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You must have a relevant Bachelor's degree to get into European grad schools in sciences?
Using Bio-sciences as an example, below seems to be the norm for admission prerequisites.
US grad school in Bio-sciences:
Have taken Bio 1 & 2, Chem 1 & 2, Physics 1 & 2 + some upper level Bio classes + GRE + a Bachelor's degree
European grad school in Bio-sciences:
Have a Bio or closely related Bachelor's degree.
So... Is this "directly or very closely related Bachelor's degree" thing pretty much a must for most European schools? When Europeans decide to switch careers between undergrad & grad, they have to do another complete Bachelor's? any other countries like that?

If you do not like the way European countries are running their higher education, why study there?

To mimick your way of expressing this: When -s decide to continue their career after their first degree, they do not directly start where the undergrad left off, but they first have to repeat several years worth of basics because other students who do not at least have a Bachelor degree in at least a roughly related discipline can enter the grad studies as well? Alternatively, the university cannot simply check for a specific Bachelor's degree, but has to check participation in single courses one by one? Omg... :/

You may be over-generalizing about US grad schools.  At many of the better ones, I would expect that "some upper level Bio classes" would mean "enough upper-level Bio classes that you would be eligible to earn a Bio major, and probably even more than that".  (Even if that's not written in the minimum admission requirements, they may not actually admit any students who have less.)  So in real life, the requirements may not be terribly different after all.

Now that the implied belittling has been edited out, this can actually become a good question - as soon as it is made clear what exactly is asked here: Is the described model the default throughout Europe? Is it present anywhere else? Does it actually work as described? Why is it like that? ...? Possibly, each of these questions could or should be asked separately.

aeismail covers the most important aspects. However, I want to add something to:

So... Is this "directly or very closely related Bachelor's degree" thing pretty much a must for most European schools? When Europeans decide to switch careers between undergrad & grad, they have to do another complete Bachelor's? Omg... :/ any other countries like that, too?

European universities do not operate like US schools. Historically, most undergrad / grad programmes, at least in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, are basically a 5-year "Diplomstudium" split into a 3-year bachelor and a 2-year master. Bachelor and master are seen as one "package", and indeed most students do both (in the same institution). You are not supposed to do the master without doing the same, or at least a very similar, bachelor first.
As for "switching careers between undergrad & grad" - you are in fact indeed not supposed to do that. It's possible between related programmes (say, going from math to computer science), but the admission committee will force you to take an host of additional courses, amounting to (typically) 1-2 additional semesters. Unrelated bachelors (e.g., from humanities to computer science) indeed do not qualify you to inscribe to the master programme.

This depends entirely on the nature of the program: basically, some master's programs are "continuous," meaning they have a bachelor's degree in (essentially) the same field as a prerequisite. If you have a related (but not identical) bachelor's degree, it may be possible to get approval, so long as you make up the "shortfall" between what your degree required and the requirements of the bachelor's that is the prerequisite for the master's degree. There's also the requirement that the shortfall not be too large (usually there's a limit to the number of extra semesters you can take to finish the expanded requirements.
However, many master's programs—particularly in interdisciplinary areas—allow you to enter with a bachelor's in any relevant field. This is especially necessary when it's unlikely for there to be many (or any) bachelor's program in the same area.


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How to attract good teachers to a young university?
I won't go into much detail, but I work at a young private university at a non-managerial position.
The uni has a strong need for better teachers and more adequate students. In my opinion, a viable strategy for quickly increasing the education quality level would be to focus on only 1 faculty/ department/ specialty first, because:

It would be cheaper to focus on one department (i.e. program creation, teachers acquisition and salary, advertizing to students).
Even if a lot of students drop out due to suddenly intensifying the program, students from other departments would continue to financially support the university.
Being great at one thing while temporarily neglecting others is better than being below mediocre at everything.

Focusing on one department would mean:

Intensifying the program.
Attracting good teachers.
Attracting better students (more willing to learn, with better background) (with the help of 1. and 2.).

I believe intensifying the program and attracting good teachers for one department (probably for CS) before attracting better students is the way to go.
I have a CS background and can help with creating the program (classes).
If I manage to convince the people in charge, how should we go about attracting good teachers (probably from other universities)? Adequate salaries would probably not be enough.
Thanks for the answers!

A warning: 90% of what you write has little or nothing to do with your actual question in the end. What this means is that you will get a lot of comments and answers from people who focus on that 90% instead of your actual question.

Which country is your university at?

@Sverre I felt like I had to give some background. I bolded the question in the end in order to avoid confusion, but maybe your warning will turn out to be right.
@ just-learning In Eastern Europe. If I say more, I could very well identify myself and my university.

My 2 cents: (1) Offer more money, (2) Offer more academic freedom, both in teaching and research, (3) Lessen the administrative burden, (4) Offer better facilities (better office, better labs, better classrooms), (5) Be more helpful in all practical matters (e.g. helping the person move, get settled, find housing, finding schools/kindergarten for their children). Put simply, the more you offer, the more likely you are to attract great minds.

Who are your competitors? Are you trying to hire people currently working at other universities in your country, or do you want to attract academics from elsewhere in the world? I think this might change the answers quite a bit.

@Sverre: Those are good suggestions. 3 is probably impossible for a young university, however; the faculty will need to create or redesign programs from the ground up, which necessarily is a big administrative job.

For each person you want to recruit, get inside the person's head and figure out what's important to him or her.  One person might be looking for a weight room and showers.  Someone else might be looking for a great concert series.  Also, see if you can offer a home to a group that has gotten spread out in a bunch of different institutions.

"Being great at one thing while temporarily neglecting others is better than being below mediocre at everything.". It is probably better but that's not acceptable. There is no reason to teach every subject in every university. Teach only what you are an expert in. People go to university to learn from experts. Why would someone attend a university (and paying a non negligible amount of money) where professors are acknowledging they are bad?

I would look at university of luxembourg, it is pretty young and doing well.

I thought I had seen this question before, and now I found it.  Possible duplicate:  http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/824/19607

Adequate salaries would probably not be enough

That's true.
Superior salaries
Superior salaries are needed to attract superior staff. There are many examples of companies that pay (significantly) above-average salaries so they can attract the best. This is true in retail (The Container Store), tech (Google), and other industries. I see no reason why it would be different in academia. While salary is not the only thing that matters it does matter a great deal. Countless research on motivation (Herzberg, Ariely, Pink) shows that what is important is to pay enough that people stop thinking about money. If people are just "getting by" then they will be thinking about money rather than thinking about how to be the best in their field.
Freedom
Once you get the money right, you need to give freedom (as written in the comment by Sverre). Hire the best and get out of their way. Yes, support them but do not "tie their hands" and make them do things because "it has always been that way." This is one point which it should be both easy for your university to do as well as to convince candidates that it is true. Your school is young and so has not been doing things the same way for 50 years. Let the candidates know they will have freedom to do as they see fit.
Support
Giving freedom does not mean abandoning them. If your teachers want start producing videos, acquire the tools they will need. If they want to experiment and they need help, help them. If they are not from the area, help them transition. Be open and supportive.

This really is a good answer, I'll add a small thing for the support: in some countries the administrative burden is overwhelming, provide so much assistance that the administrative stuff will never be in the way.

In addition to earthling's answer and Sverre's comment, here is an approach that has worked in my field (math):  Hire 1 outstanding person, and give them the reins.  (Either to their own group/unit or the whole department.)  Many talented people will be excited by the opportunity to hire the people they want, and run the department their way, while being handsomely rewarded.  Moreover, once one great person is there, it will help attract more good people, faculty and students.
Here are some examples I know from math, where this sort of thing has happened: IISER - Pune (India) hired a well-respected person to run and design the department from the bottom up when they started up a few years ago, Emory University hired Ken Ono a few years ago from Wisconsin (I think he was allowed to choose people to hire in his area) which brought up their profile quite a bit (at least in number theory), University of Hawaii over half a century ago brought on Paul Halmos as the chair (I heard that he brought in good people, and made the department much stronger than it was before).

The Best Strategy would be to first approach famous Professor in the field and get them associated with the department as external advisors. The second step would be to organise guest lectures for those Professors and If possible then convincing a few of them to join the department as emiritus Professors or suggest someone who could and would be interested in doing so. As soon as a renound person joins the department, hand over to him the charge of the department and his name and fame will attract quality faculty to the department.
Though the main issue could be how to attract the first Professor, well for that stratagies like high pay and high position could be a solution.

