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What kind of career path might be possible for a professor following a plagiarism scandal?
Prior to transferring to another university, I attended a college in a different state with a renown reputation for integrity and academic rigor. The year before I left, I enrolled in a course that was taught by this new professor. It was the only 8:30 a.m. course that I eagerly woke up for- the professor would literally jump around the room, making the lessons lively and hilarious. He'd even devote the last 3-4 minutes of class to discussing some of the most insane industries around the world. I didn't enjoy my time at that college, but his classes were downright memorable.
Outside of class, he was much calmer, but always with a warm smile and approach. People only spoke good things about him, and his respective department decided to hire him full-time, on a tenure-track position.
The autumn after, I left that college and even switched majors. I kept in touch with a few individuals from that college, and one day, they told me to check out my old college's website. This professor was discovered to have plagiarized multiple papers. I won't get into the details, but the extent would make a slam-dunk case for blatancy. He no longer teaches.
If you Google the professor's name, the first page or two will only show a massive plagiarism scandal.
I tried reaching out to my former professor via email or Facebook, because for whatever reason, I feel bad for people going through rough times, even if they're severely at fault (contingent upon remorse, etc). There was (and still is) no contact information available, and after much time scouring the internet, I can't seem to locate any social media profile. It only then occurred to me how screwed up this person's future must be: never mind having a portion of your grad school wasted (although one could argue it was wasted when he plagiarized anyway), any background check on him will yield really unfavorable results.
My question is: what does a person like that do from this point forward? Is academia pretty much a "no-go"? Does he count on connections in the industry? Does one change his or her name? I thought I'd ask here since several users here have had experience with plagiarism in one way or the other.
TL;DR A professor that I used to like got busted for plagiarism, and his name's all over the internet. Does someone like that have a second shot at academia? How would he go about getting into the workforce? ...etc

Diederik Stapel wrote best-selling books such as derailment and The Fiction Factory. A Liberating Epistolary Novel...  another appropriate way out could be... to write actual fiction.  Clearly those researchers have sufficient creativity...?

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

i totally forgot to bookmark this question. thank God i was able to find it after i googled 'academia, stackexchange plagiarism, professor'. man over 6 years ago. good times. good times.

Past a certain point in their career and education, I think it's hard for somebody to ever clean off the stain of serious, prolonged, and deliberate misbehavior.  The more that a person has built up authority and trust on a false foundation, the harder it is to ever trust them with regards to that subject again.
When a young student engages in academic misbehavior, we treat it as a teaching moment.  When an undergraduate does it, we try to put fear into them and rehabilitate them.  When a graduate student does it, we try to figure out whether it is worth salvaging.  When a professor does it, it pretty much destroys their academic career.
And to my mind, I think that's OK.  We're talking about serious and deliberate professional malpractice that undermines the basis of the whole endeavor.  That can waste millions of dollars or leave people injured or killed.  Would you ever again trust a doctor who deliberately injured their patients, or an engineer who deliberately mis-designed a bridge so that it might collapse?  I think that it is the same for an academic who engages in massive and systematic fraud.

I think a more apt comparison might be an engineer who uses someone else's bridge design, or a doctor who uses another's treatment protocol, not realizing that they are dangerously inappropriate in the instant case.

@bob This assumes that the professor the OP talks about was not aware of the fact that he was doing something wrong. Blatantly plagiarizing other people's work and taking credit for it is a major offense. A better comparison might be an engineer who steals the plans of a bridge from someone and sells them off as his own.

@PaulHiemstra:  Both hypothetical people in my examples used the work of others without credit.  They can't have reached their positions without knowing that's wrong.  In both examples, others beyond those whose work they stole were injured.  The plagiarist and my hypothetical engineer and physician are trying to make themselves look good at the expense of those whose work they steal.  They are not trying to harm innocent others; that doesn't make them look good!

@BobBrown I'd like for all of our hypothetical people to be fired and never work again.

@jakebeal: On that we can agree!  (Actually, "Welcome to Wal-Mart" is preferable to never working again; I don't want to support them, either.)

At this point I think the analogy, much like the hypothetical bridge, is breaking down.

@BobBrown I think the original analogy is more suited - an engineer who uses anothers bridge design will leave you with a bridge that can carry stuff, and a doctor would still treat you, while a researcher who has plagiarized has not contributed anything new and instead harmed the profession (by wasting peoples time) - similarly to if the bridge broke and needed to  be replaced or if the treatment needed to be re-done, due to the intentional actions of the engineer/doctor.

This comparison is completely out of place. A professor teaches, and as long as his students actually learn the subject, he has done his work. Absolutely ZERO relationship with the examples cited, no harm caused. Sure, his plagiarism is a very bad thing and he was rightly fired, but that's beside the my point here.

" A professor teaches, and as long as his students actually learn the subject, he has done his work." No. A large part of the job of many/most professors is research. If they are plagiarizing their research, they are definitely not doing their job and it does cause harm.

jakebeal, are you answering the questions 'what does a person like that do from this point forward? Is academia pretty much a "no-go"? Does he count on connections in the industry? Does one change his or her name? I thought I'd ask here since several users here have had experience with plagiarism in one way or the other.' ?

@BCLC I think my answer says pretty clearly that academia is a no-go, as is any industry where intellectual integrity is important.  Beyond that, I don't really care whether they end up making millions running a hedge fund or minimum wage washing dishes.

This is similar to how things work in many military forces. Low-ranking enlisted soldiers get a great deal of supportive discipline. They do get punished for misbehavior, but it is intended to be rehabilitative - someone punches a Sergeant, get chewed out at a Court Martial, spends a few days in the stockade/brig, and possibly gets demoted a rank, but can bounce back up and earn promotions or medals if they demonstrate that they have learned their lesson. If an Admiral get's caught in bed with the President's daughter, well, his career is pretty much over. There's no rehabilitation.

@RobertColumbia: Is sleeping with a president"s daughter a misbehavior?

@Thomas it could be, especially if she is underage and/or married. The exact scenario doesn't matter - the issue is that someone with a high rank has much greater responsibilities to avoid wrongdoing.

@RobertColumbia: Thank you for the clarification, I couldn't find the connection between sleeping with someone and a wrongdoing. If you meant to say that this is againdt the law, I see the misbehavior now.

@RobertCollumbia: Although this doesn't make your country sympathetic for me if a normal soldier would not be punished for sleeping with the underage girl.

First of all, I find nice of you caring about a person who you consider to have impact on your education, whatever happened.
However, let's put this situation in a perspective:
In academia, all you have is credibility. Without making any attempt to figure out who you are talking about, from your description it is clear that the person committed serious misconducts for whatever reason, for years and years, deliberately, which hurt only not himself, but potentially can destroy the career many of his colleagues, recomendors and previous supervisor. Look at the (admittedly somewhat extreme) case of Haruko Obakata (STAP stem cell scandal): a single persons dishonesty was able to destroy a whole institute, trigger a suicide of a well respected colleague and make plenty of other damage.
Academia is a harsh place with harsh competition for job. Majority of people who do PhD never got tenure track job in the academia. Many of them hard working, even smart, but has a bad luck, personal reason etc. They lose their years, too. If you want to hire someone hard working, talented person, there are long lines waiting and willing to do the job. Why would you hire someone who has no reliable track record of ANY results, but has a solid track record of being dishonest, and potentially nuking you down to the ground?

I'll answer the question: Does he count on connections in the industry?
I am an industry retiree. The company I retired from treats employees' integrity very seriously. It's one of the most important items on annual performance review. When they interview job applicants, they filter out people with bad past records. I don't believe that professor would have any chance getting hired by this employer. And I do know that many employers do similar things. So, he will have less than normal chance to be hired by industry companies.
Of course, he still might get a job offer with some company. But, he'd better have his acts together after he is hired. Whoever hires him would worry that he might steal company intellectual properties or even money because of his past records. They will also worry that he would cheat on his work, such as falsifying time sheets, cheating test results, etc. He will be on his manager's ding list, for sure. In other words, he will have a miserable life wherever he goes.

'But, he'd better have his acts together after he is hired.' --> how would this be shown? certificate from mental health professionals?

@BCLC You need to read on: Whoever hires him would worry that he might steal company intellectual properties or even money because of his past records His superiors would watch him closely because of his past records. If he does bad things again, he could be easily caught. Hope this will answer your question.

ah thanks. actually i kinda think you could've used a colon in your answer just as you did in your comment.

oh wait i think i get it. is this right? it's not really that the ex-professor talks to mental health or spiritual professionals and the claims to be a changed person but like the ex-professor better be prepared that, for the next employer, if there will ever be one, the ex-professor will be on the employer's/manager's ding list?

@BCLC Yes, you got it right.

right. k thanks.

