text:
What should I do if I want to work in computer science but my advisor actively despises the field?
I am a PhD student in computer science.  My advisor is a Professor in another department and complains that computer science has a poor culture, where people publish lots of rubbish papers instead of a few good ones.  My advisor prefers to publish in journal papers rather than conferences, and when my papers have been accepted to (good) conferences  didn't want to come to the conferences with me.  My advisor has published in computer science conferences in the past but now he seems to have little interest in CS or the CS community.
I am worried that I will not be able to have a career in computer science under these circumstances.  What should I do?

Seems that there's a pretty clear solution: change advisors.

I wonder why did you pick this advisor in the first place...

For the record, I think it's common for supervisors not to accompany you to conferences (unless they were going anyway). I certainly went to all conferences by myself during my PhD (in CS).

@NateEldredge I'm not sure who to change advisors to because I don't really have a lot of background in any available field so I don't know which field to choose.  I have some background in one field, but all the professors in that field have already rejected me, and the closest thing I could find was my current advisor.  Should I just quit my PhD then?

The idea of having an advisor in a different department seems both strange and unhelpful (unless they're a second advisor of some sort).  They're not well placed to deal with it if yo're having difficulties, even if they don't have the conflict of interest you seem to be dealing with.

Aren't there any advisors in the department you actually are in?

If you don't control your own life, someone else will.

Is the PHd in a subfield that other-laps Maths and CS, and the advisor is an expert in that subfield but sits in the maths department?   And the candidate would like to broaden out his/her research into subfields that sit better in CS once the PHd is done, so wishes to be visible in CS?

Should I just quit my PhD then? — No, you should move to another university that has faculty willing to advise you.

My question to you is why would you have non-computer science advisor if you are in the computer science field? That being said, you should change your advisor

One of the professors in the computer science department told me I should work with this guy, and I trusted him without looking too much into my advisor's motivations.  His previous papers had some computer science content so I kind of assumed he liked CS.  But now I think he wants to stop doing it.

@user52813, Dude, just switch advisors.

@user52813 You need to take a lot more control of your situation. "Someone said I should work with this guy" is not sufficient grounds to pick an advisor for your PhD.

@ChrisHayes Yeah I guess I was just used to having people tell me what to do.  It's made grad school kind of hard for me because people expect me to know what I'm doing.

Time to adapt and learn from the experience.

Speak with your supervisor about his long-term goals, and yours. If you want to do hard computer science and he wants to do X, then you need to find a solution. If he's moving away from computer science, but you would be interested in studying the intersection between computer science and X, then you can probably work something out. But you each need to be aware you the other's interests and of your own.
Note that it's quite common for Computer Science PhDs to straddle two fields. Combining Computer Science with another subject almost always yields interesting research. The people in field X are happy to have someone around who understands computers, and this usually creates new questions, and new opportunities.
The downside is that you have to deal with the conventions of two fields. Do you publish in journals for field X, or in Computer Science conferences? If you have co-authors from field X, what will they think of our strange CS habits? This is all part of the challenge of PhD work, and in the end you will come out with an understanding of two fields.  But you have to know whether you care about field X beforehand.

I cannot stress enough how tricky this interplay between two fields can be. If your advisor doesn't understand, and respect, these differences, as happened to me, you are in for a bad bad time. Because if you keep him happy, you decimate your chances of getting CS jobs and vice versa.

While I agree that inter-disciplinary research is interesting and common within CS, that doesn't necessarily mean your advisor should be from the other field. Even when your research involves multiple fields, it's probably still best for your primary advisor to be in your own field in the majority of circumstances, though you might have someone from the other field on your graduate committee.

Well there was this guy, A, saying that B's field is on the way out. Turned out, it was the other way round. B's field is now big, A's field is on the way out. (True story)
Whatever the case: do not take a supervisor that does not want to supervise the field you work in. I repeat. Do not take a supervisor that does not want to supervise the field you work in. Either change field or change supervisor. Everything else is a waste of his/her and your time.

In brief: find a different advisor.  If this is difficult, then your department should have a “Director of Graduate Studies”, or some similar title, and they should be able to help you.
Your situation as you describe it sounds odd in several ways.  The only reasons I’ve heard of for having an advisor in a different department are if you really want to work with that advisor, or at least in their field.  But it sounds like that’s definitely not the case here!  So it’s not clear that there’s any good reason for you to be working with this external advisor, rather than someone in your department.
You mention in comments that one potential advisor in your department has previously rejected you.  If it was only one, then there should be others to ask, reasonably close to your areas of interest; hopefully, one of them would be happy to take you on.
If you find that multiple faculty members in your department are unwilling to work with you, then the situation is more difficult.  There could be many different reasons — perhaps your department has too many PhD students at the moment, so faculty are over-stretched; or possibly the potential advisors feel that your work is not as promising as it should be.  But in either case, the director of your department’s graduate programme should be able to help understand and resolve the situation — part of their job is ensuring that no student ends up without a suitable advisor.

+1 While it's undesirable, if they can't find an advisor in their own department, it might be time for the student to start looking at other schools.

Another resource to go to is the director of the graduate program. Depending on how advanced you are into your Ph.D. program, he/she may negotiate some kind of agreement. I remember a case when a Ph.D. student was being neglected by her advisor. I recommended her to get the graduate director to apply some pressure to the advisor, and it worked (she was pretty close to finishing though).

Do the due diligence you should have done with your advisor to begin with.
Get a different advisor.
Work to develop your communication skills so you don’t end up with another similarly unsuited advisor.

Up front, clear communication can avoid these issues in the future.  Good luck.

A brief answer (in disagreement to other answers): Your advisor has the right to hold any belief he or she wishes to. It's completely legitimate to criticize CS or any other scientific culture. I didn't see in your post anything that actually harms your PhD, or your chances for academic success. So I don't see a real problem here: just continue to do good job and believe in your work.
There are a lot of great scientists with "negative attitudes", on the surface. It does not mean that they are not going to help you, or even be a very good supervisor to you.

Criticizing CS is one thing, and I agree it's not inherently a problem.  But the OP also says the advisor has "little interest" in CS.  If that's true, it seems that it will seriously hinder his effectiveness as an advisor to a student working in CS.

Find someone who is willing to mentor you in the ways of Computer Science.
Life to short to waste on people with negative attitudes toward your field.


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Do I have recourse if one professor's section has a higher average grade and "easier time" than my course's section?
From my observations comparing syllabi, grades, and coursework with a few of my peers, their professor's section of the same class has a significantly lighter work-load, more lenient grading policy, and a higher overall class-average (we're talking a letter-grade higher).
Do I have a case for a legitimate grievance?

A different professor, correct? How large is each section? Tens or hundreds?

@Buffy about 20 students in each section, correct, different professor.

Are you in school to get an education or to get a grade? What happens when students from each professor take the next level course?

I'll elaborate more. This is an economics course @BryanKrause: One professor's exams and quizzes are almost identical to homework problem sets, and are not very expensive.
My professor requires you to use extensive spreadsheets (you make during the exams) and tabulate tedious calculations over a very long period of time.
Grading is based on if you get the correct answer, not methodologies, etc.

@RealMech it’s not clear to me how these extra details change anything, except that now it sounds like you might be suggesting that what’s bothering you is not that the workload is heavy but that it focuses on tedious calculations that aren’t conceptually important to the material of the course. Is that true? In general, I think it’s important that you clarify to yourself exactly what it is you’re upset about. E.g., if the teacher isn’t teaching well, that’s a valid complaint. But hard exams and heavy workload by themselves are unlikely to be seen as actionable or necessarily even a bad thing.

To me the key point is: are you sure that the final letter grades are different as you describe? It's possible that one professor gives an average in the 70s and another has an average in the 50s, but both give 30% As, 50% Bs, etc.