I don't see how you can get someone to join the department as emeritus.

how should we go about attracting good teachers

To attract good researchers you need to offer a high salary, a good location, lots of research funding and resources, and limited admin and teaching. If you provide funding so the researcher does not need to take on PhD students and can instead afford post docs and RAs, the reputation is less important. This is especially true if you can hire a couple of PIs at the same time.
Your question, though, is almost exclusively focused on teachers and students and never mentions research. People who are "academically famous", are almost exclusively famous for their research. Hiring good teachers will be extremely tough. The first problem is identifying good teachers. Publications will not tell you if a teacher is good. You could scrape ratemyprofessor.com for student views, but I would not advise making hiring decisions based on that information. The second issue is you need to offer them something. Salary and location will help, but hiring a good teacher and then telling them they do not have to teach (or only teach a little) seems counter productive.
Instead of hiring a few excellent teachers, I would suggest hiring lots of average teachers. I think the average teaching quality increases when the teaching load and class sizes are reduced.

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As a undergraduate math student, what are some of the benefits of joining the American Mathematical Society?
I am a undergraduate student at a large university, and I was wondering what kinds of benefits are available as a member of the American Mathematical Society. I've heard that it is a great resource for networking, but other than that I have heard next to nothing about it.

You get a discount on registration fee at their meetings, which is pretty much the biggest reason why people join AMS.

Considering I live very far from most of the meetings, I guess there isn't much of a incentive for me to join...

I have no real experience with the AMS, so I'm commenting instead of answering, but if there's an undergraduate chapter at your school, you might find it useful to go to their meetings just to meet people and see what your peers are doing. You might not even need to be a member to go to events. I know that the preceding is true for the ACM (the corresponding group for CS).

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Should I email a potential supervisor who agreed to support me?
I am applying for a PhD at a certain university that requires the student to provide and evidence of support from a potential supervisor before submitting the application. After mailing some professors, one of them agreed to support my application. It was a very brief email saying "I am happy to support you". I immediately prepared a research proposal and sent it to her. She replied by saying "Noted". I prepared my application and submitted it two months later.
Is it appropriate to email her as a reminder of myself? If so, what would be a good email? This university is very important to me and I want to do everything I can to increase my chances of admission.

Yes, in general it's entirely appropriate to remind faculty members about letters/recommendations/paperwork they've previously agreed to.
In fact many faculty members I've known (and I cannot, alas, wholeheartedly exclude myself) rely on such reminders to a greater or lesser extent.  Faculty nowadays are faced with so much paperwork / routine correspondence (and are not necessarily trained or culturally aligned to regard such things as being important) that we start to believe also in the converse: what we have heard about once and never been reminded of must not be very important.
Just now I got a second email from a secretary in my department about an annual inventory issue.  She sent the first email just a few days before and included a hard deadline in both emails. In other words, she knows all the tricks to get faculty to do things without causing resentment.  The keys: be polite but persistent, and make the convergence to the deadline clear by ramping up the email reminders accordingly.  It really works: pardon me while I run down to her office so she can tag my laptop!

Thanks a lot for your response ! I may have not explained the problem clearly, but this professor is actually in the university I am applying to and I want remind her of myself because I contacted her long time ago.I thought this reminder might help my application. In any case, given the facts you stated, it seems that I should do that. Thanks again for your kind response.

I did understand that the professor is not at your current university.  (If they were, then perhaps in-person visits in addition to the emails would be in order at some point...)

As my experiences, you should.
But the tricky are, before you remind his/her about their "promises" to support you, in your email, inform him/her your little progress about your proposed research. This can be your opinion about some paper that you used as evidence. Better if you make something so called prototype. After it, change the discussion about your last email. Just ask about his/her opinion what should you do next.

The OP is a prospective student; it's unlikely that he/she has started the proposed research.


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Can I ask for first authorship on future publications that may come out of my design?
I am working on a 2-phase design. The first phase is where ideas are proved and verified. The second phase is an implementation of the first stage (Basically, like having a schematic of a building and actually building it). I have done lots of work on the first phase. My supervisor is asking me to give the final work to another person, who we don't yet know who he is, for implementation and work on something else. While my advisor has some contribution, I did almost everything.
Can I ask for first authorship for any papers and publications that come out of this now?

Is this the same old story with your co-advisor in a different version or this refers to your main supervisor? If it is the first case, then everything that could be said is probably already said.

I would be wary of this. If you don't actually write these future papers, it might be difficult to claim authorship. Writing the papers, solves the problem.

As @JeffE said in his excellent answer in http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11460/shady-behavior-by-my-advisor-for-achieving-tenure-do-you-have-to-write-papers/. As a general rule, I would say no. Of course you deserve credit for your contributions, but only once for each contribution. If your contribution is a key piece of software, then the first paper that uses that software should describe that software in detail and include you as a coauthor.

... (continued) If you walk away after that first paper, later work that relies on your software—by your advisor or anyone else—need not list you as a coauthor; you already got credit. With good reason, Stephen Wolfram is not a coauthor on every paper that uses Mathematica. You should of course be cited in any paper that uses, builds on, or improves your work, but that's a separate issue from coauthorship.

@Rob No, it is not up to your advisor to "award" authorship! Authorship is earned, not awarded, and there are standards within each field to determine when someone has earned it.

Generally speaking, you cannot "reserve" first authorship on possible papers that may come out of some work that you've done. Depending on the scope of the submission (when it's completed) and who writes/edits the actual text of the paper, you may or may not actually deserve first authorship on it. It would be inappropriate to promise you first authorship on all future papers coming out of the design at this stage.
What you can do is tell your advisor,

I'd like to start working now on a draft of a paper about my design.

Discuss the planned scope of your submission with your advisor: in particular, whether your paper should include a description of the implementation which has yet to be done, or whether a paper on the design alone is sufficiently publishable. Either way, start working on a draft right away.
Also discuss authorship of the paper you're going to start writing, given the scope the two of you have agreed on for this particular paper, including:

whether you will be first author
whether your advisor will be a co-author
what position the other yet-to-be-named implementer will have (if you decide to include the implementation in the paper)
and what additional contributions are expected from each author in order to merit authorship according to this agreement (both technical, and with respect to writing and editing).

If you discuss this with your advisor, start working on a draft now, write a lot of the text in the submission, and you generally "drive" the project and the paper submission forward, you will (assuming your work meets the standards for first authorship in your field) have a very strong case for first authorship on this paper.
Note that unless you do more work to merit authorship on other, future papers related to your design, they'll only be expected to cite and/or acknowledge your work.


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Importance of having a "connection" while applying to PhD
I am applying for a PhD to top schools in engineering. Whenever I talk to my peers I hear the word 'connection' very often. I started thinking that it is almost impossible to be admitted to these schools without knowing a professor ! (I am an international applicant)
How important is having a connection when applying? What If I don't know one and I believe that my profile qualifies me for admission? Should I apply or just not bother?

You should specify which country you are looking at. For the US, @aeismail has it right. For Europe, "knowing somebody" is indeed extremely helpful.

Dont get dis-encouraged! I got my degree with somehow good results (but nothing amazing, just a bit above average) and I started applying around Europe for a PhD. After some time a quite a lot of applications (of course, you are not going to get accepted in the first try) I am now in one of the best universities in UK in a very important project in medical imaging. I have a friend that did the same and also is in my situation. I didnt know ANYONE and here i am. Keep trying, its possible!

At least for schools in the US, it is not necessary for you to have a direct "connection" or contact at a department to be admitted.
In general, where contacts can be useful is if one of the people who writes your letters of recommendations for you knows a particular person in the given department. If that "connection" is good, and you get a good letter of recommendation, that will carry more weight than a typical letter of the same quality, since you will be better "known" than someone who the department doesn't know at all.
That said, though, there is no expectation that you would directly know someone already at the school—although your research interests should align with the department as a whole.

In my experience it differs from school to school, but since you specifically stated "top schools in engineering" I would totally agree with @aeismail that a "connection" is not needed, but might be helpful.
Also, I have come across the fact that it is common that PhD positions are "created" with a particular candidate in mind, ergo it is very hard to get a position at first try but an application will often get you to a meeting with the prof / research group representative for the department you are interested in, and will dramatically increase the chances that a position might be "created" for you.

Should I apply or just not bother?

You should apply, worst case somebody at least had a look at your resume and you will be higher up on the list for the next PhD recruitment ;)
Do note that top universities have the same issues as many other top tier employers, how do you sift through thousands of applications in a responsible manner? The answer is that you don't; you pick the first and best one, which usually is someone known from previous relations.

This advice might be true in Europe; it's certainly not true in the US. And positions are not "created for" someone; it takes a lot of planning to open up a new position. It may be, though, that they do have an "intended" candidate for the position. If that candidate turns down the offer, then they will open it up to others.

@aeismail Do note the wording I used, I said "created with someone in mind", not "for". The way I interpret your wording you are actually agreeing with me?

No. What I mean is that the creation of the PhD position is independent of having a preferred candidate, since the timing of getting a PhD position is so unpredictable.


