction or time.

@Dirk You are right, and the fact that I myself don't have any first-hand information from the professors adds to the possibility of misinterpretation. However, he seems to be certain of it, and insists that some professors have said things he couldn't interpret otherwise.

Your friend needs to involve himself in department life. If he is just as invisible as his supervisor, no other professor is going to change their opinion unless they somehow get a new impression (or forget who he was).
One of the best things your friend could do is to give a department seminar if he has some interesting results to present. Make sure that it is well written and rehearsed! He should also chat with professors during social occasions, turn up at department talks and ask interesting questions; things like that.

I have a suggestion that may help: Your friend could go to one of the professors that has a poor opinion of him, and ask for something (e.g., can you recommend a good book for learning X). In the conversation, your friend should mention that he's been working a lot harder in grad school and is enjoying it.
Life tip: In general, when you have a bad relationship with someone, it often helps to ask a favour of them. That may sound strange, but I believe there's solid psychological research behind it. Supposedly once we've done a favour for someone, we deal with the cognitive dissonance (I did a favour for someone I don't like) by deciding that the person we did a favour for isn't so bad after all. However, that explanation feels a bit manipulative to me. The way I prefer to think of it is that by asking a favour of someone, I am making myself vulnerable (they may say "no"), which reduces some of the tension in the relationship. It works especially well if the favour you're asking for implicitly acknowledges that you're trying to improve the relationship. (E.g., the very fact that you're asking for advice from this professor suggests that you take your studies more seriously now.)

Absolutely!  Some of my worst students have made serious efforts to turn things around and I always make it a point to recognize that.  I wasn't exactly the greatest undergraduate myself, and that can be true for any number of reasons -- some of which might not have a single thing to do with how "lazy" someone is.  Honestly, I'd rather see a good student work hard to turn things around than watch a great student coast and rest on his/her laurels.


text:
Does a long period in an MSc program look bad on a CV?
I'm an MSc student in (pure) math. Based on CV's I've seen of professors and post-docs in the field, it seems that almost all of them graduated in about 2 years. Where I study (let's say, medium-level university) it's common that most good students graduate in 2.5-3 years (with 2 years being the "standard" period of time by the definition of our graduate program).
I expect to graduate a year from now, 3.5 years from the start of my studies. If I decide to apply to a US university for a PhD, I might need to wait another year till the beginning of the PhD program, since I won't make it to the closest deadline.
Would something like this look bad on my CV when applying to a PhD program, or to any further academic position? What would be the best way to deal with the one-year gap in the latter case? Would it be better to extend my MSc studies to 4.5 years to avoid a gap? (In any case I'm planning to continue doing research during that time.)
This question might be considered related: My PhD went over time - advice for explaining this on a CV
However I find it different in that the OP is asking about a PhD degree, which is a different stage in one's career, they are planning to look for a job in industry as opposed to academia, and the question deals with some ethics involved.

What was your undergraduate major (field of study)?

@scaaahu Same (math).

It all depends on the reasons. A gap year because you did not graduate in time for a deadline is not in itself a problem. But taking almost twice the normed time for a masters will look bad if you do not have a good reason for it.

The gap year isn't a big deal, but taking so much longer than normal to graduate does look bad.  You should try to address it in your statement of purpose.
Of course, after you get a PhD nobody will notice or care how long it took to get your MSc.


text:
An invitation from Frontiers (Frontiers Research Topics)
On 13th August 2013 I received the following email. I  have cut and pasted it below. I haven't bothered to insert back any of the links, but can do so if anyone is interested. I would not normally post private email to a public forum, but this is obviously a form letter, one step up from spam.
At the time I dismissed it as one more attempt by a journal to get me to do something for nothing as usual, but then I got a followup from the same person on 12th February 2014. It is in my experience fairly unusual to get a followup to this kind of invitation.
I thought it would do no harm to ask people here what they thought. I haven't changed my mind on it. I don't see any advantage to the proposed work. They aren't offering any money of course. It is not a publication. It isn't an opportunity to get involved in a collaborative project. It looks like a opportunity to become some kind of unpaid new-fangled Web 2.0 type editor for some kind of new-fangled web research platform. It would probably be lots of work. So, I don't see anything in it for me. I'm not sure what is in it for the journal either.
So, to summarize my questions in a convenient fashion.

Is there any reason anyone one can think of that I might want to be
involved in something like this? Note - I'm by no stretch of the
imagination a senior researcher. Such an invitation might make sense for
a senior researcher, but I don't see why such a person could not simply
create his own web site to showcase his research.
Why is the journal trying to organize something like this? I don't
quite see what is in it for them either. Perhaps just the opportunity
to make money off submissions to an ersatz journal?

I came across[LINK][LINK] your “SNPpy--database management for SNP
  data from genome wide association studies.” published in “PloS one”
  and thought that it would be an excellent fit for the "Research
  Topics" initiative in Frontiers. We have recently partnered with
  the [LINK]Nature Publishing Group [goo.gl]  to expand our
  researcher-driven Open Science platform, and I would like for you to
  consider suggesting a consolidated topic of the latest research and
  perspectives from your field in a Frontiers journal.
However please note that our invitation is not restricted to the
  subject of this work. You are free to propose a Research Topic of your
  choice.
This [LINK][LINK]short video [goo.gl] gives you a better overview on
  the potential of Frontiers Research Topics.
You may also want to browse on the [LINK][LINK]Research Topics
  homepage [goo.gl] and [LINK][LINK]here [goo.gl] to check the final
  format of a Frontiers Research Topic as an e-book.
Like in the example above, Frontiers will create a dedicated homepage
  for your Research Topic, where you can manage contributions and
  maintain an ongoing dialogue with post-publication feedback from the
  research community.
If you are interested in pursuing this project, all it takes to get
  started is:
 - A title and a short description of your Research Topic;

A list of contributors you plan to contact.

If you wanted to find detailed information on how to launch a Research
  Topic, please browse [LINK][LINK]here [goo.gl].
Please let me know if you are interested in organizing a Frontiers
  Research Topic, and do not hesitate to contact me by phone or email
  with any questions. I’m looking forward to your reply.

As far as I can tell, a "Research Topic" is a collection of papers on a specialized topic.  It's basically a special issue of one of their journals, although it's presented slightly differently, and they charge publication fees for the papers.
What really turns me off is the publisher's spamming practices.  I've had exactly the same experience you have: they send what's pretty obviously a form letter (populated with your name and one publication title/journal, seemingly randomly selected) and then some months later send a passive-aggressive reminder asking for a reply.  Maybe this is a coincidence, but I also got a follow-up message from them on February 12, so perhaps they sent out a whole wave of them on that day.  In any case, the fact that they feel they have to advertise by spamming makes me suspicious, and the reminder messages are irritating.

Hi, thanks for replying. "Frontiers will create a dedicated homepage for your Research Topic, where you can manage contributions and maintain an ongoing dialogue with post-publication feedback from the research community." sounds more like an ongoing project than a single issue, but you might be right. In any case, I assume you agree this is just a waste of time, then? Do you plan to reply (or have you replied) to the reminder letter? Just curious.

I get those about every year and classify it as spam.