I'm certain your university has some sort of student affairs or advising.  That's who you should talk to.
I teach a class that has another section taught by another professor, and we've worked hard to align the workload and grading.  We did so initially at the behest of the department and our own student advising dean.  Both of us found the request perfectly fair.
A few points to consider though:

Are the classes really identical?  It sounds like they are from what you wrote, but be sure.
Has this been a long-time situation?  If it has been, it's possible the department is well aware of the issue and has been unable to bring about change.  In that case there's no harm in adding your voice to it, but temper your expectations.
Is one of the instructors a new professor/post doc/grad student?  It's possible they're new to this and aren't aware that the difference is a problem.
If you're unable to get anything changed it may just be something you have to accept (or change sections) - tenured faculty often get a lot of leeway in how they handle their classes.

Regardless, if you're going to do anything, don't confront the professors until you've spoken with student affairs or advising.  This isn't something you should be putting your own reputation on the line for, and certainly not with anything like a formal grievance.

It is hard to say and depends on the culture of your institution. But I think it more likely that you would do worse by making any formal complaint than otherwise. You might even be laughed out of the department head's office for making a complaint. But who can say. Professors are pretty independent in such things, though sometimes they do try to coordinate the workload if nothing else.
And what would you hope to accomplish? Toughening up the other section? Getting one of the professors disciplined? Switching in mid stream?
Being loved by some students and professors and hated by others? Lots of possible outcomes here.
And few of us from this distance can say if the "tougher" standards you might be facing are an advantage for you or a disadvantage. If you meet a high standard you learn more.
Being a tough instructor is different from being an incompetent one.
And, a secret. Some professors seem tougher than they are, making adjustments when it comes to final grades if the overall distribution of grades is too low.
I guess my best advice is to grumble to yourself if it helps, but use this as an opportunity to improve your understanding. Especially if this is an important course.

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Why did notable mathematician Walter Rudin have so few citations according to ResearchGate?
According to ResearchGate, Rudin had about 30 ish papers and 500 ish citations.
How come so few?  I thought he was this legend of maths.
Here's his profile:
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/21400404_Walter_Rudin

The book by W. Rudin "Principles of Mathematical Analysis" has 10304 citations. Please use Google Scholar yourself.

I haven't really worked in analysis where Rudin made his contributions but writing a very popular text book and making big research contributions are separate things. For a more drastic example consider the Stewart calculus books. This is probably the most sold and best known maths book in the world but that doesn't make Stewart a notable mathematician research wise.

It tells much about the quality and credibility of ResearchGate.

Nearly every mathematician in my, now very old, generation studied from one or more of his books. I still have some of them on my shelf.

@scaaahu In terms of numbers, these comparisons are highly misleading. A Google Scholar citation is not the same thing as a Researchgate citation, which is not the same thing as a Scopus citation.

MathSciNet lists 11977 citations for Rudin.

@FedericoPoloni so all citations are (not) equal, but some are more equal than others...

MathSciNet also shows something like 150 research papers by Walter Rudin.  Clearly Researchgate's database is very incomplete.  I suspect they don't do so well with papers from before the Internet era.

I  don't know how many times I've mentioned, in the "background" section of a paper, Walter Rudin's 1956 theorem that the continuum hypothesis implies the existence of P-point ultrafilters. Almost none of those mentions included a citation, because this fact has become so familiar. I suspect that the same thing has happened to other results of his.

This answer will be a bit orthogonal to the question. But Rudin's place is due to more than the number of papers written and citations.
According to the Math Genealogy project, Rudin produced 24 successful PhD students and has 125 "descendants". These numbers are pretty big. Some of his students were, themselves very productive.
A professor can be a collaborator, but not an author on a pretty large number of papers, and this is pretty typical in math.
Note also, that in mathematics it was then not normal for a professor to be listed as co-author on their student's work. I think that is still pretty standard, actually.
So, the number of citations isn't necessarily the only measure of influence.

But as to the question itself, mathematicians have moved on to other, newer, areas since his time. In some sense this is, or can be, due to success in solving outstanding problems, leaving only the hardest questions still open. So people work in areas in which it might be a bit easier to be "productive".

I don't know what ResearchGate is doing, but Google Scholar shows many many more citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=walter+rudin&btnG=
For example, "Principles of mathematical analysis" has more than 10,000 citations. "Real and complex analysis" has more than 16,600. "Fourier analysis on groups" has 3,500. These are all exceedingly large numbers for mathematicians.

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On tenure track and department chair wants me to consider leaving
A few weeks ago after my grant meeting my department chair asked me if I still wanted to do research. She said I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. She went on to say that I appeared to be struggling and that I could leave the tenure track. She said no one would judge me or think that I was a failure if I decided not to do research anymore. She said I could return to practice if I wanted to. This was pretty much an invitation to quit. She said she couldn’t promise I could get another non-tenure position and that the other departments did not have any needs.
It turns out that the department does need someone but she lied to me. She told me to think about what I wanted to do. Last week she sent me an email saying that she wanted to meet with me about my grant. So I invited my other grant team members. She then emailed me back to say that she did not want them present. She said that the meeting was not about the grant and that she wanted to close the loop on our discussion. Basically she lied again with a misleading email. The subject of her email even read meeting to discuss grant.
We didn’t meet that day. I was sick. This week she emailed me again to get on her calendar to have this meeting. I feel like she is trying to force me to resign. Do you have any advice about how I should proceed?

What do you want to do? To pick up your research program? To transition to a different position at the same university? To persuade your chair that your current research is going well?

what is the country and the field?

What exactly is your question?

What sort of grant is this (internal, government funding)?  Have you been conducting research?  Are you close to meeting the research production needed to meet tenure?  Without details such as these it seems impossible to comment on the comments of the chair.

@aaaaasaysreinstateMonica the quote "She said I could return to practice if I wanted to" makes it seem like OP was a social worker or some sort of clinician.  Definitely not a Language professor.

It can happen that a department chair gives negative pre-tenure feedback, but then the outside letters (which the chair hadn't yet seen) turn out to be strong enough for tenure.  (In these examples, the tenure decision is made by the overall department and university, not just the chair, and outside letters carry a lot of weight.)  In short, the chair doesn't always know.  On the other hand, it may be that the chair is well informed already, e.g. by knowledgeable sources such as senior faculty in your area in the department who would be in a good position to judge.

Let's be fair for a second and consider other viewpoints, not only the OPs immediate assessment: if someone's tenure decision is likely to be negative, it is best for the candidate to know about it. Of course, the chair may be wrong and there is no problem. The chair may be not good at communicating it in a subtle way, but her intentions are not necessarily evil. Also, from the story, I have the impression that the communication between OP and the chair is in general not really smooth.

I would think the date of the upcoming tenure decision with respect to the present would be an important factor to know, and also the details of what can be done to force you out when you're on the tenure track, but before the decision date.  If your chair is trying to force you out early, take a "what can you do for me" type approach.

As an untenured faculty member your options are limited and the risks are high. Depending on local law you may have some protections, of course.
What you do depends on what her actual power over you is. If she is part of the tenure decision process, then the situation is worse. Likewise if she can influence others.
But, she may just be signaling you that your tenure decision is likely to be negative, whether from her actions or just a general assessment. You don't say, for example, how the research is going or the state of the grant (or even if it has been awarded or is just being applied for).
You will probably learn more when this individual meeting happens. Sadly, you won't have any other person present who can support you or attest to any improper statements if they occur. I've been in such a situation, actually.
My suggestion is that you immediately get into the job market and start to collect colleagues who will support you both in finding a new job and in maintaining this one. Long term, it doesn't seem like this environment is supportive enough.
If she has doubts about your work, her response should be about how she can help you. That may be her intent and you aren't recognizing it as such, but it is impossible to say from what you write.

If you are in the UK, I would suggest that the law stipulates that you should be able to take a union representative to this sort of meeting. Although of course that might be seen as a hostile escalation.