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Why would a professor agree to write recommendation letter, then mention in it that he doesn't know student very well?
I had a colleague who asked a professor to write a letter of recommendation on his behalf. The professor agreed and wrote 3 letters for this colleague. The colleague had an interview with one of the colleges he applied to and he came to know that the professor wrote that he doesn't know him very well.
My questions are: why would a professor agree to write a recommendation in the first place?! And what is the effect of this letter on one's application?
I asked him to write one on my behalf, and he might have written similar statement.

My question is: Does the professor know your colleague very well? In other words, did the professor lie?

There seems to be an implication here that "I don't know the student very well" is somehow damaging, rather than a mere statement of fact.  If I know you only because you did well in one of my classes, or only because you published a groundbreaking paper in my favorite journal, I don't know you very well, and admitting this up front seems entirely sensible.

If a student whom I don't know very well asks me for a recommendation, then I point that out to the student and suggest that it would therefore be better to ask someone else for a recommendation instead.  But if the student, aware of the situation, still wants me to write the letter, I do it, and I include in the letter the information about how well (and in what circumstances) I know the student.

I strongly echo! Your approach seems to me an "upright" one; for you directly let the student know what he may get before you do it. I guess this is what @user18244, or maybe many students, might expect. The term "recommendation" can be understood both as recommendation and reference. In the OP's case, the professor regarded such a letter as a reference letter, so that only truths are stated.

In many cases professors agree to write letters for students we do not know well because we are the best option, according to the student, for them. Some students do not have good enough relationships with enough professors to get all the letters of reference they need. They may approach a professor and say, "I know we do not know each other very well and I only took a class with you/worked in your lab for two weeks/etc, but I need someone else to write a letter and I think you are in the best option I have". At which point, the professor may agree. If the student is not as up front, hopefully, the professor was clear and said something like "I don't know you very well, but I can write you a letter and talk about X." Again, some students will agree.
While it is not desirable to have references from people who do not know you well, including in a reference that you do not know the person well is not inherently bad. In fact, it probably is better to be up front about the relationship because it explains why the letter is so narrowly focused.


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How to get into research jobs after working in corporate technical jobs
I am Performance and Automation Testing engineer who recently moved into IT Security in Singapore. I hold a BSc in software system (full-time) and MSc in IT (distance learning program). I have 9+ years experience working in Testing projects where major contribution was into Performance and Automaton testing.
I wish to get into research jobs (specifically, academic research). I am looking for opportunities any place however my preference will be Germany, Singapore and USA. However whenever I have approached universities they aren't willing to consider me, stating that I don't have any research experience.
Can anyone help me with path to get into IT Security Research. I guess attending a part-time/full-time masters program (IT/INFOSEC) followed by PhD (INFOSEC) program should help. Is this an appropriate path? Will this suffice to give me a chance at getting hired into an academic research job?

By Academic Research, I assume you mean Phd.
So, I am aware of cases where people chose to move back from industry to academia. A Phd student that I know, used to work for EA, and after 3 (or 5 years) of working as a programmer he switched to academia to the field of Computer Networks to pursue his Phd.
So basically, there is the possibility of getting to such a position directly from the industry even if you have worked on completely unrelated stuff. However, any professor from a medium - top ranked program in the academia will look at you research capabilities in order to accept you as a Phd student.
What I would do in this case, is to create a strategy to achieve the goal. First be realistic with what you really have in hand to offer. What are your pros/cons compared to any other Phd student that want to apply to a given program.
Define your target universities. Maybe you should do some research and look where is deficiency of Phd students. In which country people look less interested to pursue a Phd.
Then look at the specific program that you want to apply for. If you don't have a preferred topic, I suggest that you should apply in a place where your experience will give you the upper hand in the application process.
You say you are interested in the IT security research. Do you like the applicative side or the theoretical stuff (crypto)?
I think there are many variables that may affect your application. The fact that you hold a Masters degree from a distance program, maybe your age, and the fact that you want to switch to a completely new topic (academic-wise, assuming that your Master studies were not related to IT security) are the downsides. But, don't be discouraged, give it a try.
I would target the mid to low ranked programmes and send applications around.
Good luck!

Thanks for your response. I will consider those and device a strategy. I will take up a Masters to get my skills harnessed and then do a PHD full-time. Because we need money for all that in any case. I got suggestions from my friends on applying for PHD direct but I guess the challenge is why will a professor take someone from non-research background for a Research position in academics.

makes sense, but sounds risky. especially due to the fact that I don't know your age. Is it worth investing 2 years to a masters program, and then another 3-5 to Phd?
make sure that you really understand what does doing a Phd really means. If you are up to the challenge go ahead.
also bear in mind that there are programs that do not require you to have a masters in order to get a phd (US). you can enroll to phd program there directly. but the first couple years of the phd include coursework. that is not the case in europe

Wow !!! that sounds great. I am 32 yrs old. I wanted to do Masters to harness skills before getting into PHD. But if there are programs where I can do it without having to spend years then it will be great. You mind sharing those details. Thanks a bunch for your time .. appreciate your help

hmmm, actually there is something missing in my answer. Although you don't need to have a Masters degree to do Phd in US, the phd studies there are usually 5 years by default. In europe, the phd studies are 3 years. So in the end the upper bound is 5 for the both cases. Just that in eu you have to spend 2 years prior to the phd to obtain a masters. If my answers helped you somehow please, upvote or accept them. Best

"the phd studies in US are usually 5 years by default": with a heavy tail, there are cases where it can take much more, especially in some topics-universities

As you have longterm industry experience, you have the vision towards special issues that industry faces. Try to find the most important issues, problems and disasters that industry really needs to be solved. Then, go to the net and read the academic publications around those unsolved issues. Then, in this ways you see that some of the problems need to be discussed academically and you feel that you can write a proposal around one or two industry based problems.
At this stage you can discuss those issues to the companies you have worked for or with the university professors who's research interests are near the problems you have brought in your proposal. You can try to talk to the industry to support you by funds and start an industry-based PhD project. If you do not find any industry support, do not be upset; because you still have the chance that the admission committee be interested in your point of view and a professor accept you as a research PhD student.
Another thing which is obvious, is that you should search for the minimum requirements of the universities you are aiming to apply for and prepare your academic documents during the period of time your searching for good research topics and narrowing your research interests.
By doing this, you will be also prepared for applying the research companies; because you have the problems in mind and you can do beneficial research projects for them.


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Emailing Professor Regarding Availability?
I'm trying to inquire professors regarding whether they accept masters students for graduate research assistant and I'm having trouble phrasing the email. If anyone could take a look and provide comment, that would be wonderful. Also just fyi the professor that I am applying to her field is within social media and communication and I'm trying to say that my background in social science and psychology research will be useful if she were to accept me.
"Dear Professor XX,
I am an incoming masters student at the school of XX and I was I was wondering if you will be accepting graduate research assistant this upcoming fall semester if at all? I have fours years of undergraduate research experience in social science and psychology and I hope to use my background to contribute to your research/lab in anyway possible. I am attaching my resume for your reference and I hope to hear from you soon!
Thank You
My Name"

I think that GoodDeeds' suggestion covers you well already, some extra suggestions I can give that are more specific to your email are:

Short sentences: consider that the higher the position academics occupy, the more emails they get, the less time they can/want to dedicate to their emails. This occasionally means that they will spend an abysmal amount of time reading it and they might get bored with long, single-sentence emails. For instance:

I am an incoming MSc student at the school of XX. I was wondering if you will be accepting graduate research assistant on this fall semester?

Whitespace: this is always underestimated and not explicitly mentioned in most etiquette/style guides. Adding a bit of whitespace and paragraphing on your email improves readability (i.e., odds that the person will actually read what you wrote, in this case). Just don't go overboard and stick with the logical passages. E.g.

I was I was wondering if you will be accepting graduate research assistant this upcoming fall semester if at all?
I have fours years of undergraduate research experience in social science and psychology and I hope to use my background to contribute to your research/lab in anyway possible.
I am attaching my resume for your reference
I hope to hear from you soon!

Grammar: this comes from a non-native speaker, I have been struggling with this in first person in my uni years. Some people will just straight-up ignore you if you use bad grammar in an email. It's prejudice, it isn't nice, and (depending on the academic culture in the country) might not be even explicitly mentioned at any point. Make sure your grammar in the email is on point through revision by another person (ideally a native speaker with experience in the target language, i.e. English in this case) and/or through online services (a common choice is Grammarly.

Greetings/sign-offs: should usually be appropriate to the level of confidence you have with the addressee. I am assuming from your email and post you might not know them very well (please correct me if I am wrong), so I would personally rephrase it in something like:

Looking forward to hear from you soon.
Kind regards,
Firstname Surname

The last point specifically wildly depends on the country they're based in, academic culture, and (more importantly) their personal attitude towards this kind of formalities.

I really hope this doesn't sound too obtuse, I have been just trying to be as general as possible while not being totally blind towards the fact that some people are petty towards emails, as most of us might have experienced already.

