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Is there a conflict of interest when the supervisor and co-supervisor are husband and wife?
I have been co-supervised by my primary supervisor's wife. Suffice to say that this has been problematic where both have different research interests. Each asks me to do different jobs and they often bring their home fights to work. My primary supervisor is always submissive to her will whenever she is around. Though he supports me in every decision I do and my research behind her back. It is been a nightmare and was wondering if there are some written rules that such scenario is a conflict of interest.

Sounds like you don't like what she studies. What was the original intention of bringing her on board then? And is she serving that purpose?

I did not bring her in. Before admission I had sole communication with my primary supervisor and I was surprised in the admission letter that he forced his wife as a supervisor without me knowing. It turned out he does that to all phd students.

To me a conflict of interest is when personal interests  are at stake when reporting research results (e.g. wife owns the company that manufacture the products that husband's paper say are superior to the competition). The situation you describe sounds more like lousy management and poor respect from both towards you. In other words, it affects you, badly, but not the outcome of your research.

@Jigg what you describe is one category of conflict of interest, but certainly not the only one.

he forced his wife as a supervisor without me knowing — Walk away. It should be utterly impossible for someone to become your (co-)advisor without your explicit consent.

@JeffE: if only it were always that easy or simple...Even assuming the situation warrants it, the power imbalance between faculty and grad students can make it dangerous not to approach the problem more diplomatically.

I agree with Nick Stauner. You agree with a supervisor and he grants you funding. Few weeks later you recieve the letter having his and his wife are named as supervisors and co-supervisor. You ask him about it and then he refers you to the university website saying having a co-supervisor is recommended. Plus, at that moment you don't know if she is sharing some of the funding portion. You start your studies, everything is fine in the first few months then things start falling apart and you are stuck.

Of course you're not stuck. You can find another advisor, possibly with the help of the department chair or (if they're not total sleazeballs) your current advisor. You can apply to another graduate program; people change schools all the time for all sorts of reasons. Will the change be easy? No, of course not. Is there any guarantee of success? No, of course not. Can you do it anyway! Sure.

You talking about my previous company? :-( .  And another place I know, Metrologic Corp -- ask anyone who worked there how it was having the owner and his wife holding two top positions there.

Each asks me to do different jobs. You have described half of the co-supervisors. The other half are just ghosts that the student doesn't see. Besides the home fight part, it happens a lot and it is up to you to prioritize.

Your supervisors are problematic in several ways, from what you describe:

Pushing their own research interests over what's most beneficial to you
Exposing you to unpleasant interpersonal issues between themselves that affect your working environment
Not coordinating and communicating effectively with each other to co-supervise you

However, none of these things are necessarily the result of them being married. The same issues can arise (and I have seen them) with unrelated co-supervisors who do not get along.
In general, co-supervision by a married couple is not universally disallowed.  (In my university it is allowed, and there is a husband-wife pair in my department that successfully co-supervises PhD students on occasion.)
Some universities do recognize this as a conflict of interest. This from the University of Western Australia (emphasis mine):

Supervision must be free of actual or perceived conflicts of interest.  Supervision by, or co-supervision with, close relatives or those in close personal relationships is generally not appropriate.  All such cases must be declared at the time that supervisors are nominated.  In cases where approval is given on academic grounds for supervision by, or co-supervision with, close relatives or those in close personal relationships, additional supervisors who are free of an actual or perceived conflict of interest must be appointed.

I would read your quoted paragraph as forbidding the supervisor to be a close relative of the student, not as forbidding two co-supervisors to be related to each other.  So you can't have your supervisor be your mom, or your girlfriend.

@Nate it does say "co-supervision with" not "by" (it separately specifies "supervision by")

The UWA guidelines are confusing, because "co-supervisor" seems to be a term of art: my reading of this web page is that you can have two supervisors (one principal and one coordinating) without either one being a co-supervisor as defined in paragraphs 6 and 7.  All in all, it's not clear to me whether paragraph 12 is intended to rule out no, some, or all cases in which a married couple supervises students together.

@AnonymousMathematician Here is their supervisor nomination form which requires certification that "There are at least two supervisors from UWA, and the supervisors have no conflict of interest with
applicant or other supervisors"  - hard to interpret any other way.

That settles it.

I find UWA's policy startling.  So I can't supervise a thesis jointly with my brother or mother?  Or my departmental drinking (or fishing, or...) buddy?  Why is being a cosupervisor with your spouse a conflict of interest??  Are their children filling out similar forms???

I am not aware of any written rules regarding this situation.
In our department (and other affiliated departments), there are quite a few professors who are married to each other. In most cases, I have seen that such situations tend to turn out exceedingly well. However, there are, as your situation goes, many times when this can go wrong.
The best advice under these circumstances is to treat their home fights as none of your business. Stay out of it, develop your own research agenda and pursue it independent of such pettiness.
If all else fails, Don't walk ! Run !

If any conflict between a student and one of the supervisors comes up, married supervisors have a strong incentive to support each other, rather than looking out for the best interests of the students. For example, they may pressure the student to include both supervisors as authors on all publications. It's even tougher for a student to stand up to two people in positions of authority than one.

In a conflict between co-advisors and the student, all faculty have a strong incentive to support each other.  What is the professional difference between co-advisors that have been writing papers together for 20 years and a married couple?  Your argument seems just about as effective against any two professionally close faculty being coadvisors.  Applying it only to married couples concerns me as potentially discriminatory.

Your situation is certainly very bad, but a conflict of interest in the context of academic research is when personal interests are at stake when reporting research results (e.g. wife owns the company that manufactures the products that husband's paper say are superior to the competition).
I found this definition of a CoI on various universities websites:

A conflict of interest is a situation in which financial or other
  personal considerations have the potential to compromise or bias
  professional judgment and objectivity

The situation you describe is better described as lousy management, little respect from both supervisors towards you, and a blatant lack of professionalism from their part. However, it affects you, it certainly affects their productivity, but it's not per se a CoI. It's not like if one was reviewing the papers of the other, or was in the board that attributes funding to the wife/husband's project, etc.
My advice would be, whatever action you intend to take to get yourself out of this nightmare, not to refer to the problem as a conflict of interest. CoIs are a lot more serious than poor management and you will risk triggering the wrong type of investigation, ultimately deserving your cause.

Conflict of interest does not exclusively apply to reporting of research results. For example, a parent acting as PhD supervisor to their child is universally considered a conflict of interest, although this does not necessarily affect reporting of research results.


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How to get a .edu email address as an independent mathematician?
I am a hobbyist mathematician in China. I study maths by myself and make some course videos to teach commutative algebra, functional analysis and other topics on the internet, like the Khan Academy and MIT open courses.
Now I need a .edu email to get into some sites such as ResearchGate and arxiv. Is there any organisation that will help me like this: I show them some material, such as videos and papers, and if they think I am no weaker than some college teachers at least, they would give me a .edu email?

Google is your friend.

For arXiv, you certainly do not need an e-mail address affiliated to a university. You just need to have endorsements. Getting an academic to endorse your paper is likely a lesser threshold than what you tried to describe (obtaining an affiliation to get an academic e-mail address).

BTW, as mentioned in the arXiv link I just gave, having an academic affiliation is not a sufficient condition for gaining automatic endorsements. That is to say, a .edu address gained from the methods linked to by @ChrisGregg may very well be useless for the OP's intended use.

Thanks, but I want to find some specific places with  their short introductions.

You can soemtimes join Reseachgate without an academic affiliation on the basis of your CV with qualifications and publications. You should work on producing some publications to pass peer-review. I think it would also help to not use a single word pseudonym. If you must use a "nom de plume" make it a realistic sounding name.

@EnthusiasticStudent this is not a question about a website. Please consider tags carefully before retagging. And 'organisation' is not a mistake; it's just British vs American spelling.

Of course, becoming a student or staff member is one way to get a university email.
Some institutions provide alumni email.
Many universities have various unpaid affiliates. Such affiliates are sometimes eligible for a  university email. However, such affiliates are often expected to contribute to the school, faculty, or university. For example, you might publish with the university as your affiliation or you might give occasional lectures or you might supervise a research student. These sorts of affiliations are typically obtained by building up a relationship with some academics in a given department and making enquiries.

Could you please describe more about such unpaid affiliates? Probably, appropriate keywords for searching for them. I've never seen such things on the official pages of departments or universities, and wish to learn more about it.