@FaheemMitha: Yeah, it might be better to describe it as a special issue with a discussion forum.  It doesn't sound valuable to me.  I haven't replied to the reminder; I feel a little conflicted about that, since it would be rude not to reply if it were a personal message, but all the evidence suggests it's not, and I don't want to reply to spam.

@AnonymousMathematician Great, thanks for the feedback.

This topic has received some discussion recently: at least some of these invitations appear to be revenue driven, with no specific reason related to the advancement of science per se.  Read reports here of followup emails that received answers indicating an indiscriminate approach that would, in my book, qualify as SPAM.
http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/11/05/i-get-complaints-about-frontiers/
I think frontiers should be taken to task about these practices, and their wikipedia page edited accordingly.
I opened a Talk on this here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Frontiers_(publisher)

Thanks for these links! My experience with Frontiers as a reviewer have been positive, in the sense that they asked me to review something that was entirely in my own field (both in terms of content and in terms of methods). I also find that they publish articles of interest to me every so often. But now I see that the review process is less stringent than I imagined, and that's really not good.

On the other hand, they do put the names of reviewers on the published papers, so that acts as a quality check of sorts. Overall, my impression is still that they're making some honest mistakes (and some annoying ones, such as spamming), but that they do attempt to put together a journal of decent quality.

I would suggest a response such as:

Thank you for repeated offer to participate in a frontiers research
  topic. I decline your offer on grounds of not agreeing with this model
  wherein researchers are invited to produce articles seemingly with the
  sole purpose of publishing and get them to invite their peers to
  contribute as well. I am a vehement supporter of open acces
  publishing, but I do not support publishing ‘for the sake of
  publishing’, whereas I also feel that structures to stimulate
  collaboration between researchers should not be run primarily by
  commercial partners.
Frankly, the practice of actively recruiting researchers to provide
  articles is tempering my initial enthusiasm for Frontiers.
Best regards,
my name

Spam---and this is spam---goes into the bit-bucket without reply. Every time. The recipient never owes a spammer anything---not even courtesy---because spamming is a fundamentally uncourteous and antisocial behavior.


text:
How to make my work publishable if my supervisor isn’t any help?
I just finished a bachelor’s degree in applied maths. The thesis was designed to be a fairly formulaic implementation affair of an (obscure) NP-problem, but I happened to develop a novel heuristic algorithm for it, which had some very interesting properties, both theoretical and computational.
The problem is not a canonical NP-problem, but a rather obscure one. It could be that no one would care at all, but

it does seem to outperform all previously published heuristics;
it is based on a novel way of utilizing the problem structure that conceivably could be applied to other NP-problems.

“Talk to your supervisor” is good advice, but he didn’t show any interest in the project throughout the semester (despite it being his area of research) and he hasn’t even commented on the report, despite being asked repeatedly. At this point, I am close to certain he will be of no aid if I would want to pursue this further.
I asked the head professor at the department as well – he said he’d read it but hasn’t. I reminded him about it but that looks like a dead end as well.
So what are my options? It’s far from publishable in its current state and I obviously can’t pursue it further on my own.

i would wonder a bit more on your situation. It could be totally normal, but two people being very quiet about your work could mean something else.  From the questions on this site, I could imagine either they are stealing your work for themselves, or your work is so bad they do not want to tell you and are waiting for you to leave

I changed the question in the title to reflect the question in the body as the latter seems to be the one that’s needs to be addressed first. Please see whether everything still fits your intentions.

@user1938107: "I could imagine either they are stealing your work for themselves" And if your priest is very quiet during your confession, you could imagine that he is taping it to blackmail you later.  You can imagine anything, but it seems a bit irresponsible to plant the worry in someone's mind that an authority figure will do the most unethical thing they could possibly do with no evidence whatsoever.

@PeteL.Clark my comment (not answer) is meant to point out that if the title of the question changed to, 'I want to publish my solution, but none of my superiors will speak to me about it', without changing the body, it would provoke many questions of the situation.  While i think the question itself is good, the OP seems to have some issues with ALL of his superiors (knowledgeable in his field by his own statement) not having any interest in his work.  You also took my statement out of context, there is an 'EITHER' in your quote.

@PeteL.Clark I would also point out, you decided to skip the part of my comment that said 'It could be totally normal', and skipped the part that said 'From the questions on this site' the preceded the extreme examples.  So yes, if you go into confession, and you spill your heart out, yet your priest says nothing, it could be totally normal... or based on the common case that a priest will actually say something, you might want to think about what you told your priest.

@user1938107: I read your entire comment and commented on the part for which I had something to say.  "Out of context" doesn't make much sense here: your original comment is visible along with mine.  Let's forget the priest.  The OP has already completed his degree so has submitted his project to the department and the university as a formal document.  At any university I have ever known or been involved with, stealing a student's work would be frowned upon in all circumstances but in this circumstance would be incredibly stupid, since the faculty member would be caught and could be fired.

Do you have any experience with faculty stealing student work in this way?  I would be interested to hear it.

The foremost thing you need is a mentor familiar with the subject to guide you through the process of paper writing and in particular provide feedback to you. Unless you are very good at it, writing a mathematical paper without any feedback is a bad idea, as it’s very difficult to estimate yourself whether your writing is understandable to others. Also, scientific writing is an art of its own that you probably have not mastered yet.
As you already guessed, the canonical choice for such a mentor is your supervisor, but as he is not an option, I would consider the following (in roughly this order):

other members (PhD students, postdocs, etc.) of your supervisor’s group who have experience in paper writing;
visiting scientists or collaborators of your supervisor;
other scientists from your department, with whom you are on friendly terms;
scientists from other universities doing related work;
look for a mentor on your department’s bulletin board or similar.

To avoid quarrels with potential mentors and because it’s ethical, you should clarify the following:

You are not good at estimating the publishability of your work. It may very well be that it turns out to be unpublishable.
The essentials of the situation between you and your supervisor.
How you will handle authorship: Just mentoring your paper writing does not qualify for authorship by common authorship standards, but it’s not unlikely that your mentor will, e.g., find some extension or improvement of your work that is worthy of authorship. Authorship may be a relevant incentive for mentors. For more information, see authorship.

Together with a mentor it should be much easier to decide on the publishability of your work and what journal is suitable for it.
Finally, some further caveats:

Depending on how much your supervisor laid the intellectual foundations for your reasearch, e.g., by giving you detailed ideas on what you should research and how to do it, he may have reasonable authorship claims. Unless he verifiably abandons these claims, this would lead to all sorts of trouble.
If you are worried about your work being stolen, you can publish the current state as a preprint, e.g., on the ArXiv. Be aware that there are journals that do not allow for such prior publication, but as far as I know, this is not a problem in mathematics.

Here some questions and statements that might help in your decision:

You must know previous publications on the subject. Where have these been published? There must be some interest in it for some people at least.
Since there are people who care about the subject, what can that result contribute to them?
Write an abstract. Then write an introduction.
"it does seem to outperform all previously published heuristics", but in terms of what? Do you have a rigorous complexity estimate? Do you have an experiment on your laptop?

I hope this is helpful.