Before I start, let me just say that I agree with the other answers that landing a job in academia will (and should) be neigh impossible, but let's get the more interesting stuff:
Thinking back to a couple of cases I have heard of (Netherlands, Netherlands/Canada, Germany, Italy, US from the top of my head, though for the life of me, I don't know their names and the one name I do remember I don't feel like sharing, because he seemed to enjoy the attention far too much...) where people were caught for fabricating data, faking past education and plagiarizing work at least four of them were able to get a job again soon after (though three of them didn't work in academia). For none of those people it was a good career event of course, but it wasn't as bad as you would expect with all the media attention they received and most did land jobs in the long term (all except the Italian guy outside the world of research). In certain cases I think this is 'fine' and makes sense (e.g. if you have proven that you're able to do your job incredibly well... how much of an issue is it for a company that you faked your academic credentials in the past), though in other cases I have been totally dumbfounded by this (e.g. the Italian guy was able to secure research funds privately for his work still).
To narrow it down to only those that plagiarized and I know of only leaves one person and as far as I know he's currently without a job and is writing a book about his experiences in the academic world (he got a lot of publicity when he was caught), however it must be noted that he didn't only plagiarize, he also fabricated data and didn't follow correct procedures to do certain experiments.
Now, the following is just hypothesis, but from what I have heard and seen I do believe that somebody that only plagiarized, but did not fabricate data or participate in similar endeavors, will be able to land a job relatively easily. The pay won't be great and the company will wish to keep quiet about employing him, but then again, even if he plagiarized, such a person does have a lot of skill and in a lot of fields (e.g. Computer Science: Yes, English: Nope) that's enough to outweigh the disadvantages.

Maybe a job in an office of responsible scientific conduct/research ethics?
He sounds like a nice guy, and if he is, then he probably feels bad about what he did. If he is sincerely remorseful and can convince others of that, an office of research ethics might hire him to give talks on what not to do and why.
He also may still have a shot at teaching-focused jobs, especially since it sounds like he was a good instructor.
But I doubt he'd have much of a chance at getting a research position ever again... maybe if he went the research ethics route for a few years first, to prove he had rehabilitated himself, but even then it seems unlikely.

There are enough of us without a plagiarism record who are deparately trying to get a permanent position in academia. As someone who has had my own work plagiarized, I am more sympathetic to his victims than someone who has plagiarized multiple times.
"Nice guys" aren't always so nice on the inside. Knowingly stealing someone else's work is not a nice thing to do. If that's what he has to do to succeed then maybe he's not cut out for a career in academia anyway.


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How did the 2012 rise in university fees in the UK affect university enrollment?
Did the number of domestic students decrease ?
Did international students start to make up a larger % of UK university enrollment?

I don't have data so not an answer. But two points to be aware of: 1. The 2012 changes were not just an increase in fees but also a change in how fees were paid (from up-front to 'graduate tax'). 2. International enrolments have certainly grown - but the driver here is that the fees+government support for domestic students have not changed since 2012 and so have been devalued by inflation.

related (don't think duplicate?): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/186925/how-did-the-rise-in-fees-for-uk-universities-change-the-way-things-function

I don't see how this is off topic, it's about university enrolment and thus clearly about academia. Voting to reopen.

The data you are looking for can be found at:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7857/
and is summarised in the following figure from that link:

Breilfy, there was a drop in applications in the 2012-2013 year, but numbers quickly recovered. Overseas numbers have increased over the period, the fraction of undergraduates from overseas does not look like it has increased to me.

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How should I handle reviewing a paper that is very similar to something I am working on?
I was sent a paper to review recently. I decided to review the paper and saw that a part of the paper is on a very similar method that I have been working on recently. Not the wording, of course, but the main ideas.
One of the problems is that they did not mention that part in the abstract, so I didn't know about it when I accepted the review. An even worse problem is that their paper is poorly written, full of wrong theorems, terminology etc. so I have no choice but to recommend rejection.
I know reviews are anonymous. But I want to avoid two things:

Them reporting me for a plagiarizing or stealing their idea.
Them thinking that I have stolen their idea, even if they do not necessarily report me.

What should I do?

How do you know it is a case of idea stealing, rather than common inspiration in terms of recent publications and remaining problems in your area?

@PatriciaShanahan I think what the OP means is that he does not want that the authors of the reviewed papers think that HE plagiarized them if he rejects it now and later publishes something similar.

You may want to see what sort of documentation you could provide as to work you did prior to receiving the paper for review, for your own peace of mind if nothing else.

Do you have a good-enough draft right now? If so you could put your draft on SSRN or arXiv as evidence that your ideas were already mature at the current date.

@ILiketoCode I do not have a draft right now, unfortunately

If you don't even have a draft yet chances are the authors will get their paper published in another journal before you do the same with yours. In that case you won't have to worry about plagiarism, just cite the work that appeared earlier and explain how it relates to your own.

I am going to answer based on an implicit assumption I feel much of your question hinges on:

One of the problems is, they did not mention that part in the abstract, therefore I have accepted.

This sounds like had you known that their work is so similar to yours, you would have rejected the review.
However, I would argue that that cannot possibly be in the interest of the review system.
Yes, you could argue for a conflict of interest, but it is the conflict of interest that exists generally, based on the simple fact that other people beside you do research in the same or similar topics as you. It is not a conflict of interest on a personal level (e.g. you being part of the team whose paper is being reviewed).
Instead, it is a conflict of interest that, in theory, should quite often exist in the review process - for reviews to be meaningful, reviewers need to be familiar with the topic to some extent, and thus, a similarity of the research topics between authors and reviewers is hardly avoidable.
I see your concerns about what the authors of the paper under review might be thinking, though you might have to brush them aside for the time being. However, what you can do is draw the benefit from being the reviewer and thus having early access to a manuscript:

While your method may be very similar, it is most probably not exactly the same. When describing your method, try and insert a few sentences that focus particularly on a few aspects that you do differently from them.
For future publications you might write on similar topics, keep in mind that there may be a similar publication by those authors around that you can cite.

This has advantages for both sides:

You increase the chances to include a relevant citation that you might otherwise miss (and thus the authors' chances of being cited by you are increased).
Even though you cannot yet cite the work of the other authors, your clear description of some different aspects serves as a way to "preemptively" establish the differences between your work and theirs.
If they happen to publish a revised version of their paper after your work has appeared, you have already provided them with quite a straightforward foundation for describing their differences to your work.

In the comments, the concern has been voiced that even without the assumption of plagiarism, the authors of the other paper might still feel by rejecting their work, you intentionally stalled their progress for long enough so you could publish your own very similar work first, and now it's their problem to care about the prior art.
However, there are some aspects of good scientific practice that speak against that line of reasoning:

You do not provide an unjustified judgement, you provide a review. If you choose to reject the paper, you have the opportunity to describe objectively and in detail why you deem the work in its current state not ready for publication.
The other authors have not yet published their work in a properly citeable fashion, but that still just means you have plausible deniability on your side when you are asked whether you knew about the other work. Scientific integrity still demands that you consider the existing prior work, published or not, which is exactly what you are doing by specifically describing some aspects that you do differently than the reviewed paper, as described above.

It is not explicit in the question, but it feels like a direct (I do not know if you would call it “on a personal level”) conflict of interest, or accusations thereof, might be a very real possibility. Setting aside accusations of plagiarism, the authors might still think the OP delayed their paper, or had it rejected, in order to claim priority.

@xebtl: For clarification: By "on a personal level", I meant a conflict of interest based on a relationship between persons (e.g. by working in the same group) rathern an a conflict of interest based on a relationship between topics (e.g. by pursuing closely related research questions).

This is the kind of situation where a universal use of a preprint server such as arXiv is useful: you can cite the reviewed paper in your own even if it is rejected, without making obvious that you where the referee.

Your response to the concerns raised is naive. There are many ways for reviewers to pass on objective looking concerns with the pure intention of stalling, and it's not such an uncommon practice to the best of my knowledge.

@Korem: Possible, but if the concerns are objectively justified, it doesn't actually matter whether the actual intention of the reviewer was stalling, does it? In any case, I suggested that more as a way for the OP to assume a safe position. Sure, the other authors might complain about perceived stalling, but that is exactly why the review by the OP must be written in a way so its complaints against the paper remain justified even if the editors decide to do a thorough check of the review and its claims.

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If a student is dismissed, is (or how is) that indicated on their transcript?
As faculty, I've had to report academic misconduct (usually plagiarism) many times but that doesn't mean I know everything about how it works.  My understanding has always been that the only people who know about the report are the faculty who reported the incident, the student being reported and the conduct officer or honor committee (depending on the institution) investigating the report.  The student can certainly tell whoever they like but regardless of the outcome, everyone else is required to keep the information confidential.
But what happens if the result is dismissal (permanent separation from the university)?  Is there typically any indication of this on the student's transcript?  I've heard from colleagues that at some institutions, it will be indicated on the transcript but I'm not sure if that's correct.  If the dismissal is indicated and the misconduct was especially serious, e.g., rape, is that fact also reported?  What would it say?

I added the tag united-states to limit the scope, because otherwise it would be really too broad, and in many countries the example you give would lead to a criminal prosecution.

Transcripts usually do show that students have withdrawn or have been expelled for policy or academic infractions. The specific grounds, however, are probably not stated on most transcripts, perhaps for privacy reasons.

If another institution sees that sort of notation on the transcript and they request more information about the specifics, do they usually get it?

My instinct says no, they wouldn't. Colleges usually don't like to talk about the details of disciplinary actions.