I think it's a good answer, but it's an answer to a question already asked here many times and with a community wiki duplicate here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/90725/how-should-i-phrase-an-important-question-that-i-need-to-ask-a-professor I think most of your answer is overlap with that one but if you feel there is anything to add there you can make an edit (or add a new answer; it's possible a new answer would get some downvotes if people thought it overlapped with the wiki answer too much and seemed like "rep grubbing")

Thanks for the response. Although I'm not sure where you got the idea that I'm a non-native speaker.

Sorry, didn't want to imply it (it doesn't really matter, regardless of the language spoken), but when I passed it through a grammar checker it flagged up a couple of phrases.

I don't want to sound mean or discouraging, but in my 15+ years of professorship, I received hundreds such emails and, after a split second look, discarded each and every one of them. All my colleagues would probably do the same. (Math, US -- maybe it's different in social sciences/other countries.) I am, in fact, genuinely interested to know if anyone ever succeeded in getting an RA this way.
There are two main reasons. First of all, if a professor has funding or there is a spot in their lab, there would be an official advertisement for the position to be filled, so you should respond to that, rather than try to get personal in a completely artificial manner. Second of all, your letter does not indicate that you have a clear idea of what the professor does/needs/wants or how exactly you may be useful to them. Take their classes, participate in their seminars, go to their office and talk to them about their research, etc. Most likely, if they feel that you can fit in their lab, or you could be a worthy graduate student, they would be the first to ask if you wanted to work with them. No matter how you phrase, "Hi, I am shiny, please, give me money!" -- it's just that. I can't imagine any sensible person responding positively to such an inquiry. (It's not to imply that every professor is sensible, of course.)

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text:
What are the most important actions after starting as a junior lecturer?
I am a new lecturer in a sciences department, this is my first academic position. There is no one telling me what to do which is great, but I am not sure how to maximise my chances of doing well here. What would you think is the most important actions to do and not to do in your first 6-12 months of a position like this? Some people suggest to apply to all grants possible, but I am tempted to get my backlog of papers submitted instead. I was given a lab which is currently empty, and I have limited internal research funding but I can hire one PhD student. Any tips from more seasoned academics?

I think this is a useful question but you may need to make it a bit less subjective. E.g. what do you mean by "most important"/"doing well"?

Find out which actions are viewed as most important in your department; general advice isn't probably helpful here.  You need to find a mentor locally.

I second Nate Eldredge's recommendation that you need to find a local mentor. This is important.  If one is not assigned to you, you could ask your department chair to assign you one  or find someone on your own.

Thanks for the suggestions. By doing well I meant both integrating well in the department with the teaching and admin duties, whilst managing to do funded research. What I worry is that if I don't get funding in the first year or so I will be so full of admin/teaching commitments that I will lose the window for establishing funded research. This is something that I have heard about, and I wonder if it other people here had a similar doubt when they started off in an academic position and how they dealt with it.

As commenters already point out, ultimately this is a question that only people within your department can answer. However:

Some people suggest to apply to all grants possible, but I am tempted to get my backlog of papers submitted instead.

In general, and assuming you are in the sciences, the people that say that you should be focusing on grants are probably right. I kind of understand the temptation to write up all the things that you did not yet have time for due to needing to wrap up your dissertation, but this seems like short-term thinking to me. Sure, you will appear fabulously productive for some time, but then your backlog is empty and you have not acquired funding for new students nor started any other longer-running new initiatives.
As a faculty member, you will now need to start focusing more on the longer term, and sadly this often means that grants are more important than individual papers.

Step 1 should be to network within your department. Go to as many formal and informal events as you can (seminars, discussion groups, coffee break chats...) and get to know the other staff in your area. This will enable you to:

Gather local advice that is tailored to your situation
Look at what other lecturers, particularly those early in their career, spend their time on
Gauge the culture of your department (are they primarily interested in big grants? Very teaching-focused?)
Find opportunities to develop collaborations, get involved in current initiatives, etc.

I don't know what Steps 2+ should look like, as they will depend on your particular situation (as discussed in the comments). But hopefully when you get started on Step 1, you can get the local advice you need.

In many Eurogames, and in the stock market, the key to success is often to diversify.  If you find that you achieve optimal productivity by working on one or two papers while also working on a grant application, then diversification could be a good strategy for you.  Also, there may be some chaining possible by diversifying.
Request a mentor.  Look around for one on your own as well.
And ask the department whether you should emphasize grant applications, completion and submission of papers already in the works, or a balance of the two.  Keep the question succinct with low emotional tone.  I understand that this is an exciting and rather anxiety-provoking time for you, but by projecting a cool image, you will get better results, and also the cool tone will help you keep calm.  Amazing but true.
Consider that in some departments, grant applications are done as a group effort.


text:
Mention a potential adviser in Statement of Purpose who is in another department
I am very interested in the work of a professor who works for department X. His work is interdisciplinary and I am interested in the engineering aspects of his work. I contacted him and he agreed to be my primary mentor as long as I had a secondary mentor through engineering school since I am not going to apply in his department. He mentioned a specific name in the engineering school who shares the same research interests. Is it a good idea to mention his name along with the name of the professor in the engineering school in my Statement of Purpose (SOP)? For instance, that I would like to join the engineering lab and conduct a collaboration with the other lab? Is it a good idea to show an interest in a lab who is not in the department but still related to engineering?

I think that in general this would be fine, but don't give the impression that working with him or the other lab/prof is, in any way, a condition of your acceptance. You want the department that you are applying to to be interested in you but not to give others the impression that you are inflexible in any way. But stating that you have a well worked out plan and have at least partial buy-in on it from a professor shouldn't hurt you, and might help.
Your first goal is to get accepted, then work out the details. Make it obvious that your background supports your SOP goals.

I edited my question. Hope I cleared the ambiguity

A well thought out plan can be impressive (that you are self directing).  Also it gets at least one person in your corner.  I would also communicate some flexibility to work for others though as you may need it (what if choice A loses funding, dies, transfers or is an asshole).  Also hopefully it gets others in your camp.  You shoul be able to broaden the project into a subspecialty or at least be able to express some other interests.

Note, this is not just a game...you actually need a plan B and to run some decision process before comitting to A after you arrive.  Don't go to a school with only one acceptable advisor.

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text:
How to reduce workload and recover while dealing with aftereffects of a serious concussion?
Around one year ago, I had a ski accident and suffered from concussion. I was on sabbatical at that time ⛷. At first, I didn't notice full-on effect. Now I am back to full academic life of teaching, admin and research. I struggle with being fatigued all the time and sensory meltdowns.
Any one been in the same boat? I was advised by my doctor to reduce workload but feel overwhelmed with how to identify things that could be ditched or delegated. How does one even start?
I am employed in New Zealand, and entitled to sick leave. My institution has health support for students, but I'm not sure what support is offered for staff.

Where are you located? Does your institution have a medical officer? Are you entitled to sick pay? Will your GP write you a sick note until you have taken care of these things?

I am located in New Zealand. I had concussion a year ago but still struggling with post-concussion syndrom. Our university has support for students, all sorts of support but I am not aware what support is actually available for me as staff. I am not sure if I take sick leave, say, for 5 days and return to full time work, I will be totally fine.

I didn't mean to suggest five days of leave will suffice for recovery. But three weeks of leave will help to sort things out (i.e. find out what tasks you can off-load and how) and recover a bit.

I thought about taking time off after semester is over which is in 2 weeks time. I think it's a good idea. Hopefully, I can last for 2 more weeks. I wrote 5 days as it's a standard paid sick leave in New Zealand. However, university is very generous with the sick leave.

if you can't last two weeks, take them off. The world keeps turning without you for another two weeks, and putting off your recovery will only prolong what's inevitable.

Thanks, Henning. I think I will try just to reduce meetings in these two weeks to begin with and have reduced hours. I am afraid to cause resentment from peers if I bail out of teaching suddenly.

Like you, I didn't know about available support for faculty until I needed it. I learned that the support is amazingly good. My class was assigned to another instructor before I even asked; the university's central administration seemed most concerned with faculty's tendency to try to do more than they should; and there were several other pleasant surprises. If your department and university are even half as good as mine, you'll be fine.

Look for help within your department/institute.
You state that you are struggling with fatigue and sensory meltdown. That means that you are probably also not in the best place to make these kind of decisions, since you also feel overwhelmed by this decision you need to make. Don't try to do this by yourself.
Talk to your department head, ask what resources are available. In my country (Netherlands) we have a company doctor that can help you identify the problems and make sure your workload is adjusted to what you can handle. Maybe there is another resource that can help you, maybe there are people in your department that can take over some tasks. Ask for help from your colleagues in handling this.

Thank you so much Jeroen. I did talk to one colleague but I don't think they were able to understand that the task of identifying things that could be ditched is daunting by itself. I will try other colleagues.

@Math_manul I would suggest asking your higher-ups specifically. Ask them about resources, or contact your HR department about this. They should be able to point you to resources you need.