The first question you should address is whether your result is worth being published. In your case this translates into "Is your heuristics new, because you had a good idea, or because the problem is so obscure?". Just saying that your algorithm outperforms published ones is not sufficient, even if they are published by well known scientists. Sometimes good Homer sleeps, and pointing out the failings of (future) colleagues is too petty to be proud of. Also "novel way" can mean anything from a great idea to a minor modification of a well known method. Answering these questions is part of the job of your advisor, if he doesn't fulfill his duty and there is no other expert in your department you have to contact some outside person. You could try to present your work at a conference, which might be difficult because at your stage of career funding for conferences is often hard to get. Or you could contact someone working on this problem.
If your paper is worth being published note that a good paper on an obscure question, which is not very short, is hard to publish in a paper journal. An electronic journal does not care about the number pages your article has, or the number of articles it publishes, so obscurity is a minor issue here. A good electronic journal has the same reputation and  dissemination as a paper journal.
What you definitely should avoid is looking for a journal which is bad enough to publish your research. While having one peer-reviewed publication is uncommon for a fresh bachelor and can improve your early career, publishing in bad journals leaves a stain which you have to live with forever.

Using the same performance metric, my method got better numbers than the existing methods. I don't think that's particularly petty, that's just progress.

What you definitely should avoid is looking for a journal which is bad enough to publish your research. – You should specify what you mean by bad here. There is no shame in publishing in a low-tier journal, but publishing with predatory and fake publishers should really be avoided.

@luegofuego: "Better than existing method" is only progress if the existing methods cannot obviously be improved. Even a great mind can miss a simple improvement, and pointing this out would be petty. Unfortunately it is not obvious what obvious means. That's why you should ask an expert. May be he tells you that your approach is great and encourages you to publish in a good place, or he tells you that your approach is good, but only applicable to your specific problem, or he tells you that it is rather trivial. We cannot judge the quality of your results, or the quality of prior results.

@Wrzlprmft: By bad I mean journals most people never heard of. If your standards are sufficiently low you get everything published which is not complete nonsense. Vice versa it is common to assume that everything published in a strange place is close to worthless. I know several people who count such publications with the weight -1. Note that this is not my opinion, but a common opinion. While I agree that not publishing is better than publishing a bad paper, I don't believe that the quality of a paper can be judged by looking at the name of the journal it appeared in.


text:
How do academics change their area of research in the middle of their academic career?
Often, I have come across profiles of tenured faculty members who are now doing research in completely different topics than what they had done in their PhD, postdoc or in the beginning of their academic career. For example, a professor in our department had done his PhD, postdoc and initial career in using molecular dynamics for nanomechanics. However, over the course of time he also added quantum mechanics (density functional theory) and continuum mechanics in his research. In other case, I have seen a faculty with an engineering-physics PhD related to thin films shift to working on 3D printing and developing aerospace materials.
My question is, how do academics change their area of research and what efforts goes into establishing oneself in a changed research area?
I have seen academics hire a PhD student to work on a new research area and learn as they guide the student. But, how can someone guide if the area of new research is very minutely related to their area of expertise.

Honestly, going from MD to DFT is not changing fields at all. Neither is thin films to 3D materials. Those seem examples of research fields that evolved and the PIs either adapted or perished.

@FBolst yes I agree. But, how do PIs guide a student or apply for a grant without having worked in the area and having no significant theoretical understanding of the area?

@Guoot A good and common way is to collaborate with someone who has been working in that area.

In theory, getting a PhD shows that you are capable of diving into some topic and doing research on it. If you have done it once what keeps you from doing it again? Even thinking that once you start in one field you are stuck there should just feel wrong...

People do this outside of academia too. The thing you start off working on needn't be the sum total of your capability and knowledge coming out of school, it's just one niche where you found paydirt.

I think you severely underestimate the ability of people to learn. People do this all the time, “terminal degree” doesn’t mean you stop learn new things in academia.

There are two parts to this. The first is easy. If you are tenured then you just make the change, either immediately or gradually. Tenure gives you the freedom to do that. If you are untenured then you make the change and worry a lot about whether you will get tenured.
There is, however, one scenario in which it is advantageous for even an untenured person to change. If you are the new hire in a department in which there is no one to collaborate with then it might be an advantage, even if you are untenured, to join a research group and move toward their interests. It could, perhaps, enhance tenure possibilities.
The second part is a bit more complex, assuming you want to behave ethically. You can't really advise students very well if you have no knowledge, though a surprising amount can be accomplished. It is, in theory, possible to teach things that you don't know yourself, but you have to do it carefully, putting the student on a learning path that you haven't followed yourself. This is possible if you know about research and how to conduct it and are sophisticated enough to follow the arguments put forth by the student, just as you would the arguments of any colleague. I'll note that research groups actually do this - exploring a path that no one has followed.
But if you change fields gradually then you can also work into the advising role gradually, perhaps by being a co-advisor of a few students - even if informally until you get the required background.
I'll note that advising students outside your expertise, while possible, is risky and so the methodology used needs to remove risk for the student. A student, on the other hand, is best advised to choose an advisor who already has sufficient expertise in the direction to be followed in the research.
Note also that at the end of doctoral research the student is actually expected to know more about the specific research area than the advisor, unless the student has brought the advisor along on the journey to the end. If the opposite were true we would never advance, with each student being somehow less than the advisor.

Note that I've assumed here that the change is to a field that has similar research methodologies, such as changing subfields within a larger field. It is harder otherwise, of course. But the way we do mathematics or computer science is pretty similar within most subfields. Similar for chemistry, say. But to switch from math to history is a bigger challenge as the research methodologies are (I assume) much different.

That makes sense. But, what I feel confusing is that don't you (as being experienced in academia) feel technically challenged when advising a student in a new research area? How common is it for an established academic to go back to basics and study something from scratch like they used to do as a undergrad or graduate student?

I don't think you go back to basics. One of the things you learned in grad school was how to research in the broad area. If the new area is similar in methodology it is not such a big jump. I think a lot of people in CS, for example, change subfields as we learn new things and areas open up. It is probably less common in more stable fields with a longer history.

If you (or anyone) would like a dissertation on how to teach what you don't know or how to advise students when you aren't the expert, ask an appropriate question and I'll expand on that. I asked such a question at CS Educators a while ago, actually: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/q/4379/1293

yes, I would be very grateful to know more about that. I will ask an appropriate question for that. Thanks!

While in grad school I got to know Ed Kramer. Originally interested in low temperature physics, he was irritated when a plastic piece failed in his apparatus. While reading up on why it failed and how to prevent it, he got interested in polymer physics, as well as deciding that the explanation did not make much sense. So, he moved into polymer physics, eventually winning the APS Polymer Physics prize in 1985.

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


text:
Reviewing papers at a journal where your own work is currently submitted
As an editor, how appropriate do you think it is to send a referee request to an author who currently has a paper under review at the same journal (with you as the editor with final say on whether that paper is accepted)? Because of the power imbalance, it seems as though the author might feel compelled to agree to review the paper even if they didn't otherwise want to. Or maybe they will feel an instinct  to say the paper is terrible if they believe fewer other papers being accepted might increase their own chances.
Context: I am an editor myself and I never do this on principle. But as an author it has happened to me on a number of occasions, and I'm not sure how justified I am in finding it so annoying.
For further context (in case it matters) this is in pure mathematics.
Bonus question: Is asking for a "quick opinion" (rather than a full review) in this context more or less appropriate than asking for a full referee report?

It happens any time. Think for example of a special issue which publishes extended papers from a conference: the reviewers are frequently among the participants who have typically also submitted a paper.