Why is "expelled for plagiarism" more private than "failed Temporal Wormhole Dynamics II"?

@DavidRicherby: Because character flaws are more private than proficiency flaws.

I think this varies enormously by institution and maybe even by program. The only way to be sure what happens at your own school is to ask the registrar or office of academic affairs.

@ElizabethHenning: The policy regarding transcripts should be uniform within a university, right?

@aeismail Not necessarily. They might be different for grad and undergrad, for example, and they might differ among grad programs and possibly certain undergrad programs too.

@ElizabethHenning: Different departments might have differing standards for releasing information about disciplinary proceedings. However, I would expect that what appears on the transcript is under the authority of the registrar (or equivalent), and should thus be uniform for undergraduates or graduates.

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Is there a dataset, database or API as large as WorldCat that allows for search by library of congress call number?
Is there a raw dataset, database or API as large as WorldCat that allows for search by library of congress call number?
As far as possible I need to query all the works in the world. At least every book or monograph, or title that has been given an LOC call number. As for journals, congresses, journal articles, fresh research etc., I can exclude them. I don't need 100% everything, but something as large Worldcat. Hence, a single university library, as large as it may be, may not be sufficient.
I need to input some call number eg. Q179, and get all the titles under that call number. Is there such a thing? Preferably free also, but if really no choice, I am ok with subscription needed or need to purchase

Why can't you use the library of congress catalogue itself? It should include all books that have an LOC call number by definition. API: https://www.loc.gov/apis/

WorldCat has two different interfaces. One allows you to search by LC Classification and one does not.
The first interface is the public one you get from https://www.worldcat.org/ :

This interface's Advanced Search does not have an option to search LC Classification or call numbers:

The second interface, OCLC FirstSearch, is available through subscription via your local academic or public library. You will need to access it from your academic institution or public library and log in with your institutional credentials or your library card:

This interface's Expert Search has an option to search the Library of Congress Call No.:

Type Q179 into the "Search for" box, select Library of Congress Call No. from the "Indexed in" dropdown, and click Search.
Results:

Yes but no.
Yes: You can search the LC catalog by LC Classification number (e.g. Q179).
No: However, the LC catalog reminds one: "Please note: The Library of Congress does not keep a copy of every title ever published."
How to search the LC catalog by LC Classification number:

Navigate to the catalog at https://catalog.loc.gov/

To the right of the search box, click "Search options" > "Keyword Search"

In the next page, to the right of the search box, click "ALL" and change this to "EXPERT (use index codes and operators)"

Note the Keyword Search Tips below the search box.
a. The tips tell you that the wildcard for one or more characters is the question mark.
b. The tips also include a link to a help page describing the special index codes.
c. The list of index codes is on a separate help page.

Using the tips and the help pages, you can form this query: 0500 Q179? which will return any items in the LC catalog where the LC Classification number starts with Q179, e.g. Q179.98 .S53 1985 FT MEADE. If you want Q179 (or any other class) exactly, then don't use the ?. You can also use 050A instead of 0500.

You can get even fancier by combining additional index codes, but this should get you started.
Caveat: LC call numbers may vary from library to library. Usually the variance is in the details at the end of the number that doesn't affect your use case (e.g. a different year, or a local shelving notation), but some libraries that do original cataloging (vs. copy cataloging) may have arrived at a different classification entirely (by choosing a different main subject), or the cuttering (the .S53 in the example above) may be different. This is increasingly rare as most libraries now just copy the call number they're given and possibly add some local information, but it's a possibility to be aware of.


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Entering a program you don't want to finish?
I am an aspiring mathematician but I am depleted/ malfunctioning (as alluded to in my previous post What do you do to keep mind sharp?). Thus I am not in any position to begin a graduate math degree. Is it a bad idea to join an easier program (outside of math) for the sake of funding, and then transfer when I get to full strength? The only alternative is to get a job (and worry about getting fired) which does not sound like a way to "re-charge" at all...

If you're not all in, you're potentially wasting time and resources to do something you may not ever enjoy again.

I only skimmed your other post.  But I think you need a more mature attitude and rethink whether maths research is what you want to do.  If yes, then go out all and get on the best maths PhD program you can, now.  Speaking from bitter experience, "my brain fog will clear soon and then I'll be on fire" is deluded thinking.  In the PhD->Postdoc->Permanent game, you will only get more brain f*ck.  The sooner you learn to be productive regardless, the better!

Having said that, I do think you can benefit from some time away from math.  But how will doing another PhD program, which you're probably indifferent about, allow you to "recharge"?  (Unless you plan to do no work, in which case do you expect good references?)

Also, how do you intend to convince the admissions tutors for the "easier" program?  Are you a sufficiently competent liar?  (not making a moral judgement, it's more of a practical question!).   From what I know, all funded PhD programs (science, humanities, whatever) are competitive (admittedly to different degrees).  In any case it's tough to compete unless you really want to finish.  Are there no programs, which are less competitive than R1 math, but still have a math focus, and interest you?

@P.Windridge there is a difference between confusion (brain f*ck and brain fog. Brain fog makes it difficult for you to talk to your family, but you can still do math at a reduced pace/ creativity (a pace that I assume is completely worthless in a competitive environment)

@P. Windridge I have already convinced them. I never had to say I wanted to complete the program, just filled in the essay with fluff.

If you're not "charged" as the way you put it. Then nothing you're saying would work. If you want to enter a Grad degree but can't focus on it then that's a bad idea because you may just end up failing which, obviously, isn't good.
Going for an easier program would be a waste of money unless it would relate some way to your main field. For example most marketing students have a graphic design certificate because software like InDesign and Photoshop are heavily used in the marketing industry.
If you're worried about getting a job because you may be fired too then you have more problems that just school. It sounds like you're either uninterested in your field of study or that you are facing some depression.

But there are much lesser minds that will be in the graduate program and passing the courses.

"Much lesser minds"?

Yes, even with my fatigue. These are some highly trivial beings.

@bigmoney Talking about other people about "lesser minds" and "trivial beings" is highly offensive.

@Alexandros It is okay for a young man to be arrogant, just not ignorant.

@bigmoney Are you the ignorant one, the arrogant one or both?

@Alexandros Both. Willfully ignorant, poignantly intelligent. Now if only I can get myself to sleep well again I will conquer the world.

@bigmoney You're just on here fishing hoping that someone will feel bad for you. I can see why you're afraid of getting fired from a job because no one wants to work with someone like you. You say you're ignorant and arrogant? I say you're a child who needs to feel better about himself. No great mind thinks of other people as "much lesser minds", that's something children say in elementary school.

@Memj Plenty of great minds were arrogant and condescending. Then again, so were many merely good minds.

@bigmoney "Great minds" don't act like 8 year olds. What you have is a hyper-inflated ego.


text:
Applying for 'qualification' for MCF position in France: documents in English
I would like to apply for MCF (Maître de conférences - eqvivalent to assistent professor) position in France. This, however, requires applying for so-called Qualification at the Galaxie portal (https://www.galaxie.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/ensup/CNU_qualification.htm), in my case in section: applied math.
I am wondering: Does anybody here have experience with the portal? Is it possible to upload a CV in English? Or is it necessary to translate everything into French?
Is there any recommendation on what CV should contain for the successful qualification?
I would be glad if anybody would share their experience.

You will need your CV translated/already in French, the only exception is for qualifying works

Article 5 of the Arrêté du 11 juillet 2018 relatif à la procédure d'inscription sur les listes de qualification aux fonctions de maître de conférences ou de professeur des universités states :

Les diplômes, rapports de soutenance, attestations et justificatifs rédigés en langue étrangère sont accompagnés d'une traduction en langue française dont le candidat atteste la conformité sur l'honneur. A défaut, le dossier sera déclaré irrecevable. [...]

Translation mine
Dipomas, defense reports, attestations and justifications written in foreign languages are to be accompanied with a French translation the candidate sworns is accurate

There is an exception :

[...] Dès lors que les documents mentionnés au 3° de l'article 4 sont rédigés en langue étrangère, un résumé rédigé en langue française doit être transmis, par l'ensemble des candidats concernés et pour chaque document, si la section le demande.

When documents from the third point of Article 4 are written in foreign languages, a summary written in French must be sent, for all the candidates in question and for every documents, if the sections demands it

Article 4.3 states :

3° Un exemplaire des travaux, ouvrages et articles dans la limite de trois documents pour les candidats à la qualification aux fonctions de maître de conférences et de cinq documents pour les candidats à la qualification aux fonctions de professeur des universités ;

A copy of works, books and articles, 3 maximum for the candiates to the functions of maître de conférences and 5 for candiates to the function of university professor

Thanks! Quick question: what do you mean by qualifying works? for qualification?

Does point 4.3 means that I should provide translated abstracts of my 3 published papers?

@computational_scientist The qualifying works is point 4.3, for those you are only required to provide a translated abstracts if it you are specifically asked for those...

Well, there is the law that contains remnants of the world 50 years back, and there is how things really work today... You could email the examiners that are assigned to you and ask if English is fine. I think examiner details are shown in Galaxie. To show your motivation, it would still be good to have at least the CV in French.