@IanSudbery, yes. Having a third party present is an important safeguard. Having a recording of a conversation is another. But both may be regulated.

I think anywhere that has a faculty union would be willing to push for a union rep to be in such a meeting, even if it's not legally mandated that such a thing must allowed. Point being: if you have a union, talk to them

In the U.S., unionized workers being asked to an investigatory interview have a right to union representation, known as the Weingarten Rights. Whether this qualifies I'm not sure; one could of course ask in any case.

when you do get that appointment, make an audio recording of the conversation with your cell phone, can be useful to get a clearer picture of what was said afterwards (not easy on the spur of the moment when emotions are high), and to use as evidence if improper statements are made.

"she may just be signaling you that your tenure decision is likely to be negative."  If this is the case, the chair may be trying to avoid `calling you out' in front of your (the OP's) peers, which is potentially embarrassing for her, you, and anyone else.  In my experience academics can sometimes be non-confrontational to a fault.

Sorry to hear about your situation.
The other advice about i) protecting your interests in the face of dubious communication, and ii) starting to look elsewhere regardless, are good. But I'd add another dimension:

Are you struggling? If yes, are you marketing your achievements enough? If not, what help do you need to get onto the right track?

The tenure-track stage is hard, for many reasons. Many people take a while to find their sea-legs, or are thrown off kilter by unrelated life complexities. Some discover being a standalone researcher is not their thing. (And some get chewed up by the tenure machine unfairly, too.)  Are you making the type of progress you need, given your stage in your career?
If yes, it is unfortunately possible that your chair has it in for you and just wants to get rid of you. It is also possible your chair is just misinformed. Have you filled in requested updates in a timely fashion and highlighting your achievements? Have you communicated your research plan enough? A number of years back, a couple of us (in math) had to step in to help a brilliant but very introverted young colleague who had recently had some pretty impressive research results, had just submitted a paper about them to a prestigious journal, but filled in his activity reports -- quite accurately -- that he had published no papers and made no conference presentations, for the 3rd year in a row. He just missed the memo that self-marketing was needed.
If you've had setbacks that have impacted your progress, but are now on track, do you have your narrative ready about that. Research often doesn't work the way it should; experiments fail; hypotheses turn our wrong; ethics committees misunderstand and delay progress. We, as lonely academics, get sick, depressed, etc. Too often we try to internalize all these wounds, since they make us feel vulnerable. But do they in fact explain limitations you have had that may be giving a wrong impression as to your future promise in a research career?
If you are struggling now, but do want to continue, what help do you need? Do you have mentors to guide you? Do you need specific support to get over roadblocks? If you are having some personal challenges, look into (and definitely ask your union) what are accommodations that you may be entitled to. In my old department, there was very little attention paid to such things. My wife's department has a pretty extensive accommodation policy, for both students and faculty, that in particular has helped some of her junior colleagues by "pausing the tenure clock" when needed, or considering progress in context. But you have to know to ask, especially if your chair seems at best clueless.
All of this is both to get you into a better place, if needed; and to take charge of the narrative, if you've let it run away from you. It's also helpful to think through if it is true the chair just has it in for you...since then, part of your response is to make it clear you are informed, equipped with facts/narrative of your own, and therefore not an attractive expendable target, if there is funny business going on.
Good luck!

Not knowing the politics, is it possible the chair has someone else in mind- but needs the slot to open first? It's much easier and less of a fight if the victim leaves the scene voluntarily ...

This is where you should consult your faculty association (or union) for advice, or where a trusted mentor comes in. Individual contexts differ, but this could be an indication that they're worried about the outcome of your tenure decision and are giving signals.
That said, a good chair will be clear about what they are indicating.
You can't be forced to resign, but you should meet with your chair if they are requesting a meeting. Discuss with your faculty association and take notes in the meeting, and make sure to take no decisions on the spot.

Sounds to me like your chair is trying to tell you that you are not going to get tenure (or at least she doesn't want you to). Now maybe there are other professors who will vote in your favor, but getting through tenure with a chair that doesnt want you to is going to be hard / impossible. Detmining the exact politics of the department is useful if you wish to continue.
Carry on for now - and find another job

I think you can reasonably demand to have a 3rd party present, such as a union rep or an impartial friend or an HR member depending on local culture.
That would be my thinking here, or to say "I am going to record the meeting" and then do so.


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Top app to run the University course classes remotely during a medical epidemic emergency
As our University closed most of one week which estimated more than one month, we need to be in contact with each other like the classrooms, so I have spoken by one of our master who was recently in USA in last two months and said there we used the:
 1. Google class
 2. classroom  app.
So I ask here which one is more professional for running the classes and better for this condition, and if you know more proper method or app to run the courses class in this kind with ability like :
 - User friendly and simple usage
 -  Have options like using low bandwidth internet and with low-speed internet
 - Have ability to ask questions during the live streaming

Here we use Zoom. It's gratis account have limitations (only 40 minutes of connection), though. Works well enough.

If you are in China, you can use https://www.ulearning.cn/
We are using it for our university. However, I do not know much about the technical aspect of it because I am just using it as a lecturer.


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Student side strategies for handling stressful atmosphere in class
At first day of second semester of my  M.S biomedical engineering classes we have 12 units as 4  courses:

Image Analysis
Fuzzy systems

3. Pattern recognition

Research methodology

So only the fourth course is with one other master and the 3 others courses are with one master in 2 day as compressed time setting of classes.
After first day, i have seen some conflict between myself and the 9 unit courses master, for example :

I like to have access to cellphone during class to check additional information and some answer for my questions which is faster to find  by googling them, but banned by master. Also found that the statistics showing:

Around 97% of college students use their phones during class for non-educational purposes, according to a study published last month in Journal of Media Education.

So when I found some strange aspect of his lessons or specially his off topic remarks during the courses, at this time I become so aggressively and feeling  some force to express it by my communication during class by asking hard question from him which I think is intensified by myself need to accessing to others way of finding information by accessing to internet, which comes back to myself from master by changing Class atmosphere to more stressful by side effect on others student.

One of options in this sense is to be silent which have had some negative effect on me like these:

By my vision, become Less Efficiently, which takes other of  my times during days to learn course, which is declared by our master which is I think is one of education goal of our master to learn us to become more independent and learn science by ourself, which I think have agreement on it but I like to know about some others ways to handle it as backup when I can not or don't like do it.
Missing the opportunity of communicating during the class to one by master and other student.
More negative effect, when this master is one of only three mater of
this University department as this mater chosen as Supervisor for my final thesis.
At this first day of class I have done some partly, become so
silent and writing my questions and some strange behavior of this
first contact with my master personal characteristics which founded
and my  guest of psychological theories  based of them to find out
where am I and how to reaction during the to one by also tracing my
reaction to find out what happening during myself  into myself
Manuscript leaflet, but this way is some times based of guesses and
I feel needs to be testified by communicating and bad part of it is
expressing those parts which was like notification or advice from
my side which are common in my culture especially when we become
more older by ages ( me 36 and master 48 years old !!!)

So I like to know do you have had this kind of strange experiments by being one master in this situation or as a student ( or I am alone!)?
And result of this kind of relation or situation in your life and academic working area if you like to share here?
Also if possible any suggestion tag to Google about this kind of relation.

I have students who say they use their smartphones for “research”... Sadly for them I can recognize most of the games they are playing as I have two sons who play the same games. Some of those are about to do resits...

Why the downvote?

Yeah although I don’t ban cell phone they are distracting and this adds stress to students try to focus on the lecture.

@user111388 speaking for myself this reads like a another “do-you-know-that-I’m-entitled-to-my-cell-phone” question.