@MassimoOrtolano "conference papers" is not a thing in mathematics.

Often the editor who chooses referees for a given paper is not even aware of what other papers have been submitted to the journal.  Likewise, the referees for your paper will not be aware that you are refereeing another paper.

Even though journal articles are more common and perhaps seen as more prestigious, "conference papers" definitely are a thing in mathematics.

I think this is normal.

Because of the power imbalance

I think the power imbalance is a bit overstated here. Editors want good papers for their journal; a good editor is not primarily just farming out the job of peer review with as little effort as possible.
If I...
1) submitted a paper,
2) received a request to review a paper,
3) denied that request for good reason, and then
4) had my paper rejected by the editor,
...either those outcomes are unrelated and the paper should be submitted elsewhere, or the journal is crap and the paper should be submitted elsewhere.

it seems as though the author might feel compelled to agree to review the paper even if they didn't otherwise want to.

I think this is not really a very crucial ethical issue, although I am not in mathematics where maybe the burden of review is greater. Certainly if this compelled someone to review a paper they were not qualified to review, that would be a problem, but I don't see this being a substantial issue.
If you are submitting papers you should also be reviewing them. If all papers were single-author papers, then the number of papers you review should be greater than the number you submit. If a journal is in your area of study such that you submit papers to it, you are among the people in the best position to review other submissions applicable to that journal.

Or maybe they will feel an instinct to say the paper is terrible if they believe fewer other papers being accepted might increase their own chances

I can see this being an issue for grants where there is a limited pool of money and a zero-sum game. I don't know of any journal where it is a practice to rank order articles and then reject one for publication because it wasn't the 12th best article submitted this month. Journals just don't operate on that time scale, and if a journal did decide to be more or less permissive due to overall submission and acceptance rates, that would be over a longer time scale than the review of a single paper.

In summary, feel free to feel annoyed: feelings don't necessarily require justification. However, I don't think there is an ethical violation here.

In mathematics there are many (perhaps 100?) journals I could reasonably either submit or review for, so I don't specifically think the "you submit papers so you should review them" is relevant here; I do my fair share of reviewing. But thanks for your thoughts.

@Confusedaboutetiquette I certainly didn't mean to accuse you of not doing a fair share, I just meant to shift the perspective towards being asked to review as an everyday thing rather than a special favor.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm probably going to wait a few more days to see if any mathematicians chime in with any countervailing opinions before accepting an answer.

OK, I'm not entirely convinced that (in the situations I am thinking of) the editor couldn't think of someone else to ask. And I don't think I'm going to change my own behavior of avoiding this practice. But on the question (which is what I am perhaps most interested in) of whether this academic community views this as constituting impropriety, the votes on this answer suggest that the answer is no. I'm still going to be annoyed!

Let's take the null hypothesis that this is ethically fine, and then examine reasons why the hypothesis might be wrong. You raise two:

Because of the power imbalance, it seems as though the author might feel compelled to agree to review the paper even if they didn't otherwise want to.

This is a legitimate concern. However I think it's fair to say that most editors have seen so many reviewers decline to review that they won't bat an eye at yet another reviewer who declines.
Of course you should give a reason for declining. Something like "I currently already have 2 manuscripts to review for other journals" is more likely to lead to empathy than derision. If you don't feel qualified to review that's also a fair reason. I'm confident most editors will prefer a good review over a poor one, even if they have to work a bit harder to get that good review.
Is it possible the editor will reject the paper because the author didn't want to review another paper? It's conceivable, but not likely: ultimately declining to review is quite minor, and the editor will want good papers. It would take a pretty annoyed editor to reject a good paper because he doesn't like the author (see this question and the reactions of most people to the would-be annoyed editor).

Or maybe they will feel an instinct to say the paper is terrible if they believe fewer other papers being accepted might increase their own chances.

This on the other hand isn't really justifiable. If a paper is rejected it's far more likely that it didn't meet the minimum standards required for publication in the journal than it is because the journal has run out of space. In the latter scenario, it's much more likely the journal will hold the paper to the next issue, and if the next issue is also full, then it might consider increasing the number of issues a year.
tl; dr: I don't think there's a ethical concern here. If it troubles you as an editor then don't, but there are reasonable people who aren't troubled, both as an author and as an editor.

This is normal, and even expected, especially for conferences.

Because of the power imbalance, it seems as though the author might feel compelled to agree to review the paper even if they didn't otherwise want to.

Few people really want to review papers; doing it well is a lot of work for relatively little direct payoff (esp. compared to just reading a published paper).  However, it's understood to be an important part of participating in the scholarly community, and the golden rule (classic definition) applies.  By submitting a paper to the journal, an author is clearly expressing a desire to be part of whatever very specific scholarly community that journal serves.  It is quite reasonable for an editor to request that a submitting author become a reviewer, if the editor believes they could do a reasonably good job of the review.  (If the author's submission was crackpot nonsense or way off topic, they may not be a good reviewer candidate.)

Or maybe they will feel an instinct to say the paper is terrible if they believe fewer other papers being accepted might increase their own chances.

If they want to be persuasive, they will need to say specifically why the paper is "terrible" and if you reject what they are reviewing it should be because those are valid points.  Similarly, if you as an editor reject what that reviewer authored, it should be because of valid shortcomings pointed out in the reviews of that paper, and a completely independent decision made without considering whether they agreed to review other papers.
Authors submitting to or published in a particular journal have an incentive to set the bar for that publication to a high level (so as to enhance the reputation of their own work, by association).  Some authors may wish to qualify this, setting the bar high but not so high that their own work can't get in.  Ultimately, it's up to you as the editor to decide where the quality bar is for that venue, and the reviews are just input to guide you.

I am an editor myself and I never do this on principle.

As long as the venue does not have any specific policy against doing this, I would have no qualms about it, as long as I know my editorial decisions are separated from authors' responses to review requests, and that the content-based reasons for the editorial decisions are clearly expressed in the decision letter.

As an author it has happened to me on a number of occasions, and I'm not sure how justified I am in finding it so annoying.

As an author, I don't find any extra annoyance from a review request because it comes from a venue where I've submitted.  The opposite is actually more likely, especially when I'm a new submitter to a venue that I believe to be high-quality: I take it as a step of being welcomed into that scholarly community as a qualified peer.
I'm also considerably more likely to accept review requests from venues where I've submitted, because I've already reached the decision that this is a venue worth supporting.  I'm also not nearly as likely to lump such a request in with the academic spam clogging my inbox with requests to review or edit for what I assume are generally low-quality venues looking for good names they can use to build their reputation and/or further a scam.

Bonus question: Is asking for a "quick opinion" (rather than a full review) in this context more or less appropriate than asking for a full referee report?

It depends: is that a normal step/activity in the venue?
You might get better full referee reports from reviewers who also have work submitted at that journal, and/or who recently received good-quality reviews (positive or negative) from a submission to that journal; such reviewers may be more cognizant of the golden rule when doing their review.
As an editor, I'd be more inclined toward requesting full referee reports where possible and appropriate, only asking for the "quick opinion" reports if I were needing more of those reports for a step in the venue's process, and lacking in reviewer candidates likely to give those but unlikely to do full referee reports.

Thanks for your answer. In my particular situation, I have never been to any conference which ever had "conference papers" so that is less relevant to my personal situation and more generally in mathematics, but it is certainly relevant to the more general question and in other fields.