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Does name of university matter for internships?
I have been recently applying for summer internship positions in the engineering discipline. I am a senior undergraduate at UCLA university. My GPA is above 3.7 and I have both desired and minimum qualification for the internships, but I keep receiving rejection email from different companies. I was told by my friends that since students from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT and other more prestigious schools than UCLA are applying, therefore they get the internship first and if there is any opening hiring managers will consider people like me.
I would like to know: is this really true and does the name of such universities compared to UCLA make a huge difference?

Related: Does your university name matter?

Improving your grammar will likely help as well.

Don't let the initial rejections get you down.  Keep in mind there's a big element of luck involved in this.

Some companies specifically recruit preferentially from top schools, some don't. All of them know that a 3.7 at one school isn't the same thing as a 3.7 from another and will make what they think are appropriate adjustments.
But it isn't just about grades, and the only thing that will guarantee you don't get the internship is if you don't apply. Trying costs you nothing but a bit of time, and UCLA is a respectable school. Go for it; at worst it's good practice!

Correction accepted. But note I said "preferentially" -- few companies will take an uninspiring and uninspired candidate from a top school over an enthusiastic and dedicated candidate from the next step down.  It''s more likely to be a biasing factor -- as I szid, the grades may be adjusted for comparison -- than absolute. If you approach them as an enthusiastic, competent student who'd love to get some exposure to a company you think you'd be interested in working for after you graduate, and you look like someone they'd want to interview when that time comes....


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The importance of having a "big name" as your thesis advisor
When it comes to postdoc positions in mathematics in the US, does it make any difference for the hiring committees if your thesis adviser is a big name (say, someone like Gromov or Milnor)?

I assume you have a PhD  and since you have no longer an alternative for your thesis adviser, what is the relevance of asking if it make any difference if your thesis adviser is a big name or not?

@user37208 Wow - "the single most important factor" does not involve at all the quality of your research work? If it is really so, it is disappointing.

Presumably, getting a good letter from a well known person is about the quality of your research work, @Federico Peloni.

@OswaldVeblen Of course, a student with a good letter from a top-level advisor has the best opportunities. There is no arguing against that. But "the single most important factor is your advisor" to me means "a bad student from a well-known professor has better chances than an excellent student from University of Nowhere", and that bothers me.

Yes, that quoted statement is not true in my experience. But user37208 did say "assuming they write you a good letter"...

I'm surely not the most qualified person on this site to answer, but I have been on a postdoc hiring committee in pure mathematics and I quite disagree with the existing answers. The single most important factor is going to be your letters of recommendation (with second on the list being your publications and preprints). I think having a famous advisor is going to be of minor importance in comparison; most people understand that also great mathematicians sometimes have students that are just mediocre, so that it's no great predictor of future success. In fact I heard in a sense the opposite argument being made, that if an applicant from a smaller university with a less famous advisor has strong letters from big names, then this is more impressive than if a student at a "top" university had the exact same letters.

In spite of the obsession with objective assessment and quantification that supposedly governs science, personal recommendations often still matter the most during the hiring process. Hence, if you have a big shot PhD advisor, you'll probably have an easier time finding a good postdoc in a group that your advisor has good contacts with.
If you don't have the big shot backing, you can (partly) make up for it by approaching potential postdoc advisors in person (e.g. at a conference) and convincing them that you're not only a scientist with high potential but also a nice person.
The point is, when you apply for a postdoc in a good group, your application is likely to go to the "meh" pile if neither your nor your advisor's name ring a bell with the group leader.

I downvoted this answer because it does not (in my opinion) reflect the situation in mathematics, which the original question asked about; for example, postdocs in mathematics are not usually in a "group", good or otherwise, but rather in a good department. However it might be more applicable in other fields.

Yes, it makes difference.
However, your personal relationships with the prospective advisor make even more difference.

I downvoted this answer because it does not (in my opinion) reflect the situation in mathematics, which the original question asked about; for example, postdocs in mathematics may not have a single "prospective advisor", or any particular advisor at all. However it might be more applicable in other fields.

I agree with Tom Church. Of course, no department wants to hire a postdoc that nobody can work with. But apart from specialized applications (e.g. the NSF postdoc in the US), math postdoc applications don't really require pre-existing relationships with anyone in the target department.


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How much can you 'laymanize' a PhD presentation?
I am in my first year of a PhD in France. I recently attended a competition of best presentation by PhD students. It was a 15 minutes visual presentation and 7 minutes of questions. After the presentation, one of the members of review committee openly stated the following;

Since we have an audience from diverse areas of science, mathematics and technology the presentations should have been simple so that a layman can understand. I quote A. Einstein, "if you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough."

Even though this communicates an obvious message, I feel layman bear a high level of ambiguity with it. The following questions crops up in my mind.

How much can you laymanize a particular research topic say, from theoretical physics, for example Non local wavefunction collapse?

The topic is chosen as random but for those who don't have exposure in basic quantum mechanics may not understand the technical terms.

Is it advisable to prepare such a presentation in assumption that the audience are completely nescient?

If I oversimplify the presentation, leaving all the technical terms, I highly doubt that there will not be any material for those who actually knows the subject.
One approach is to try to satisfy both the extremes, first explain the technical terms in detail and then move on to subject core which I found is difficult if not impossible to fit into the time limit.

You cannot "laymanize" everything. But you can simplify the presentation of a) the motivation of your work (why it is important) b) How it improves over previous works c) How much it improves over previous works d) Applications of your research

When I defended my PhD in Switzerland in the 1990s, it was expected I do two presentations. The first was to the PhD jury, who were experts in the field of course. Yet I still did not have time to present every mathematical proof in the presentation. After all, the audience saw the gory details in the dissertation. Once that defense was passed, there was a public defense for anyone. The goal of this is to be transparent. But the presentation was also very layperson-oriented, else you tortured your family and friends for 45+ minutes. Preparing both was a great experience.

FWIW, Einstein probably  did not say anything like that. The quote is of course anti-intellectual and tendentious; the right one is "if you cannot explain it simply enough for the audience present, talk about something different."

First, it is important to recognize that every scientist is effectively a layman for almost all other science.
For example, I am a computer scientist, and I have only a vague layman-level understanding that when you say "non-local waveform collapse" it's probably about quantum mechanics and Bell's theorem, and the math you put up on a slide will certainly be rather alien and fairly incomprehensible to me.  If I put up a slide on the semantics of field calculus, it would probably be likewise alien to you, and if a biologist of my acquaintance put up a slide on the chemical mechanisms of chromatin remodeling it would be alien to both you and I.  Think of a layman, then, not as some sort of idiot to be condescended to, but as an intelligent and interested person whose expertise happens to be in a different field.
Furthermore, our relative ignorance of one another's work is greatly amplified while listening to a talk: when I am puzzled and need to think about what you've just said, I miss the next things being said and have to try to catch up! In effect, only people who are extremely close to your own work, even within your field, will be able to follow deep technical details in a talk.  Every audience except the smallest and most intimate, then, is effectively composed mostly of laymen---but likely with a few experts as well.
So, how do you give a talk to heterogeneous audiences?  Personally, I find it effective to think of a talk as an advertisement, the goal of which is to make people interested enough and convinced enough by your work that they want talk with you about it afterward or to read the manuscripts that present it fully.  Start with a discussion of the goal of your work, how the work relates to other work and why its goals might be interesting, narrow down to a few key details (which might only be understood in detail by the few experts in the audience), present evidence for why your insights are correct, and widen back out to explain why what you just presented satisfies the goals you laid out in your introduction.   Such a structure can then "laymanize" even the most complex topic, by explaining how it fits into the larger world, while at the same time respecting the intelligence of the audience and not sacrificing communication to experts.
For the details of how to accomplish this effectively, I personally have found Patrick Winston's "How to Speak" lecture to be an excellent resource for heuristics and tips, and recommend it to others as well.

Any of Steven Pinker's longer talks on The Sense of Style would probably work as well. Yes, he's ultimately trying to sell a book, but since the book is largely about communicating in plain language and navigating around "the curse of knowledge", so any sufficiently long presentation is necessarily going to give away much of the game. (As an aside, I haven't touched "serious" mathematics in decades, but I have very little trouble following Cédric Villani's talks to general mathematical audiences. Depths do not need to be impenetrable.)

+1 for the Link to Patrick Winstons lecture alone - This was the most interesting and insightful things I have ever seen about how to present.

A good rule of thumb when speaking to lay people (or scientists from other fields) is to talk mostly about why you research a particular topic, and only a little bit about how you actually solve the problem. A general audience isn't going to understand the details anyway, but you should be able to explain to them in broad strokes what it is that you're interested in and why anyone should care. Indeed, if you can't explain these last two points, then you probably did not understand them well enough yourself.