@All One example is a visiting position. Also, if you have your own postdoc fellowship from your government etc., you can be an unpaid postdoc at university unless you teach a course. These may not be what Jeromy had in mind though.

I imagine it would be a fairly idiosyncratic process. I'd just start by sending an email to academics with whom you have an existing relationship and who value your research.

As a researcher whose is that of a very small university in Europe, whose domain name and institutional email addresses do not end in .edu (nor in .ac.uk or any other recognizable pattern): any website that uses email domains as filters has a fallback mechanism (or exception handler) that you can reach if your own email address doesn't fit into the patterns they recognize. It may take some explaining, though…

Actually, I think the OP is asking for getting an e-mail at any academic institution, not necessarily that with .edu ending. At least, certainly both arXiv and ResearchGate maintain their own internal list of recognized academic domains, which includes much more than just simple filtering by TLD.

source: Stack Exchange

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Is it common to provide digital notes (slides or handwritten) for students?
I am preparing a lecture course for this semester and I am planning to teach from slides. I will consider these slides my notes for the course. However, the following points may also apply to handwritten notes that a lecturer might use as a reference.
I can see several advantages and disadvantages associated with providing the students with the notes for a given lecture prior to that lecture:
Advantages:

Students have to write less (because the core of the material is already present), so more material can be covered;

Disadvantages:

Students may lose focus more easily when they have digital notes because they do not have to copy everything down (this was my experience as an undergrad);
Students may choose not to attend class because notes are available elsewhere (of course, they may choose to do so anyways...).

One alternative I have considered is to distribute all of the notes relevant to an exam some suitable time period prior to that exam. However, this may reduce the effectiveness of the advantage, although it will mitigate to a certain extent the disadvantages. So, my question is as in the title: Is it common for professors to distribute digital notes to the class? If so, what methods are common?

I've seen lecturers print out copies of the slides, which the students would pick up as they entered the room, so they could make notes on them. Requires them to attend, but you could also say that you can collect copies in your office if people can't make it.

@FionaTaylorGorringe That's a good idea too! Unfortunately, I have almost 100 students, and I'd rather not waste so many trees, even printing several slides per page. Thanks! You should post it as an answer, I'll be happy to upvote it!

One compromise that I liked to use in the past: you can provide slides that have a few "blanks" that require students to fill in important details from an in-class example problem that you work out for them.

@MadJack That's a great idea!

I don't understand what's meant by "the (digital) notes". Are you talking about notes you have written for yourself that aren't part of the slides?

@Sverre No, I mean the slides themselves in my case, but it could be generalized to the case where slides have not been used but the professor could e.g. distribute scans of handwritten notes.

@darthbith It would be helpful if you clarified your original question. I am unable to interpret "the (digital) notes" in your question as synonymous with "slides" (a word you also use).

@Sverre I hope the edit helps your understanding :-)

"Students may choose not to attend class because notes are available elsewhere" this is not, strictly speaking, a disadvantage. If a student is able to study the material without a teacher why would you want to waste his time following lectures? It's only bad if the student isn't able to do this. This may happen if 1) the student isn't able to judge his own skill (which means he'll fail in some other way, probably) or 2) the course is advanced, or there are some parts that require special care. In this case you ought to clearly state that attendance is important for this reason.

@Bakuriu You make a good point. However, in my experience, most, if not all, undergraduates overestimate their ability to self-learn the material. I know that I certainly did this as an undergrad, and now I'm on the other side looking back! Moreover, I believe that students who would do well by self-learning would find other ways to obtain the material if they decided to skip the lecture. It is mostly my purpose to try and catch the people who might "fail in some other way, probably" :-)

"all of the notes relevant to an exam just prior to that exam" - I dislike this idea. At the very least, I would find it problematic to convincingly convey to students that everything they see in the class should be learned for their skills, not just for the exam (and forgotten right after). But the more practical problem that I see is that with almost 100 students, at least a few will decide to take the exam later (thus getting more preparation time with the slides), and some of the attendees might not take the exam at all, so they couldn't access the slides either for no reason.

As a student, I always preferred to have the slides beforehand because then I was able to read them through before the class and actually focus on the things that I didn't understood or ask relevant questions.

Students have to write less ... so more material can be covered — I don't think that's an advantage.

"Students may lose focus more easily when they have digital notes because they do not have to copy everything down (this was my experience as an undergrad)"
My experience as a student has been the opposite - in classes where I have been given written notes, I have been able to pay attention to the lecturer and have learnt the material much more easily. In classes where I haven't been given written notes, I have to spend lectures copying material off the board, which makes it much more difficult for me to concentrate on what is being said.

Learning is already hard, don't make it harder by deliberately holding off critical materials. In university and college your students are adults who should take charge of their own learning. If some missed the class and hurt their learning, that's their loss. Don't make learning more difficult for the more enthusiastic students just to entice the less enthusiastic ones.

Speaking as someone that just completed a CS course, if you don't provide advanced lecture notes, and then proceed to lecture something that a group of students already know (e.g. the SQL syntax lectures from databases as a personal example to me), there likely going to proceed to talk / use laptops during your lecture while just barely paying attention to see if you moved onto something that interests them.

At my university, all the professors provide the slides online before the lecture. A few provide additional pdfs. The expectation is that if the material is provided in advance that we will have reviewed it before the lecture, and that the lecture will focus more on questions / details / additional material. I appreciate the approach, because I feel like I'm past the days where I need someone to stand and read slides to me. :)

The one tutoring class I learnt most was the one where we did not have to take any notes because we knew that we would get a high-quality summary (only about two pages) of the content. I can listen way better if I don't have to write at the same time. If you don't provide a summary, students will still have to do that and I personally prefer to do that quickly by pasting screenshots of the slides in one file and adding short notes where needed, then focus back on trying to understand.

I used to distribute slides before class, and found that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.  I now distribute them shortly after each class.  I tell students to jot down important points during the class, but not to worry about things like lists because they'll have the slides available.  I also suggest that they merge their classroom notes onto the slides.  The ones who listen to me tend to do very well.
I base my decision on the premise that learning should be effortful.  I think, hope, and expect that providing slides after class is a compromise between no slides and slides before class.
As an aside, I also record my lectures and make the podcasts available.  I do that because I have students for whom English is a second language, and non-traditional students who are sometimes called away for work.  I'm a little torn about the recordings because some students do try to use those as a substitute for coming to class.  I console myself with the thought that they were destined to fail the course anyway and would do even without the recordings.

From my own experience, it is possible to learn resonsibly and successfully from/with recordings (at least if it's a class with low interactivity), provided you do the other coursework such as exercises. Recordings are a real boon for students with overlapping timetables. 2) If you don't have slides, things become interesting. If you give blackboard course, you can choose between a) providing your notes in some form or b) forcing everybody to copy what you write, diverting attention from the narrative.

One can undoubtedly learn from recordings.  Sadly, the students who use them as an excuse to miss class then do not make use of the recordings, either.  That's why I describe them as "destined to fail anyway."  The best students do make use of the recordings as a supplement to the classroom experience.  That's why I continue to make them available.  Also this: http://bbrown.spsu.edu/papers/podcasting/podcasting_protects_ip.html

When notes are given afterwards, you notice half of what you wrote down was useless, and some things you couldn't write down fast enough, was lost. It's better to give the notes beforehand, so students see what's already on paper (and don't need to duplicate), and can add the tidbits they think are important, interesting or just missing from your notes. Duplicating is just not optimal use of their time & attention.

-1 for "learning should be effortful".  Good learning requires effort, but creating artificial effort doesn't translate to better learning.

Providing copies of the material afterward is not "creating artificial effort;" it is cutting off an opportunity for intellectual laziness.  If I gave 35 students a stack of lecture notes, reading assignments, and recorded lectures at the beginning of a term and told them to come back in 16 weeks for the final exam, two or three would earn grades of A and the rest would fail.  Spreading the material out improves the pass rate; delivering the lectures in person on a schedule improves it more.  My pass rate went up when I began providing slides after class instead of before.

@BobBrown As a student myself, I have gotten very good grades in the past without going to class at all the whole semester, and relying on recordings and exercises alone, sometimes just using lecture slides when the pace of the recording is too slow. I just want to make a point that different students have different ways of learning, and providing an option is good for everyone.