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


text:
Blind grading for exams isn't very blind
TL;DR:
How should I blindly grade exams when I can recognize over half of the papers by the handwriting?
Situation: I'm a TA for an first year physics class of approximately 50-60 students. Due to a complaint along the lines of "the grader hates me so I failed the class" that the department got last year, there is a proposal in the department to ensure that tests be swapped to blind grading. However, as the class assigns a fairly large amount of homework, from experience I know that I can reliably recognize more than half of the class's handwriting. The proposed system goes along the lines of having students use an ID number that they get when they take the test that isn't shown to me until I'm putting grades into the computer. The problem is that I feel that this would do very little to actually reduce bias if TAs can just recognize handwriting without a name.
Short of putting people on rotation for grading this stuff, which has its own problems, are there any better ways to implement a blind grading system to remove any handwriting bias?

As the TA this is not your issue, but: I find the proposal to switch to a blind grading system because the graders cannot be trusted to grade fairly problematic.  It seems to -- albeit in a weak, tacit way -- endorse the possibility that the graders are unfairly biased against individual students.  But that is a serious enough charge that it should be affirmed or denied.  If graders can show that they are in fact grading consistently according to a clear standard, case closed.  On the other hand, if your personnel are in fact untrustworthy you should find out: this has other implications...

@PeteL.Clark: I disagree strongly. We started grading blindly because we know we are less ojective if we know the author. You don't have to have a grudge; simply knowing the students approximate skill changes how you read their answers, and then comes personal interaction. Blind grading removes all that from the equation -- but for handwriting. (I rarely recognise handwriting. Even if I can place one, I'd probably only know "one of these four", not more.)

@Raphael: First, who are "we"?  Second: yes, there are issues with enforcing consistency and correctness of grading.  But grading "blind" only addresses these indirectly: you can still be biased against an author or grade inconsistently and inaccurately if you don't know who the author is.  (For instance, if someone demonstrates a misunderstanding on one problem, when you grade all the subsequent problems you have that misunderstanding in mind.)  The way to compensate for lack of objectivity is to adopt a grading style that forces you to keep your objective goals in mind and follow them.

@PeteL.Clark 1) My group. We give undergrad algorithms lectures. 2) That is true. We try to mitigate by grading by problem, not by hand-in (this has other advantages) and agree on reasonable precise grading schemes for each problem. We verify the consistency of its application by making a second pass with doctorands only (which don't see any student handwriting during the semester, too). Of course, you still need to want to stay objective. Personally, I have found the effect of having no names on the exams makes this a lot easier as it enables the other measure I mention to be effective.

Also, think about this as a reaction to the specific allegation "The grader hates me so I failed the class."  Which is better: "No, don't worry: the grader doesn't know who you are [unless of course she figured out who you are, which everyone seems to agree happens at least some of the time, but we hope it doesn't happen too often]." Or "How the grader feels about you is not relevant.  Either the work has been graded correctly according to this explicit standard or not.  Let's determine whether that has occurred."

@Raphael: Your response is quite reasonable.  Let me say: for me, I would rather keep consciously in mind that I need to separate my feelings about the student from the grading of their work than adopt blind grading, with its implicit claim that this is necessary and sufficient to ensure proper grading.  Also: people often have guesses about the identity of anonymous authors.  If you're an academic you'll know how often people say "I just know that Prof. So-and-So was the referee."  Actually you don't know, you're just guessing.  In a grading context, guessing could be even worse!

When I grade, I try not to look at the name, and try to overlook quirks that are dead giveaways (one girl consistently wrote in a strange color). Having a clear, detailed breakup of points awarded helps. Split up grading by question, so that if there is a bias it won't affect the whole exam/homework (and also get more uniform grading). Have a robust mechanism in place for handling complaints, including the "I failed because they hate me" type.

Blind grading also protects against mistaken or outright spurious accusations of biased grading.

If I understand this correctly, blind grading is a formality introduced by the University to make students' claims on the biased teachers unjustified. I would say - keep it that way and do not bother any more. You are not going to hate them and give them lower grades, are you? So, it does not really matter that you in fact can recognise the handwriting. If a student is really really bothered to keep their identity secret... well, they could try to write with the unusual hand.
Answering your question formally - to implement a real blind grading system you can swap the scripts between departments, or TAs.

...or require all homework to be typeset, so you can't learn students' handwriting.

@JeffE There's still an awful lot you can tell from the students' typesetting.  When I graded Computer Science assignments, there was a big difference between the MS Word writeups, the inexperienced LaTeX writeups, and the experiences LaTeX writeups.  Things like vocabulary choice, common typos, etc., can still make it easy to recognize students.  Even if you don't know their names, it'd be relatively easy to recognize "that's student 7892's assignment, and this is student 2034's."

@JoshuaTaylor I think Jeffs point is that, if the homeworks are typeset, you can't recognise anything in the handwritten exams.

Others have mentioned the issue of removing hand-writing from the equation by having homework or assignments printed as opposed hand-written. so I will simply add what we commonly do in my department.
Add a moderator to a random sample of scripts/exams.
With a moderator, even if the grader knows the student, the grader must consider that their own marking will be checked. If Gary Grader consistently mis-grades papers (due to bias or simply weak grading skills) then Mary Moderator should catch this, at least on some. Those flags may indicate a need for someone to step in and talk with the grader about grading bias or other grading issues.
Now, you could make the moderating blind as well so that Mary Moderator would not know which grader she was moderating. One reason to do this is that Mary might be concerned that George will be angry at her (or take revenge, etc.) so Mary might simple say that "Yes, all of Gary's papers are graded correctly."
We don't do blind moderation but I have heard others comment that "we don't change grades because we don't want to cause problems for our colleagues" which disturbs me greatly (because the graders know this and it, in effect, nullifies the whole moderation process).

+1 for moderation. Also add a marking scheme, in my experience it works well in CS and maths, don't see why not use it in physics. If I was in the OP's situation, I wouldn't bother about recognizing the handwriting, I would rather be concerned that the university management treats me as a potentially dishonest employee. If there were complaints from the students, they should be investigated and discussed by the relevant university board instead of tarring all the lecturers as unable to provide unbiased assessment.

Taken further, in the UK all exams are graded by at least three professors (and one of them from another university), and the marks are reviewed by a committee if they differ a lot. This is a slow process, but students can be sure they have been graded fairly.

@Davidmh Looks like you have a very interesting data set to run statistics on. Do you run some analysis? What is, for instance, the variance among grades given by different professors to the same exam?

@FedericoPoloni I don't. I just have friends that have studied in the UK. IIRC, the committee reviews the grading if the difference is above 5-10%, so they want to be quite accurate.

@Davidmh I do not believe that ALL exams in the UK are graded the way you describe. The one where I teach simply has a single grader and the module leader will moderate.

@earthling could be that not all universities do that. I know that in Edinburgh, all exams in the schools of Physics, Maths, and Earth Sciences, are like this.

@Davidmh Could be the subject (mine is business) or could be the location (mine is in England).

@earthling That method was used in English universities in the past, though it may not be anymore (I'm not in the UK now), but it was only used for exams which counted towards the final result and not interim progress exams except when a course was being evaluated, in which case it was a supplement for externally-conducted vivas (verbal exams).