In my experience the best approach in these situations is the use of analogy.
The reason for this is, if you can find an analogy which is applicable it can be accessed by most members of the public as well as your peers. There is an added bonus that an analogy is far less condescending than a talk during which you treat everyone as if they were 5 years old :)
Analogies can be scaled to the audience. For example, I once saw a talk at a conference where kinetochores were likened to couples dancing. It was effective and I feel would have been accessible to anyone. While speaking to an academic audience terminology was used which made it clear that the 'couples dancing' analogy was not fully suitable however it was a good 'base' on which to build the questions and hypothesis.
Another advantage of this technique is that if you are clever about it you can make your talk humorous in a natural way.

One of the members of review committee... stated... "The presentations
  should have been simple so that a layman can understand."

If they did not provide these instructions ahead of time, and if it's not clear that the one guy is speaking for the whole committee, I think you may safely ignore his comment.
Some topics are of course more laymanizable than others.

You should talk to the audience that you have in front of you, not the audience you wish to have.
If your audience knows next to nothing of importance of your subject, explain to them why anyone should care. Given the time constraints, this might mean that you give them an introductory lecture from a 1st year course, and reduce your own work to "having something to do with simplifying calculations that arise in blah.". It is better than them being completely lost and intimidated by words that they do not understand.

If you read the first part, the presentation I attended is by PhD students who present their work. I don't think introductory lecture from a first year course is a proper thing to do on that stage. More or less it would render the audience to applaud the obvious inappropriacy if not stupidity of the presenter.

I did read your post.  It is better to break the letter of instructions and explain something than to follow the instructions and leave audience no wiser than before your talk.

@ThejusMahajan: The reality is that the topics of most academic talks are only tangentially relevant to the vast majority of their audiences. The people who come to your talk may not have an overwhelming interest in your topic, but they do have an overwhelming interest in not having an hour of their time wasted. Non-understandable talks waste other people's time (and your own), so you shouldn't give them. If in doubt, make your talk extremely simple and let people go away feeling like they learnt something. The purpose of giving talks is to communicate, not to advertise your own cleverness.

And incidentally, as an audience member, I don't find talks that tell me something "simple" about an area I'm not familiar with inappropriate or stupid -- if anything, I rate the presenter's communication skills more highly, and assume that they're actually interested in telling me something rather than showing off. I do, however, take exception to presenters who go out of their way in their talks to make non-specialists feel like idiots because they don't have a background in their extremely niche topic.

My rule of the thumb is: Everyone should understand SOMETHING, but not everyone needs to understand EVERYTHING.
Make sure the context, motivation, and results obtained are understandable by, e.g., your family attending the talk.
But you also need to prove to the committee that your work was interesting and not trivial.
It also helps to use the "layman" bits to break the rhythm, so that if someone got lost (which always happens, even with the committee) they have a chance to get back on board.


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APIs or databases that allows one to retrieve the works that a book cites
Are there APIs or databases that allow to retrieve the works that a book cites. Eg. I give it an ISBN, and it returns all the works that it cites (not those it is cited by).
APIs or databases like Microsoft Academic Search usually only contain citations of journal articles and papers, but not books.

Mendeley has quite powerful database on all kind of sources.
http://dev.mendeley.com/

Also, you should check Elsevier's developer portal, as they provide a number of APIs for their services:
http://dev.elsevier.com/
Where ScienceDirect API is especially relevant for you:
http://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/support/api
As you probably know, Elsevier is one of (if not the) the biggest publisher(s) of academic publications, including books.
In case you might want to query your own instance of Mendeley Desktop - check my blog post, for few starting points:
http://blog.veles.rs/mendeley-desktop-http-api/

Books (and their chapters) may have a DOI, especially if their publishers focus on academic works.
Use the DOI to access CrossRef's API (by using https://api.crossref.org/works/{DOI}) and look for the reference-field.
You could even access the API by the ISBN via http://api.crossref.org/types/book/works?filter=isbn:{ISBN} (though it seems to me that the API usually works better with DOIs).
Here is an example from a book published by Cambridge University Press. It says reference-count: 1427 and lists all the 1427 works cited by that book.


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Is it rude to forward an email to someone left out of the email?
I've emailed a professor/TA and cced my peers or also a different professor/TA and cced another professor/TA. However, sometimes I get emailed back only to my email, not the person cced, would it be rude to forward the email to the person cced?
I'm not sure in some cases I'm not sure why they would respond only to me when the question for example was relevant to all my group members, or as well, when I email a professor (A) a question on a project I'm working on with another professor (B) but professor A only replies to me instead of professor B cced.
I want to forward the email but I'm not sure what the person cced would think of my trustworthiness, especially considering she's my professor/supervisor.

Usually it is fine, but it depends on the content and personalities involved.

This is a bit subtle, since email client software is different for different people. A lot of people replying to an email don't take the time and effort to look at who (all) will get the mail.
In the general case, for a group that communicates frequently, you can, perhaps, establish guidelines. In the specific case, you could ask the professor that sent the email - i.e. A.
But, if the mail is about group work that everyone should see and has no personal elements, then there is little to fear. It was probably just an oversight.

I see, I don't believe there are personal elements though I'm unsure. The professor I emailed (A) said they're no longer that familiar on the topic due to personal reasons but that they'd ask their colleague on it. So I believe it should be okay forwarding it to the other professor (B) cced?

They will probably work it out themselves.

Yes, when in doubt assume user error. If the people involved wanted their answer to be confidential they would/should say so. In academia, people get zillions of emails; clearing inboxes is a chore. Many people will take as little time as they can over each email.


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A journal appeared indexed until 2016 is now cancelled in Scimago. What does this mean?
In some online databases such as DBLP some journals or conferences appear that are canceled or not appear at all after a few years. For what I know that is because, according to DBLP, the mentioned conference does not uphold with some criteria of quality to continue to appear on that database.
In Scimago, I have seen that a journal appeared indexed until 2016, but now it appears a message saying "Cancelled", what does it mean apart of the obviousness of that message? maybe that the journal has become a predatory one? or that it quality has decreased?
Any comments?

Scimago seems to draw from Scopus' journal coverage (according to its About Us-page):

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).

Scopus regularly re-evaluates its journals. It even offers an Excel-list of recently discontinued journals (at the bottom of this page).
In that list, you can see the column Reason for discontinuation (column F). This should at least provide a vague keyword as to why a given journal was cancelled.
It seems that there are four such reasons:

"Metrics" (under-performance of a journal)
"Publication concerns" (I see journals from predatory publishers like OMICS who carry that reason).
"Radar" (outlier performance; "an algorithm that flags journals based on approximately 40 outlier predictors, including sudden change in output volume, sudden change in publishing country and/or affiliations, and high journal/author self-citation rates" -- citation from this F1000 article, at p. 14)
"do not meet Scopus criteria" (probably refers to Scopus' journal selection criteria, e.g. peer reviews, lack of publication delays, editorial board diversity, online availability of articles etc. As this Scopus blog post indicates, some journals are indeed simply discontinued by the publisher, which might fall under this reason.)


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What do professors do if they receive a complaint about incompetence of a teaching assistant?
If a professor is teaching a course with a significant number of students.
My university randomly assigns teaching assistants (TAs) to courses. For example, I was given the assistantship of an advanced hardware course when I was only a freshman.
The TA assigned to the mentioned course has no knowledge about the course topic.
Thus, he is making a lot of mistakes here and there.
What happens if a student complains to the professor about the TA doing a poor job?

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Where is this? Are you paying for this "tuition"?

A somewhat less cynical, but hopefully still realistic take.
First, there is a certain "activation energy" for the professor (and even more so, the department/faculty) to pay attention. The reality is that there is a certain baseline of largely-unwarranted complaints about all TAs, professors, etc., since there is a certain baseline of students who complain about everything, or fundamentally don't get (yet?) that at University, they are responsible for their own learning, and won't get spoon-fed. Of course not every situation/complaint fits that mold, but it has to break out of that noise to get acted upon. Complaints that come from articulate students, with generally good performance in the course and in their academic careers to date, that provide concrete evidence, and avoid name-calling, are less likely to be ignored. And multiple such complaints, not necessarily coordinated, help.
Second, immediate remedial action in the current course depends on the professor. And professors vary widely in their interest in teaching and in their willingness to expend additional time. When I used to teach courses, I would try to attend my TAs' tutorial sessions once in a while, but there were certainly trimesters I never got around to it. However, even then, I think if potential issues had bubbled up to me, I would have made the time. I have subbed in and been "acting TA" for my own course when a TA fell ill during the term, and I'd like to think I would have done the same thing if a TA were hopelessly bad.
Professors generally have office hours. If TAs are good, very often the professor's office hours are poorly attended. A student or group of students could exert pressure, deliberately or not, on a middle-of-distribution-in-terms-of-caring professor by showing up regularly at office hours with questions, and being factual (rather than just complaining) about useful help not being received from the TA. If a professor is regularly being asked "elementary" questions, and hearing the TA could not or would not answer them, it doesn't take a rara avis teaching-prioritizing professor to realize they need to do Something.
In all the above, the unfortunate reality is that it is very difficult for a department to replace a TA during a course. So immediate remedial action is essentially limited to the professor or some other teaching coordinator coaching the TA, and/or the professor doing more of the work themselves.
As to consequences for future courses, again it depends. I wish it were better, but the number of universities/departments that have meaningful performance management and professional development for TAs, in the way I have gotten used to in the industry part of my life, is pretty darn small. The reality therefore is just hope that some coaching helps, and/or there is enough of a clear situation that the TA is not assigned to that course next time.
As to removing bad TAs from the future pool altogether, it depends on the supply/demand balance of TAs in that department. I've taught in applied science-type departments where TA-ship is a building block of financial support for all grad students and it would take someone really bad to be taken off teaching--there's a perpetual hope they'll do better next time around. I've been in a math department where teaching was core, but there were more students than teaching spots and poor quality did have consequences. And I've seen language departments where TA/lector spots were highly competitive and a poorly-student-rated lector was just not going to get hired again.
Finally, decades ago it was pretty awful, but Universities are getting better at policing misconduct. So all the above applies to poor quality teaching by TAs. If the issue is blatantly unfair grading, unresolved material grading errors, or--even worse--misconduct towards students (or others), there are usually now independent processes to take care of that. There may well be challenges whether those processes move swiftly enough and are impartial enough, but it's a whole different ball game.
This answer has a North American, science/math/STEM bias.