You raise a number of issues here and so this is only a partial answer. Generally, it is a bad idea to fight with an instructor. They set rules and you are pretty much required to follow them. Hopefully the instructor has reasons behind the rules, but normally they have the authority to enforce them in any case.
So, in the case of having smartphones forbidden there is a simple work-around. Get yourself a pack of index cards and always carry a few to class with you. When something arises that you'd like to look up on the phone, write down a very short note to yourself on a separate card so you don't forget it. Then, immediately after class, do your searches. You can also use the card to write down key ideas from the information you find.
Don't discard these cards. They can be very useful for later study when it comes time for exams and such.
The same cards can be used for other important ideas, making it possible to carry a short summary of important ideas for review whenever you have a spare moment.

For more on the index card idea, see this answer to a question on another site here.

Most researchers are always to be found with some type of permanent notebook - notes at anytime, late night blinding ideas, odd questions to search etc etc

@SolarMike, even poets, actually.


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Is it fine to ask a collaborator to give me a recommendation letter directly or should I ask my adviser to do so?
Recently, I need to take some recommendation letters from our collaborators but I'm not sure is it fine to ask them directly by myself or should I ask my adviser to do so? Any idea or suggestion is appreciated.

It's always better to ask a person directly for the letter of recommendation. That way you can judge the person's enthusiasm and interest in writing a letter. They will also be able to give you more direct information than working through the "middleman" of your advisor.
If you feel uncomfortable approaching your collaborator for a letter, that's probably a sign that you might not get the quality of letter you want.
But you should also mention to your advisor that you are asking your collaborator for a letter, regardless of which path you pursue.

No, I'm not afraid about the quality just I don't want to look awful as someone that contacted our collaborators without working through the "middleman" as my adviser. Something like: After some while maybe the collaborator says to my adviser that your student got a recommendation letter from me. But my adviser says I didn't know that. And, maybe that looks awful in my adviser eyes that I contact professors without letting him to know. Am I just hesitating too much or it is rational in your opinion?

@AloneProgrammer So let your advisor know you are going to ask the collaborator for a letter then.

Why not to ask the advisor what is better to do? He will either propose that he will ask or will tell you to ask.

@AustinHenley: Thanks for the reminder. I had planned to mention that as part of my answer.

If you're worried that your request will look like you're going behind your advisor's back, CC your advisor on the request email.


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Is it possible for me as a graduate student in the US to a sign a contract with an US company to create a US patent from my PhD research?
I'm a third year graduate student in the US and a company in the US is interested in a special part of my PhD research, which was about developing an algorithm and create a software based on that algorithm for biomedical applications, and they want to sign a contract with me to create an US patent based on that algorithm and software. I know cause this work is originally developed in my university, the intellectual property is owned by the university, but it's not really clear in the university's intellectual property policy that in these kind of situations that a third-party is interested in a student's work what would be the procedure? I really appreciate if someone has any idea or suggestion regarding this matter.

Voting to close. You're aware that there are intellectual property issues here and that your university's intellectual property policy is critical to the situation.  We can't answer this question because it depends on information that we don't have.  In any case, this is a legal matter and you should really be seeking the help of an attorney.  Finally, whatever the answer is in your particular situation, the next graduate student who comes along will probably be attending a different university with different policies.  Thus any answer we might give wouldn't be helpful to them.

In general, the procedure works roughly like this:

Optional, depending on how potentially valuable this situation might be: Contact an intellectual property owner of your own, especially if considerable monetary amounts are involved.
Optional: It can be very helpful if you can see if anyone in your department has had experience with this personally, as you can go to them and they can often provide a few insider tips and suggestions that would be more relevant to your local situation.
Contact your University's Intellectual Property Office (or equivalent) to schedule a meeting to discuss the situation. Initially you just attend yourself with any co-creators, company isn't involved yet at this stage.
If you are in a place where the University claims ownership, you'll need to file something like a discovery statement outlining the intellectual property. If the University doesn't have ownership, they'll often be willing to discuss the option to assign it to them as part of a royalty agreement. If they do have ownership, as the creator it is still typical to receive royalties as part of the process (it is not ownership that is strictly free of responsibility on their part), but refer back to the IP office and your lawyer for specific guidance.
Your assigned representatives (lawyers, generally) will try to work out a contract with the company to define the transfer of rights, limitations, royalties/payments, etc.

As you are new to the process, the only way anything is likely to work out well for you is to get experienced people on your side to look after your rights (and ensure they themselves get paid for doing so).
If you are working with a University of any significant size and experience - and just having a PhD program suggests the place probably qualifies - there will be an office of people who have done with this many times before and can advise you better as to your specific situation.
There is huge variation in the IP agreements you signed between institutions and local laws, so I believe what I outline above is as close to a universal answer as possible. The devil is always in the details, so make sure you talk with people who are familiar with the local laws and policies that will apply to you.


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How do I tell professors I am no longer applying to graduate school?
I can't tell if my email should be a be a casual heads up or a weighty explanation of how I fucked up.
I just graduated college and have been doing a number of side gigs, one of which was teaching English online, for money. I always knew I wanted to research this niche topic in educational media, so I have been preparing my applications since graduation and requested letters of recommendation from all these people.
Then out of the blue, I get a job offer from the company I've been teaching in English in to move to their office and work on producing educational media. The industry sector, the job, and the country they are in is practically perfect. So naturally I take the job.
Now I'm at a loss over how to tell my professors I'm putting a halt on my applications. I feel shitty for making them write letters that I won't use, and worse, I know I will be asking them again in a few years to apply again.
Is it common for people to give up on their applications like this?
Is there a polite way of emailing them not only do I not need the letters anymore, but to also hang onto them because I will need them again?

Just tell the truth. Anyone who's not a jerk will understand.

Tell them as soon as possible, and pretty briefly. "I got an unexpectedly great job offer, which I plan to take, so I will not apply this year. I still plan to go to graduate school in the near future, and appreciate all of your work in supporting me."

Definitely make sure to emphasize that you'll be applying again, too - probably your professors would rather write the letter now, when they remember the details a little better.

You have a number of choices at your disposal:

In person. I would recommend this as it offers the most rich (in terms of feedback) setting for you to explain your situation, offer your gratitude for their help thus far, and secure the notion that you would be revisiting your graduate applications down the road given your new job. However, given the fact that you may not be near your university, this option has its drawbacks.
Through a Phone Call. Second to an in-person conversation is a phone call. You can receive more feedback in terms of their reaction to the news through audio cues. At the same time generating a more organic flow to the conversation.

Now I'm at a loss over how to tell my professors I'm putting a halt on my applications. I feel shitty for making them write letters that I won't use, and worse, I know I will be asking them again in a few years to apply again.
Is there a polite way of emailing them not only do I not need the letters anymore, but to also hang onto them because I will need them again?

As for email, here is something to consider:

Dear [Professor X],
I wanted to thank you for the time and effort that you have put into
  writing a letter of recommendation for my graduate studies. I really
  appreciate the help and advice you have given me through the process.
I recently received an offer to work at [insert company here].
  Although I had not considered it before, this position would allow me
  to [insert reason here]. I have discussed this with [potentially other
  professors, significant other] and I decided that this would be the
  best move for me in the next couple of years.
This does not mean that I do not have any aspirations to attend
  graduate school however. I understand how you may be disappointed in
  my decision, but I am hoping that you would support me if I were to
  postpone my graduate studies and reapply down the road. I am wondering
  if you would still be inclined to help me.
Please let me know of any comments or reservations you may have about
  this. Thank you.
Respectfully Yours,
[Your Name]

As for your questions:

I can't tell if my email should be a be a casual heads up or a weighty explanation of how I fucked up.

Keep it simple and to the point. You did not fuck up, you are making the best (relatively speaking) decision for yourself at this point in time.

Is it common for people to give up on their applications like this?

No hard data, but people quit programs for a multitude of reasons. You deciding to pursue a position is not the end of the world nor a unique situation.