To help "save me from myself," from the first moment I was allowed to implement partial credit (after escaping my alma mater's absolute insistence on all-or-nothing grading), I began crafting incredibly, at times ludicrously detailed rubrics (down to the half-point, even for the many questions on a 100-point exam) detailing every conceivable level (and timeline) of errors that a student could make (or at least, that I could anticipate them making), and I make myself stick to it.  Even if the student has annoyed me with his in-class noisy chattiness--even if he has already been caught in an academic misconduct net earlier in our acquaintance--it forces me to treat him the same as every other student. If it's a 3-point mistake for someone else, it's a 3-point mistake for him, too.
(Sidebar, Your Honor:  Sorry, fellas, for the gender bias there, but after a single XX to start the Sad Roll of Dishonor, it's been an unbroken streak of about 76 in a row for the XY's.)
I also grade each exam one page at a time, to help break up the exams and make the handwriting-recognition neurons fire less often.  That also has the fringe benefit of keeping me from turning any concerns that might be forming about trends in the grades so far (since I don't know the overall results yet) into an inappropriate shifting of the standards bar halfway through.

Something I used to do (I no longer teach) was to grade in such a way that there should not be any problems if any or all students compared their graded tests with any or all other students in the class, and this certainly happened in my classes (and I did it myself sometimes as a student). Another thing I started doing (after a few years of teaching) was to photocopy my solutions/rubric sheet and handing a copy of it back with each test. Even before this I often handed solutions out to save class time (and office hour time), and at some point I realized I could save even more (continued)

(continuation) of my personal time by simply handing back what I had already hand-written for grading purposes, and not try to rewrite it again in a neater form. The solutions were often brief, but for rubric purposes I would always show steps I expected some students to miss, so it actually worked fine with most students (who could, and often did, ask their neighbor for clarification anyway). As for the rubric, this was often a "work in progress" in the sense that I made grading decisions whenever a certain type of error showed up, rather than trying to anticipate them in advance.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by rotating (and the associated problems), but we use the following scheme:

Graders have "their" questions.
exams "rotate" between the graders until in the end each question is corrected for each exam.

Sometimes this is done in large batches - each grader goes to the secretary when they have time, get all or maybe half of the exams, vanishes to their office, and returns exams and marks list when done.
More often, all graders meet, and small batches of exams are exchanged. Here, everyone gets one question, and as soon as you are finished (or cannot easily find a new batch) you either get a new question assigned or towards the end help sort who still needs to get which question and carry those exams where they need to go.  This way, the exams are quite well shuffled, so one would expect that even if a drift in the marking over the course of going over all exams occurs, this is different for each question and cancels out in the end.

There are two main ideas with this scheme:

Even if there are example solutions and a rough list of points the professor wants to be considered, usually a bunch of minor decisions has to be made. It is easier to have consistent marks for all students if the marking for a given question is done by one grader.
It is faster if every grader has to go into the details only for a few questions. Getting "into" a question can take considerable time, and after solving the question myself and comparing that to the example solution I tentatively write up criteria for the marking. I then grab some 10 - 20 exams and go through the question marking them but without actually giving grades and check whether my tentative point list is feasible and what other typical problems I need to add to the list. Only then the actual grading starts.

I cannot recall whether we have the students pseudonymized (by student ID) or whether we have names - typically the pressure is to get the grading done, and that means I (and about all of my colleagues but the one who transfers grades to the final result list) never look at the name. I directly go to the sheet where "my" question is (or sometimes, particularly towards the end, people who are already finished will do that for others).

With such a scheme, the impact a single grader biased against a particular student can have is quite limited.
BTW: some of us usually "know" the students from labwork practicum (others help only with the exams and have never seen any of the students) - but that are brief encounters of large numbers of students. A student has to be either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad or behaving exceptionally in some way to be remembered by name. At least for me, while I may remember someone when seeing them, the connection to name or handwriting is much weaker. Of course, that is different if you encounter them again and again over the duration of the course.

I'd like to add some general thoughts:

While I do see distinct advantages with the system described above which can easily be carried out in a blinded fashion, the student claim

 My grader hates me so i failed the class

is not among the good reasons. Students can look at their marked exams. They can then complain if they suspect the grading was not fair (or an error occured).
They can even ask for someone else grading their exam. If it turned out that there was a problem with the grading, this is dealt with a) for the student (or all students in the each-grader-has-their-questions scheme) and b) will have consequences for the grader.
In my experience, students thinking that TAs not only remember them but have strong enough feelings that they end up giving biased marks to a measurable extent (in a field where a large part of the grading scheme is usually formulated in "hard" ways like calculation correct yes/no; sign error, axis label missing, units missing: each -1/2 point and so on) greatly overestimates the importance the given student has to the typical grader (PhD students or postdocs who are assigned to help grading on top of all other work they have)
Do not forget that there is a distinct bias against letting students fail: failing students come again for examination and create lots of additional, but unsatisfactory (IMHO it is far more pleasant to correct a good exam than to sort out the mess of a bad exam) work.

IMHO there are some trade-offs involved. Obviousy, possible bias against students is bad and needs to be avoided. On the other hand, you have to be careful not to make otherwise bad decisions and end up unbiased, but overall worse:

One obvious way of not having a student bias (that also removes the information-leaking of the question) is to have graders that were not otherwise involved with those students.
OTOH, people who have been TA with these students may have a far better grasp what can be expected from the students than people who have not been involved with that course (we have a fair amount of PhD students and post-docs helping with the grading that have a related but not the same background, e.g. physicists and optical engineers helping grading physical chemistry exams).
Another obvious possible bias is that seeing what the other grader gave for their questions will influence the grader*. This could be removed by having separate sheets for each question - at the cost that it is error prone and/or a whole lot of additional work to make really sure nothing gets lost, nor mixed up.
Already having only student ID or other pseudonyms in practice means that some easy way of error checking is removed: it is much easier to mix up the grades between students when transfering to the grade list when the list consists of longish ID numbers instead of names.
Obviously there should not be any errors, but such errors do occur. And at some point the question should be asked whether the removed alleged bias is worth that less time can be spent on actually teaching the students because it is spent on double checking anonymized lists and correcting errors that occured.

* (But for our exams it is rather typical that students perform very differently in different subfields: one is at home with thermodynamics but doesn't get kinetics and vice versa)

The blind grading should never allow the name of the student to be linked with the student number. Your grade sheets should be coded only by student number until the end of the semester. All written assignments, wether marked or unmarked, should be identified by number. In this way, you will have much less of a chance to learn the handwriting. You will get the odd look when a student shows you a paper to ask a question.

I'm not sure that such thorough anonymity is practical in many course settings.  If the OP were merely the grader, I could see this working well, but he said that he is the TA.  So presumably he is also interacting with the students in person and fielding questions about their problem sets, exams, and the grading thereof.  In many contexts, making sure that you never see a student's handwriting would make it difficult or impossible to fulfill the responsibilities of a TA.

@PeteL.Clark And it's not just about handwriting.  If a student comes to you asking about a misunderstanding, it can be be pretty obvious when that same misunderstanding appears in an assignment.  Even without face to face interaction, other features make homeworks identifiable through the course of the semester.  It might be impossible to put a name to students after two assignments, but it's often not too hard to recognize that submission78 for homework1 and submission 93 for homework2 came from the same student.