I found the classes that provided notes shortly after were, generally speaking, the most helpful.

I would resent the lack of available slides during class almost as much as I would the suggestion that I then spend a large chunk of time merging my notes into the slides because I was prevent from doing so while taking them.

Different students have different needs. If you make notes available, students who benefit from not having notes have the option of not using them. If you do not make notes available, students who need them have no option.
I write fairly slowly, and do not seem to be able to listen and think at the same time as writing. For me, needing to write notes during a lecture drastically reduces the benefit of being there - the only product is what I manage to write down of whatever was written on the board, with no gain in understanding until I study the notes and text book afterwards.
You may have a student in your class who is not hearing what you are saying whenever they are writing.

I also have this problem. Don't try to force students into one learning style because you will end up harming those who can't use the one style you arbitrarily have chosen.

I believe this can be improved by the lecturer giving adequate time for jotting notes, as well as pointing out what to write. Facts (Beethoven wrote many piano sonatas), definitions ("Net income" is ...), formulas (Magnetic flux = ...) can be looked up easily. Reasoning is usually what to learn (The defendant seems right, but his logic is flawed because ...). Students should listen the reasoning process in its entirety. Then, give a brief summary, and a 30s pause.

@kayson "Adequate time" varies from person to person, depending on writing speed, and on the nature of the material. My degrees are in mathematics and computer science. Lectures often included mathematical definitions and proofs that did not have a surplus character in them. I would generally need at least as long as the time it took the professor to write the material on the board.

@PatriciaShanahan I agree writing speed differs from person to person. My major is also computer science. I particularly liked a lecturer who did all the steps on the board, together with the class. The only time he gave printed slides beforehand is when the computation is very tedious. After the talking he usually tells a little joke or just chat some random stuff. I can't say how long, it feels like a minute or two; but I believe that was adequate, without slowing down the whole class.

@kevin A minute or two would not be adequate for me, unless he were pausing every minute or two.

To answer the main question, yes it is common.
I guess it's a matter of your personal idea of your role as a teacher. My approach is to do everything I can to make the material easily accessible to the students. Some students don't want/can't attend classes, they have their own priorities.
Of course teachers are by no mean obliged to take these cases into consideration, and I'm perfectly fine with courses taught without anything else than the blackboard.
But if I create slides anyway, I see no sane reason to restrict access to these before, during or after the courses are taught. I will also mention textbooks, articles and other sources I used to create the content.

I don't know how common it is, but I can tell you that in the classes I teach (general chemistry), I use a combination of lecture slides and writing on the board. Here's a rough breakdown of my approach:

Approximately one slide per major concept, with very limited text (mostly definitions) and images/graphs to explain the concept. I make these available online (they can print before class if they want to)
I write quick outline notes of major topics on the board before starting the section or chapter, then back-fill the details during the lecture, and give a review summary at the end.
For problem-solving, I use one or more slides with an example and outlines of the steps, then demonstrate on the board using the same example. I follow that up with a different example, and finally have the students work through a problem on their own in class.

Using slides in this way works well for me because it allows me to spend less time writing and drawing on the board, and more time engaging students with discussion and question/answers. I think it helps the students as well - they are free to pay attention to what I'm saying, rather than just trying to copy down everything I write. Once they realize that they only need to write down the extra details, the lectures become more fun and I think they get more out of them. Since the slides are always available online, they can print them out whenever they like, or just look at them on their computers/tablets/phones.
Writing the summary notes and outlines on the board helps me organize the lectures, keep things on track, and prepare the students to pay attention. It also gives those with less-well-developed note-taking skills a template to use.
By combining the two, I think this approach addresses both of the disadvantages you brought up:

Students may lose focus more easily when they have digital notes because they do not have to copy everything down (this was my experience as an undergrad)

Since the outline summary notes are on the board, students have something to write down, and I can use their tendency to automatically copy whatever I write as way of getting their attention if they seem to be "zoning out"

Students may choose not to attend class because notes are available elsewhere (of course, they may choose to do so anyways...)

Since the slides are mostly graphical illustrations with limited text, there is still an advantage to coming to class. I do want to point out that I believe it's part of my job as a teacher to make coming to class valuable for reasons besides just getting a copy of the notes, but, I recognize that for some students who are good at self-study, that might not be the case. I try to follow the textbook pretty closely, so students who can't make it to class for some reason are still able to catch up pretty easily between the book, my slides, and notes copied from classmates.

"it's part of my job as a teacher to make coming to class valuable for reasons besides just getting a copy of the notes" sums it up perfectly.

I wish many of my lecturers had the same attitude as you - make the class interesting to come instead of taking attendance!

Some background: In Finnish universities the mentality usually is* that student should have the responsibility for their studies and learning (from what and how many courses to take each year to how to study course material). For example, it is very uncommon that attendance at lectures is mandatory, and even mandatory weekly exercises are not very common. In that sense, providing lecture notes has several advantages:

Students have to write less (because the core of the material is already present), so more material can be covered
Students may focus [sic!] more easily when they have digital notes because they do not have to copy everything down (this was my experience as an undergrad)
Students may choose not to attend class because notes are available elsewhere (of course, they may choose to do so anyways...)

*or at least it has been in the recent past; some things seem to be changing

Some lecturers provide the notes only after the lectures, because students are very good at pointing out typos and other mistakes in the material during the lectures. Some lecturers provide a preliminary version before the lectures, and a corrected version after the lectures. Some lecturers have completed the material on previous years and give everything at the start of the course. Some lecturers have completed the material on previous years and give material related to each lecture shortly before or after that lecture.
Nowadays, at least in Aalto University, the material is almost always provided as PDF files (or other relevant format) using a web service provided by the university. In the past there was a very complicated system where the lecturer provided the material to a certain company from which a student then ordered the printed material which was then distributed to a folder which was maintained by an association of the students in the degree programme of the student; but for some reason that system was abolished a few years ago.
The contents of the material given by the lecturer varies from a complete set of notes that is almost like a book, to bullet points listing what parts of the course book were covered during that lecture. Nevertheless, I think I've never taken a course where you wouldn't be able to study the material without attending the lectures.

One alternative I have considered is to distribute all of the notes relevant to an exam just prior to that exam. However, this may reduce the effectiveness of the advantage, although it will mitigate to a certain extent the disadvantages.

I've never seen this happening. Some students have asked lecturers who don't provide extensive material during the course to do that before the exam, but most responses I have heard have the following points: Providing the lecture notes just before exam would encourage bulimic learning - that is, putting a lot of stuff in your head for a few days before the exam and quickly throwing it up during the exam without actually learning anything. Most students who don't want to attend lectures might still not attend if they know they will get the material anyway; by providing the notes so late you'd only harm their learning.

"bulimic learning" - Great phrase! Very evocative. Thank you for your thoughtful response! :-)

"bulimic learning" aka the "sponge/faucet method" in which the sponge is filled during the semester, wrung out on the final exam, and thereafter empty.

Yes, it is common, at least at the freshman and sophomore level. In my experience, few professors provide digital notes (or digital copies of lecture slides) in the upper levels of undergrad teaching.
I always appreciated those who did so, because I was usually able to take better notes due to not having to write as much. However, recall was usually not quite as good, for the same reason. (FWIW, I almost never skipped lecture, whether or not there were digital notes available).
As for what methods are common, I've seen three main methods, mostly differing as to when the notes are made available to the students.

Post all slides at the beginning of the course. This has obvious shortcomings if you change your lecture slides in any way--and good teachers almost always do!
Post shortly before the class session in which the material is presented. Either immediately before (< 4 hours) or several sessions in advance. This seems to work best, because students have time to print them out to take notes on, if that's what they prefer. You can also tweak your slides as needed without confusing your students.
Post lecture slides immediately after class. This seems to me the least optimal, in that students cannot read the slides ahead of the lecture or use them to take notes on, but could potentially still use this as an excuse to not come to lecture.

One advantage of having something before the lecture (be it slides, notes or textbook) that responsible students who know they have problems can prepare in order to take the most out of the lecture.

I agree, and assign reading before each lecture.

"This has obvious shortcomings if you change your lecture slides in any way--and good teachers almost always do!" This makes it sound like you're living in 1992. Post your slides online and update them whenever they change. There are many tools that can keep your online version automatically in sync (or you can use something like Google docs so they can see your edits immediately without any effort on your part).