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text:
Are there enough academic jobs for geometric measure theorists?
I am considering focusing on Geometric Measure Theory, and I want to stay in academia.
Some of my colleagues told me that there are fewer and fewer people doing GMT in the US, which would result in fewer and fewer jobs for GM theorists.
Questions:

Do math departments still hire GM theorists?
Is it true that the number of positions is declining?

I feel like this question could be generalised to "are there enough jobs in academia?". Why do you think geometric measure theorists in particular are having a hard time of it?

"there are fewer and fewer people doing GMT in the US, which would result in fewer and fewer jobs"- Did you mean that there are more people doing GMT, such that the job market for GMT's is increasingly saturated?  Or if not, what's the reasoning behind this concern?

Although it is apparently clear that there are "not enough jobs in academe", some sub-specialties are out of favor, and in that regard this is a very serious question.

Also, btw,if it is true that fewer-and-fewer people are doing degrees in GMT, that does not cause fewer jobs for that subject... but is perhaps an effect...

Csörnyei was hired as a full professor at the University of Chicago in 2011.

@Nat I mean fewer people working on GMT will make research on that subject less active so that math departments will hire fewer people specialized in GMT. It's a loop.

There is less supply and less demand.

There aren’t enough academic jobs in mathematics in general, as has been discussed in several answers here. My are about GMT specifically though.

I don't know about geometric measure theory in particular, and I'm not sure if anyone on this site does. But I can offer one answer to the more general question "Do math departments still hire people working in Specialty X"? In particular, here's one source of information that might help you answer your question:

Identify the names of the leading geometric measure theorists in the field, and/or the particular researchers you might be interested in working under.

Look them up on the Mathematics Genealogy Project, and find out the names of students they have graduated in the past 5-10 years.

For each student, type in "[Name of Student] Math" into Google; typically, if they are employed in some math department somewhere, either their website or their department's website will be the first hit.

If you know people in the field, you might also ask them directly for their impression of the job market, especially if they or their students were on the job market recently.
Good luck!

I am worried that, given the significant decline in the number of pure mathematics tenure-track openings from 10 years ago, historical data may not be that accurate.  Very few mathematicians advise so many students that the last 5-10 years of data will be meaningful, especially since the most recent graduates are still doing postdocs.

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text:
What can a grad student do when their assistantship requires more hours than specified in their contract?
I'm currently finishing my second year as a STEM PhD student at a fairly large research university. As a grad student, I am expected to fulfill 20 hours of extra duties each week. Typically this involves working as a TA for two classes and then completing a few hours a week in the tutoring center or helping out in large lecture classes. This has gone fine for me during that last three semesters. However, this semester I was only scheduled for one TA section. So this left about 10 hours in the tutoring center for my leftover duty.
Over the course of the semester the department has been giving me fairly large grading assignments for upper-division classes. The first was given about three weeks in and required some shuffling of my schedule to accommodate (I'm getting ready to take my quals and am taking multiple core classes this semester). This replaced 7 hours of my tutoring center time.  Now toward the middle of the semester they've given me another fairly large grading assignment, but are only counting it for 3 hours so as not to go over my 20 hour limit.
Is this typical behavior for a department? I feel like having my schedule disrupted like this is very unprofessional. Also, I know there are other grad students in my department who could more readily take on this assignment. This new assignment is for a class outside of my field, and I have zero experience with the material. It just seems like there's no consistency to these work expectations as many other students have duties that count for their full time, but are much easier and require fewer hours in practice.
Is this something that I should bring up with my department? All of these duties are starting to take a toll on my work. I appreciate any advice.

I am going to today. My main complaint, besides the lack of consistency with the hours, is having my work duties changed randomly throughout the semester. This makes it hard to have a routine.

It is fairly common for graduate students to have TA assignments that are expected to take up about half of their time, as you have stated is the case for you. In this case, you should not really think of yourself as a full-time student, but as a half-time student, half-time employee of the department, since your teaching work is what you are being paid to do. Moreover, a healthy department will typically have its expectations of students adjusted accordingly.
There is, of course, a huge amount of variance in the actual time required for a given class, based on the particular students, professor, assignments, etc.
It sounds like this is what's being the problem for you: since you only got assigned one class, you were expecting to have a light load, but the department is trying to "get its money's worth" from you, and is doing so in a manner that you find difficult to plan for.
I would think it is entirely reasonable to ask for notification farther in advance, so that you can plan better.  It's also entirely possible that you will not get it, since the person making the assignments is likely an overloaded professor who is dealing with requests that are being given to them at the last minute as well.
Ultimately, my recommendation would be discussion with your advisor so that you can:

make them aware of the impact last-minute requests are having on you,
enlist them to help in either improving the situation or alleviating its impact on you, and
prevent it from happening to you again in the future.

Grading assignments are not quite the same as a TA assignment—at many schools, even including some relatively small departments, grading assignments are handled as "bonus" duties for students looking to supplement their income slightly. To have someone who is listed as a TA made responsible for grading assignments seems a poor return on investment.
That said, departments do have a large amount of latitude in making teaching assignments, and there may not be a whole lot you can do to change things for the present semester. If, though, the magnitude and scope of the assignments threatens your ability to complete your other degree requirements—including research and passing your qualifying exams—you should let your advisor know immediately. As I always tell my advisees and supervisees: Come to me when you have a problem; don't wait for it to become a crisis! If there's a problem, we can usually find a way around it; by the time it's a crisis, there may be few, if any, palatable solutions remaining.


text:
Checking the content of research statement
I finished Ph.D several months ago and planning to apply for postdoc positions. I am preparing my research statement. I would like to ask some experts to review it before uploading that. Is it ethical to ask my Ph.D advisor to study and review it? I do not know how and to whom can I send my research statement to check and review that before uploading for postdoc position.

Yes, your advisor would be a good one to do so. Other academics in your field that you might work with could also offer advice.

Why on earth should it be unethical?

@lighthousekeeper Related meta post.

Yes, your PhD advisor should definitely go over your research statement. Getting you a job is part of his or her job.
The people writing your recommendation letters should also go over your research statement and give you feedback. It will also help them write letters.


text:
How to deal with left over work from a Post Doc
I have recently (6 months) left academia after a three year postdoc at a high ranking university. During my time there, I became the lab's statistics guru having carried out analysis on a lot of our labs data, both my data, and others.
I was let go due to lack of funds, but my previous supervisor is now asking me to carry out a number of analyses on new data for publication, and to finish one or two papers I did not finish during my employment.
So my questions are:

How do I graciously refuse to touch others data? I wrote the data analysis pipeline, but am not interested in maintaining and rerunning it every time new results appear. It's available on github and well commented, just no one else in the lab knows how to do anything with computers. The actual running is easy for the most part, it is "small" modifications that are causing me trouble. I've offered to train others (and trained an undergrad who has also since left the lab), but the amount of training to teach someone python from scratch is a little daunting.
How to finish up my own papers? I'm currently contracting to industry at rates 3-6 times what I was paid during my postdoc - my supervisor is asking for me to work for free, or maybe my previous rate if he can get the money. This is a significant time sink, but I do feel obligated (and interested) to finish these off. What is a good pay rate to ask for? How do I do this without offending my supervisor?

Location is USA. The postdoc was a yearly contract, where an informal agreement was made to extend it to a 4th year, which had to be cancelled due to a loss of funding 4 months from renewal, thus the somewhat unorganized departure. In my heart of hearts, I'd like to continue in academia, but due to partner issues have to stay in the current location, making academia extremely unlikely. I'm currently undergoing the recruitment process for two different industry positions, as well as my contracting.

no one else in the lab knows how to do anything with computers, I hope that is a hyperbole.

@gerrit Unfortunately, it may not be. Academia: the place you can get away with not having any idea of what a computer is!

@gerrit I'm a software engineer. I expected all other software engineers to understand computers, Windows, etc. Turns out this is definately not the case...

Is he planning to pay you for the work he's asking for?

Am I reading correctly that you had 4 months warning and nobody asked you to train them on the software/data pipeline during that time?