You make implicitly an important point: To take the complain seriously, the professor must believe/want that their course is or should be useful to the students.

My university randomly assigns TAs to courses.

Then it’s not the TAs who are incompetent, it’s the person or people in charge of making the assignments.
Treat the core of the problem, not the symptom. If the system is rotten at its core, complaining about what happens at the end of a broken process won’t result in any meaningful change.

Yea I really don't get this; why complain about poor TAs when they were not even selected?

This brilliant answer sums up the two biggest problems in academia: (i) people trying to tackle the problem in front of them instead of reaching to the source of the problem, (ii) problems being ignored unless majority are disturbed by them.

@padawan "two biggest problems in academia": this sounds unduly specific. Why "academia"? Why not "two biggest problems whenever many people create complex organizations?"

@CaptainEmacs I'm not very familiar with other types of business. It would have been a shot in the blind.

@padawan Fair enough. I can assure you fear and inertia is typical of mediocre leadership. ("fear" including avoiding the core matter) Your two little comments should be amongst these 10 reminders of what constitutes mediocre leadership on a good leaders wall, academia or elsewhere.

My answer is going to be cynical but it is from a lot of experience. I went to grad school at an R1 public university.
Often the professor will do nothing. The department will continue to assign the terrible TA to the same class, or reward the bad TA by given them an easier (and more desirable/competitive) assignment next quarter. In fact it got so bad that some people were bad on purpose so they could get easier assignments, spend less time teaching and more time on research. If your university doesn't care about teaching, everyone will take the path of least resistance around your complaint.
The one time we got a TA reassigned (he was grading a grad class and deliberately lowering grades of people he saw as competition without being able to explain why) we all pushed back as a group and signed a letter, with some faculty on our side guiding us. He never TAd for us again, but the next year he graded the same class for the younger cohort. The faculty chalked it up to personality differences rather than personal and systemic incompetence.
So your best chance (if an initial complaint is ignored) is to organize, but don't get your hopes up.

You are probably correct in most cases.  But this is missing the detail that TAs are not paid very much, which explains why they are not easy to replace.  And often nobody is paid to train the TAs.

When I was a TA, the professor in charge set up an email filter to automatically forward all course related emails to me.
Someone thought I was incompetent and emailed the professor to complain.  The email was auto-forwarded to me.  I forwarded it back to the professor because he should deal with it.  He pushed it back to me because he did not want to do any work.  I met with the student and resolved the complaint.

Was not wanting to do any work his declared reason or did you deduce that was the reason?

@samerivertwice It has been a long time and I do not remember much more than what I wrote.

Sounds like your professor trusted you to handle that particular complaint on your own.

@alexis that is a very kind thing to say.  thank you.

What do professors do about TA complaints?
In your scenario, get exasperated by the university. You've explained that TAs with limited or no experience are assigned to courses by the university (rather than the professor or their department). This will frustrate professors, but a system change is necessary to fix, which is likely beyond the professor's ability to influence, especially in the short-term. Longer-term professors can petition their department to push universities for change.

I would take "My university randomly assigns teaching assistants (TAs) to courses" with a grain of salt. It is not a given that students would know anything about the TA assignment process, so the OP may simply be inferring this from the poor background of the TA at hand; or be using "my university" to mean the department, or the professors who do the assignment -- who knows.

@alexis We can only answer based upon what is given, perhaps stating assumptions where useful. In this instance, we have university randomly assigns and I got an advanced hardware TAship once, being a computer science freshman, which suggests the university is assigning TAs on the basis of their major. The computer science department would presumably assign TAs who have taken relevant courses, where possible. (Of course, randomly should be taken with a grain of salt, selection doesn't appear random, just ill-conceived.) That said, the OP might just be mistaken, maybe departments assign

I have had professors not care, I once TAed a course and gave everyone As so nobody complained about me. Rubber stamp that shit and get on with your day.

In some countries, TA are dispatched after the Professors made their choice on which course to give.
As some PhD grants/contracts imply to teach, even in another speciality than what the thesis is on : you might have a TA that never had the chance to choose the course he/she is teaching.
In my case, I was "sure" to be able to teach a course... and when I saw the content of the course : no, I was not ready at all/I had another point of view on the course.
And I had to call another TA to correct me at the end of nearly each course (or at least half of the semester). Hopefully, I can teach it now as I learned in parallel with my students.
So, there are tons of good or bad reasons for a TA to not be ready to teach a course.
The best things to do, from a student point of view, is to ask questions to the main Professor in charge and stay kind with the TA as long as he/she is not doing wrong things (bad grades, misconduct, ... as stated by Houska).


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How to properly cite a domain-specific result of a generic concept from a paper?
I plan to cite two sets of equations (referred to as Equations X and Y) from a paper. Equations X that hold for a model look like textbook results to me, but the authors give a lengthy explanation with a citation to another paper. Equations Y were derived for a special case of the model, since only the special case is useful in that paper. I am working on a different problem and will use this model. I need to include both Equations X and Y in my paper.
Is it appropriate to cite the Equations X followed by a similar but much shorter explanation as follows:

The following equations hold for these performance variables, as also seen in [citation]?

Is it enough or should more credits be given?
For equations X, it is quite obvious that it also holds for the general Model. Can I write something like the following?

[citation] has showed the above equation for the special case where L=0. It can be easily verified that it also holds for L>0.

To be pedantic, you can say something like "The following equation (eq-A) is from [paper-A], in [paper-B] the special case (eq-B) is derived from the above."
Season to taste.


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Advice: How to prepare myself for Adjunct Teaching
I will be receiving my Masters Degree in MIS this summer. I have a bachelors in Computer Science.  I also have 3 years professional working experience. I am interested in teaching as an adjunct at community colleges. I have no training in teaching. I had an interview recently. One of the questions that came up was what is my teaching philosophy. I had no answer being that it was the first time had heard of the topic. My question is what can I do to prepare myself to be a better candidate for these positions. Do I need to take teaching courses or is there some reading that I can do to prepare myself. Are there any certifications for teaching at this level?

Somewhat related: Without teaching experience, but industry experience, how can I begin teaching at college level?

I am a biology education researcher at a large public university, which means I spend a lot of time reading about teaching techniques and analyzing student outcomes. I teach college biology courses regularly. I say all this to emphasize that teaching well is a difficult skill set in itself. Being an expert in a field is only tangentially related to being an expert teacher.
So, I am assuming that you not only want to get hired, but want to become a good teacher. I'll suggest three ways to become an effective (and hireable) adjunct.

Read a book on university teaching. Most are geared toward new faculty. Some examples are: Teaching at Its Best or How Learning Works.
Google for the journal on education research in your specialty. For computer science, it looks like Journal of Computational Science Education. Read through several articles to get an idea of what the current issues in teaching in your field are.
Get practice teaching. If there is a community college, liberal arts college, or university near you, email some of the faculty and ask if you can assist for free during recitations/labs and help grade exams. Effective teaching requires understanding how confused students think and lots of practice helping guide them over hurdles. There may be legal issues to overcome here, but hopefully someone will appreciate free support.

It's easy to Google "how to write a teaching philosophy statement," but a good statement requires you to have some teaching experience to use as examples.
To summarize -- read up, get practice, appreciate that this is a new skill.

Adrienne is exactly right.  Becoming an expert teacher takes time and dedication -- and too many adjuncts seem to lack the latter.
I've taught at the university level for 15 years and have hired a lot of teachers and always give the advice to give yourself three semesters.  In your first you're going to make every mistake in the book.  In the second you're going to over-correct for all of those mistakes and in so doing you'll make a bunch of new ones. By the third semester you'll have it down.
And don't forget the most important part of being a teacher: Never stop learning!


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Math Adjunct Professor positions and salary in a big city
From searching online, I see that the salaries for math adjunct professors are about 36k. That's insanely low for New York City standards. An undergraduate business school student that graduates from a decent program will make 3x more money in his first year of work than a Math Phd Adjunct Prof. My question is: What else do these adjunct professors do to make ends meet? Do they typically take on another job?  A summer job?  Work night shifts at a bar?