@dss539, The platforms I was most familiar with support only pdf files, (so yeah, circa 1992!) which means manual updating of slides after every change. Few do this, so students are left with slides that don't match what is being presented in class. Google docs is certainly a better solution than the default option in this case. :)

Sorry you're stuck with PDFs. You can still upload the PDF to Dropbox or Google Drive (which they can do on your behalf automatically if you set up auto-sync).

I've seen lecturers print out copies of the slides, which the students would pick up as they entered the room, so they could make notes on them.
It requires the students to attend, but you could also say that you can collect copies in your office if people can't make it.
People sometimes picked up copies for friends, but it generally meant that people attended the lectures. It's really useful to have the slides to make notes on directly.
Kills a lot of trees though.

@Jigg What's the point of offering a class if the students don't need to come to class?

@sleekvisage The point is that the students who benefit from attending a class have the possibility to do so.

@Jigg It depends on the level of your students. I teach some subjects where the students are extremely unprepared for university life, they overestimate their abilities, and by allowing them to skip class, I enable their destructive behavior. I certainly don't think one-size-fits-all works when teaching. That said, I don't mind if the strong students miss class (but they are the ones most likely to attend anyway).

by allowing them to skip class, I enable their destructive behavior — Nonsense. College students are adults. They are responsible for their own behavior. If skipping class hurts their performance, let it. How else are they going to learn why not to skip class? (I skipped a lot of classes as an undergrad, and it hurt me. I do not enforce attendance in the classes I teach.)

The tree-killing can be mitigated by making electronic copies available in advance, and people with suitable tablets can mark on them during the lecture (and otherwise).

I skipped a fair number of classes as an undergrad, and it did not hurt me because I carefully chose which classes to attend based on how familiar I was with the material and how easy it would be to learn it on my own. This gave me a little more time to devote to harder classes. Requiring class attendance could actually penalise students pursuing the more challenging majors.

@JeffE: For the first several years in my current job I didn't require attendance.  Then I gave a midterm exam and noticed a couple of people I didn't recognize.  When I talked to one of them afterwards, she told me flat out that she knew she should attend class but too often didn't; if attendance were required, she would.  I made attendance required in the middle of the course and waited for the students to scream bloody murder.  Not a peep.  Ever since I have required attendance in my undergraduate courses: in freshman level classes I enforce it by having them turn in something daily.

Is it ickily paternalistic?  Yes.  Would I have liked it as a student?  No, but it wouldn't have significantly changed my undergraduate experience.  Does it work to get the students to go to class and thereby increase their grades?  Yeah, it does.  You ask how students will ever learn why not to skip class.  The answer is that they won't, but this is in my opinion less important than what they're not learning by skipping class.  I decided to stand on the principle of "Do what will teach students the most" rather than "Do what will best foster mature adult behavior".

(I do understand your perspective, since it was my own for most of my life.)

...rather than "Do what will best foster mature adult behavior". — I prefer to frame my attitude as "Do what will teach students the most assuming mature adult behavior." I am definitely not trying to teach my students to be adults; I assume they already are.  (That said, I put videos of my lectures and detailed lecture notes on my course web site, so that students who miss class only miss seeing me in person.)

When I last taught big lecture classes, I would distribute pre-class and post-class versions of my slides.
The pre-class versions would go online the night before.  They would have fewer steps worked out (I teach math), some solutions left blank for students to ponder in advance, and jokes subtracted.  They would be laid out three slideframes to a letter-sized page, with ample space for annotation.  So they could print them out and take them to class.
The post-class versions would be the complete slideshow from class, with worked-out solutions, jokes, and errata included.  They would go up at the end of the day of class (depending on how much I had to fix).  They were not laid out to be printed; it was just one slide per page of PDF.

As a student, I am most comfortable and effective learning lecture notes that are provided in traditional book format (even if it isn't available on paper, but as a PDF).
I have a very strong bad feeling towards slides that double as lecture notes. I believe the requirements for these two are so different, that when people merge the concepts, the result is equally bad as a slideset as lecture notes. When the whole material is crammed into slide format, aiming to provide all information the student has to learn, it has several possible disadvantages (all first hand experience):

Teacher reads the slides verbatim, rendering his/her presence meaningless.
Teacher doesn't feel obligated to prepare for the lecture, because everything is on the slides (in extreme cases the slides are made by someone else and the teacher never prepares for the whole course).
Teacher doesn't feel obligated to put proper effort into making the slides, because "I'm just making supplementary material", resulting in quickly hacked together slides (examples include copy-pasted stuff alternating between first language and English, three complete courses with equations without defining any notations used, two complete courses with equations and no explanatory text at all).
The slides are inherently not detailed enough to be a complete resource for the course, so students go to Google for additional resources, and sometimes what they find is completely wrong.
The teacher's line of thinking may be so different from the students, that his/her idea of what should be on a slide results in slidesets that are incomprehensible and of absolutely no information to the students.
Students are disengaged from the lecture because the slides are available online. Even committed students find it hard to pay attention.
PowerPoint and similar software makes it easy to place randomly formatted random stuff at random places on the slide. A teacher with no visual/typographical sensitivity and/or proper knowledge of the software may easily create slides that are painful to even look at because of the messy and amateur layout and formatting. (Examples include a complete course in all caps, physics plots handdrawn in PowerPoint/MSPaint style, equations in plain text instead of the equation editor, source code listings in bullet points, etc.)

My suggestion is, take the time needed to type proper lecture notes (maybe next summer) in proper sentences, with all the details etc., and let the slides contain only those pieces of information that you simply cannot present verbally or on the blackboard. An alternative to writing lecture notes is providing pointers to existing (text)books in which the material is already covered (maybe the very books you yourself use to prepare for the course).

"provided in traditional book format" - isn't this what a textbook is for? I have no intention (nor time!) to write a textbook for my course... "go to Google for additional resources" - I suspect they will do so anyways... "slidesets that are incomprehensible" - This can be the result just as easily if the course is taught with chalk and blackboard... The first three disadvantages I certainly agree with, and I intend to avoid those at all costs :-)

@darthbith You're right. What I've seen are lecture notes that were created over the years for the specific course at hand, contained less material than an all-encompassing textbook about the subject (150-200 pages instead of 500), and contained only the material actually covered in the lectures. Some students helped scribe these, under the teacher's supervision and editing. I think creating well-thought-out slides for a course is not much less of an effort.

I provide my slides. I give them to the bookstore to print as a "course pack" sold for a nominal amount (none of which goes to me) and if I change them during the year, I put them online for download right before (or in some cases, immediately after) class. I typically have a separate small deck with comments and diagrams and such that arise from marking an assignment or test. I don't upload these ever. In the first class I explain all of this to the students along with the following important announcement:

I can and will test you on material that was only covered verbally in class and is not written on these slides. You can and will lose marks for not knowing something that was only talked about during a lecture.

If I find myself putting the screen up to draw something on the blackboard, I take a note to add that diagram to the deck for next year. I find that drawing diagrams out is a great way to learn, but that most students will not do so - having a predrawn diagram helps them less than having one they drew, but more than having nothing, so I do it. Since I am teaching them how to make design decisions and record those decisions in the form of a diagram, the more examples they have the better.
In over a decade, no student has ever objected to what I'm doing, though there have been some who (wrongly) thought it meant they could pass without coming to class. I also had a few in the early days who objected to my file formats, giving me the extra work of exporting each deck to PDF or HTML or whatever they could handle; that seems to have stopped although I still ask each year if anyone needs a different format.

Students may lose focus more easily when they have digital notes
  because they do not have to copy everything down (this was my
  experience as an undergrad)

I can either be writing down what you just said or I can be thinking about what you just said. Your choice.
If you try to force students to scribble down everything while you're talking they're going to be thinking "damn, where's my spare pen, this one is going dry" not "Hm. I wonder how that principle applies to...." when you say something.
You're dealing with adults, if they fail because they're overconfident, have bad judgement and think they don't need to attend class then they made that choice with their eyes open.
By all means, warn them and recommend against doing so but refusing to make slides, handouts or pdfs available is just devaluing your class for the students who do attend.