Since your reasons for wanting to finish your own papers are personal, then I think you should seriously consider doing the work for free. The obvious disadvantage is that you have to do it in your spare time (perhaps by deliberately not filling your schedule with contracts), but it has two benefits:

it forces you to assess whether you really, truly do want to finish them for personal reasons, and that these reasons alone justify your time.
it forces them to accept that you don't work for them, they are not your boss, that they cannot afford you, and you're involved on your terms now. This stops them expecting you to do whatever they ask as opposed to strictly only what you wish to do as a collaborator on the one or two papers in question. If you take their coin, you may not be able to hold this line.

It also means you only have to do the things that strictly need to be done by you, and as far as possible you can encourage other (paid) authors to pick up bulk of the work completing the paper. Of course if you were always the only author doing any actual work then "as far as possible" is "not at all".
However, if your reasons for wanting to finish the papers are professional (that is to say, you're hoping to get back into academia and want the credit) then, although it seems like a paradox, I think you should not do so unless you get paid at least at a plausible rate for the role, and preferably for a rate that takes into account any benefits that you're missing out on as an external temporary employee rather than a full-time postdoc. Chances are they can't afford this, so chances are it won't happen and you have to let those papers go. Either your supervisor considers them worth their time to finish, or not, you can let that decision out of your hands.
The reason is that if you want to do something for a living, you have to make sure it's paying for itself. Else you don't have a profession, you have a hobby of acting like someone else's employee and doing what they tell you as if they're your boss. You also give them no incentive to do what you want, which is to find the funds to rehire you, since you're doing the work anyway for nothing. It's tough to give up on a vocation, but if academia doesn't pay then you're better off paid in industry than as an unpaid academic, so be that. Or, if you think you can find an academic job elsewhere, focus on that job search and then, once you're stable again, figure out with your new employer whether and how you're going to finish the papers.
Depending on your attitude to work and pay in general, you might also consider whether you want to do unpaid work that they "should" pay someone else to do, and therefore you're contributing towards a job not existing where a job "should" exist. I'm not a fan at all of unpaid internships, but if you don't consider them a problem then fair enough.

How do I graciously refuse to touch others data?

First, it's rather cheeky of your ex-employer to even ask this, considering they let you go. However, on the principle that it's acceptable for anyone to ask anything provided they're prepared to accept no for an answer, say something like:
"I'm sorry, all I'm going to do is complete these 1 or 2 papers. I'm not available to maintain your software or train your staff."
This might mean that the software is no longer usable to them. But letting you go was their way of making this their problem and not yours. They can't hope to rely on your charity to reverse their funding shortage.

Thanks for this comment, I think this will be more or less my approach. I'll explain that until I am stably employed, I'm unable to help in any capacity, at which point I'll gladly work as a collaborator, rather than employee, on the parts of the research which are of interest to me. Depending on my workload, I'll see about charging for the non-interesting parts.

The easiest way to do this is to politely inform your previous advisor that you no longer have the time to commit to the projects you were working on as a post doc. It is not your responsibility to train others in his lab, or to take on duties beyond what you're comfortable with.
One option to consider, if you're working on a "for hire" basis, is to offer the possibility of hiring you on a contract basis to do the work. You would then be able to set the scope and extent of the work, as well as your compensation. If your advisor was unwilling to accept the terms, it would put the refusal on him, and you'd be more or less "in the clear," so to speak.
As for the pay rate, you should probably select a rate that is between the academic and corporate rates, but leaning more toward the former—remember that academic pockets are typically not as deep as corporate ones.

I find it pretty unlikely that a postdoc who has just been let go for lack of funds is going to be rehired on a contract basis at a higher rate.  At least not for long: maybe this is something for the supervisor to contemplate as a stopgap measure if the departure of the postdoc really brings his research to a screeching halt.

@PeteLClark: That's pretty much what I had in mind—enough money to train someone else or to finish up a paper or two. But there's also a difference between not having the funds to pay someone for a year and not having any funds at all.

Right, but if funds are so scarce that a key employee was terminated, hiring someone else at a rate that is beyond the academic rate seems very hard to justify except to fix specific problems.  Some academics have training in python and statistics, just no one left in the OP's lab.  It is arguably even a bit irresponsible to pay "industrial rates" for this kind of consulting.

@PeteL.Clark - While your observation is probably completely correct, it's also not really the OP's problem at all. The advisor is looking for work to be done, and it's completely within the OP's request payment for that work. The fact that there aren't funds is the advisor's problem.

@eykanal: No, I think there are nuances here.  If the OP is looking for an academic career, then responding to his former supervisor's request that he finish papers he was working on (the OP doesn't say they were joint with the supervisor, but let's assume they are as this seems to make the most sense in context) by trying to negotiate a certain pay rate for that may not be an optimal career move (in my own academic circles it would certainly not be).

@PeteL.Clark - I think you've identified a source of frustration for post-docs everywhere. Any time the term "career advancement" is used in conjunction with "free labor", something's probably wrong. That said, if that's how it works in your field now, the OP would be shooting himself in the foot by not following common protocol.

I would say that the OP finishing their own work because it's something they want to do is OK, but it should be clear to all involved that it's no longer subject to the employer/employee relationship and will be done at the OP's discretion.

Thanks for the comment. I think asking for any remuneration is likely to come off bad to most academics, but doing unpaid work for a previous employer who let you go would be completely unheard of in any industry job. Switching between the two is tricky.

I am a little unclear about what it means for a postdoc to be "let go".  Does this mean that you had a year-to-year contract funded by your supervisor's grant and he found out after three years that he didn't have enough money to keep you for another year?  There's a sort of implied abruptness your choice of phrase, but I'm sure you know that many (most?) postdocs are three years or less.  Certainly that's enough time for your supervisor to plan for the future of his work.  Assuming that someone whom you've hired will continue to do that work after the end of their employment is...well, an assumption.
After reading your post I have one, key, question: you are now working in industry, not in academia.  Are you looking to get back into academia, to have an industrial career, or are you not sure?
In my experience, the vast majority of the time when people leave academia for industry they really leave.  In fact the famous mathematician Paul Erdos referred to people who left mathematics as having "died" (and thus also referred to people who had died as having "left"), and there is some insight behind this eccentric language.  If you're doing a joint project with a student or postdoc and they "leave for industry", then in some ways it is as though they have died (and in others very much not, obviously); notoriously, it is not a good idea to leave such "dearly departed personnel" with work to do on projects; rather it sort of goes without saying that they will completely stop working on whatever they are doing and keep their authorship on all their partially completed projects (with the idea that it won't affect their career much either way, so why not be nice about it).  So if you are done with academia then I think you can just communicate that to your supervisor.  As I said before, if that's awkward for him it's really his fault rather than yours.  If you left things in good working order on your departure, I think you can have a clear conscience.
On the other hand, if you want to continue to have an academic career then in my view your supervisor is giving you an opportunity by prompting you to write up your old projects and trying to involve you in new ones.  That's exactly what you need to be doing to get back into a research-based academic job.  In terms of how much to ask to get paid for that -- maybe things are different in your field, but to me that sounds a bit strange.  On the one hand you were "let go" precisely because there wasn't available money to pay you so....how can there be enough available money to pay you?  On the other hand professional academics usually do not work for hire: whatever they get paid is for "full time work", and to be honest about it, the payment for much of the hard work that is done in grad school and the years afterwards is the promise of a permanent academic job in the future.  Whenever I collaborate with students or postdocs, they are "working for free" in the sense that if they write X more papers it has no effect on their salary.
I think you should figure out how much involvement you want to have in academia in the future.  Since you now have an industrial job which is paying 3-6 times as much as your academic job, I think you're seeing most of the financial rewards there.  I encourage you to stick with the academic work if and only if you foresee getting nonfinancial rewards from it.  If you don't, don't be afraid to bow out, and don't overthink how to do that: just say that you are now working full time in industry.