Thank you Jeroen!


text:
Academic home page with low maintenance burden
It's been mentioned before on this site how important it is to have a webpage.
Most academics don't have a lot of experience with web development, and do not realistically have time to learn it and keep the knowledge up to date.
What are some good ways/tools to create and maintain a professional website when the priority is minimizing long term maintenance burden?
My experience is that it's not uncommon that people will put in the effort to build a very nice website once, but they simply won't be able to maintain it long term.  Either it's too much effort to add new content (too busy to do it), or they change institutions and it's too much effort to migrate the site (because e.g. the new institution's hosting doesn't support some of the necessary tools, such as PHP, etc.)  Even if I put in the effort to learn a bit about web development today, I won't be using this knowledge contiually, so I'll forget how to do it.  At that point it might become too much of a burden to keep a website up to date, so eventually I'll neglect it.
This question is about how to avoid this situation, and what tools or hosting methods to use to minimize maintenance burden so a home page can realistically be kept up to date.
The simplest solution seems to be to only use basic (static) hand-written HTML and maybe a simple CSS stylesheet.  Many (most) academics are doing this.  The result will probably not be very beautiful and will look like webpages 15 years ago, but it can serve the purpose.  Are there any better ways?  (Typing all that <p> and <em> and <pre> and <ul> is in fact still rather tedious and error prone compared e.g. to writing MarkDown here.)

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about web content management, not about academia

It is web content management but the software requirements come from an academic environment in an unclear and possibly unsatisfiable way (i.e. as usual).

Writing HTML by hand should be no problem to someone who knows LaTeX. And, as pointed out by mhwombat, there are decent-looking, free templates to take care of the design step.

As someone who has done this error already, I recommend to avoid writing HTML manually. It adds flexibility, but it raises the bar a lot for ease of editing and updating.

The fact that a so-called academic can't figure out HTML/CSS makes me sad.

The result will probably not be very beautiful and will look like webpages 15 years ago — So what?

Very related question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/719. As pointed out by @mhwombat, updating the bibliography will be more than 50% of the work, so it is better to focus on a tool that excels in this task.

Current versions of WordPress (finally) auto-update themselves. And it's easy enough to use. Sorted.

@horsehair: I wouldn't expect every PhD-level academic to be comfortable with HTML or CSS. More to the point, though, this is a variant on the "boat programming" theme, as there is nothing exclusively academia-oriented.

@aeismail Why?  On which site would it be appropriate then?  It is specific to academia that one is almost required to have a home page.  It is also a pattern I see repeated in academia that home pages fall out of maintenance because people can't find the time to maintain them, and this is often the fault of the tools they chose at the beginning.  Claiming that this is "boat programming" really misses the point.  This question is about a problem that is really common in academia, but not common at all elsewhere.

@Szabolcs: Really? Most small businesses have similar problems with out-of-date and hard-to-modify websites.

@aeismail A buniness home page is a completely different thing (and serving a different purpose), also it's typical for businesses not to build their homepage on their own, but to pay someone.  I thought it would be clear that it's not a comparable situation.

@Szabolcs: I completely disagree about academic and business sites serving different purposes. They have different information, but their primary purpose is advertisement and providing information. And many academics don't manage their websites themselves!

@aeismail Please let's not make this one of those unproductive stubbornness driven "who is right" discussions--they never lead to anything good.  The point is that the majority of people reading the question and answers disagree (look at the votes), and clearly see the value here.  Please also consider that while your experience may be different and you might not be able to fully appreciate the problem yet (especially if you're at the beginning of your career), it doesn't mean that the problem does not exist.

@Szabolcs: There are also significant enough numbers of voters who think the question is off-topic. If some of the users who support the question think it should remain open, someone with sufficient privileges can nominate it for reopening.

If the academia-focus is not enough for the question to stay here, why not migrate to [softwarerecs.SE]? cc @aeismail

@Raphael given that there is some disagreement over whether it's on-topic here, it could possibly be reopened, so better not migrate it immediately; see this meta discussion

@Szabolcs You may be interested in http://bibbase.org/ .

tl;dr: Wordpress (installing a Markdown plugin), if you are a techie, Jekyll.
(My website is in Wikidot, I created for my group with Wordpress.
EDIT: Now I use Jekyll; here's why)
See Software for Scientists: Website tools:
For personal homepages, lab notebooks and conference websites.

WordPress - code  and WordPress - hosting

Examples:

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/
https://gowers.wordpress.com/
http://netsci2013.net/wordpress/

Jekyll

For writing blogs in Markdown and easily putting them on GitHub
Tutorial for using LaTeX in it: http://cwoebker.com/posts/latex-math-magic
Examples:

Open Lab Notebook in Jekyll
A homepage

Wikidot

e.g http://offtopicarium.wikidot.com/

Wikispaces

Simple wikis, very easy to create and manage
Used as open science notebooks, for instance http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/

Site44

Showing small site by putting files into a Dropbox folder

GitHub Pages

Static websites with Git

Instiki

Wiki especially for mathematical collaboration
Examples:

http://www.azimuthproject.org/
http://ncatlab.org/

WorkingWiki

Wiki especially for mathematical collaboration

Sphinx

Great for writing documentation
Example (in Polish): http://django.carrots.pl/

Jekade

Jekyll-like static pages with built-in LaTe support, in Node.JS

Actually this is quite useful!

I'd also like to point out the existence of Nanoc (with krandown), which is like Jekyll but possibly harder to use; and also to mention that those two tools do not have serverside dependencies, everything generated on your computer and uploaded to the server.

And the anonymous downvote is for...?

I forgot about Jekyll, "trying it" is still in my ToDo list. Octopress may be an interesting option if choosing Jekyll.

If you mention Jekyll, don't forget Hugo: https://gohugo.io/

The main thing that needs frequent updating is your bibliography. Some people don't try to maintain a bibliography list; instead they put a link to their DBLP search results. For example:
http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/h/Holland:John_H=.html
This may not show extremely recent publications, but it may be more accurate than one you maintain manually and forget to update!
Another option is to link to a Google Scholar search. For example:
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wfAPzPQAAAAJ&hl=en
Aside from the bibliography, I don't think there are any requirements that are specific to academia. There are so many options for creating and maintaining websites. Which one is right for you depends on how computer-literate you are, among other things, and would really be a boat programming question.

EDIT: To avoid dealing with the HTML directly, there are the usual suspects: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal.
A "hand-built" website doesn't have to look old-fashioned. If you decide  to go this route, you can find some attractive, free templates here: http://www.oswd.org/

EDIT: If you have a GitHub account, you can create a website for it using GitHub Pages. You can write your pages using markdown (there are other options as well), and you can have your own custom domain.

I disagree about the question not being specific to academia.  I considered posting it on a programming related site first, but from my experience it would not receive good answers there, because the problem is not technical and because many users of those sites won't even understand the real problem: not having enough time and motivation to maintain something that is not central to one's work, but still important.  One possible solution is technical (find software tools to do it more efficiently), but it's not the only possible solution.

To point is: most programmers will not understand the problem and the situation, and will either not give a useful answer ("just learn X cool new software tool, you have to put in the effort") or close the question.  (Yes, I have already asked outside of SE.)

I've added a bit more info that might be useful.

The tools you suggest are nice and useful.  The reason why I ruled them out is that most universities do not support webhosting with PHP and databases.  Also, the maintenance burden of these systems is higher because of more complex confuration and having to pay attention to security (constant updates, etc.)

Those tools are really only practical if you pay for your own webhosting service (in which case they are often provided, and the updates are done for you). Also, those tools are kind of overkill for a simple webpage. For simple websites, I usually just use a template from a site like the one I linked to, and maintain it manually.

Then we get back to just writing HTML by hand.  The more I think about it, the less interesting the question seems.  If you still believe that it's not appropriate for Academia.SE, I can delete it (but right now I can't, nor would it be nice, since you did write an answer)

more templates: http://www.styleshout.com/ I would definitively discard PHP and I think the best option is to link dblp, google scholar or an account in bibsonomy, research gate or whatever is preferred.

BTW: it should be feasible to make some javascript using the styles in zotero (or a customized one for the matter) that reads a bibtex file and generates some nice HTML. The maintenance would be maintaining a bibtex file updated, it cannot be any less than that, except for the option of providing a link...

@Szabolcs, I'm not suggesting you delete it. I think the maintenance of an online bibliography is in scope for this site, as would any other academic-specific requirements be. My comment about "boat programming" was intended to explain why I focused on the bibliography part in my answer, rather than the whole "what's the easiest way to build and maintain a simple website" question.

@Szabolcs: "The reason why I ruled them out is that most universities do not support webhosting with PHP and databases." - if the page is going to be hosted at a university anyway, it is on the other hand likely that there is a university-wide website system that includes templates for personal websites, often done with content management systems that allow even less technology-savvy users (or their secretaries) to click together the basic information from a set of prefabricated blocks (e.g. automated list of publications, based on a department or university-wide database).