@Joshua: Yes, I agree.  Upshot: the measures necessary to seriously enforce anonymity seem in many cases to be antithetical to the TA job.

@PeteL.Clark I agree entirely;  I don't think that anonymity is all that it's cracked up to be.  It's awful hard to help students if one of the typical ways of recognizing their difficulties is removed.

The first time a studnet asks for a regrade, you can attach that student to their ID number.

@JeffE I said it reduces, not eliminates, the opportunities to learn student handwriting. Further, I have a hard enough time remembering students names. I think remembering their names and student ID would be impossible for most academics.


text:
During your undergrad, how much time did you put into assigned journal readings?
I feel like I can study one academic article for a very long time. Usually I end up spending many hours mulling over one specific article on the first pass. When you were going through your undergrad and reviewing the assigned readings, how much time and energy would you put into a single article on average? I know articles vary in length and density so this is hard to put a number to, but I'm looking to compare myself to a "normal" length of time.
How much time on average do you dedicate to article readings, per class, during your undergrad?

It would also help to know what kind of articles you are reading. For example, if you are reading an article of 2-3 pages, that would be very different from an articles of 30-35 pages. Including the topic can also get you more useful answers.

I'll answer in such a way as to incorporate the difference between my undergrad and grad experiences; hopefully that will help justify keeping your question open and relevant. However, I'm trying to keep this relatively objective, because you don't want to get flagged for being too opinion-based.
I probably spent very little time reading as an undergrad, except of course when a test was around the corner (it's a fixed interval "reinforcement" schedule; this is to be expected). I could usually get away with just studying all night the day before a test (that might work out to about 10 hours/month/class), but as a psychologist, I've since learned that this is a pretty poor way to study (at least in terms of how effectively you'll learn), so I wouldn't recommend it, unless it's the only way for you to balance your need to learn with your need to do other things with your life. There's something to be said for finding your natural style early and not fighting it too much just because it's not the best by some specific criterion like information retention.
As a graduate student, my very first class seemed to make a point of swamping me with reading. It was ridiculous, and somewhat infuriating. Lest this seem like I'm diving further into personal anecdotes and opinion, note that I'm not the only one who felt this way, and I know my program wasn't the only one to adopt this sort of pseudo-hazing strategy, which I once heard referred to as the "Harvard Method." (Of weeding out the not-so-die-hard students I assume?) Can't find any internet info to corroborate this, but I'd love to hear if anyone who actually went to Harvard—like the professor of this class of mine did—noticed whether professors like to assign entire books to read on a weekly basis there.
My later classes weren't quite so bad, but I partly perceived them to be better because that first professor was really over-the-top with tremendously long reading assignments due every week, and I had to learn how to skim effectively just to "survive" it. In retrospect, that was a good lesson (albeit learned the hard way), because my graduate studies involved much more reading in general, and more in-depth, weekly accountability. I couldn't just cram from a textbook for a test every month or two; I had to read (skim) enough of multiple separate articles (often denser, with disparate writing styles, and not uncommonly longer than your average textbook chapter) to get a sense of what I could talk about in a seminar-style discussion with much fewer other students to hide behind, all of whom knew my name, as did the professor. I definitely did more reading as a grad student; anywhere from 3–15 hours/week/class when I had classes (not counting reading to prepare as a TA, or studying for my own research purposes). I suspect these experiences are fairly common, but I don't really know.
Other factors affecting my reading time included how interested I actually was in an article, and how messy my personal life was on any given week, of course. I should also add that I sometimes felt I needed to study less than the average student, yet I also felt that I read a given amount of text more slowly than the average student, so I may not be the best representative (probably a multivariate outlier in any case). Empirical summary statistics from educational psych literature might be of more use to you, though I don't have any sources on hand.


text:
Should I be considering a Accelerated Master Program?
I'm a 3rd year undergrad in Mathematics and Chemistry. I find most of subjects I have encountered very interesting, like computer science, physics and my two majors. I try to be involved with projects with professors from different fields. I'm having a hard time to decide what I truly want to do. That's why I want to learn more about each subjects. Should I focus on one thing at a time?
The decision I need to make right now is that, I found two Accelerated Master Program (AMP) in both Chemistry and Computer science. They are both 5 years program. The deadline is the second semester of junior year. I heard from my Chemistry adviser that I cannot use any AMP credit to fulfill part of a PhD if I changed my mind later. I think AMP is a good chance for me to have a better view of those subjects without committing 5-6 years PhD work. I'm afraid once I go in depth and I find I like it then I will have to spend more time later.
Is it more advisable to pursue an accelerated masters program or just a bachelors degree when planning on possibly pursuing PhD program latter?

Please specify your goals and the context you are working in (country, institution type, funding...) and try to make the problem clearer.

I would suggest to change your thinking style. There are many things we are passionate about them, but the life is too short and there is always a career competition. Therefore, most of us could be successful in one branch.
I suggest specify a deadline for yourself, ask others in these fields and at some point decide when your decision deadline come. By deciding I mean throw away all the other subjects completely from your mind.

This answer would probably be more useful if you would offer some supporting logic or explanation beyond "life is too short."


text:
How to find out if an author is practicing pseudoscience or is fraudulent?
I have had the need to dig deep into the theory of architecture and in doing so I have encountered various authors who make extremely grandiose claims about themselves and their work.
This of course is not a measure for the actual value of their achievements, but sometimes it is hard to find out if an author is just very bad at expressing themselves, want to mask their ideas with jargon in order to make them seem even deeper, or if they really are just fabricating incoherent theories.
I by no mean want to denigrate anyone, but I don't want to learn from authors who are practicing junk science. The problem with architecture are authors who talk not just about architectural theory - but connect various disciplines to it, for example psychology, computer science, mathematics, etc... I have no required knowledge of any of those disciplines - so it is impossible for me to know if they are just using complex constructs from another discipline in a way that is just "sugar coating" for their claims.
A bigger problem is that there are very few people who have studied both architecture and some other discipline in detail and are able to comment both.
In this case I am baffled by two authors: Nikos A. Salingaros and Michael Leyton. Their book make incredible sounding claims, and their homepages and Amazon reviews are full of praise that rings all kinds of alarm bells, but at the same time they have permanent positions in universities which to my knowledge are quite reputable, and they have published a lot...
Regarding Michael Leytons theory of perception and cognition, there is a detailed criticism by Hendrickx and Wageman, but as I said, I am no mathematician... Apparently there is something wrong with the mathematical side of his theory though.
Is there any way to find if I can trust these authors? They seem to gather citations from their students and other people who use their work without any kind of criticism. Do I need to go through the magazines they publish into and find out if they are peer reviewed and of good reputation? How would I go about doing that?
I don't want to pollute my work with bad science, and I am very hesitant to make any claims myself if I don't have good grounds for them. With complex interdisciplinary claims like the ones these two authors do, should I just not use them at all since it seems so hard to find out if they can be taken academically seriously?

Asking if you can trust specific authors is far too "localized" a question; it won't help anyone other than you, and would this be considered "off-topic" here. However, the question of figuring out how to know when to trust authors as a general matter is perfectly on-topic. So I'd recommend removing the parts of your question relating to specific authors.