Thank you for your response! Perhaps that is a poor phrasing on my part - It was my experience that my mind would wander when I had a Professor's notes in front of me or knew I could get them online later. Of course, everyone learns differently, so certainly punishing the students for whom providing the slides would be an advantage is not my intent. Nonetheless, although we call the students adults, I think they are still learning how they learn and do not necessarily make their decisions with eyes wide open, which complicates this decision (hence the large number of responses to my post). :-)

The first course I taught, about 15 years ago, was an advanced undergraduate introduction to General Relativity.  The way I taught that (and currently teach it again) worked for me and apparently for the students.  There are a variety of overlaps with points made in the other answers.
The way it goes is:

I've assembled detailed formal lecture notes, which have turned into a what I realise amounts to a short book! (feel free to have a look if you're at all interested).  I distribute these in blocks before the relevant lectures.  I request/advise the students to read ahead in these notes.
The lecture I give is somewhat more informal than the written notes.  It goes over the material in the same order, but skips some details, and says ‘it's a bit like...’ more often than the notes would.  That is, the lecture itself is significantly distinct from the notes.
I don't use powerpoint (or prepared acetate slides, before you ask), but I do use a document projector to display scribbled diagrams and mathematical derivations.
I record the lectures, and make this available to the students as well.

So they've got lots of resources.
The points that are relevant to the question here are:

This is well-known as a challenging course, but the students generally find the topic interesting and are motivated to work hard at it.  That is, they are cooperating and trying to learn, and as others have pointed out, this is more important than anything else for the success of a course.
This is a notationally intricate course, and I know from being on the opposite side of the lecturn that it's basically impossible to take accurate notes and actually pay attention to what's being said.  I still tell them to take notes.
I tell them that the topic only makes sense after the second time they do a course in it, but that the printed notes and the oral lecture count as two courses simultaneously! (to an educationalist I'd say something about ‘multi-modal learning ...blah... different learning styles ...wibble’).  That, plus the recorded audio, cues them to take charge of how they approach the material, and to take a critical attitude to the available resources.

As far as I'm aware (I don't check) they do all turn up to the lectures.  That's nice, as it suggests I do myself have a pedagogical function being in the room.  If they don't turn up then either they're going to fail the course, or else they're able enough that they can master it with their own resources – both are fine by me.
The other course where I've used this approach was a pre-honours course, also regarded as somewhat challenging, but also with motivated students; also with a masters-level course which was a bit less interesting, but which could presume motivated students.  It might not work so well with a service course, or a more bread-and-butter course.
The last point being said, I do have general sympathy with the insistence that undergraduates are adults, who can damn well be given responsibility for their own learning.  But that fine attitude might run into difficulties in a different institutional or course, or a different student body, or a different (pecuniary) relationship with the students.  There are important factors lurking there.

As a student, I was more focused when the professor had the slides behind him because the slides were just a summary and he had the details. I was more concentrated because I haven't had to write down every single word so the lesson was more fluent.

For large lecture classes I usually present the material on an overhead projector.  I make the slides available to the students before the lecture, reduced to quarter size for convenience.  Most of my colleagues do something similar.
It's true that this may result in some students cutting lectures.  I am usually quite up-front about this, and tell students in the first lecture that while it is up to them, trying to learn the subject from the lecture notes alone is the best way I know for the average student to fail the course: for most students it will be necessary to attend lectures, consider extra comments, explanations and examples which I may give, and most importantly of all, ask questions and engage with the subject.
You can "force" students to attend lectures by withholding the notes, or by leaving gaps in them.  I don't do this because I find it to be unacceptable behaviour: in effect, it treats students as children who must be manipulated "for their own good".  I make it clear that I expect students to take a responsible, adult attitude towards their studies; the result is that most of them do.
IMO this is so important that I'm going to paraphrase it in bold type: the vital thing to realise about students is that most of them are extremely cooperative.  They want to learn: if you make it clear what you expect of them, you will usually get it without pulling any tricks like issuing incomplete notes.
Finally we should ask (or perhaps we should have asked initially): what is the purpose of lectures and other classes?  It is for the students to learn the subject (of course!).  It is not an ego trip for the lecturer.  If my students learn the subject then the course has been successful, even if the lectures have been half empty.  (But if the lecturer demonstrates a concern for students and a dedication to teaching, then the lectures never will be half empty.)

BTW, I may soon have to find an alternative for the overhead projector.  Apparently my institution believes that such things are too old-fashioned to be tolerated in a modern, forward-thinking institution which never stands still, and is gradually withdrawing support for these ancient devices :-(

I have found that the document camera that is coming to replace overhead projectors gives much the same feel to both the instructor and students. YMMV :-)

In the university that I attend, almost all of our professors provide digital notes. I believe this is a good practice because many students can't keep notes and comprehend what the professor says at the same time. As a countermeasure for the second disadvantage you mention, professors often give some extra techniques and explanations that are not included in the digital notes.

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


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How to edit name on existing publications after a name change?
Assume that I publish many papers in many journals and someday I changed the family name (my last name). How can I edit that where my papers have been published? and is it easy process?

Probably not. I can't remember the name of the professor who changed sex and a lot a few people though that he was much better than his "sister".

You should check out the following post: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/9003/4394 which involves the same type of issue. To answer your question: you cannot change your name on articles past.

@Zenon, you're probably thinking of Ben Barres.  See, for example, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201883.html

I am voting to reopen. The other question is about indicating a name change on a CV, and all the answers focus on the wording to put on the CV. What is asked here is a different matter.

It would also be really confusing for all those papers that cited your earlier works. Are you going to try to submit corrections to the papers of everyone who has ever cited you?

I am afraid that you can't easily change the name on a published article. Publishing is (at least theoretically) still done on print, so there is simply no way to change the physical journal once it has been sent to university libraries all over the world. Even for more important issues such as plagiarism or factually incorrect data, only an errata is issued, or the paper is marked as "retracted".
What you can do instead is advertising the double name on your webpage and CV, and ensuring that the academic databases (such as Web of Science and Scopus) correctly recognize and handle your name change, marking all of your papers as written by a single author. You will probably need to notify them using the "contact us" functions on their websites.
Several authors in the same situation choose to keep the old name also on new papers; this makes it simpler for other researchers to recognize you, at the price of using a name that you might have disowned and now consider a relic from the past. In practice, there is no requirement that your academical nom de plume coincides with the one that is written on your ID and that you use on legal papers, so you are free to sign your papers using a different version of it. Once you choose this route, however, it will be more practical if you consistently use the old name also when attending conferences.
If you are simply getting married, then signing your papers with both surnames is probably the easiest option. (I realize that probably you have already considered and discarded this option, but I thought it more appropriate to include it in my answer anyway.)

"In practice, there is no requirement that your academical nom de plume coincides with the one that is written on your ID" - unfortunately, this assumption can get endangered in situations where the two worlds touch; e.g. if people at a conference (who tend to rely on the author name indicated on the paper) need to see something issued by the university (which is based on legal documents), or vice-versa.

There are two strategies that I have heard of that people with renowned accomplishments tend to employ when they get married (what is, I think, the most common situation when a person changes last name). It certainly depends on your legal system, but in my country they either: stay by the old name or use composite last name. The latter meaning that if a person's name was Smith and nupturient's name is Brown, then they change the name to Smith-Brown.


text:
How to find OA free to publish journals with a JCR ranking?
I would like to find journals that:

are ranked with JCR (no matter how low) and
have open access (anyone can access the papers for free) and
are free to publish (authors are not required to pay)

Maybe I am asking for a unicorn, but I think this should be feasible.
If I'm not mistaken, arxiv.org only fails in the first point. If someone could provide (a link to) a list of such a kind of journals that would be awesome. If such a list does not exist, how would I go about creating a list.

Journal of Machine Learning Research is perhaps the most successful example in computer science.  Stuart Schieber's description of the journal's internal structure is amazing.  (On the other hand, arxiv.org fails because it's not a journal; arXiv papers are not peer-reviewed.)

There are very, very, very, very many journals out there.  I think the question would be improved if you specifically limited it to a field (rather than I prefer, specify what you need).

The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics also fits your criteria.

@gerrit this is great, I didn't know there was any. Do you think it may make sense to create a wiki post so that people can edit and collaboratively generate a list? (possibly categorized by area/field/topic)

@JeffE if it is ranked in JCR, I (personally, sorry for this) don't mind about any review process. arxiv.org is not reviewed but papers there are cited, the utility/usefulness of the review process is doubtful when that is happening, it may even be negative (although that is a completely different topic).