In some places (such as University of Bristol, apparently), post-docs are often hired on an open-ended contract with the notification that they are let go if there is no more money to fund them.  Although little difference in terms of job security, it makes a big difference when applying for a mortgage.

@gerrit: What does open-ended mean?  Annually, or that you could be "let go" at any time?  (The idea of a postdoc applying for a mortgage is pretty out there to me, but to be sure there are more things on heaven earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.)

I mean that there is no end date specified in the contract.  Instead, HR must send a notice of termination three months before whatever money salary is sourced from runs out.  Supervisors and postdocs are encouraged to apply for funding to keep people employed when one project runs out (this is how I understood it when a colleague explained it to me).  Note that I'm using postdoc loosely here to apply to any research-funded staff, i.e. any researcher on soft-money, including those who have obtained their PhD 10 or 20 years ago. Their actual job title may or may not include the word post-doc.

@gerrit I can confirm that this model is very common in Switzerland. Most postdocs around here are essentially open-ended, with people staying 4+ years not being uncommon. If you have been in a lab for multiple years and don't get your contract renewed due to lack of funding, it certainly feels like being let go (even if this is not what technically happened).

@gerrit: I see.  Yes, the term "postdoc" is the most nebulous one in all of academia.  I should also admit that in my field, a "postdoc" mostly means "a non-tenure track assistant professor" (but there is still plenty of room for nebulousness!), which is really antipodal to any work-for-hire situation.  But I am trying to give an answer which applies to the OP's field.  Anyway, as usual I feel like the OP's question would be improved by adding some identifying geographical information: things work differently in different parts of the world, I think we know by now.

@PeteL.Clark "Yes, the term postdoc is the most nebulous one in all of academia." As a postdoc, I can confirm this.

My university has titles for non-teaching research staff who are senior to Postoctoral Researchers (the official postdoc title) including Research Associate, Research Scientist, and Senior Research Scientist. These are non-tenure/tenure-track positions, but the requirements for being promoted to Research Scientist are similar to that of gaining a tenured professorship without the teaching requirements. After a few years, postdocs that a department wants to keep are usually promoted to Research Associates, but they are still usually on soft money and expected to be submitting grant proposals.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'm not sure how much of the ask is an opportunity back into academia, but it's an angle I hadn't thought of before.

If you can expect a co-authorship for this work (assuming that was the arrangement), then you might consider doing it to bolster your CV. You are presumably on the market for a job now, and having some more papers in the pipeline (submitted, under review, in press, etc) might be helpful to your future prospects. Paper publication doesn't pay your rent or feed your family, but doing this work for "free", especially if the papers are good, might lead to a better job down the line. If you have time between your contract gigs and job application preparation, you might consider it. It might be better to be working than to be doing nothing.

If OP is now in industry, he may not care much about co-authorship or bolstering his CV.

I agree, but I read the post as unclear on OP's current status. Contracting to industry didn't seem like the long-term goal.

Thanks for the comment, this is how I felt upon initially leaving, and how I imagine my ex-supervisor feels. After talking to my peers in industry, they are shocked that I would even consider unpaid work. Conversely, my peers in academia have called me a heartless mercenary for thinking of charging. There's a balance there somewhere...

@user2031521Turn it around for a second, your former supervisor is asking you to do unpaid work which, while you're doing it, will actively impede you from doing what you need to do in order to sustain yourself. How are you ever the heartless mercenary in this? Sure, 'the work needs to get done', but your supervisor should have considered that before terminating you before terminating someone else. Also, he could have had you train someone up during the 'notice period' when he knew the funds were starting to run out. No matter how you slice it this is not your problem to solve.


text:
Does all my credits have to be from same degree when applying for masters?
I noticed many of the admissions requirements for masters in data science requires some credit on computer science. Currently I am doing a closed credit Bachelor's on Geology in a university where there is no course for programming. If I do a programming course from another university will it be considered as the required credit for those masters degrees?

One typically is required to submit transcripts from all prior educational endeavors. In this case, it will be clear to anyone deciding on your admission what you have taken and the associated grades.
The direct answer to the headline question is "no". But the quality of each program you have been part of might be considered. If the other university is reputable, then you should be ok, but the decisions are made by individuals.
And, of course, different universities have different rules.


text:
As an undergrad in research, how should I deal with a uncommitted PhD co-worker?
I'm a sophomore in CS planning on grad school, so I asked Prof. A to do research, hoping that I may eventually get some publication (which was understood).
Prof A. is THE star in our department (and in the field as well) and is all busy fundraising, giving talks, etc. So as I expected I was assigned a PhD student B to work with (so this is B's project). Basically I'm building the software infrastructure of online surveys related to the research, and B is responsible for giving me data so I can populate my survey templates and publish them online.
Now the problem is that B has put off their share of his work (or at least it seems) repeatedly -- they'd promise "I'll take a look at your UI tomorrow and give you feedback" -- then two weeks would pass by, I'd email, and eventually get back to me one week later ("sorry I got busy..."). This has happened a few times, and I believe I finally have the UI the way it was wanted and the entire system ready to deploy -- but seems to be unable to  deliver me the data. Again I emailed, still no responses. No luck finding the Prof in their office either.
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to tell Prof A. about this (who after all  funds this project)... I have put in too many hours of work (for free) to quit this project, and worst yet the Prof I'm working for doesn't seem to care, and I never dared to ask about authorship (so there's no promise). What should I do?

One technique to use in this sort of situation is to copy Prof. A on your e-mails to B.

"... then two weeks would pass by ..." and 13 out of those 14 days delay were your fault, because you didn't ask for the feedback at the time it was promised, i.e. "tomorrow".

You seem to be in a complicated situation: you are doing grunt work for a person who is not very committed to it, and on top of that you don't know if you will get anything back (the authorship issue). They say that hindsight 20/20, but you should have discussed both the authorship issue and the project timeframe (deadlines, milestones) before getting involved. That would make it much easier to get the PhD student to do his work by reminding him of the deadlines and of your stake in the project. If you are just supposed to get no authorship or only a footnote acknowledgement, you could let it be and let the PhD student dictate the pace of work. When you don't have a stake in the paper, you are not losing anything if it gets delayed and someone else publishes it before you. It is his loss, not yours.
Now, in your current situation, I would approach the student (perhaps together with the PI) and ask about the timeframe for the project and if there are deadlines. This will automatically have the effect of reminding the PhD student that he has to do his part of the work. It will also get the PI's attention without looking like you are complaining about the PhD student to him. While you are at that, you can also try to get your authorship doubts solved by also asking if there will be any paper written and what will your role be in that.
You are doing undergraduate research work, but you are not meant to be anyone's servant. Once you have put work into it, it is your right to know that your work is not done for nothing.

Look at it from the PhD students perspective. It is possible the work you are doing is not important enough for them to care. They could also be so overloaded by other work.
I see two options. You either take work on your own: improving the current work or moving onto the next stage, or you could talk to A saying "I think I am done with work, and B hasn't had the time to take a look, is there something else I could be doing to be helpful" I usually go with the second option because the first one might lead to a path not needed or already done, where as the second path reminds the professor you are there to help and might get him to start a conversation with B about scheduling.

Or just work on your stuff instead.

I would do the following:

Always Email PhD student and Professor: First of all, any email you send to the PhD student, should also include the professor email address as well. You might ask why? The reason is that the supervisor sees that your are doing your work and the PhD student is the lousy one.
Request a Meeting: Then if things started to heat up and PhD student does not get involved, have a meeting with the supervisor and explain to him/her the situation.

Note: I do not agree with the other answer that states the PhD student might be busy, and this is the point here! If the PhD student is busy he/she should not get involved with other endeavors; just to have a better resume without putting down the work.