@O.R.Mapper Using something like that would become a problem when changing institutions.

Added a mention of GitHub pages to my answer.

It's really not that hard to analyse the options.
1. Self-managed page
You certainly don't want PHP or anything server-side here, probably your university (institute or whatever) will provide you some web space that you "should" use and it's not going to run anything as fancy as PHP (let alone Python or Java). Which means that you have either:
a. some HTML with Javascript, possibly parsing BibTex files, should be feasible.
b. some script/program that generates the static web pages (and possibly updates them via FTP) and here you can program in whatever you want and do really cool things like updating your CV in PDF using LaTeX at the same time. But it's going to take a while to program it, unless you find it already done or you find someone else to do it (paying helps in finding, usually).
Everything is client-side, nothing on the server, no different reasonable options in this regard...
2. Linked page
If you are really worried about maintenance time then you can link to another page from the static HTML page, it may be updated automatically, which is great. Options are dblp and google scholar, among others. (e.g. Microsoft Academic Search)
The maintenance is zero, so there isn't anything more to reduce. This option works with static HTML with no Javascript, as opposed to the previous one.
3. Third party managed page
If you don't want to use that webspace provided by your organization, if you don't ever want to see any of the ugly HTML code, make design decisions with CSS, etc. and you don't want to do anything that even slightly resembles to programming but still have a nice webpage with your personal information, publications, etc. then let the professionals do the job.
There are several portals that can offer such a thing. Research Gate is the first one that comes to my mind, but I think LinkedIn provides a reasonably good page for academics and sure more people will be able to provide more examples.
And that's pretty much it.
We all would like to have robots that do everything for us, but the closest to that is option 2, with the robots that crawl the web and index the publications for their authors. Beware, though, that they may fail at finding some of the publications (specially when moving between institutions, and publishing with disjoint sets of authors).

There are several existing solutions for (1b); for instance, webgen, jekyll, nanoc. Jekyll especially is gaining traction due to native support in github.

I really miss the option to use a CMS like wordpress. If one is a bit tech-savy, getting a wordpress site online will take only a day or so (including writing content). In addition, maintenance is very low.

@PaulHiemstra If we are not going to use the very limited (in capabilities) hosting provided by our university (only static pages, .htaccess is the most fancy thing) then this question does not really belong to academia.

From my experience, I can recommend to stay away from both hand-made sites and general-purpose CMS.
OpenScholar seems to be a good fit. It is open source (based on Drupal), allegedly "easy to create and maintain" and certainly designed exactly for your/our use-case.

From OpenScholar's website: "OpenScholar is open source software built on top of Drupal." That sounds like it's using a CMS-like system to me. . . .

@aeismail: True, Drupal is a "full-blown" CMS. I don't know how light-weight and easy to use it is, say comparing to Wordpress or Joomla, and how much of the complexity is retained in OpenScholar. Sadly I can't find a demo.

Why do you think using general purpose CMS is a bad idea? Can you relate more of what you've experienced that makes you think so?

@LieRyan: Every system has its own hassles, but across the board the prohibitive factor (imho) is major maintenance and oftentimes usability issues. Try using Joomla. It seems that if you try to do everything, nothing "just works".

I'd discourage you from using any CMS backed by database --- keeping software stack up to date, coping with backup and migrations might be very cumbersome. Of course you can leave outdated CMS version or don't do backups... but this will bite someday, as someone break in. So really you need to keep the software up do date whether you change content or not.
I had some success with using a tools like pelican or sphinx (this documentation generator for python projects but works well for course materials, etc.). Both tools take input in reStructuredText and produce static HTML from it. You might code something similar from scrath using for example pandoc or docutils, that will take care for conversion between input format and HTML.
I like these tools because:

Input format is user readable, text based and easy to learn
I backup wepbage using tools I know (like git), or really just zip everything and store on some disk.
I don't need anything from website administrator --- just a plain webserwer.

It specifically decreases maintenance because:

Zero maintenance costs if you don't change the webpage, no need to update CMS and so on.
Very low maintenance costs when you just add some content to the webpage --- just regenerate HTML and you're done.
You can safely use outdated (but working) version of generator --- since there are no security bugs whatsoever.

I went this route and it seems to work well so far.


text:
What are the risks of doing a PhD in a new department?
I was recently admitted to a doctoral program to be part of their inaugural class for a new interdisciplinary science and engineering department. The program is located at a top-tier university in the United States and appears to be very well funded by the founding university.
The faculty that they have hired so far are all well established researchers in their respective fields. These faculty have also successfully brought the majority of their students and post-docs with them, so there should be no major loss of continuity as far as research is concerned.
My primary concerns are that:

the graduate curriculum itself is new
the program (outside of the reputation of the individual faculty/university itself) is currently not very well known. Will this look bad to prospective employers (both in industry and academic), or is the reputation of my faculty advisor more important?
professors may need to spend more time doing administrative activities for the new department

What other risks are associated with joining a new program, and are there any professional/academic advantages to doing so?

The risks are as you describe, although I suspect that the third item is not as serious (unless your advisor has a formal administrative role).
The pros are that you will have a lot more input into how the curriculum and the program is shaped. As a new department, people will try things, and not everything will work. There will be many opportunities to suggest improvements and how to do things differently.
If the parent university is well known, it's in their interest to make sure the new program succeeds, so you should also get some benefit from the level of attention paid by them. By bringing a number of faculty over, they've expressed "buy-in" to the new institute.

...if there is a parent university. Some new institutes (like Cornell NYC) do, others (like IST Austria) don't.


text:
Should I reply to Travel Grant Award Notification?
Do I reply to travel grant chair for notifying me approval of my travel grant award application for a conference? (Thanking him/her.. etc)
What is my appropriate action? Or is it not really expected and I should just follow instructions of submitting listed receipts to the specified person in email?

Best option is to respond very briefly. This is basic courtesy, to let them know you received the notification and will accept the travel grant. Of course, it is also wise to remember to submit the receipts as requested! The first is courtesy, the second business.

I don't think it's necessary, but my inclination is to just write a one or two sentence response, just saying "Thanks for the wonderful news.  I'm looking forward to the conference." This way they know you got the email and are still planning on attending.


text:
How can I sell independently created software to my university?
I am in a situation that I think is not uncommon nowadays.
I wrote software on my own time, by my own decision, and with my own resources during my undergrad career at a university in the US, and now I want to be monetarily compensated for it because my software is used on a regular basis by a department in the university. I have heard of a couple cases where a student wrote a program that he/she thought would be helpful to the university in some way, after which they purchased it because they also thought it was valuable.
I want to go through the same thing, but the head of the department seems to refuse to pay (or at least say they are unable to pay for it). They claim it was a "senior project" even though that is not true, but somehow that means they can't pay for it. I think the intellectual property and my work that went into the software is worth money, so I feel I should be compensated.
Since that department is already using it and finds it valuable, shouldn't they pay for the product? If they completely refuse, is it smart to take the software away?
EDIT for clarification:
Nothing has been signed. There have been no agreements written on paper that determine who has ownership. We have only spoken about this.
As a "trial period" I gave them the software's source so they could use it while I was away (because I graduated and moved away) and so I could make updates to the code. This was not a senior project. My work on this project had nothing to do with the university while I was writing it. The only relevance was that I intended to have it be used by the people at the university once it was finished.

"because my software is used on a regular basis by a department in the university" - under what terms are they using it now? Was there any agreement (implicit or otherwise) that they could use it, and was that agreement limited in any respect?

If you say "trial period", are there emails that document that you gave it to them as a trial period (that specifically use the word trial)?

If the department had nothing to do with it, why do they have it?  We're missing that part of the story.  Were you working under the guidance of a faculty member?

To reiterate that point: Is the "senior project" something supervised by the university? If so, did you sign any kind of contract for the project? At universities at my place, any such project or thesis invariably involves a signed agreement by the student that grants a perpetual, non-exclusive right to the university concerning any code or otherwise usable product produced during the project or thesis, for example.

You probably should give up the idea of getting money from your university about that.

The situation seems too subtle to get a definitive answer online. If the money you stand to make from the software warrants it, you should consult a copyright/intellectual property attorney. What you report as the University's view would mean they think they own the software in the United States. so if you ever want to sell it to anyone you should hire a professional to help you sort out ownership of the software.

I work for the language department at my university and have created several very useful software utilities over the last 2 years that has automated a third of the typical "help desk" job. I'm currently working on a more complete software package, and to ensure that I am compensated well (more than the minimum wage university student staff), I have decided to start my own business (LLC) for contracting purposes. This way, I can be contracted by the department for the software. This may be something you want to do to make your intentions more obvious and more 'legally-binding'.

@Saichan Did you put a copyright notice in the source code, splash screen, and About menu? If not, your case is weakened.