Do you care about JCR specifically, or are other indexing services like Scopus acceptable?

@JeffE I care about JCR because the government, institutions and pretty much everyone cares about JCR (at least here, in Spain). I don't know whether there are services that are comparable to JCR in some other country or how widespread is the use of JCR as the standard to rate publications. Depending on that, those services could be more or less interesting. I hope the citation metrics will be similar or correlated in any case, at least.

If I am wrong, please let me know, but this question reads as primarily a "please list me journals that possess qualities X, Y, and Z". These question types are frowned upon for all SE sites. As there are already a few other close votes on this question, I'm going to cast the final vote; please comment if you think this question should be an exception to the general rule.

@eykanal that is how I read it also, I edited it to try and make it a better fit.

@DanielE.Shub - Thanks, that looks better to me.

arXiv.org also failed because it is a repository, not a journal.

@PhilipGibbs being a ranked journal implies being a journal, if I'm not mistaken.

arXiv is not an academic journal because it does not have peer-review. It makes no difference if someone gives it a ranking or lists it as if it were a journal.

@PhilipGibbs there are academic journals that are not peer-reviewed. If something is defined as a journal, it's a journal (by definition).

Please feel free to edit anything.

Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning

Journal of Machine Learning Research

General

Journal of Universal Computer Science

Mathematics

Combinatorics

The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics

Statistics

Journal of Statistical Software

I removed TSWJ since it is published by Hinadwi which Beall considers to be a borderline predatory publisher and it has an APC

I am down voting because I think that this type of list goes against the types of answers that are best suited for the SE network. It is going to be an hugely incomplete and maintainable list.

@DanielE.Shub  There are longer and more dynamic lists on wikipedia. Sure this is a hell lot of work for a single person, but not for a community, IMHO. If SE cannot handle this, then where? I'm not sure about how well will wikipedia work for this, but I guess I'll try in a week or so if this question remains closed.

part of the SE philosophy is that just because something doesn't fit someplace else doesn't mean it fits here. I would guess that there are 1000s of journals that meet the requirements. This answer is not going to provide an efficient way of accessing the information.

@DanielE.Shub there are 11K journals in JCR, out of those most do not provide OA, out of those with OA most charge authors (for publishing, processing, etc.) It's already surprising that there is any journal with these characteristics, I guesstimate the list cannot have more than one hundred journals by any means. But I can agree such a list may not be the best solution. I'll try to think about something else.

For mathematics, there is also SIGMA (http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/).

This is perhaps not exactly what you look for but, as a partial answer, the Advanced Search feature of the directory of open access journals (DOAJ) lets you filter the open access journals by subject AND by publication fee. Unfortunately, you cannot infer from the DOAJ data whether these journals are on JCR.
In particular, the DOAJ search results for open access journals in Computer Science with zero publication charges are at this URL.
In principle, as a next step one could compare (by hand or perhaps using some software) the list resulting from the DOAJ search with the list from JCR for (a given branch of) computer science or search in JCR (e.g. in the list of full journal titles) for specific journal names.
Also, the DOAJ listing includes links to home pages of journals and often data about the journal impact factor (if any) or JCR listing are available at these home pages.
To give a specific example resulting from a quick attempt to compare the lists, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is open access with zero publication charges and has a 2013 IF of 0.904.

There are many journals that satisfy your criteria… here's how to find them!

Use Journal Citation Reports
Search journals by publisher:

Choose an open access publisher, such as “Public Library of Science”

Enjoy!

Edit: as JeffE wisely noted, this does not address the criterion of “no publishing charge”. You'll have to check the various journals, but some have no publishing charges, including some published by Hindawi Publishing Corporation for example. To find out which, cross-reference the JCR data with this list maintained by Berkeley.

This does not address his third criterion: free to publish.  Many (most?) open access publishers require authors to pay significant publication fees, including PLOS.

Another pitfall is that some open-access journal can be published by publishers that also publish traditional journals, i.e. are not "open-access publisher". An example would be Forum of Mathematics, published by Cambridge University press (but this one plans to charge APC soon).

Sherpa Romeo, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/, might be helpful to you, as well.  I think you'd still have to do your cross-check against the JCR, though.


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Should I mention that I was an athlete in a curriculum for a PhD application?
I am going to apply for a PhD in mathematics in north Europe. During my high school and undergraduate years, I was also a semi-professional athlete, and I retired when I was a graduate student to focus on my studies. I think being an athlete at a high level tells many things about a PhD student. A high level former athlete has probably developed a strong attitude for work, knows how to focus and how to manage their time; moreover, high level sport teaches you also how to manage stress and failures. However, I am afraid that a potential PhD adviser might get the wrong idea: I don't know any former athletes doing a PhD in my field, but I know at least one professor who thinks being an athlete could be a distraction. Unfortunately, in my country there is not a strong sports culture, and hence the academic and sport worlds are completely disjoint. Do you think I should mention my former career as an athlete in a curriculum for a PhD application?

«Unfortunately, in my country there is not a strong sports culture, and hence the academic and sport worlds are completely disjoint» Why is that unfortunate? Being evaluated for your academic skills rather than how fast you run seems reasonable and pretty fair to me.

I was a college athlete (who spent far more time on my sport than on academics) and am now a PhD student in math. I briefly mentioned it in my applications and it didn't seem to hurt me. I've also had many more positive responses to me being a former athlete than negative ones in grad school. This is in the US, by the way. See also this story: http://tech.mit.edu/V135/N38/urschel.html

@AndreaLazzarotto I never said that the fact that you "run fast" should overcome your academic skills in your evaluation. But I do think that sports are very important in the growth of a person. Imho, an educational system that discourages doing sport because it distracts from study, is not a good educational system. I know very well the Italian situation: if you want to pursue a sport career in an individual sport, you pretty much have to enroll in the army. Pretty sad in my opinion.

You are asking a question about (academic) cultural views, but you don't reveal either your country of origin or the countries that you plan to apply to.  IMO, this means that you will have to wonder to what extent every answer you get applies to your situation.  I suggest including more information.

The dean of Stern School of Mamagement was a wide receiver for UNC, and won the British college basketball championship while spending a year there. It's not math, but I think a lot of people would agree with your reasons for why having been a competitive athlete is a good sign. If you ever go to industry, highlight it definitely.

@Hamlin: Are you sure you are asking specifically about sports, or about any extra-curricular activity in general?

@PeteL.Clark You are right, sports are considered in a very different way in US and in Europe. I am going to apply for PhD programs in north Europe, but I want to keep this question general, because I am interested also in opinions from the US.

@O.R.Mapper I am asking specifically about sports done at semi-pro (or higher) level. For that, I mean doing sports and at least being sponsored. Anyone can do sports for fun, and this does not tell anything to a potential supervisor. The situation is different for high level sport.

@Hamlin: I see. I. that case, I fully agree with AndreaLazzarotto in that I find it very fortunate that one specific extra-curricular activity does not generally have any other bearing on the application than other such activities. If semi-professional sports were considered meaningful in this context, I would feel actively discriminated against and I would also see the risk that such a policy could restrict the diversity among the team.

@O.R.Mapper I didn't say that doing sport should be a discriminating factor. I don't think that. I just think that being a former athlete tells positive things about your attitude to a PhD, just as many other extra curricular activities, and I was looking for opinions about that.

@Hamlin you said that "unfortunately" those worlds are disjoint and that's what I replied to. You seem to imply that the american model where people can get scholarships just because they are athletes is good, but it isn't.  Doing a sport is good, but it should never influence your academic career, neither in a good nor in a bad way.

Being a college level athlete is definitely a bonus for you in any endeavor including pursuit of a Ph. D. From my Point of view it seems it can only help your application by showcasing the skills you mentioned in your post. Perhaps you can (in cover letter or informal conversation or email) discuss how your experiences as an athlete helped you improve your ability to perform research.

@Hamlin How does wanting to play sports entail enrolling into he army?.