Probably salaries vary by location.  If universities in NYC cannot find anyone to hire for an adjunct position in math, then what will happen?  Will they offer more money?  [sensible solution] Will they cancel their math program?  Will they hire non-math people to teach math?

I can ask User001: if you cannot afford to live in NYC, why not apply for jobs somewhere other than NYC?

@shane Food stamps.

I don't know how typical this is, but where I went to undergrad (around Baltimore), the adjunct instructors I had were all teaching 1-2 classes per semester as a second job "for fun."  How was the average salary of 36k computed?  What does it include?

30% of households in Manhattan have an income lower than 36k, according to census data; 36k is actually above the average income for an African-American or Hispanic household in Manhattan.  You're right that it's hard to get by on that amount of money, but plenty of people manage it.
EDIT: A good point in the comment below:  typically graduate stipends are well below this number (31k is the highest I have ever heard for a graduate stipend in math; I'm sure the CUNY stipends are much lower). Of course, most people don't want to live like a grad student forever, but it's not as though it's impossible to survive.

@NajibIdrissi I see your point, but the question wasn't whether the situation was right or fair.  Also, I feel for the 500K other people in Manhattan making less; that's 36k as household income, whereas many adjuncts have someone else in the family bringing in other income, so 30% understates how many are worse off than the adjunct mentioned by the OP.  They may not have done 10 years of school, but that just means most of them have less opportunity to find a job doing something else.

I worked as a math adjunct in NYC for most of the prior decade, making about that much income, no other job, and expenses of about $25K/year. I have a partner who splits expenses with me 50/50 (prior to moving in together we had other roommates who did the same). We live in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn, but it's very far from Manhattan; we live frugally but comfortably (no kids).
In discussions at school (we've had ongoing contract negotiations for a few years now), the impression that most other staff has is that adjuncts are either public high-school teachers moonlighting for supplemental cash, or spouses of other full-time employed people doing the same. I'm not sure I agree with that characterization (it certainly wasn't true for me).
One other thing about teaching in NYC (at least at CUNY): unlike almost any other location, adjuncts here get full health benefits (up until last year via the PSC-CUNY union; now from CUNY directly). So that's actually an enormous leg up over the same job in other locations. Also: You can easily get by without a car here. All things considered, I was able to save more money adjuncting in NYC than I could previously in Boston.
Edit: PSC-CUNY Adjunct Rights and Benefits

That is surprising about the health benefits - thanks for letting me know.  I don't go to CUNY but I do know a couple of adjuncts / assistant profs as well tenured associate / full professors at CUNY.  I looked up the tenured profs' salaries.  $116k.  Pretty good.  But, all I ever heard from them was a lot of complaining, e.g., "I don't get paid enough to do this".    These are math profs.  I wonder why they are so cynical and probably disgruntled, when they are making a healthy six-figures, while working on a cushy academic schedule.

My guess is that they will never stop comparing themselves to the mathematicians just next door -- over at NYU and Columbia.  @DanielR.Collins,

There are certainly frustrations to the job. Fairly high teaching load, open admissions, unprepared students from NYC high schools, and more control by non-teaching administration to mandate curricula and higher graduation rates by fiat. The majority of our incoming students don't have 6th-grade arithmetic skills. Every semester I have a few days where I need to talk myself down from quitting and getting a different job. In one sense the schedule is nicely flexible; on the other hand, I'm always working nights, weekends, and holidays at home.

Someone taking such a job almost always is not depending on it as the sole source of income.  They may have a spouse who has a more high-paying job in or near New York City.  Alternatively, they may be independently wealthy or retired, or at least have enough money to make ends meet for a year or two while they are forced to stay in the city for some reason.
Certainly, someone who takes such a job is doing it because, for whatever reason, they want to be teaching instead of doing something making more money, and they are lucky enough to have another source of income so that they can teach.

@shane I do kind of doubt that most adjuncts have other sources of income If they don't have other sources of income, how do they pay the bills? At least, they need to eat and have a place to live in, right? Anyone who had been in NYC would know 36k is not even  close to pay the bills if you live there.

@shane You forgot the tax (Fed/state income tax and FICA). The net income would be somewhere around 30K or less after tax. And I am not too sure anyone can live in U.S. without health insurance. It's not that I don't believe you, I do. I just think they would have a very very hard time in NYC.

@scaaahu While estimates of the number of Americans without health insurance varies, no number I've seen has ever been below 10%, even with the recent reforms.

-1 False: "Someone taking such a job almost always is not depending on it as the sole source of income." As an actual math adjunct in NYC, this isn't/wasn't true for me.


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Becoming a Professor in a Developing Country after a PhD in the US: Feasibility and Challenges
I'm applying for PhD programs and I'm thinking about what I'll do afterward. Specifically, I did my undergraduate in a well-respected US university and am applying to similar tier universities for a PhD in a STEM field.
From my undergraduate experience I know I like teaching and research- so I'm thinking of trying to go into Academia and be a professor. Turns out this is really competitive. It also turns out you don't get a lot of flexibility about where you live, which is quite important to me.
So I had a thought: what about trying to be a Professor in a developing country? I spent most of my childhood in a developing country and helping to improve education/opportunities in developing countries is something I've cared about for a while. Also, I'm not a US citizen, and I've spent little time living in the EU country I am a citizen of, so have fewer ties to the Western world than some.
So question 1: How easy is it to become a Professor in a developing country having a STEM PhD from a US university?
And since that question is quite broad, I'll say regions I'm interested in: Sub-Saharan Africa, China (if that's still considered a developing country), Indonesia.
Question 2: After getting in, what issues is one likely to have? (Academic culture, still being able to work competitively in interesting/cutting edge research, funding, etc). Especially if people have experiences of going from the US/EU to be professors in STEM fields in the aforementioned regions I'd be interested to hear about them.
Note: I am aware of this similar question but it seems to be more about short-term programs rather than becoming a longer-term professor.

I can't write a full answer but I do have one comment to share.  I think it would be helpful in the long run if you had some good collaborations and networking set up with several groups in the developed world before starting.  Even better if you can set up a formal relationship between two departments.  The ideal situation is if a relationship exists such that you can invite some people to your department to give workshops, etc., and send some advanced students to the other department for visiting student stints.  Because there is a danger of becoming isolated.

I cannot help but wonder why you are interested in such diverse set of regions. I know some postdocs that have gone to South America, in particular, Ecuador... which BTW gives a hint about your question 2: language.

@Miguel well he wants to work anywhere that is high demand of highly skilled...problem is that region is too broad and I am afraid there will not be good answer

Have you considered that without academic network it is hard to get a job anywhere, especially in countries which are khm less famous for meritocracy/ may have strong preference to hire local citizens?

@Greg why you assume that China Iran, and others dont have merit based systems?

@SSimon OP wasn't even asking about Iran, but a wide range of other countries from rather different regions. My statement was not the complete lack of merit based systems, but pointing out that those are often less efficient and in many of these places one has a hard time without being part of an old boy network. Why do you distort my comment?

@Greg I think you think the situation in developing world is same...sorry without connection you cant get into good and famous groups...sorry...reality more of DW

@SSimon I think you totally misinterpret and overgeneralize what I am saying. Also, you misinterpret the question, as OP wants to establish his own group, get funded, get tenured, and not to get into some famous group as a student or postdoc.

@Greg why do you think it is not possible to get funded tenured and have own group?

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/106800/is-the-academic-job-market-in-developing-former-eastern-bloc-countries-welcomi

Another point: some developing countries might not even have group of experts in your particular PhD field, and the research culture might be less satisfying compared to research institutes in developed countries, since developing countries seem to not have much research institute, and maybe less funding due to the gap of currency value. If you enjoy teaching and administrative tasks more than research, then you will be fine maybe, since you can try to find jobs in universities or private universities. Depends on what kind of research and country. Getting a permanent job maybe challenging

There are two distinct circumstances that occur in regard to your question. Either A) the developing country is your home country (or a country that you once lived in) or B) it is a country you have not been extensively to. This will, I believe, affect the outcome. I'll try to answer for the two cases in my experience (and from what I have seen / heard from friends who went back to North Africa/Middle East/China)
Q1 : STEM Ph.D. from the US, especially if they arise from a good university or research group, are generally well seen outside of the US and, more specifically, in developing country or in China. As such, if there are position available in that country, when applying  your candidacy has high chances to be considered. However, for that, there has to be positions available. Some countries are really low on budget for academia and as such do not hire as many professors in research/teaching position, but mostly solely on teaching positions.  If a position is available, you have good chance if you know the custom (language, culture, etc.) of the country where you would like to work. However, position opportunities might be more rare.
Q2: I can only speak from experience of friends. However, what I have seen is that in some developing countries, professors at university have a much higher teaching workload than in the US, they have less funds and they have less opportunities to hire/pay international Ph.D. students. Therefore, it can greatly affect your capacity to do research because A) you have less time/money to dedicate to it and B) it's harder to find students.