" If the PhD student is busy he/she should not get involved with other endeavors" PhD students often have somewhat broad research, get tasked with handling fluff work, or decide there is a better direction to take. I would go so far as to say that sometimes they get assigned unneeded or worthless undergrads who are more of an annoyance that asset.


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How to deal with self-plagiarism or re-publishing of previous work in literature review paper?
I am writing a systematic literature review and the problem is that in my subject there are multiple cases of previous work re-publishing or self-plagiarism: the same authors write multiple (2-3) papers on the same topic with almost no changes. I wonder how to deal with it. I am reviewing a theoretical models, so I cannot simply decide whether the paper describes the same or different experiments. The duplicated papers usually differ in some minor ways. I would like to create a graph of how my chosen topic was developed in time by plotting different papers and their citations and which model was based on which previous one. But I don't know how to deal with this kind of duplicate papers. Merge them into single, first paper? Plot all of them as a derivative models? Or maybe I should somehow graphically mark the papers which describe the same content?

Are all of those "extra" papers cited in the others? If so, then it isn't self plagiarism. Or are they all written as "first" papers?

@Buffy I don't want to engage here in a discussion about what a self-plagiarism is and what it is not. What I am concern about is that the content of those papers are almost the same and I don't know what to do with them. If you have a better nomenclature for such cases then I will correct my question.

Were they cited? That is all I ask. The content can be very similar when one paper extends or modifies another. But it is only self plagiarism if the other papers aren't cited. If they were cited, your best response is to list them as you would any other papers. To do otherwise seems to be making an accusation that may be unfair.

@Buffy sometimes the cite each other, sometimes not. I am not interested in accusations, but I am concern that if I skip those duplicates I wouldn't miss any new insights. They are just redundant.

But maybe you are right that skipping them wouldn't be OK. What about bundling them instead?

It isn't similarity or reuse of a model that makes it self plagiarism. It is the lack of citation of earlier papers. If they have done that then you have no issue at all and should treat them as normal. Citation - not similarity. If a reader of the later papers is pointed to the earlier ones then all is well.

@Buffy I've edited my question to point out that I want to know how to deal both with self-plagiarism and re-publishing of previous works.

"I cannot simply decide whether the paper describes the same or different experiments". Are you suggesting that you don't understand the papers completely?

If the authors are vague and don't publish all the equations or parameters values used in the model, which is sadly quite common, then I cannot say that I am 100% sure that both papers are describing the same results.

My advice remains the same. If you treat these papers differently from others you are on shaky, possibly dangerous, ground. You can't make decisions based on what you don't understand.

Duplicate publication can be misconduct even if it is not plagiarism because duplicate publication is a waste of resources.

Since you do not want to address the matter of duplicate or multiple publication (I prefer those terms; I dislike the dubious notion of "self-plagiarism"), I will focus only on the matter of handling the existence of such works in the literature other than choosing to ignore some of the publications.
What you describe seems similar to a concern that comes up in meta-analysis (a statistical approach to literature reviews). For the statistics underlying meta-analysis to work, an important statistical assumption is that each publication being analyzed is independent of each other so that each publication counts as a distinct piece of evidence. But this assumption is violated if two or more studies were conducted on the same dataset (which might involve the same group of authors, but not necessarily so, especially if the dataset is public). There are different ways for handling the resulting statistical problems, but they generally involve giving each of the non-independent studies a lower weight so that altogether they would have around the same weight in the overall meta-analysis as any one independent study.
Following this principle, if you have a case of non-independent studies (that is, your case of duplicate publications), you could weight them in some way as just one study. I cannot recommend how best to do this without knowing in-depth the nature of your study, the nature of the duplication, the extent of overlap, etc. You would need to consider your particular situation and then decide how best to represent these duplicate publications as one data point (whether that means taking an average of results, the first publication, the last publication, the most highly cited result, or whatever representation you think most appropriate).
In your final analysis, it might be a good idea to present and compare two sets of results, as is sometimes done in meta-analysis: one set treats each duplicate as an independent study, and then another analysis uses your chosen aggregation approach to group all the duplicates as one piece of evidence. That way, you could see if the duplicate publications sway the overall evidence significantly or not, which is valuable to see.

I would like to create a graph of how my chosen topic was developed in time by plotting different papers and their citations and which model was based on which previous one.

I think the answer to your question will not actually solve your problem.  Publications and citations do not describe how the research has developed.  Instead of doing this, I suggest creating a graph of how the research outcomes have changed over time.
Classic example: https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html
This approach will avoid the problem of duplicate publication.

This kind of graph is possible if you have one single measure used and developed in all research papers. It is not possible in my field, which just starts to develop and each paper asks a bit different question. But I guess that this is a better approach if only it is possible.


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Would I be able to do a PHD without having a bachelor or master degree
I have finished my high school and did 1 year program of FOUNDATION IN BUSINESS. I left my degree (BBA/Accounts and Finance) after completing 2nd semester. Now I have done an online 3 months course and certified in digital marketing, and also certified in another online course of Fundamental of Digital Marketing from Google. Now, I am going to have another online course of Digital Marketing for 7 weeks from London Int'l Studies and Research Center. Now I have a plan to start my PHD in Digital Marketing.
Would I be able to start my PHD on the basis of these certificates? I will be glad to hear advice from you.

In theory yes, in practice it's very unlikely unless you have some superstar ideas and awesome connections. Is there something about your current research or research ideas that you suspect would make a good PhD?

@RobertColumbia, that is probably an answer. Maybe the best answer. Make it so.

But the only way to know for sure is to make application to a suitable program.

Possible duplicate of PhD without previous academic degree: truth or myth?

Please edit to use typical English punctuation and capitalization.

You would have to have something in your background and resume that appeals to someone like me, a tenured professor of CS (now retired, though). I have to say that, from what you say, I would be very skeptical. You would need to find some way to convince (people like) me that you actually have the skills, not just "certificates".
The problem is that when you take a standard course of study from a university, people understand what that means. We have a basic trust of colleagues elsewhere that if they say you are ready then (a) they have personally evaluated you in some way and (b) you meet their own standards of excellence, which are probably similar to my own. With online courses it is very difficult to be able to say the same thing. What, in particular, does it mean that you have such a certificate. It could be worthless and mean nothing more than that you paid for a course, whether you gained anything from it or not. It is hard for people to evaluate how much actual expertise you gained through practice and how much feedback you got on your work. How high was the quality of whatever work you did?
That isn't to say that you don't have the required expertise, but certificates alone, from commercial businesses especially, aren't proof that you do.
So, to be successful, you will need some way to convince people of the quality of something that is different from what traditional students are able to do. If you can do that, then you will have a chance. But many of us will be very skeptical.
And one problem is that if you have a slot in a doctoral program, then someone else doesn't. It isn't an unlimited resources. Your road isn't impossible, but it is definitely uphill.

However, if you can establish a personal/professional relationship to a faculty member at a doctoral institution and convince them of your expertise, the road might (might) get easier.

(Your road isn't impossible, but it is definitely uphill) I got it brother... Thanx for ur advise. I really appreciate it.

In theory, anyone can be admitted to a PhD program if they can convince the applicable faculty to let them in. Generally, this is done by having awesome research or research ideas already on the table.
Are you ready for this level of work? Getting a PhD is not about memorizing a textbook and regurgitating its contents on a multiple-choice exam, but about contributing something substantially new about your field. If you have such an idea (and can explain its novelty and relevance), you can contact faculty at universities and ask about the possibility of meeting with them to discuss your ideas. If you ideas are good enough and you appear dedicated enough, they can likely find a way to waive admissions barriers (most universities have special case clauses or appeal procedures).
If you are treating getting a PhD as similar to jumping up a grade in secondary school or challenging the final exam to an upper-division undergraduate course in your second year of undergraduate study, then you are not ready for this. Keep learning and studying your field and seek the mentorship of faculty you trust.

Thanx for ur advise. I appreciate it.