I would put it in your CV. I see several reasons for this: first it completes your CV and you are 'honest' with anyone you apply to. I don't know the sports you are in but if someone googles your name, s/he might end up finding you which in my opinion raises questions (if you did not mention it).
The second reason is that of traits and skills a semi-professional career as athlete gives you: persistance, discipline and so on. Yes, it may distract you, but this is why you have chosen to focus on one path. Be prepared to answer questions about this when you are interviewed. Focus on the positive aspects that this occupation has given you.
Third: I think it highly depends on your sport. Is it athletics, football, or something else (popular) it is perhaps ok. Something like Mixed Martial Arts raises other questions and might put you into a unwanted light (agressive, conflict orientated). Sports like e-sports are also still a problem. Many do not recognise them as sports at all, although they might indicate team and communication skills as well as reflexes.
So I guess you should reflect upon the positive and negative aspects of your sport and why it has formed your character into the person you are know. If you can answer questions about this relation in an interview setting, you are pretty well off I think.

Regarding e-sports, see here: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/62496/19607

I saw this post on poker a few weeks ago. I think it is still something different than esports. Poker still is considered gambling. However, I think we can agree to that esports are a difficult thing.

There are several parts of a typical Ph.D. application.  In some of them, sports will almost certainly not appear; in others I think it will strongly depend on whether you find your sports experience highly relevant to your progress as a graduate student.  Here are the places that I think sports might appear:

In letters of recommendation, your sports will likely not appear at all, since your recommenders are likely recommending you on the basis of your academic work.  Still, you likely have no control here, and if one of your recommenders feels that mentioning sports strengthens your application, they may do so.
In your personal statement, you should only mention sports if you believe that they are highly relevant to your development and goals for a Ph.D.   For some they most absolutely are; for others, they are largely separate.
In your C.V., I see two places that sports might appear:

If your "semi-professional" status as an athlete actually meant you were being paid, then it should probably appear in your list of prior work experience.
Sometimes as C.V. has a miscellaneous "other experience" section at the bottom, in which you might put a bullet point on sports.

In short, there is not much place for sports to appear unless you believe it is critical to your path in academia.  Nor does there need to be a conspicuous absence, however: if you have just that bullet point at the end of your C.V., that signals "this was a big thing in my life, but it's not what I'm focusing on here."

Your first bullet point suggests that you think that non-academic work experience should appear on an academic CV.  In my circles (mathematics in the US), it usually does not.

Speaking for Germany and the EU, non-academic work experience is displayed in a seperate vocation list. Especially so if you worked during your academic education or a PhD programme. I think this might actually depend on the subject and the 'culture' of presenting CVs.


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How can I make self-studied course in undergraduate official when applying to graduate school?
I'm a second year Physics and Mathematics student.
Although I haven't attended many different professor's lectures, from what I have experienced, and what I know about the professors in both of my departments, I generally don't like the style that the lecturers uses in both departments. What I mean by this is that, for example, in physics courses, generally lecturers tend to justify their claim by doing "sloppy mathematics" and generally without clearly stating their assumptions, and they don't explicitly state what is an experimental result and what is a mathematical result, so this generally confuses me.Of course this is just one of the examples only in physics department.Therefore, mostly I studied the subject by myself, and ask the questions either to the T.A, or the professor's itself depending on situation.
I should also note that, in both departments, there are some professors whose way of explains things coincides with how I think, so if I cannot understand a subject that I'm self-studying, I generally go to those professors and ask them.
So, for this reason, I'm going to ended up studying lots of subject by myself, and for that reason I will not take course on those subject because why should I waste time by taking the lectures on subjects that I have already know.Instead I can take different course that I really benefit from.
However, the only problem in this way is that I will not have an official account on those subjects that I will have beed studied when I apply to graduate school.
So my question is that how can I make these studies official ? I mean, for example, I will study point-set topology in the next spring break and I will not take this course from the department, but how can I prove that I know this subject when I apply to graduate school.
I'm hoping that I'm able to clearly express what I'm asking.If not, please say it what is not clear.
Note that, I have seen this question, but even though I don't exactly know the content of GRE tests, I don't think it will be a valid method in my case.

Just as a comment, physics isn't math. It isn't worthwhile being less sloppy about the mathematics: the expectation is that, as part of learning physics, you learn to deal with that "sloppiness" and recognize that it isn't sloppy at all, but usually based on common sense. In contrast, much of what makes mathematics "not sloppy" is unnecessarily verbose and boring in the context of physics. Many of the results you will encounter in an undergraduate physics course have substantial experimental and mathematical support; which came first is more an issue of history of science.

@BryanKrause For that reason, I'm not studying any physics subjects without first learning the underlying mathematics. You cannot train a science student saying that "you should not accept anything without a proof", and than say just that F = ma.

Science does not depend on proofs, only mathematics does. I would really suggest you take a broad spectrum of classes, in class, rather than learning on your own. It isn't always just about learning and understanding the material, but also learning and understanding the language in which people in a field communicate. Self-study can always supplement.

@BryanKrause What I meant by a "proof" can be a mathematically rigorous proof, or and experimental observation.

From the perspective of undergraduate physics, for example, F=ma is as much a definition as anything else, and is useful to completing many relevant problems in beginning physics. The only way to derive F=ma mathematically is from the original part of Newton's 2nd law, involving momentum, and then that requires more definition and empirical evidence. All that said, F=ma is a wrong equation anyways, if you want to be a stickler on mathematical assumptions. In fact, it is wrong on every scale. And yet it is still incredibly useful.

The word "proof" is not used in English to mean "experimental observation" except by a lay audience.

@BryanKrause I don't the original Newton's 2nd law, but as far as what I have been told is that it is formalisation of an experimental result, and it works as long as the first law is valid, and even this mostly ignored by the lecturers.

@BryanKrause Also note that, I'm not a native English speaker, so the word "proof" might not be used in such a way in English, but I'm thinking Turkish, and translating it to English, and I don't know better word for what I want to say than "proof".

@BryanKrause Do you think "evidence" would be much better ?

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

Have you asked your academic adviser?

@MichaelC. I have just send him a detailed email about the situation, thanks for pointing out :)

You might ask those in charge of the courses to let you take the exams without attending class.

@MarkoKarbevski Mostly, there is no attendance, but it wouldn't want to do that because there is lots of headaches in such a method.

I don't know much about Turkey, but in most systems there isn't really any way to get credit for a course you didn't take.
You may be allowed to enrol on a course, skip all the lectures, and just turn up to the exam, depending on how strict your department is about attendance, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Courses are taught in a certain way for a number of important reasons. University is not just about imparting knowledge, but also familiarising students with the norms of a field. Concepts may be introduced or explained in a way that seems silly to you for the sake of demonstrating some property or relating disparate concepts (like electromagnetism and gravity).
You may be unsatisfied with the mathematical rigour of your physics course, but this is deliberate and necessary. Most of the equations you will learn as an undergraduate are empirically derived (or derived under certain assumptions), and will probably prove to be inaccurate or incomplete later on. But they are useful, and teaching them "properly" would require bogging down first-year courses with complex and mostly-irrelevant mathematics. Imagine if, instead of stating Newton's third law, your lecturer had diverged for several lectures to discuss conservation of momentum, introduce Lagrangian mechanics, and prove Noether's theorem.
You are, of course, encouraged to dig deeper. There is nothing better a student can do. But university courses are (usually) carefully designed to teach you important concepts and the "language" of the field in the simplest and most efficient way.
And, uh, the lectures are what the exam will be based on.
To get the grade on your transcript, you must enrol on the course and pass the exam. That probably means attending the lectures. It may not seem like it, but your lecturers know more about teaching their subject than you do.

Just a small correction, I never said they don't know how to teach properly, it is just their teaching style is not matching with how I learn.


text:
Email to a potential Phd advisor: how to make a research proposal if you don't have one?
I'm a third year Physics & Mathematics student, and I want to work with a specific advisor. I have read almost all the related questions in this site and this blog post. However, almost all of them suggest the student to make a research proposal, or - sort of - a problem that s/he is planning to work in his/her Phd.
But, the thing is, I haven't had a chance to neither doing a self-study, nor
taking a course in the field that I want to work on, though I'm very familiar with the basic concepts; I can easily read papers on the level of undergraduate.
In that case, how am I supposed to make -sort of - a research proposal, or suggest a problem that I can work on ?
I mean, for example, this last semester I took a graduate level Algebra I course, if I were to work on Group/ Ring theory, I could almost find fifty interesting research problems top of my head, but I'm not familiar with the actual problems in the field that I want to work on; I'm only familiar with general problems and general methods, and I don't want to look like "I'm interested with the field and to work with you, but I don't know what I'm actual interested in" in my email, so what should I supposed to do in this case ?