@Chris If you did any development or support while you were working in the lab(ie being paid by the university) then you may be in trouble. I would ask your boss and the university lawyer sign a disclaimer of intellectual property.

@RoboKaren The work I did for the previous 2 years was work I did for free essentially, because it also directly benefitted me as an employee of the department. However, the new system under the LLC is a rework of the old that introduces new features. The new system is contracted under the LLC. It was just a suggestion to the OP to do the same to make the line he wants to draw in terms of employment and payment more discernible.

For myself, part of the agreement when first signing contracts for school was that anything I created, (for schoolwork), was technically theirs. Primarily so they could use basically anything in advertising without having to deal with annoying legal issues. If I created software on my own time but took it to school and used it for schoolwork, I'm not sure I could still claim it as mine. If it had nothing to do with the university, how did they get it? Did you actually express the "trial" as a trial?

Off topic, but do you really not have exclusive rights to software you write as a final project? Seems like if you had two ideas, you'd then use the less lucrative one, that is, perhaps the worse idea, for your project. How does this not incentivize students to perform less than their best?

@RoboKaren Actually it is not weakened. By default code without an explicit license/copyright notice means that all the rights are reserved by the author to the extent permisssible by law. Moreover the problem is not really a copyright issue as other have noted but a licensing issue. AFAIK you surely cannot force the university to pay for the use they have made until now of your software (you gave them the product and explicitly allowed them to use the software, although only by spoken agreement). However I believe you ought to be able to change the terms from now on.

It is weakened as to the extent as to authorship is unknown without the declaration. The university could say that it was work for hire or done as part of your regular work responsibilities, and thus belongs to the university. The lack of such declaration greatly weakens your case. Remember, universities have very good lawyers on retainer.

According to this, students own the copyright on their works (in the US at least), but since you are trying to commercialize student work, it is less clear. You just need a professional attorney. http://www.onlinecolleges.net/15-copyright-rules-every-student-should-know/

I would suggest a different tactic altogether:
Give them a license to use the software as well as any and all updates for free. Support should not be free but done by others under your instruction. In return ask them to sign over any previously perceived ownership of intellectual property. Next ask that they help you by providing suggestions for improvements to your software. Sell it to every other university in the world.

If it's really that much better than the competition,  this is the right business plan. Treat them as your beta testers and reference account, and encourage them to tell everyone else how much they like it. Make the current situation work for you.

Let the wookie win.

This is possibly the worst advice here. due to the really really bad sentence " In return ask them to sign over any previously perceived ownership of intellectual property" In a dispute where they're claiming ownership where the OP may not wish them to claim ownership you're advising the first thing he should do is to agree with them in writing by asking them to sign over ownership.Worst plan imaginable.

@Murphy: You'd need a lawyer to word it properly, but it is entirely possible to have a contract where one party relinquishes a claim without the other party acknowledging that the claim was ever valid in the first place.

I wrote software on my own time, by my own decision, and with my own resources during my undergrad career at a university in the US
I want to go through the same thing, but the head of the department seems to refuse to pay (or at least say they are unable to pay for it) because the software was just a "senior project."

You have a disagreement about the copyright on this software. You say you wrote it completely independently, while they seem to assume that the project was part of some kind of undergrad project.
One interesting question is how the department initially started to use the software if it was just your own, completely independent, project. Under what circumstances did you give them access to the software? Under what agreement? How did they even know that this software exists? If you just went to them and told them "hey, I wrote this nifty tool for the problem you talked about in this course, care to start using it?", I think an argument could be made that they could reasonably assume the software to be made available free of charge. Usually, if one wants to sell something, one does not just give away the product and then, later on, starts talking about money.
In your edit, you say:

As a "trial period" I gave them the software's source so they could use it while I was away

Was it a "trial period" or a trial period? That is, did you just intend this as a trial period, or was it at least verbally made clear that you expect to be paid for this project down the road? Your post somehow alludes to me that you did not.

Since that department is already using it and finds it valuable, shouldn't they pay for the product?

Not necessarily. Open source and free software exists, so just that they are using something does not imply that you are entitled to getting paid. Further, if you in fact did work on this somehow connected to an university project, the legal situation gets muddy much more quickly than what you seem to assume.
Further, I should caution you that most customers, including universities, typically expect more than just a piece of running code when they actually pay for software. If exchange of money is involved, part of the agreement may be that you are supposed to be available for bug fixes, feature requests, and user trainings down the road (paid or unpaid, depending on agreement).

If they completely refuse, is it smart to take the software away?

Legally, you are likely free to do so. Technically, it may be hard to "remove" already deployed (in some grey-area legal situation) software. Even if somehow forbid them to use your software in the future, this sounds only like a good idea if you never need to deal with them again. You are likely going to be a very unpopular person in this department.

It was indeed a "trial period," only spoken out without any agreements on payment. I handled it poorly I suppose. At the time, I had no idea if I should demanding money so early, or if they would offer to pay after the software became very stable. So is it too late to ask to be compensated for the work I've already done?

@Saichan Legally, you are certainly free to still ask for money. Their willingness to pay will depend on many factors, though, including (1) how much they really need the software, (2) how much you ask for, (3) whether they honestly think it was part of a senior project, (4) and whether they think you somehow tried to get them started using your software and are now ransoming them by the threat of taking it away. So, in summary - some social skills will be required, as in most business interactions.

I'd up vote except for the last paragraph. Legally, I don't think he has a leg to stand on... and attempting to remove the code over their objections might even open him to vandalism charges.

@keshlam I am not convinced that the OP has legally no right to disallow further usage of software that he wrote, even if there was an understanding that the software was provided free-of-charge. At least within my jurisdiction, that is indeed something that sometimes happens. Of course "take it away" would mean sending a letter (e.g., via lawyer) asking them to uninstall, not hacking into their machines and deleting it himself - that he is most obviously not allowed to do.

A nitpick about the beginning of your answer: I think it's misleading to imply that this is a copyright issue. Based on my understanding of the question, the ownership of copyright in the software is not disputed. That rests with @Saichan. What is disputed is whether the university has a current license to use the software without paying Saichan for it, and if so, what the terms that license are.

@DavidZ if they think it's a senior project, aren't they owned by the university?

In addition to the other answers, I would like to specifically respond to one part of your question:

Since that department is already using it and finds it valuable, shouldn't they pay for the product?

Not only with respect to this university, but also concerning possible future customers of yours, I consider this stance to be a very unwise one to express. The issue is that it can easily be understood as

I let them use it for free because I didn't think it was valuable, but now that I see that they actually need it, I am going to start charging them for it.

That, in turn, means that you did not spend a certain amount of resources that you wanted to ammortize with the revenue from your software all along. Rather than that, it can be interpreted as waiting till your software (that the department seems to have assumed to be free) is in use (and possibly not easily replaceable), and once that has happened, you let the trap snap shut to make a few quick dollars.
I would consider this deeply unethical, and if anyone outside of the department learns of that, it certainly does no good for trusting in future software of yours. If I buy a future piece of software from you, how can I be convinced that it will not suddenly be severely restricted once you realize it is much more valuable than what you charged me?
It is bad enough that numerous companies in the real world already use this business model. Please don't become one of them.

...how can I be convinced that it will not suddenly be severely restricted once you realize it is much more valuable than what you charged me? Is not this how all business works? If you rent a place and a landlord figures out that his price is too low for the market, he is rising the price. If a seller figures out that he can charge you more, without being afraid of competitors, he will charge you more. The price of the product is determined by demand and supply, so yes, if there is a thing that is hard for you to replace and is really valuable, do not be surprised if the price will go up.

@SalvadorDali: If the price can suddenly go up, that drastically reduces the value of the product, and thereby the demand, because customers cannot rely on the fact that the price will remain at least to some extent stable. For some products, this is even so essential at least in some places, laws regulate how far prices are allowed to suddenly rise (you wouldn't want people to become homeless just because the landlord realizes they can charge more). Lastly, business works by charging the price of manufacture plus some revenue. Sudden jumps in price make it blindingly obvious to customers ...

... that what is charged is not manufacturing costs plus "some reasonably deserved margin of revenue", but rather an arbitrarily high amount that the vendor apparently thinks they can make customers believe is justified. At that point, we come back to the loss of trust I was referring to in my answer.

Only limited amount of products are price regulated (and sadly the landlord can raise a price as much as he wants at least in US). If the price you pay is a price of manufacture + some revenue, then in case of iphone where the price of the manufacturing is 30-40$, your some revenue is like 50% (taking away price for IP/patents/salaries for devs/designers). You can not see high fluctuations mostly because of the competitors. Once you enter a market where big competitors can suddenly appear/disappear, you will see sudden jumps (oil and gas, with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran).

@SalvadorDali "If you rent a place and a landlord figures out that his price is too low for the market, he is rising the price." And then, in Austria and Switzerland, you call your lawyer and the problem will go away very quickly.