The OP makes a bold claim that is not adequately supported by evidence.  Hence this post is pseudoscience.

Context: I'm a PhD student in Computational Social Science, so I'm very knowledgable about Complexity Science and related fields and how they are applied to design, architecture, organization science, and economics.  Also, my adviser is a leader in the field of Design Science, particularly how Cognitive Science and AI can be applied to understand design and designers.  Finally, I have a lot of domain knowledge regarding Pattern Languages and generative models of conception and design.

Is there any way to find if I can trust these authors?

I've encountered many authors, researchers, and consultants who I have identified as "charlatans" when it comes to applying Complexity Science or other models or theories to social systems.  For the most part, they apply Complexity Science only in a metaphorical sense (e.g. "edge of chaos" concept), but have no basis or foundation in empirical or theoretical research.
But to determine whether any particular author is a charlatan or not, there is no substitute for you understanding the underlying theory or method. There is no reliable method for you to determine whether author A has a valid foundation in theory X unless you do your homework and develop a working understanding of theory X.  If, on the other hand, you stay with your position that "I'm not a mathematician", then you have no basis for deciding either way.  Looking at what other people say or citations will not help you, in an academic sense.
If you don't want to do the work to understand the mathematics, computational science, and formal methods that these author use, then just go another direction.  If you must include them in your papers, then just say that you have no opinion on their validity or significance because their methods/theories are beyond your grasp.
Finally, just because you don't understand the mathematical and computational methods these authors use their theories doesn't mean there is any "junk science" going on.  As Steven Covey (7 Habits) advised: "Seek first to understand."

Edit: Whether or not these authors have tenured positions at important Universities is not very good evidence regarding whether their "science" is "junk" or not.

@BenCrowell  Yes, you can use these two methods, but you are in effect depending on other people's judgment and evaluation, not your own.  I accept that we all have limited time and capabilities, and so it is expedient to rely on the judgment of other people.

Absolutely correct. There is a crackpot WM who is a full professor at a university but regularly posts nonsense on MO, Math SE and Phil SE, denying Cantor's theorem and other things. This nonsense has unfortunately persisted on one of those sites, which exemplifies what happens when crankery meets incompetency.

I think your definition of academic fraud or pseudoscience is way over the top. I am neither a mathematician nor an architect, but just doing a quick background search on both authors you mention gives me no indication that they are some wackjobs that use terminology from other disciplines to sound smart. If that is the case, they sure have convinced a lot of people that certainly know more about these fields than me (and, maybe, you).
Sure, a lot of people disagree with their theories, but that's completely ok, quite naturally actually. Most theories that go against the mainstream in a field are critiqued strongly. Michael Leyton, for instance, is a professor of theoretical computer science at Rutgers. His theories may or may not be correct, but I would be very hesitant to call it pseudoscience in the absence of further evidence.


text:
How do you keep focused on a long-term academic goal while working?
I'm a college graduate and now working as an EMT in the hopes of going to physician assistant school next year. While working, it's easy to get sidetracked by many different points of view. I don't want someone to end up persuading me to become a paramedic.
How do you stay focused on your long-term academic goals outside of academia?

I don't think there's any' simple answer beyond remembering what your goal is, why it's your goal, and that you don't have to justify it to anyone but yourself. And if you want to, you can sign up as a part-time volunteer EMT once your career is stable.

Hi, and welcome to Academia.SE!  I've edited your title to focus it more clearly on the question removed the lol (text-speak is generally discouraged here); please feel free to fix my title edit if you feel it conflicts with your intent.

I do not understand what "boat-programming" is. I neither see boat nor programming in the question.

@Ketan "Boat programming" is a StackExchange term for tangentially related questions, as explained in this meta post.  Personally, I disagree with this assessment of this question and think it's a good one for this site (but then I'm relatively liberal about scope on this site)

@MadJack thanks. I am not sure if it is a popular enough term to be used as a basis for voting to close a question. I am pretty sure the asker wouldn't understand it. I agree with jakebeal that the question is quite relavant.

@MadJack It's good form to include a link when using insider jargon like boat-programming.

You're right: it is easy to get sidetracked by the immediate responsibilities of work and other parts of life.  The first question that I would recommend you ask yourself is: why is that a bad thing?
A higher degree ambition is a great thing, and can lead to a very fulfilling life.  But you can also have a very fulfilling life in a lot of other ways as well.  What would happen if you just let go of the ambition and abandoned the plan?  Would that be so bad?
If it would be so bad, then there must be a reason why.  Now, that's the driver for your long-term goal.  The problem is, how do you get from where you are to that long-term goal, when all of these distractions are around you?  Some of the best advice that I have heard on this subject comes from writing podcast that I enjoy listening to: in one episode the podcasters, who are all well-established fiction writers, were talking about the shifts they had made on their path from aspiring writer to well-paid professionals.  One big shift that they all identified was that they had had to start thinking of writing as their job even while they were not yet being paid for it, which meant setting aside significant amounts of time per day to work on writing.
I would recommend the same thing for you in terms of making sure that you keep your focus.  Set aside a weekly schedule of time to work on the things that you need to do in order to be able to gain admission to the program you are aiming at and to prepare yourself academically for it.  With that time, you can both organize yourself, planning the short term goals that will move you toward your long-term goal, and also you can work on those steps.
Then, keep records of how much time you are actually devoting toward your academic goals.  If it's much less than you intend, then you need to reassess your priorities and ask again: do you really want this degree if you are not setting aside time to prepare for it?  And if you do really want it, what are you going to de-prioritize in order to make the time you need?
Preparing for higher education while working a full-time job can be hard, but it's also very possible, and I know many people who have done it.

This is a fairly generalizable question, so hopefully it will be of interest to more than just those confused between PA and paramedic.  However, I will answer it with the PA/paramedic terms, since that will make the writing easier for me (and it will probably make the answer easier to read, too).  I will also assume the OP is currently at least 95% certain she wants to proceed with the PA plan.

Keep a double list of characteristics of the two fields.  For example (I'm guessing here): paramedic -- lots of adrenaline and excitement, very rewarding when rescue or save someone's life, devastating when unsuccessful, some periods of inactivity and boredom, working with new people every day, frequent exposure to serious injuries and death, etc.  These lists will probably evolve over time.
Shadow a PA; shadow a paramedic.
Read short stories, novels, biographies, magazine articles and blog posts by and about physician assistants, doctors and nurses.  One author I like very much is Perri Klass.
Spend some time visualizing your goal, in other words, picturing yourself as a physician's assistant, and remembering why you chose that goal.  Remind yourself which of your strengths make you well suited to that job.  Once you've got this image clear, you'll be able to pull it to the surface easily whenever you need it.
Get to know some PAs and some students working toward that goal.
(This is similar to 5, but slightly different) Create a buddy relationship with someone who has a similar goal to yours.  For example, when I was working on adopting a baby, I had a phone buddy who was working on the same thing, and we were able to keep each other going despite various setbacks.
Make some partial goals and deadlines for yourself and put them in a paper calendar that you keep on the wall.  Reward yourself with a special treat when you make one of your partial deadlines or goals.
Find a good mentor.
Enlist the support of friends, coworkers and family.

To be focused is quite challenging now a days. Break your long term goal into number of short term goals so as to achieve them easily. Also keep reading inspirational articles and thoughts.