May you precise the reasons why you want to work with this specific advisor? Do you know if they accept PhD students? You might want to contact them saying why you want to work with them (1st question), asking them the 2nd question, and, if yes, if they'd be interested with working with you/what they'd need from you to consider your application.

Speak to potential PhD advisors (ideally face-to-face) and discuss your questions with them.

I'm sorry but @user2768 have you even read the question ?

@ebosi so you are saying that I shouldn't mention any potential research topic to work on ?

@onurcanbektas if you don't have any and that you have motivations to work with them "better" than "his famous and I want to benefit from their fame", yes. My personal opinion is that it's better to be genuine and ask for help/guidance to define an interesting research proposal, rather that faking an interest or send a proposal that won't be very good as you say you don't know what to speak about.

@ebosi I've lots of reasons why I want to work him, and none of them contains "because he is famous". I've already written a quarter of the mail with quite genuine intentions, but it is it looks like a kid asking "I really like you, would you accept me as a Phd student" :), and I'm afraid it will indeed be perceived like that.

@onurcanbektas Yes, maybe consider my answer?

I am not sure why you are asking to do a PhD as opposed to work with this professor on problems of his choosing as an undergrad research assistant. Can you clarify? Is this person at your institution? When you say you are a third year, I would assume you have a year before PhD application...

@Dawn Well, not really. The application for 2020 Fall ends around December 2019, which means I've only 10 months to complete everything, including searching schools & advisor (if he does to accept), taking tests. At the same time, I have to graduate and continue to my self-studies, etc. I mean, I practically even take a summer break, so I really don't have much time to spare this kinds of thing. That is why, I have to start early.

Ah, I see below this person is not at your institution. It was unclear to me why you hadn't taken a course with this person and did not offer to work on their projects as an undergrad vs. waiting until grad school. Makes more sense now.

You may be giving yourself an unnecessary task. While I don't know the academic traditions specific to Turkey, for mathematics in the US it isn't normally necessary to propose a specific problem to a professor. It may be different in the physical sciences, such as the blog post you cite implies, but in maths you need only suggest a fairly narrow sub-field in which you want to work. Algebra is too broad, Group Theory, still very broad. But non-Abelian groups is getting you closer to a field of interest.
Your question suggests that you may have some insight into algebra since you think you can propose interesting questions. That is what you want to stress in your communication with a potential advisor. "I'm interested in this tiny field and think I have some insight into the inner workings there."
Research problems in mathematics don't come out of the blue, they come out of study of other mathematical things and questions that arise there. They come from asking "what if". What if I drop an axiom? What if I change this definition?
Topology, for example, as a field suitable for deep study, came out of focusing on a particular aspect of Analysis (open sets), and then generalizing. But that came out of studying analysis, not just proposing something unrelated to other mathematics.
One great way to come up with research problems in mathematics is to attend research seminars led by the potential advisor. Take a lot of notes. Ask a lot of questions. What is known? What isn't known? What is related? What if we change something just a bit (generalizing or specializing).
But for the initial contact, it is likely enough (here anyway) to express that you have narrowed the field of study to one that is feasible to explore more deeply.

Thanks a lot for the answer; I wish I had an insight about the field that I actually want to work on as much as I have on Group/Ring Theory. The field is general Nonlinear dynamics and Chaos, and there are lots of interesting subfiles; such as quantum chaos, turbulence etc., and he is interested in all of those subfield, but I haven't narrowed myself down. I mean I'm like child in a candy shop; I want all of them :)

By the way, the advisor that I'm referring is working in US.

Just try to open a conversation with the fellow.  It is not an expected thing for every new grad student to have a research problem.  For all you know, the fellow is looking for students or wants them to work on what he wants them to (this is very normal).
Sure, there is nothing wrong with developing your own research proposal and it is an act of independence.  But I really wouldn't put it in your head as a requirement or the norm (whatever those blog posts say).
It would help if you would examine why you want to work with this fellow in particular.  If you and him interested in same scientific subfield (fluid dynamics, star spectra, whatever) than surely that is a point to open the discussion between you two.
If it's for some other reason than I wonder if your motives are correct (there are a lot of professors that are nice, have funding, get people jobs, etc.)  But really I don't know.  But it sounds peculiar to be so fastened in on one guy already.
In any case, I would emphasize to look at more than one school or one professor (even if you want to study physics of crocodidle bites and this is the only guy publishing on it).  Profs sometimes lack funding or don't like you or turn out to be jerks or what have you.  You need to have options.

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Is dropping one of my major considered "bad" if I were to study related to that field?
I'm a third year Physics & Mathematics student, and through the years, I have done lots of self-study in semesters/winter breaks/summer breaks.
Now the thing has come to a point that I can learn almost anything by myself as long as I have the necessary prerequisites for studying that subject.In fact, what I have observed in these last 2 years is that I barely learn anything in the lectures I take compare to my self-studies. That is why, if I didn't have to take exams, I would spend all my time self-studying the lectures I need to graduate, and more.
Now the problem is, I'm not taking not much (in fact not at all) benefit from my physics major, and it seems to me that it just wastes my time. That is why, I was thinking to drop of physics, and just graduate from my mathematics major.
However, if I were to study in a field related to physics, would this have negative impact in my future career [In fact, I want to study to in a field that is the intersection of Physics and Mathematics; so I'm not planning to go for pure mathematics]? I mean after all, I'm dropping out that major, but the only reason that I'm doing is so that I can have much more time to self-study by which I learn better.

I doubt that anyone will find out about you dropping a major, besides your registrar and perhaprs your advisor.

@xuq01 Well, I would definitely mention that I was a physics major for 3 years; I would definitely get a reference letter from one of my professor there. Also I did add the courses I took there to my math major etc., just by looking in to my CV / transcript, anyone would figure out that I dropped my physics major.

I don't think it would so much be an issue that you dropped the physics major, as that you don't have a physics degree.  You'd probably be treated the same as someone who had never declared a physics major at all, but happened to take some physics courses along with their math major.

Does your question roughly boil down to "Can I do applied math related to physics with a degree in math and a bunch of additional coursework in physics?" - that's kind of how it comes across to me.

@BryanKrause I didn't said I was planning to work in applied math. For example, I 'm currency interested with quantum mechanics; so consider the question as if I were to pursue a career on quantum mechanical system, would this have a negative impact on my career ?

That I'd say certainly not - many (theoretical) quantum mechanists have pure math backgrounds.

Would this have negative impact in my future career?

Absolutely no one cares what you did in undergrad, except grad school admissions. Further, as Nate Eldredge said in the comments:

I don't think it would so much be an issue that you dropped the physics major, as that you don't have a physics degree.

So, I think your question is equivalent to:

Am I less likely to get into grad school for physics/math with only a math degree?

You're certainly less likely to get into physics grad school without a physics degree (though with enough coursework, it's not impossible). For math grad school, I'm less qualified to comment, but I strongly suspect that a dual degree would have more weight than one degree + coursework. So, yes, I think the second degree would help you get into grad school. Only you can weigh this reality against the advantages of self-studying.
By the way, I also wanted to comment on this line:

the only reason that I'm doing is so that I can have much more time to self-study by which I learn better.

This has been discussed elsewhere, the consensus being that while many passionate students feel this way, few truly do not benefit from a course's structure and a professor's experience. Just one other factor to consider in your decision.

Well, the question that you reference is also asked by me, but the question was there is that not having enough motivation for my self-studied during semesters, but even if I had, I've load of coursework, and lots of things that I want to study and learn, but doing both is almost impossible because it is like studying 3 different majors: math + physics + self-study. I mean one might think that self-study would be parallel to what I  study in my self-studies, but, for example, one of my professor does not accept an answer ...

in an exam where you didn't solved it in the way s/he wanted you to do, so to pass that course, I have to attend and learn the technique in his/her way, not in the way that I'm comfortable wth, so the choice boils down for me is between learning properly and having a additional degree.

@onurcanbektas The reason for that is that the course is meant to teach you the techniques, not to teach you how to solve the typically trivial problems presented in a course format. If you have another way to solve the problem that would be fine if the point was to solve the problem; it's not.

@BryanKrause Well, from my point of view, it just boils downs to "APPLY THIS ALGORITHM", which can be done by computers much more efficiently & effectively & correctly, i.e I don't have to think, I just have to remember.

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