@SalvadorDali No, a landlord may not raise the price as much as they want in all of the US. First, the landlord can never raise the price on the stuff you already agreed about; if you signed a year-long lease at some price, the landlord can't say "it's valuable so pay me more." Second, there are cities with rent control laws that prevent landlords from raising the price excessively.

@SalvadorDali It's not about raising the price once something becomes valuable. It's about raising the price once someone has "entangled" themselves with your product. For instance, if gmail suddenly become a paid-only service, people that had expected a free product to remain free would be put into a nasty situation.

Unfortunately you have painted yourself in the corner. You are facing two very prominent problems here:

Its one thing to get people to use/like a piece of software. Its a totally different ballgame if they need to pay for it. Going commercial changes everything, permanently, no going back. It also changes peoples perception of the usefulness of your software.
Your actions may be perceived as variation of a bait and switch fraud. As such people in charge can react to this very unfavorably. Many times this would lead them to sever contact with you, possibly even in spite, regardless of cost.

Its not so easy to get people to give out money. Especially by changing the deal retroactively.

This answer, short as it is, deserves many more upvotes.

Senior Projects can be rough from an IP standpoint.  I'm not speaking as a lawyer, but I am speaking as someone who manages many senior projects and is in the middle of working out the IP status of the students with our univ counsel.
For your specific case, we're missing some of the specific details, like exactly what were the resources put into the project, etc, and exactly what were the circumstances and communications involved (please don't provide that as comment -- I'm not particularly interested, but will try to cover a variety of scenarios and you can place yourself in whatever box you see as appropriate).
My recommendation is if you worked on this FOR a specific lab or department, and they helped you evaluate and debug, and no discussions of ownership took place a priori, and the ONLY possible users are the people you've been working with, then I would allow them to keep using your code without charge REGARDLESS of whatever legitimate IP claims you actually have, and chalk it up to experience and lessons learned.  If the groups needs any further development or support, let them know that you're willing to handle it on a consultant basis.  Note this has nothing to do with what's legal or what your real claims are.  It has to do with professionalism, making payments and deliverables clear before work is started, leaving behind a swath of people who feel good about working with you as opposed to people who regret having worked with you.
If you really plan to develop your code, improve it, and market and sell it beyond the boundaries of that one department, then there may be clear disadvantages to just handing them your IP, and you should start a business and consult with a lawyer.  Personally, I would think in that case your best bet, or at least a good option, is to formally grant the users non-exclusive use of the code at no cost, just to make it clear that you are holding on to your IP and not giving it away.
In all cases, you should make sure that if money is going to be made in the future with this code that you will be part of it or all of it!  Thus, even if you decide to just let the department continue to use it, and have no plans to ever sell it elsewhere, you might want to go through the exercise of establishing a license, just to establish ownership in case the department ever wants to sell it on their own.
Of course, getting the right sort of licensing contract might just mean hiring a lawyer, and thus spending money.  You'd have to figure out if that's worth it, unless there are some kind of templates out there.
In our own design course, we certainly don't want anyone taking advantage of our students from an IP perspective.  That said, we have "customers" for every prototype we generate, and if we cut off our customers from the fruits of the project, we wouldn't have many future customers.  We have had IP come out of the class, and some of the patents have been assigned to the university with students as inventors if the university has contributed substantial resources to the project, or if a faculty member is one of the inventors.  Others, where the university has not contributed much in the way of resources, go to the students, who are free to do with it as they chose.  Some have spun out businesses.  In either case, we would NEVER cut the customer out from at least being able to USE the prototype.  It would be shoddy.

"Senior Projects can be rough from an IP standpoint." While correct, I should say that the OP specifically said that this was not a senior project - this is only the argument of the department.

Considering that it's a premise of the question that the software was not actually a senior project, I don't think this is a useful answer. (Though I see that, at the time you posted the answer, this wasn't clearly stated in the question.)

[Putting on my department chair hat]
We're often cautioned by the administration to avoid conflicts of interest. This makes it difficult for us to sign a contract with someone who is not at arms-length relationship from us. A former (or current) student is problematic from this perspective.

If you were selling a commercial product and we happened to be just one of many clients, we could argue to our auditors that there's no special interest involved -- your product is simply the best on the marketplace.
This is not the case in your situation.
It would also be different if we hired you as a work-for-hire student (or non-student) worker. Then we would own the product of your work. To the auditor, we simply hired the best student/worker that was available, paying the fair-market wage for that type of work.

But you are presenting a third scenario where you want the department to license your software for an undisclosed amount. How do we justify to the auditor that this is a fair price and that it isn't simply a payoff to you?
The people who suggest that you give the software to the university for free and instead contract your labor as support are using a variation of #2. You would have difficulty asking for more than the normal student wage, however.
This doesn't solve the question of who owns the intellectual property rights to the software. If you weren't a student worker, then the university usually has little claim but you need to check your university's IP regulations. That being said, you don't want to burn bridges. The most amenable suggestion would be to tell the Chair that the software they are using is copyrighted by you and that you will allow them to use it for free, but they cannot redistribute it in any form.

If you have previously given the software to them for free, with no license agreement in place, I don't think you can charge them for continuing to use those copies. You could charge for support, but they can always decide to support it themselves...

This is almost certainly wrong. If there was no license in place, and no explicit right to for the University to use student work in the University's rules, then he can ask them to stop using it. If they don't, then they are likely violating his copyright and can be subject to lawsuit for damages. He probably can't sue them before asking them to stop since there was an implied license to use it when he gave it to them. But this answer is probably not correct. We'd have to know much more to say anything close to this.

Without a license, there is only copyright, and if he gave them authorized copies at some point I don't think there's a way to take them back. He can forbid their distributing the software further. He can refuse to support/enhance unless they buy new copies (which may carry a license). But unless the school took the code without his permission.... Of course, simply threatening to publicly complain that the school swiped a student's work might embarass them into either paying a small fee or no longer using that tool... but blackmailing your own school may not be a career-enhancing move.

@BillBarth: Saichan is claiming this is not "student work product" (which becomes very dicey so far as intellectual property rights and which the University may be able to claim ownership of as such) but rather work done by someone who also happened to be a student. Simply put, if he gave verbal permission for use and presented them with copies for use, he has given those copies away to them (see keshlam's comment). You can't retroactively claim license terms on something someone already owns. At best you could offer to sell them a new version, or a service contract, or more copies.

A number of issues yet to clarify.

Were you at any time, an "Employee".
What basis really exists for classifying the work as a Senior Project ?

This should be black and white. Can they sanction you academically if you sue ?

Were you "supervised" in any way during the development, was it truly independent ?
What rights did you sign away upon enrolment ?
Is the source in their hands ? What copyright exists ? Can they alter the code to create a derivative work that differs substantially ?

Your only other course of action would be to issue them with a non-exclusive license, and incorporate, transferring the rights to the corporation.

First, I would check the IP guidelines/regulations of the university. Many institutes, university etc explicitly deal with such situations about patents, software etc. If you find any relevant part pro or contra, you have at least something to talk about with your department and with IP office of university.
Second, even if you own the copyright and all the rights, you may not get money out of them. Not because you don't deserve, but because you are in a tricky position now and most probably you don't have the power to go full legal bottle (would it pay off). What you can do however to clear up the legal status, and make them sign a contract that they can use the software for free (maybe restricted to this version, so they actually have to buy any latter upgrade), but they acknowledge your rights, they do not give it anyone outside of the institute or given labs and they grant you to sell the software to other universities.
If the software worth anything, you can make much more money selling it to other labs, and the people who use it know will be your free advertisements. You can explicitly ask them to reference you whenever they use your software.
If you offer this option to them,  they don't loose face, they don't need to pay any money, so it is a very smooth solution for them, too, on long term it and has merits to you, too, and you don't need to hire a full legal team.

What's their incentive for signing a contract like this?

@Mehrdad If OP is correct, and actually have the rights for the software, then it cleans up the situation and legalize it without any cost. If OP is wrong about the situation, and he has no rights, off course there is no incentives to the univ to sign anything. These kind of contracts are rather common when someone develops a software related to his research with the consent of his supervisor or someone wants to take out his existing code and continue development as a commercial code (see e.g Gaussian).

I feel you wrote the software for the university and out of your own curiosity, but you didn't sign anything and now you regret the time you spent on it.
Actually, it happened to me and finally I abandoned it. But you said:

Since that department is already using it and finds it valuable, shouldn't they pay for the product?

You can't force them to pay for something if they didn't agree it before, but in such situations, if you think they really need your software then you can do the deal.
You are the owner of the software and if it really worth, customers pay for it, jut advertise it and negotiate on it as the university is one of the customers. If they get convinced they will buy it, if not you don't give it to them (However, you still regret the time you spent on it, but it was your own risk.  When we don't specify our purpose of something and we don't sign an agreement, we should expect such things to happen.)