I need to add that some countries (almost all) require NOSTRIFICATION procedure, even if you finished OXFORD or HARVARD: please keep that in Mind

My first suggestion would be this: you are still to embark on your PhD in a STEM field. A PhD is a long term affair and your career goals can change over time. So it might be good to think about these issues a couple of years into your PhD. During your PhD itself, you will face many issues---are you in the right department? Are you happy with your advisor/group? Do you like your research problem, etc.
Coming to moving to a developing country, I think it is best to attend conferences in your country of choice to first get a good idea of what the academic culture is like in that particular country. There are two issues here: (a) The culture of the country and (b) academic culture in that country.
You will need to familiarise yourself with both of these.
Also, just because you have a PhD from a good university in the US, does not automatically make you a sought after candidate. Often, hiring institutions in developing countries will look at your familiarity with the local language and culture. They might prefer to hire someone from their own country who has gone abroad to get a PhD and wishes to return. Or they may often hire someone from their own institutions.
Overall, I would suggest focussing on your PhD, publishing enough so that you are competitive, and keeping yourself well informed about your goals.


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How to address being interested in two areas in statement of purpose
I am applying to graduate school in US. I am wondering how I can write statement of purpose If I am interested in both signal processing and communication system. Should I talk about why I am interested in both and talk about researches  and projects I have done in both areas and my future research in both fields since I like both equally?. However I was thinking this is too much and is going to pass the word limit for statement of purpose. I am looking for some advice about this. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

I would not just say exactly what I like, unless I can use that to make my argument more convincing.

Can you elaborate on that?

"I am interested in both signal processing and communication systems."

@JeffE I mean can I talk about both my signal processing and communication projects and courses that made me interested in these two pathways? My major issue here is that I am thinking my SOP looks really long and not detailed since I need to include name of instructors that either do research related to both pathways or include name of one instructor from each different pathway.

I assume when you say "communication" you mean an area of engineering closely allied to signal processing, rather than communication in the context of the arts or social sciences.
In this case, you may as well just talk about some specific problems you are interested in, without worrying too much about how to categorize them. If you can talk in detail and with confidence about your past projects and potential future plans, then you can write a good statement of purpose. It is more important to spend words on demonstrating your understanding of the actual research problems (What do you want to do? Why is it important? Why is it hard? Why is it original? etc.) than on classifying topics within the overall field. The former is what readers really want to know about.


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What is the difference between a "statistician", "applied statistician", and an academic applying advanced stats within their field?
Within academia, I am wondering how statisticians use the titles/description of "statistician" versus "applied statistician."  Also, what is the difference between an "applied statistician" and an academic researcher whose work focuses on or involves the application of (relatively) advanced stats to questions in their field (I'll call this a Quantitative ________, where the blank can be any field).  What types of training and expertise do these different titles/terms imply?
Context: I am a PhD biologist and am applying for a lectureship in a stats department and am not sure how my definition of these terms/roles compares to those of actual statisticians.  To my peers I refer to myself a "quantitative ecologist." I am wondering if I can call myself an "applied statistician" or if that would be overreach given my training (I have taken a number of applied stats courses but am mostly a self-taught user of stats and programmer).
In my mind

Academic statistician: PhD in stats, math, or biostats and highly trained in fundamental mathematics and theory of stats.  Might work on theory, methods development, or directly on applied questions.  Key diagnostic: can convey statistical ideas entirely in matrix algebra.  EDIT:Publishes all their work in statistics journals.
Applied statistician: PhD in any academic field, whose research/work is focused on development and/or application of novel or highly advanced methods to applied problems.  Might or might not have high levels of formal training in math and stats but is fluent in mathematics.  Key diagnostics:   EDIT:Publishes most or all of their work in statistics journals.
Quantitative _______: Similar to applied statistician, but whose training in math might be less complete or formal, and/or might focus more on computational aspects of statistical application than mathematical aspects (Such as development of computational algorithms, statistical packages, best practices, etc).  Key diagnostics: is fluent in a programming language and/or teaches their department's grad-level applied stats class.EDIT:Publishes their work in journals within their field.

Would "Theoretical statistician" not be a more appropriate substitute for "Academic statistician"?

To me the term "academic statistician" would mean a statistician in academia.  Also, what field you got your PhD in does not determine what you are.

When I look at the websites of professors in stats departments, it seems like they often have a mix of applied and more theoretical interests.  "Theoretical statistician" perhaps could be a separate category.

I think you are safest referring to yourself as a quantitative ecologist, or more broadly a quantitative biologist, but not a statistician. You would have to highlight your statistics experience in the rest of the application. Regardless of how you describe yourself, the department might prefer someone who has a more complete formal training (given you will be doing formal teaching; not that one is a necessary requirement for the other, just talking departmental leanings or tendencies) - you won't be able to mask that with a title shift. Alternatively, they may care much more about any teaching experience you have rather than your specific research interests, as long as you have demonstrated some mastery of the material behind the courses you will lecture for.
I think you would have a better argument for defining yourself as an applied statistician (regardless of your formal training) if you had published not only in your field of quantitative ecology, but also published in statistics/math journals or at least published on novel statistical methodology in ecology.

Your comment about publishing makes sense, and is probably a general rule about recognizing disciplinary boundaries.  Moreover, even if I had published in a statistical journal that probably would not be enough to deserve the title "statistician."  Would I call my self an economist if I published a paper or two in an econometrics journal?  Probably not.

Another diagnostics as to whether I am or am not a "Statistician" of some kind: could I serve on the committee of a grad student getting a degree in stats?  If they are working an very applied question in my field of science, perhaps.  If they are working in any other field of applied stats, likely not.

I would argue he is not a fully quantitative person.. Quantitative need to develop algorithms, not just theory.

It is always interesting to me to see how different people outside of statistics perceive it. (I am a Ph.D. in statistics who had worked in academia, international organizations, and industry.)
In American academia (I am not qualified to speak for other countries), whenever you see somebody with the title that has "statistician" in it, it probably means they run SAS PROC POWER for somebody in medical school or in agriculture (grant land universities with outreach programs). This is a lowly job, for the most part, and you rarely if ever publish: more often than not, you are an acknowledgement on a paper, not a co-author. Biostatisticians though can often advance themselves to co-authors and co-PIs when a grant/project requires a statistician to be written in as a senior staff member of the team for quality control purposes.
I would have a somewhat difficult time imagining a stat department in a research school looking at somebody whose degree is not in statistics nor mathematics for a tenure-track position. The teaching positions can be filled with the department's own grad students or recent graduates who could not find an academic job. I heard that in some universities (California state system), hiring somebody to teach statistics courses runs into an odd difficulty: statistics is taught at math departments, but math departments are only allowed to hire graduates with a degree in mathematics.
So your hopes shouldn't be very high, and if you are hired into a stat department, you probably won't be given any courses above the first couple of undergraduate intro courses -- t-statistics, ANOVA, regression. A 3+3 load would also leave no time for any work back in biology for you.
Having said all that, I think it would be fair if you were to call yourself "an applied statistician" in your letter. I had called myself a "quantitative methodologist" when applying to quant psych jobs (to no avail).
Your classification is a bit silly, BTW. There are branches of statistics, Bayesian methods or rank methods for instance, that do not think in terms of matrix algebra at all. And, with few exceptions, econometricians or reliability engineers don't have any reasons to call themselves applied statisticians, as it does not give them any promotions or any additional funding. And even if they did, "proper" statisticians (those with PhDs in statistics) may not agree with this denomination (even though a good econometrician knows asymptotic theory of statistics way better than an average Ph.D. in statistics these days).

As a computer scientist and applied ML scientist with 5 ML systems deployed and in use by real users, I would likely call OP a biologist, not an academic stat, applied stat, or quantitative person. I too have a strong background in stats, theory and applied. Already, all science related PhDs rely on quantitative methods, which more than likely include statistical methods to assess outcomes. Biologists could also use qualitative methods (e.g. interviews, surveys, questionnaires, etc) in certain scenarios where quantitative methods do not apply as the scenarios can not be measured. Calling OP a biologist will more than likely apply also if OP is trying to enter a department full of stat related PhDs, who would be deeply familiar with statistics benefits and limitations when applied to certain use cases. In addition, I would argue OP is not a fully quantitative person as he has only taken a few courses in stats. Meaning OP likely knows some stats methods names and has applied stats methods to certain use cases because he was told to by a professor, not because OP deduced OP needed to use such stat method. Academic courses do not reflect the natural world as a number of assumptions apply in the academia sandbox. Real stat experience requires strong understanding of the inner workings of stat methodologies and why such methods are being applied to a particular problem. In the wild, finance for example, both applied statisticians and/or quantitative people tend to develop custom computational algorithms, either by creating variations of an existing algorithm or by grouping many stat algorithms (not just theory), that are likely to "solve" a particular problem if implemented successful. OP may lack the (stats related) epistemological and ontological knowledge of why a stats person would need to modify or group existing stats algorithms instead of simply reusing existing stat methods naked (e.g. t-tests, z-test, one-way ANOVA, two-way ANOVA, regression, inference, statistical learning, etc). P S. OP's question is old, but it is relevant now that many people are jumping in the AIML, data analytics, data science, data mining, deep learning, reinforcement learning, NLP bandwagon after taking 1 or 2 stat courses, manifesting the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect.