text:
Should I contact the search panel before applying for a tenure-track position?
I'm applying for tenure-track jobs in the US and I wanted to know about the American etiquette concerning contacting the search committee before submitting an application. In the UK, where I am based, it seems to be encouraged for job-seekers to contact the department ahead of submitting an application to ask about the advertised post (and get your name recognised) — but I have heard in some circles (still with limited US experience) that Americans don't do this.
Should I get in touch with the individuals (presumably the chair of the search committee) named in the job advert? Would it be appropriate to ask why the position has become available/what specifically they are looking for and what else should I be asking - or would this be considered a faux pas?

Do not do this. If an applicant were to contact me, I would not respond. Instead, contact faculty in your research area in the department who might be interested in your work and in hiring you.

@MoisheKohan, that's an answer, not just a comment.

Generally, that contact info is presented to give you a contact point regarding the status of your application or to provide any necessary updates or such.

That's a "don't overthink it" situation. Ultimately, you will be evaluated based on your track record and application materials, and that's where you should invest your time.

Should I get in touch with the individuals (presumably the chair of the search committee) named in the job advert?

You may. That is why they are named in the advertisement.

Would it be appropriate to ask why the position has become available

No.  Ask them for information that is actually useful.  Positions can be available because someone left (common), because they need more people (rarely), or because some dean told them to advertise a position they cannot afford to fill (more common than it should be, and they will never tell you that).  If someone's leaving, that could be delicate information you'd best not get involved in.

what specifically they are looking for

If you are 100% certain that information is not in the job ad, in the university's strategic plan, or on the department website, then yes, you should definitely ask.
If you can ask a question that:

There is no other way to get the answer.
It's not rude.
Will help you decide you don't want to work there.

Then I strongly recommend asking.  Finding out you don't want to work there before filling out the paperwork is a massive time saver.
If they do not like getting polite questions by email, then they are probably not good people to work with.

I think this answer contains the correct elements, but the beginning really ignores the full context in the question to the extent that it's misleading. Should you send an email to ask about a posting and "to get your name recognized"? An emphatic "no"-- emails to the committee should really be reserved for genuinely non-routine questions, the default should be to try to avoid sending one if possible. Everything from "If you are 100% certain..." to the end seems to capture this idea cleanly.

I work in a research-oriented top-50 (actually, less) math department in the US. I have served on hiring committees (both postdoctoral and regular) in the past.
Do not contact search committees this way. If an applicant were to contact me (as a member of a search committee), I would not respond (but would be annoyed). Instead, contact faculty in your research area in the department who might be interested in your work and in hiring you. Simply inform them about your research interests and that you are applying for a job in their department. If they are interested in your application, they will contact the search committee, which will improve your chances.

"Do not contact search committees" ... "contact faculty in your research area in the department"  Usually those are the same people.

@AnonymousPhysicist Let's put it this way: Out of I think 40 places I applied last season, maybe 4 max had members of the search committee that were the faculty most aligned with my research. The place that hired me was not amongst them.

@AnonymousPhysicist: Typically, these are not the same people (at least, in math departments, at least in my 30+ years of experience as a faculty member and as a job applicant).


text:
Was I unreasonably left out of author list?
Two years ago, I was about three weeks (fortunately I keep notes) into a postdoc research position with a federal government organization, and I was excited to participate in a meeting with a federal researcher who was asking for help with ideas after a paper was rejected by journal reviewers for lacking any kind of validation of the results or approach.
During the meeting, the researcher presented the model, and I pointed out that rather than constructing an empirical distribution for P(y=1|x), the method was estimating P(x|y=1), which none of the internal or journal reviewers had noticed. I suggested two ways out: sort it out with Bayes' theorem or take an entirely different approach by creating a binary dataset with y taking on 0 or 1 instead of just 1, which was possible due to the sampling scheme.
The researcher took my second idea and quickly published a paper using that idea and included a long list of other folks in the author list and acknowledgments, but there is no mention of my contribution or name.
Now I am writing a paper about my own research that implements the same idea, but with substantial enhancements, and as I contemplate the literature review, I am extremely aware that I would be citing my own idea as the foundation for my approach, but with no obvious way to let the world know that it was my idea or that I contributed in any way.
A footnote explaining my role in the cited research seems weak because it would lack corroboration (unless I put the federal researcher's name on the author list [their only role was providing the dataset, which anyone can ask for and receive], a topic that is a whole other can of worms...).
Reading the responses here and here suggests that perhaps this is a more dramatic ethical issue than I expected (e.g., mentions of plagiarism).
I am also hoping to move on from being a postdoc, so I'm trying to accumulate recommendations so I can take the next steps in my career. I am working with the same federal researcher on another project (that they lead) and I get lots of credit for my ideas that have greatly modernized the approach and for teaching the team all about it. I have been expecting to rely on this researcher for glowing and detailed recommendations, which makes this a bit more difficult...
Broadly, this research is in the area of biostatistics and software development.

A footnote explaining my role in the cited research seems weak because it would lack corroboration --- Just an idea (without knowing the conventions of your field or the personalities of those involved), but perhaps you could include a footnote saying that the idea occurred to you in conversation with XX about YY problem, which XX was able to successfully use [or to give XX more credit (to lessen potential fallback): "XX found a way to successfully implement"] in ZZ paper, and the object of the present paper is to further develop this idea by applying it to show . . .

From what you've written (which may be incomplete), it honestly doesn't sound like you played a big role in terms of the science itself. (By which I mean, it doesn't sound like anybody would have any reason to remember you as, say, "the guy who suggested using Bayes's theorem for this problem".) So I would caution against accusations of plagiarism here unless you know there were others with equal or lesser contributions than you who nevertheless received credit, and you have reason to believe you were omitted deliberately. And even then, it might be too petty of a concern.

Since when do you get acknowledgement/authorship for pointing out a mistake in a paper ? Made in a one-off meeting on the topic ? If you complain about this, don't be surprised if people will stop talking to you. Back when I still did science, I had a wrong distribution fitted somewhere. Three other academics didn't see it either, the 4rth one pointed it out, everyone thought "that explains a lot" and went their merry way. I doubt the professor was still thinking about this by the time they left the building. You could ask them to see if they even remember and add that to your question.

Are you worried that that your methods will be viewed as plagiarism of the paper you contributed to without credit?

@Marianne013 An acknowledgement seems fine to me for pointing out a mistake. Not mandatory, but a reasonable gesture (and honestly I'd think less of an author that didn't add an acknowledgement for someone who helped them). Coauthorship seems excessive, unless the mistake completely invalidated the paper.

Getting input from fellow researchers is a common thing. There is nothing wrong with building on discussed ideas. This is one way how research progresses, as you have just experienced. Acknowledging that in some way is fair, of course.
But sometimes, it happens that you overestimate the input you gave. Authors of papers usually thought a lot about their work, so many ideas and approaches are already in their heads. Additionally, implementing an idea or adapting experiments and data analysis also takes a lot of effort most of the time. From the perspective of your discussion partners, your input then might be very small, too small to result in co-authorship. Butterfly effects like that happen all the time. I advise to exercise this change in perspective to answer your question yourself, as it is hard to tell from the distance.
Usually, when something as I describe above happens to me, I am actually quite happy that I was able to help. Well, occasionally only after an initial phase of disappointment, I admit. It also depends if you have reasons to suspect that your discussion partners have a tendency to treat people in an unfair way. Cooperation should be founded on mutual trust. If you trust these people, then you can assume that they acted with no malicious intent. And you might even be able to ask them about their perspective on your contribution.

No, I don't think you were unreasonably left out of the author list, assuming I'm reading the situation correctly from your description.
I have several times made comments of this magnitude on other people's papers regarding mistakes in their statistical analyses. Similarly, I have had reviewers of papers I have submitted that made comments of this magnitude and made corresponding adjustments in the manuscript. Other places that you might see this sort of thing happen would be in discussions at poster presentations or during/after a talk at a conference or speaking visit. These formal and informal opportunities to comment on someone else's work are not bids for authorship. None of these circumstances led to changes in authorship in my experience. If they take your feedback and improve their work, then that's just taking ordinary feedback as part of the scientific process.
In some rare cases, contributions like these might lead to authorship, but not from just the simple suggestion alone. Instead, the way it would happen would be for that one comment to lead to further involvement in the project. For example, if I were to suggest a different statistical analysis, and the current authors invited me to run the analysis myself, write the methods and results portions of the paper that involved that analysis, and to further review the remainder of the manuscript, I would certainly expect to be made an author.
Unless I'm missing something, it seems that all you've done is to identify an error. It may be a simple error or one ultimately resulting in a profound reinterpretation of the results, but still, it sounds like something of the magnitude that a peer reviewer should have found or that would have come up in one of the other settings I've mentioned.

Actually, I think you are wrong here. The error had been identified (no validation) and the paper rejected. The OP claims to have made two suggestions, one of which led to success. Providing "head slapping" insight is pretty big in some theoretical fields. I'll guess that our "action advice" to the OP would be about the same, though.

@Buffy All I can do is speak from my own experience in situations that sound similar to me to what was described. It's certainly possible the insight was more profound than I am appreciating, and it would have probably have been appropriate to offer an acknowledgement in any case, but I think it's a bit of a leap to think this is so crucial to be worth authorship by itself. And yes, as you point out, not much productive to be done with it now, anyways.

You could cite the paper you mentioned and add another reference "personal communication" with you as the first author and the federal author as the second one. This links you to idea, it makes clear there is no official record, and it does not claim authorship of the other paper.
Example
We test our hypothesis by creating a binary dataset
with y taking on 0 or 1 instead of just 1 as done in [1,2].

References
[1] Chappy Hickens, Federal Agent: *Personal communication, adding this idea to [2]*
[2] Federal Agent et al: *Different topic, using idea with y taking on 0 or 1*

That's probably what the Federal Agent should have done as well. Giving co-authorship to OP might have been a bit much.

It certainly seems like the paper has your "fingerprints" on it and that you made an important intellectual contribution. Yes, I'd call it plagiarism if you weren't at least acknowledged and probably an author.
My field is math/cs, however, where a few minutes of input can have major impacts. I don't know how similar things work in biostatistics, but for theoretical work, I'd think they are similar. Some people think that it is "effort" or "time spent" that makes you an author. But really it is who contributed the ideas. Especially the crux ideas. It feels like you qualify.
I can't, however, suggest a solution. Think long term, however. If this turns out to be a single "glitch" in your career you can probably leave it behind you. But future "collaboration" with such people isn't advised.

It sounds to me like OP made an improvement using a method that should be basic knowledge for a (bio)statistician. I think that in most cases more is needed to warrant authorship (for example actually doing the analysis for the coworker). If I got a penny (or authorship) every time I pointed out a mistake or made a suggestion to a co-worker in a group meeting I would be rich.

@Louic, certainly true for some interactions, but I read this one differently. Missed by reviewers, etc. Might have been the crux. It wasn't pointing out a mistake, but pointing to a solution. Quite different.

It really doesn't sound like this was some kind of genius idea that the OP gave to call this plagiarism.  It really sounds like many, many other researchers would have quite likely come up with the exact same "solutions" if they had a mixup between P(x | y) vs. P(y | x) pointed out to them. As such, claims of plagiarism seem kind of petty (is the next generation of scientist really going to look back and think you had some massive role here?) and might even reflect poorly on the person claiming it.

It would have been prudent of the authors to have mentioned you in Acknowledgements but take this as a learning experience:

Always consider inviting colleagues as co-authors, if they show interest and come with valuable inputs.
Be aware whenever you are about to hit the "submit" button: Is there anyone I have forgotten to acknowledge?
If you ever feel cheated for a co-authorship, let it pass but do blacklist the offenders; the tit-for-tat strategy from game theory works nicely in this domain.

No. It does not appear to me that you were unreasonably excluded.
In addition to the excellent answers, it is also worth mentioning that different fields have very (very, very) different author inclusion expectations.
For example, in my experience, biologists tend to include several --perhaps too many-- authors. It is simply a matter of culture. Compare that with pure maths, which is the opposite.
Perhaps you were coming from a more biology background/culture? Whereas your collaborators were more statistics/comp sci, and never even thought about including you as a minor contributor.

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text:
What should I do if my parents are forcing me to study a career I don't want?
I want to study biotechnology and become an engineer. I'm a straight A's student and as the eldest daughter I'm quite disciplined. However, my parents don't want me to study that career and are forcing me to study instead finances. Reasons are that I have the "obligation" to continue the family's business, and that studying biotechnology on a nearby city would be too expensive even thought it's a public university.
I have already talked with my mom and just expressed her my feelings and wishes but she told me I was being ungrateful and selfish, and that I wouldn't last long on the cruel outside world so I should probably stick with a career that already has for me a planned success.
The thing is that no matter how good it sounds to stay I just feel miserable about it. I wish to become a scientist, to create new things and help others with my knowledge, to make history, and, forgive me if this sounds cocky, I know I have the potential to do so much more than just stay on an office.
I told her that I was considering just leaving and live on my own if the economical burden was a problem but she then started to scold me for having such a naive and foolish thought. That she knows best for me and that I shouldn't do something so stupid out of whim. That between all my sisters I was the best "shot" they had to push this family up to riches.
I'm considering now moving out as soon as I finish high school but the thought of me being wrong just crawls on me every night, what should I do?

If you are still in high school, then the question concerns undergraduate admissions, which is not in the scope of Academia. I sympathize with your family dilemma, though, and hope you find someone who can help.

In which culture are you? In mainstream Western culture, your parents' expectations are unreasonable; in other cultures, they might be reasonable, but it might be an option to leave that culture altogether.

Need a lot more information for a good answer,  What country are you located in?  How would you/your parents pay for college, if it isn't paid for by the government?  Could you get scholarships, grants, or loans to pay for it?  In your country/academic culture, is it acceptable to work for a period between high school & college?  And perhaps most important, in your country, can your parents legally force you to do this?

Since this is more interpersonal issues SE than Academia question, I can only recommend this question be migrated there. As a side note, perhaps there is something that can be done to  both let you peacefully pursue your goals and to reduce the stress of your parents. 1) bioengineering could be a quite well-rewarded career depending on where exactly you do it, which could be a help to your family's business every now and then, and 2) maybe any of your other sisters does show interest in what your parents expect and her potential plans are more aligned with their wishes.

Let me just say that while this site may not be a perfect fit for your question, this is a wonderfully great question. Congratulations!

@Gnudiff I'm hesitant to migrate this question to Interpersonal SE because, given the policies there, the answers already given here would be probably deleted, which can be a pity. Since the question is already closed here, I suggest Anemix01 to ask a new question there if they wish.

You are presumably an adult, you should not do something so important to your life as studying only for your parents wishes. Guilt-tripping children is very bad parenting, you should not feel ashamed to do your own thing.
However, before you start doing your own thing, think about what the consequences could be. Can you afford studying without your parents help?  Can you afford being at war with your family? Is there some sort of compromise you can find with your parents? Those questions only you can answer, and you (unfortunately) have to consider them. But never feel ashamed for studying what you want to.

@R..: I disagree. First, I do think it's about undergrad, next, your statement is wrong in my country. Finally, yes, I am very much thinking about lifestyle costs.

I deleted the comment because I missed that OP is still in HS and just about to start college (undergrad). Where are you that non-funded grad science programs are considered legitimate?

@R..: Western Europe. Since you emphasized Science: Is there in your experience a difference in funding between Science and non-Science studies?

Yes, sadly most non-science/math grad programs in the US are pay-your-own-way or have only very limited support, compared to fully supported being the norm for math and science.

@R..: Okay, I think in terms of funding and legitimacy, here all grad programs are like your non-science programs. (However, for most people, education is free.)

Yeah, that last part is what makes the big difference. :-)

@R..: Well, not for all, though:)

Though possibly somewhat out of scope for this site, as I assume it relates to undergraduate studies, here are my two cents anyway, as I sympathize with your dilemma, and have, sadly, seen it time and time again.
First of all, going into university studies without having your heart in it, is rarely a good idea. This is a common source of burn-out for students - if you don't have an inner drive, it can be quite difficult to become a successful student. Keeping that in mind, my first suggestion would be to try and convince your parents that biotechnology can be a good idea. But how?
They seem to be quite keen that earning potential for your future career is important - well, biotechnology is exactly that. Biotech-engineers in industry can potentially rake in quite sizeable salaries, and since stuff like personalized medicine is only going one way - up - this is likely to continue. Try and find the average salaries of graduates from the program you want to enlist in, and show this to your parents. If you don't know where to look, try and write to the admissions office.
Good luck!

I'm going to approach this from a different angle.
Why do you parents think the family business is a guaranteed success, and what do they think a finance degree will contribute?
There is a long, long list of well-established businesses which fail because the person (or people) in charge don't run it well. Presumably it is currently successful because your father is good at running it. There is no guarantee that you would be any good at all at it.
In any case, the techniques you would learn in a finance degree are incredibly unlikely to be applicable to any business which is not a multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation. In a small business, simple life experience is more likely to be useful, and that you should learn on the job by shadowing your father.
If she thinks you can't survive in the outside world, you aren't the right person to run the company anyway. There is no job more stressful than being responsible for an entire company. If she doesn't think you're tough enough to survive a uni course, you're not the right person to run a company.
And if you can, and you can prove you're a success with your own ideas, perhaps with a degree under your belt you might be more inclined to try working in the family business.

Many of the answers respond from a Western perspective. Western culture (generally speaking) values individual freedom and personal autonomy. As you can see, many Western people here are horrified at the thought that your parents would have any say in your life, once you turn 18. (Indeed, if you're coming from a Western culture, I'd be inclined to agree with them!)
If on the other hand you are coming from a non-Western culture, I would guess that you are being tugged in two different directions, to be loyal and obedient to your parents from your home culture, and to be a free and autonomous individual, perhaps based in part on the pull from Western culture (and, perhaps, based on the idealized version of Western culture presented in Western media!).
As a person, you'll need to think carefully about how to proceed. There is no right and wrong answer. If you're coming from a non-Western culture, I would just caution that you be sensitive to the consequences of any decisions you take. A common trope in Western fiction is that the protagonist succeeds immediately once she begins to believe in herself (for a recent example, see Captain Marvel). But life is not a movie—even in the West it's an overly simplistic approach to the way the world works.
If you would like to learn more about the pluses and minuses of various cultural values, I think that the work of Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede does a very good job of presenting an even-handed analysis (especially their book Cultures and Organizations). You could also watch movies about immigrants and the children of immigrants (such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding or The Joy Luck Club) as a way to think about how other people navigate between two cultural worlds.

Your parents don't owe you any support after you are 18.  You don't owe them obedience either.
My advice is to either work things out, or just do your own thing.  If they are paying for school (or living expenses) than it is reasonable for them to dictate what they spend on.
P.s.  Finance is actually not that bad.  Pretty useful and portable across different industries (to include pharma).

That depends entirely on the location. In Germany your parents owe you an education (by law), including potentially going to university, or until you are 25. You don't owe them anything after you turn 18, though. I'm sure there are cultures where the norms or laws are exactly the opposite, you continue owing your parents, but they don't owe you anything.

@Grapher At some point if your parents get old and need expensive care, you might find that in Germany, you do owe them.

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What is the best way to explain unrelated work in a Masters application?
I graduated in 2016 with degrees in Law and Arts, with Arts majors of International Relations and Criminology. Since then, I have been working as a corporate lawyer (specifically, insurance).
I have realised I don't want to do this long-term, and am applying for Masters degrees in the field of political science / international relations / public policy.
I have decent academics and plenty of relevant extra-curriculars from my undergraduate degree, but I am not sure how to best explain the last 3 years?
I am based in Australia and applying for coursework Masters programs in Europe and the US

"I did some stuff and figured out I liked other stuff more, so now I want to get a Masters to do said other stuff." Just be honest, there is no shame in changing directions, especially not that early in your career. If you can point out how the experience in the last three years will help you in your new plans, even better.

It is unclear whether you are applying for a coursework Masters or a research Masters. If it is a research Masters, applying for a project that straddles across three disciplines seems unlikely (political science/international relations/public policy).
Coursework Masters tend to not have a high selection process as coursework Masters tend to be funded by the student compared to a research Masters.
So if it is a research Masters that you are applying for, then evidence of the ability to do research would tend to be the focus. If you have done an honour thesis during your law degree, that would be significant useful. If you have done extensive research and wrote long form analysis as part of your role as a corporate lawyer, then that would be relevant too. Some lawyers have written submissions or in-house publications, so that would be good evidence of your work.
Being able to show that you are able to engage with difficult political science and public policy issues would be useful as well.  You have done international relations in your undergrad but you may not be as convincing in the areas of political science and public policy especially at a research Masters level. Extra-curriculars would not be that convincing, unless it is extra-curriculars that has produced good work such as an editor of a student journal or publications that potential supervisors that are able to examine.

Thanks for the advise! It's coursework masters I am applying for (24mths with the final 6mths being a thesis), but Masters with scholarships as I don't have the $$$ to self fund, so I expect they will be fairly competitive.


text:
Who should be author in an application note
Work leading to the application note
During the c(o)urse of my PhD studies, I have written some analysis tools. I later collaborated with another PhD student to developed a proper analysis application. We then wrote an application note, to publish it in an journal. A third PhD student provided us with data, did an analysis using out tool and wrote the corresponding methods section in the application note.
The problem with authorship
By the rules of the journal, there should be three persons as authors: us three PhD students (Contributed work, and involved in draft). But as it is custom, is proposed an author list including us PhD student, the respective supervisors and the head of our research group/PI
However, my supervisor wants me to only include two PhDs and himself as last author. It seems quite important to him that the author list is short. Additionally, he wants to submit the paper himself to the journal. He has little knowledge about our work, nor does he understand the reasoning behind the analysis performed.
His sole contribution was to review the draft, so that all technical passages are now very understandable, as we explain our work to a scientific layman.
What I am asking myself currently

This is my first publication and I wonder if the demands oft my supervisor (him submitting to the journal, claiming to be the only "guest author") are justified, given the nature of his contribution?
Given this context, who should be author?

On a side note: While writing this, I also realize that the relation to my direct supervisor is quite toxic...
Edit:
We three PhD students are not in the same Departement.

Discuss the issue with the other two students. See what advice they have. Lobby them for your position if you like.

I should edit this for the tyop, but I love the idea of "the curse of my PhD studies"

"my supervisor wants me to only include two PhDs and himself as last author. It seems quite important to him that the author list is short." -> if it's so important to him, his wish can easily be satisfied by letting the three of you be the authors.

Seriously there's no more reason to restrict the list of authors to 3 than to 2 or to 4, did he give any reason why he wants it this way?

@Erwan: Not really. Just that is better to have a short author list for such papers, as it makes each contribution more valuable. At the same time he states, he has no clue about such papers and did never pupish such a paper before. I assume, he wants to be last author. Nearly every other supervisor would be higher in hirachy and the render him not last author

Authorship customs tend to be very field-specific, but I've never heard of discarding a co-author from a paper just for the sake of having a shorter list of authors. This sounds ridiculous: following this reasoning your supervisor could as well decide to be the sole author of the paper!
It's common in many fields to add a supervisor as co-author (usually the last one), even if their contribution is very limited indeed. However good authorship practice recommend that every co-author should have played a significant role in the paper. So in theory you are right: if anybody should be removed from co-authorship, it's the supervisor himself.
Needless to say, it's completely unethical to deprive an actual co-author of the credit.
If there is any room for argument with this strange request, I suggest the following: check a few recent issues of this journal and count for each paper the number of authors. You should be able to easily prove that papers with more than three authors are common and there's no reason to discard anybody.

Thanks for you Answer. I did as you suggested. In general one will find paper with similar scope and several authors, and some with only two authors.


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Ws on transcript affecting admission to engineering masters?
I have a 3.67 GPA at Rutgers in Materials Engineering and I plan on going to UConn for a masters in Mechanical Engineering since my job after graduation is more aerospace and mechanical engineering ( I am working for Pratt & Whitney) and I am more interested in the crossovers between MechE and MSE. However I have some W's on my transcript. One was a Matlab course my freshmen year I took that I hated and dropped a week after the withdrawal deadline (wasn't needed for my major). Another was during my junior year when I did a full time internship and this was an elective in industrial engineering for systems and reliability engineering. The course was in the evening but at a horrible time after work and I disliked it by the middle of the semester and I didn't have an interest in the material anyway. I also withdrew from 2 major classes because of courseload problems one semester my senior year but I took them the next semester and got an A in both. I dropped a graduate level MSE class in thermo recently because the course subject matter was dry (I don't like phase diagrams and chemical thermo too much) so I dropped it; I took the class originally to see if I would like MSE at the graduate level despite my career path moving towards mechanical engineering just to get a feel for things.
I anticipate doing well on the GRE and I can have many letters of recommendation.
Will these W's hurt my chances of being accepted into the UConn engineering masters program?

Could you explain "W"?

Rutgers and UConn are universities, right?

A W is a withdrawal from a course, and yes those are both universities

So what does "withdrawal" exactly mean? Do you have to register for courses and if you change your mind you obtain this "grade"? Does it have any implications? ..You might want to clear your question up for the international audience.

In the USA, students have a grace period of sorts at the beginning of a semester/quarter during which they can drop and add classes on a whim (more or less), with no penalty. After this period a student can withdraw from a course without affecting their GPA, and it shows up on a transcript as "W". Some institutions have a WF or WP, to indicate if the course was dropped with a failing a grade or passing grade.

While it is impossible to know what is in the minds of an admissions committee, I would think a few W's shouldn't matter much as long as your GRE scores are strong and your letters are positive. However, I would consider briefly addressing those withdrawals in your personal statement in a positive way (ie, you preferred another course vs you hating a course).
Basing this on a brief stint on a medical school admissions board in the USA.


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Teaching subjects as an instructor which I scored average grades in
As a final year PhD student, I have been asked to teach a short introductory course on solid mechanics for undergrad students. Now, my PhD research has been applied mechanics where I developed tools and carried out fundamental research on a manufacturing process. But, it was quite away from what we get taught in our undergrad and grad courses.
I had taken solid mechanics course during my undergrad time, but I remember not scoring well in my tests and assignments. Infact, I had got a B+ grade in the subject. I am confident about my knowledge on the important concepts, derivations and theories, but I am poor in solving problems at the back of the chapters.
I am wondering if anyone can give me some advice on how to prepare assignments and questions for the course? I will be taking 6 lectures, 2 out of which will involve giving a hands-on training on a software that I use for my PhD research.
I am worried about the first 4 lectures and developing assignment questions for the class. I have 3 weeks to prepare.

Would your adviser (or another professor in the department) have a prep for this course that they would be willing to give you? When I was a PhD student, my advisors were never shy about handing me whole courses, including their lecture slides, homework problems, solutions, exams...

First, you are doing well to focus on exercises. Student activities are the most important part of any course preparation. In general, it is much more important what the students do in a course (exercises) than what the instructor does (lectures).
If you can recommend a textbook to the students it will have exercises from which you can choose. Or, you can tailor some of them specifically to the material you will be teaching if the book is a bit too general.
Alternatively you can adapt exercises from a variety of textbooks. An interesting way to do this is to give exercises from various books but cite them explicitly so that the students have an opportunity to go to those books (in the library, perhaps) and read some context to help them.
Finally, let me note that for your own learning, teaching a course in a subject is likely to deepen your own understanding of it. This is partly due to the reinforcement you get from preparing lectures, but also from responding to student questions and having to actually find ways to explain things in a way they can grasp.
As for the software, some exercises that depend on its use to solve some simple problems is good, but I suspect you know that already.
A trick for connecting to your students is to admit that the material is hard and that you also found it so as a student. This will put them on notice that they need to apply themselves, but will also make you more human and accessible in their eyes. This may be desirable or not. It is considered a good thing in the US, but perhaps not universally.


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What is the threshold for a software paper to be publishable?
I've been asked to referee a paper about a software tool. I'm struggling with whether this particular work is sufficient to warrant publication. The journal I'm reviewing for doesn't have a "notability/novelty" criterion, but they do require that the work be a "unit of publication."
Let's call the thing I'm reviewing "Feature." Feature is part of a larger package, let's call it "Package." Feature is a GUI tool that takes the data that has already been calculated by Package and plots it using a widely-used plotting backend. It has some nice stuff exposing options in the plotting backend as GUI elements, and a few options related to the nature of the plot being made (scatter plot vs. heatmap, basically, plus some toggles based on domain-specific labels in the data).
Here are some facts that are shaping my view:

There is essentially no scientific logic in Feature. It needs to be able to read the files, optionally multiply by a weight, and then it has a few stored toggles in the data to change which data is presented. But it's mainly a very simple GUI to analyze visualize data from Package.
The entirety of Feature is less than 1400 lines of code, with almost half being the GUI-specific.
Looking at the code, (especially non-GUI) I suspect that I could cut about 300-400 lines of code -- the developers aren't using scientific software tools available, including reimplementing a function that's in a library they include.
Currently, a paper about Package version X.0 is under peer review (X>1); cited in the manuscript I'm reviewing. All authors of the paper on Feature are also authors of the paper on Package.
The entire author list for Package is essentially one research group -- this isn't a giant community-wide effort. And the paper on Package version X-1 was published only 2 years ago, so I'm surprised they're trying to get two more software papers out already.

The last two especially annoy me, because I feel like the purpose of scientific software papers are to make scientific software development citable, not to pad your paper count. The authors will already be getting the citations based on the other paper.
On the other side, I came to this with some bias that one of the authors has a tendancy to care more about quantity than quality with publications. So I'm not sure if my leaning toward reject is partially based on that, or on the facts on the ground. (Hence the desire for other opinions.)
EDIT: I forgot to say that Feature is not yet merged into the main branch of Package, but it currently in a separate branch in the same git repository.

Could Feature be used on data not generated by Package?

@AzorAhai In theory. If the data used the same output formatting as Package (text files arranged in the file system in a certain way). Package is a modern rewrite of OldFortranCode, so output from OldFortranCode will also work. But it wouldn't be compatible with the main competitor to Package (unless someone writes the translation software). EDIT: Clarify: OldFortranCode was only used in-group; so it has no user base.

Would you expect people in other groups to ever use Feature to plot their data, then?

Feature is primarily designed for users of Package. Other groups will use Package, and therefore Feature (Feature will be distributed as a part of Package). In principle, someone could add a Competitor -> Package translator. But Competitor is a Python library, and therefore has immediate access to plotting with matplotlib, so I'm not sure its user base (of which I'm a member) will demand that.

I guess I don't really haven anything to add beyond Buffy's answer then. It does sound like you know the problem pretty well and this might be a publication-count stuffer

Something I've done -- you could scan over recently published papers in the journal (say, within the last 5 or 6 years) and see to what extent your concerns with this paper appear in any of these other papers. But perhaps for your field and topic (of which I know nothing about), this might be a difficult thing to determine by quickly looking at a paper. That said, my gut reaction from reading your concerns (e.g. #3 seems especially problematic to me) is that this paper has several apparent shortcomings, which might not be shortcomings, but it's reasonable to expect the authors to defend them.

@DaveLRenfro: Good idea, and I had done some of that. The specific subjournal is a new member of the journal's "family", but I skimmed over recent software papers in sister/parent journals, as well as other software-publishing journals in the field. A few papers were a little small for my liking, but usually justified by being very general-use or a first announcement of a new code. I didn't see single new features of existing code. That said, I only noticed how weak this one was once I got into reviewing it.

Re: #3: That's painfully common, in my experience. People don't know their tools, and the result is wasted keystrokes and hard-to-maintain code. I list it here because it's relevant for using lines of code as an estimate of "unit" status. I would not reject a paper based only on poorly written code. I call it out in the review, and point to better tools/educational resources. The problem is institutional, not individual -- software scientists were trained as scientists, and don't know the software side..

Related: How to review a software-tool paper?

There is no bright line threshold for such things and the answer should be the same as for any scientific paper, hinging on questions of novelty and extension of knowledge. If it doesn't have that, then it probably isn't a good candidate, though the standards of different journals vary widely.
But you seem to describe a small-if-any advance with little novelty and you also seem to have made up your mind. We can't help you with the judgement and you just need to take a risk and call it. Others may disagree with you, but that is always the case in reviewing.
I don't really understand your point 5 and might disagree with your emphasis on it. Why is work done within a group less valuable that work that crosses institutional lines? Lots of papers are done by one or a few people within a research group. However, I might agree more if you mean all of their cited papers come from those same people. That isn't necessarily a red flag, but might be.

Sorry, to clarify point 5: I mean this in the sense that if Package had 100 authors, then the authors of Feature might feel like their contributions are getting lost in the mix, and I might understand why they felt a second paper was needed to emphasize their contributions. With ~6 authors, their contributions are not going to be ignored.

Also, edited to clarify that the journal explicitly forbids considering novelty. (Also impact, narrow focus, etc.)

Seems pretty broad. Is anything that is correct and doesn't break norms acceptable then?

Yep. The journal intends to encourage publication of attempts at replication of prior experiments (assuming a justification can be given for the replication) and it allows negative/inconclusive results. So they don't want impact/novelty to be a measure for acceptance. I understand the intent for experiments, but I find this hard with software papers. So I'm trying to come up with a better test for "is this enough of a contribution for a publication" than "my gut says ...."

And before you ask (because it would be my next question) -- the journal is legit. Or was not long ago. I verified that one of the Nobel Laureates the parent journal lists still lists the parent journal as one of his editorial assignments.

I'm going to accept Buffy's answer, because even if it is not the "here's how
to make it easy on you" answer I'd hoped for, it seems to be the
generally-agreed correct answer.
That said, after a lot of thought (and considering feedback from here) I've
come up with a list that pretty much satisfies me. I guess that everything
after the first two points is more to check "is there novelty/notability here
that you're overlooking because your gut reaction is that this isn't enough
work to count as a paper?"

Does this implement any non-trivial science? If the tool implements
significant data generation or data analysis logic, then it should be
considered. "Significant" is still a subjective term, but just reading an
output format would not be significant.
Is the software tool distributed independently? One important purpose of
software papers is to make the community aware of plugins that otherwise
wouldn't be noticed (lost in some dark corner of the internet). These may be
relatively small (but useful) bits of code that would be overlooked without a
journal to serve as an announcement forum. This criterion is probably only
applicable to edge cases.
Is the tool re-usable in many contexts? Even a very simple tool can be a
valuable contribution if it is designed to facilitate interoperability. For
example, a simple "universal translator" for domain-specific formats might be
very small, but might be worth publishing.
Is the approach novel? Even for journals that do not have a novelty
requirement, the existence of a novel approach can be a consideration in
whether a paper should be accepted.
Does implementation of the tool require significant domain expertise?
Packaging significant domain expertise in a way that makes it available to
non-experts is a potential purpose of a scientific software publication.

For the fifth point, I'm imagining something like a GUI that prevents users from
selecting incompatible options, where the incompatibilities may require domain
expertise. I know in my field we have script-based data generation programs
where users can accidentally select incompatible options and get nonsense as a
result.
I'm not positive that this covers all cases, but it covers everything I can
think of. And I feel better having used a rubric that I could apply
to any software package.
Posting with the hope of community feedback, and so the next person in a
similar situation can see what I did!


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Inspiration for great presentations
I enjoy creating presentations a lot and I think I have an eye for nice design, however, I tend to always have the same layout/colour scheme/etc. and I'd like to try something new for my defence.
So I've been googling great presentations for hours, and there are heaps of innovative designs but usually these are from outside academia. I still want to convey information in a serious manner. But when looking at websites that intend to give advice for scientific presentations I find the examples horrible and very much 1990s (bullet points...)
So, in short, can you think of any scientific presentations with unpretentious but great design, which can be found somewhere online?
Edit Thank you for your comments, which definitely include heaps of helpful advice, however, I was less looking for "basic" presentation guidelines but more for design elements, which do not distract the audience but which make the presentation a bit more interesting. For instance, a colleague of mine recently gave a presentation and before each section she'd have a slide with just the title of the section and a photo (e.g. "Methods" and a picture of her lab equipment). I liked that because it structures the presentation and is a nice break from charts, diagrams and (in the worst case) bullet points. So, yes, I am really more looking for inspiration on fonts, colours, using white space, ...

You're using LaTeX with beamer, right? ;-)

Is that a trick question? Unfortunately my skills are limited to PowerPoint..

No, not a trick question... LaTeX and beamer are widely used in many academic disciplines precisely because of their unparalleled ability to produce clean, serious yet visually compelling layouts, and to make it easy. Anyway, if you're limited to things that can be done in PowerPoint you should definitely specify that in the question, otherwise you'll probably get a lot of answers pointing you to beamer templates.

@DavidZ I don't think “something new” is going to be found in a beamer theme… we always see the same ones!

There are two aspects to your question, in my opinion: design and function.
Function. Many have criticized PowerPoint and bullet points and perhaps none so much as Edward Tufte in his essay booklet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. The defaults of PowerPoint and reliance on bullet points is interesting and "forces" users into a particular form of presentation where bullets are more reminders for the speaker than the audience. From this background an alternative is to use the so-called Assertion-Evidence Structure which takes a very different approach to building slides.
In the Assertion-Evidence Structure the heading of the slide is the main point of the slide, a take-home message. The slides use graphics extensively to support and high-light the main point. The structure has been shown to yield significant improvements in both audience understanding than normal bullet-point presentations. Se the linked example of the structure.
The Assertion-Evidence slides are not necessarily pretty but they do the job very well so that brings me to the second issue.
Design. When you look at designing slides it is probably easier to list the don'ts than the do's. In general, anything "fancy" easily becomes boring when overdone. Therefore simple is better. I would also add that subtle is better. Do not use strong colours and avoid backgrounds that can clash with the text, either structurally or in terms of colour, after all you want your message to shine.
So design anything with a principle to do as much as possible with as little as possible and you should be on a good road. I think referring back to Edward Tufte is useful also here.
So taken together, it is not clear what is a well designed presentation depending on whether you are looking at aesthetic impact or factual impact.

I've tried following a number of design presentation guidelines (Presentation Zen being one of them).
In the end, I've found that the real focus of presentation design needs to focus first on your story (and therefore your content) and less on the visual aspects of your presentation. One colleague of mine read a lot of presentation books and then tried to do a presentation filled predominantly with large photographs (as recommended by one of them) and minimal text. A faculty member complained that he couldn't follow the talk because there were too few words. I've seen slides that are dull and boring that are accompanied by fascinating speakers. I've seen talks with boring slides and really amateurish graphics that are good talks (the amateurish graphics were actually interesting in that they made the presentation stand out).
I think my main message here is that we could throw examples of good scientific presentations with good visual design at you all you like but they won't necessarily improve your presentation. If you already knew that, then that's excellent - you're probably just looking for something minor then, like a new type of bullet or an interesting color scheme. But if you're hoping that "using more animated builds" to explain complex topics and adding "more punchy pictures" will help, that's not a sufficient condition!

If you are tired of the slide-by-slide format of PowerPoint, you can have a look at dynamic presentations with Prezi or Impress.js. These two tools can introduce you to a whole new way of creating presentations but using them must always be motivated by good reasons. Because PowerPoint follows a linear path in the presentation, it is easy to do the same with Prezi and Impress.js while they can afford for a higher level of interaction between each slide.
Last but not least, some people have motion sickness and using too many effects might annoy them.

Butterick’s Practical Typography  has some great tips for making more readable presentations that don't look like typical PowerPoint ones.
Don't use a white background. High contrast slides can be very exhausting, especially if your presentation is given in a darkened room. In that case, consider a black background with light grey text. Even in bright rooms, using a light grey background with dark grey text reduces eye strain.
Use a consistent font size. Most presentation programs will automatically adjust the font size based on the text, which just looks messy. It's better to adjust your text so that it displays nicely at your font size.
Limit the use of color. Use color sparingly to emphasize or set apart certain elements. A lot of color quickly distracts from the content, and when everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

Other than that, I have seen some really good hand-drawn presentations. They have a feeling of authenticity that you can't get from PowerPoint. I've seen two versions of this: using note-taking software, or simply a sequence of photographs of a stack of hand-written sheets of paper. The note-taking software can make it much easier to do certain animations, as you can draw on the slides during your talk.

I personally like the books from Nancy Duarte, "slide:ology" is about design and how to express certain concepts (Flow, Structure etc.) while "resonate" is about structuring the story.
Clearly these books can't be applied to Science directly, there is nothing about setting formulas etc, but they provide good directions and give inspirations on what to think about.
Beside this I would not focus that much on the whole presentation, but on special components, like "How to visualize Information/Data", typography or design in general. There are a lot of websites and books on these things.
Finally on real examples: There are tons of presentations on ted.com. In my opinion Hans Rosling is an interesting speaker, his talk "Global population growth, box by box" is a example of a presentation which combines powerpoint and real things. Brian Cox is also worth mentioning.

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How to secure recommendations and apply for PhD after having worked outside of academia for two years?
I have been working in a big-shot multi-national corporation as a developer for two years now, with a possible future as a software architect in some eight to ten years.
Now I want to enroll in a PhD program. I am planning to quit my job and join some university for PhD programs. Now most of the universities needs some research papers, of which I have none. They also require recommendations from professors, however I have already quit college two years back and don't have a working relationship with those professors.
How should I secure letters of recommendation? Will a letter of recommendation from my manager help? Does academia really care about professionals wanting to enter back into the world of higher education again? Will I be able to apply to competitive universities with my profile?

possible duplicate of How do you get a bad transcript past Ph.D. admissions?

I'm not a computer science guy, so I don't really have experience with the norms of a CS department in a university.  But I can give this general advice:

If you want to do a PhD, you should at the very least: 1) know you enjoy research; and, preferably, 2) have specific research problems you really want to work on. Don't enter a PhD program if you don't like to research. If you're not sure, start with a master's in a program that has a history of allowing master's students to graduate into PhD programs and in-so-doing take advantage of their master's coursework.
References: get them from people who make you look good and make sure your letter-writers know what makes a good grad school letter of recommendation. If you have a good manager who can attest to your capabilities as a learner, sure, have him or her write a letter.  However, not all managers are going to know what graduate schools are looking for -- so educate the writer. Grad schools want people who can learn and work independently above all.  Emphasize that. And, of course, if you are interested in a certain kind of research, make sure your letter-writer knows that and can comment about it!
The personal statement matters. In your post here you mentioned your strengths (professional experience at a good firm) and weaknesses (disconnected from academia, non-academic references).  Be straightforward about those in your personal statement. More importantly, use the personal statement to discuss what you want to research, why, and your prior experience in the area. Furthermore, explain why you are a good fit for the department...
Fit. You need to fit in at your department. This basically means you should apply to programs where you can have an appropriate mentor who is an expert in what you want to study, or expert enough to guide you along. Do not just apply to any-old program, or a program with a good name. Read through the department web site, figure out the kind of work they are doing, and contact possible mentors/advisors with questions that show your interest and help you decide if the program is a good fit. Having prior rapport with the faculty will help you, and if the department knows you want to be there, this will bump you up a little in the stack of applications. Of course, having good credentials and clear research interests is what makes for a successful application, but departments don't want to waste giving offers and potential funding to candidates who are unlikely to attend the program should they be admitted.

Hope this helps.

I believe you really should give it a try, but of course it depends on the field of CS that you are going to apply to. So try to check a field of specialization that is closely related to the one that you have been working, eg. Software Engineering.
Also here it depends to which university are you going to aim for. A certain number of them require that you have already a master's degree in CS; some of them can choose you directly to do PhD studies being just a bachelor, but that usually happens to students that got at least one or two publications in a respected peer conference or journal (that is for the admission committee to check it up if you have research skills). The last point is not a must, but it is important. I have talked a few days ago with a Professor in one renowned university in the North America area, and he mentioned me that the admission committee in his faculty is getting more strict each year, and now to have publications is really a must (apart of a MSc degree of course).
In any case give it a try, and do not forget to say in your cover letter your research interests and why you really want to pursue a PhD.
Good luck!

Most of them require that you have already a master's degree in CS — That's not true. I don't know of a single North American CS PhD program that requires a prior MS. (I know a few that have a de facto publication requirement, but none that require the degree.)

you are right JeffE what they really point is the research skills, let me rephrase it

@JeffE I don't know of a single North American CS PhD program that requires a prior MS. While this might be true for the US, Canadian programs often do have this requirement.

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Is "party ranking" a genuine ranking system?
From some discussion here, I surprisingly found (by googling) that there are some ranking for top universities for partying. From USA Today and Time to Playboy, they list top universities for party and nightlife.
I understand that there are not quantitative factors to make such rankings, but are they genuine rankings or just practical jokes?
It is a fact that some students go to university to have fun, and care about such activities in their future university. Thus, such rankings can attract some students, which is still good for a university.
My question is: Do university take such ranking seriously? I mean, are top party universities proud of this feature and advertise to attract interested students?
Universities are proud of their athletic teams, and use their achievements for advertisement, but what about partying? (I ask because this is the first time I heard about naming top universities for party).
NOTE: I do NOT exclusively mean partying. I general mean any ranking considering extra-curricula activities, any ranking based on factors other than education and research.

"... attract students, which is still good for a university" --- I really hope that 'good' is not defined via 'revenue' here, and the intended meaning is more along the lines of "... by luring the heavy-partying students to an educational establishment, they are given an opportunity to turn to scholarship and learning, which otherwise they would deny to themselves." Right?

Universities aren't pleased about ranking highly in such competitions they didn't ask to participate in. That is at least their official position. As it might help with recruiting, some people dealing with attracting students might quietly approve; but in the same way it attracts certain people, others will be repelled. The university in the above link has a great academic reputation as well, and would probably do just fine if it didn't have this other one.
Other than "being known as a 'party school' ", or appearing in 'rankings' such as Playboy's, I don't think there is any publication that evaluates extra-curricular activities. However, schools greatly value to be seen as a good place that people like to spend their formative years at. When I was accepted for graduate school at NYU, I got hardly any information on their academic side, but a beautiful hardcover picture book on Greenwich Village. Places that don't have natural advantages still care about presenting the school and its surroundings as desirable living locations. The tongue-in-cheek "Where the hell is Grinnell?" slogan comes to mind (it's in the middle of nowhere, but both the town and school are rather beautiful). In addition to mere location, social activities on campus are certainly highlighted in information about the school, and when visiting on site.

They are neither genuine nor practical jokes. They are, however, entirely made up rankings designed to sell magazines and newspapers. I doubt that universities take them seriously other than to be concerned that some students may partly choose to enroll based on them in order to take advantage of the supposed party atmosphere. No university I know of advertises its party-schoolness directly, whereas many advertise the corresponding academic rankings they receive from these publications.
Having the reputation for having a great social atmosphere might help a university increase its enrollment, but no serious university is going to try to game the metric that these publications use (if there really is one) to generate these party rankings. They do, often, try to game the academic ranking systems by manipulating the data they submit. Lots of applicants care about these academic ranking measures, and so universities either need to take them seriously or refuse to participate.

Do you have any evidence that they are "entirely made up". I would have thought there would be at least some interviews or surveys with current and/or former students or a count of the number of local bars or faternities and sorieities or something.

@StrongBad, was basically just my assumption. this one appears to have a methodology of sorts. Heavily weighted towards student survey data with the rest being bar proximity based on US Census data.


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Too busy with coursework to do research, can I transfer from CS Masters to a PhD in another school?
I just started my Masters in CS at EPFL. I got accepted here with their university wide scholarship as well as a unique opportunity to do research in a lab. My problem is that the course load (typically 7-8 courses per semester) is so much for a Masters degree here that I don't have any time to dedicate to any research. Of course there is the Masters Thesis but that only comes after all course work is finished.  In the mean time I see that the PhD students and other researchers in the lab are working on really interesting stuff and I won't have the time to participate in such work. So I was thinking about just applying directly to PhD programs either at EPFL or ETHZ or in schools in the United States. I wanted to do a Masters to get a better understanding of what exactly I want to research but I have realized that just by picking the research lab here at EPFL I know what field I want to do research in.
I was wondering how common it is for people to apply to PhD programs without completing their Masters studies. How should I explain this in my application, that I am deciding to leave a program? Would it be fine to explain that I am deciding to leave as I want to enter a more research oriented program? How open will admission committees be to that? Will the admission committee be worried that if I decided to leave this Masters program I might decide to leave the PhD program, which I don't intend to?
Any advice in this matter will be helpful. Thanks.

In most Europe countries I know of, you will need a MSc degree before being enrolled to a PhD program. Since EPFL is an excellent university, I would suggest to finish your MSc there.

Yes but the PhD programs in the United States don't require a masters.

I know that. But you still have courses to pass there too, so why move?

@Zaid in the US, PhD programs are usually in conjunction with a masters, so you would have to do all the coursework again.

I was wondering how common it is for people to apply to PhD programs without completing their Masters studies.

In most parts of Europe, students typically have a masters degree on entry to a PhD program.
In the United States, it's quite common in many fields (including CS) for students to enter a PhD program without a masters degree. But if you start a PhD program in the United States without a masters degree, you'll just have to do the coursework that would have been part of a masters degree at the beginning of your PhD. The course load may be a little lighter, but in general, you won't have much time for research during that period, just like your current situation.
(If you enter a PhD program in the US with a masters degree you'll still have to do some additional coursework in many cases, but typically not as much.)
See this answer for more details.

Would it be fine to explain that I am deciding to leave as I want to enter a more research oriented program?

It sounds somewhat strange to leave a masters program in which you will have a chance to do research (once you've completed preliminary coursework) because you want to enter a "more research oriented program." In any program you enter, if you haven't taken graduate-level coursework yet, you'll probably have to do some before you can do research full-time.

It's perfectly understandable that you're eager to get started on research - that's a good sign. But you can't just skip your graduate-level coursework entirely - you'll have to take it somewhere, and while you're busy with that you won't have much time for research.
I suggest you try to look at look at your coursework as something that can help you when you finally get to start on your research. The breadth of the classes you're taking will expose you to methods and ideas that you may be able to use in interesting ways in your research. The following advice is really sound:

What you think is useful or relevant will (probably) keep changing for a while. Everyone is, at some point during their PhD, forced to take some class they really don’t want to take. Over the past few years I walked into quite a few classes thinking they would be irrelevant or even useless. But I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge (and I really should have taken better notes!). Sure, there are classes whose value I still have to figure out (and maybe never will), but there are also classes that surprised me and others whose relevance became apparent many months after I delivered that final paper.

That last piece of advice would've been really useful to me 4 years ago... it even applies to people that you meet. You could be surprised who you end up asking for a job.

I wish I had seen the last piece of advice forty-some years ago. I withdrew a class because I thought it was no use at all to me at the time. Recently, I just found out I need it so badly that I searched everywhere for it. I found a more modern approach of the topic and start reading it. My problem is that it is taking me much longer to digest it because I am slower than then. I regret I didn't take that class, otherwise it could save me a lot of time and energy (at least I could have some notes for me to go back to). Sigh.

PhD programs at EPFL have super low coursework requirements (12 credits over 4 years, that's basically less than 1 class every 2 semesters) because you're supposed to have passed a big bunch of "graduate courses" (US-style vocabulary) beforehand, ie. have a Master's degree.

I see that the PhD students and other researchers in the lab are working on really interesting stuff and I won't have the time to participate in such work

That's because... you're neither a PhD student nor a researcher... just a university student, good old European style.
That's very good I'd say: you're in an excellent program that will prepare you for top-level PhD programs after you complete your Master's.


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What it feels like as a PhD student in math or computer science in the US
I am currently an undergraduate in Canada, but I am interested in math/comp sci PhD in the US. I heard that an academically supporting environment(the environment of the school? of the department?) in PhD study is very important. Also, I heard in some schools, PhD students don't like helping each other, because they think they are competing, which is a sign of bad experience. In some other cases, the adviser might be unhelpful or even selfish. So how can we choose a university/department/adviser to ensure a good study experience? If you are a PhD student, do you like your department? I like any personal experience or examples.

It feels pretty much the same, just a bit more south. However, this is way too broad.

Sorry what you meant by south?

South of the US-Canada border.  Unless you're studying in Alaska.

@JeffE Or in Detroit, which is due north of Windsor, Ontario.

But there is no direct entry to PhD in Canada.

This is not really an answer but a (somewhat) relevant anecdote that's too long for a comment. About 20 years ago, I chaired my department's graduate admissions committee. The college had a requirement that new graduate students whose undergrad degree is from outside the U.S. must participate in an orientation before the start of their first semester of enrollment, to acquaint them with various aspects of life in the U.S. and, in particular, university life in the U.S. We could apply to an assistant dean to have specific students exempted from this requirement. We had admitted a student who did his undergrad work at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, not Belgium), and I requested that he be exempted form this orientation requirement.
I thought (and I still think) this was a no-brainer, but the assistant dean wanted evidence, meaning information from people who had taught at the University of Waterloo. So I had to write (with some embarrassment) to a few of this student's instructors, asking them for the necessary information about similarities and differences between Waterloo and Ann Arbor.
One of the responses ended with a sentence that, I think, summarized the situation very well: The only thing the student will have to get used to in the U.S. is the absence of Tim Horton's.
End of anecdote.
We now have Tim Horton's in the U.S. So I suggest you think about U.S. universities the same way you'd think about Canadian ones.

Hmmm, I have to question this anecdote if there was no mention of poutine. Doesn't compute. Or is Ontario exempt?

@Buffy - I’d say that poutine is getting more common these days in the US, particularly at brew pubs. So, Canadians don’t even have to abstain from it for the duration...

@JonCuster, ah, but is it the real thing? To be or not to be (poutine). That is the question.

@Buffy - if the beer is good enough, does it really matter?

@JonCuster, Hmmm. I'd have to think about that, though I wasn't born in Canada. But I am descended from both Jean Guyon and Zacharie Cloutier of the Percheron Immigration. But beer resonates as the other half of my family is from western Germany.

I think this depends a lot on your advisor. Some will be very helpful and supportive and others not. I had both experiences.
The first part of a doctorate in the US is normally a lot of coursework, giving you access to several faculty members. You will also probably be assigned an advisor, but you don't need to stay with them for the dissertation phase. They are there mostly to watch over your progress and see that you get ready for comps. At this stage I had an advisor who was not yet tenured and spent all of his time making sure that he got over the line. He wasn't very helpful and I was lucky to eventually leave him behind. However, I stayed too long with him even knowing we weren't going anywhere.
Later in my studies (long story) I wound up in a better situation with a better advisor. It wasn't that he gave me more support, actually. It was just that our mathematical interests were more alined and he had a wealth of experience to give me the support and helped me with new ideas when I needed them.
But, had I switched out my first advisor (much) earlier for someone that I knew would be better for me, my journey would have been much shorter.
So, your experience can be good or bad. There are horror stories on this site. But the good stories don't get mentioned here. But, look around at the options and hook up early with an advisor who has a good reputation among students and is aligned with your research interests.
Some of the best advisors will run a formal or informal seminar series in which a few faculty and a few more students meet regularly to discuss ideas and/or papers. These tend to be more senior faculty, I think. People share ideas openly, though each works on their own stuff more or less independently.
And, I'm pretty sure that the advisor is more important than the school in almost all cases. The exceptions would be for those advanced students who can carry on research with minimal help from an advisor.


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Is it normal for a first-year CS PhD student to learn/relearn so many computer skills?
I am a first year CS PhD student, I find myself spend 80% of my independent study time learning many computer skills rather than the contents of my research. Does it mean I am less capable than other peer students? Below are some examples.

I switched to MacOS from Windows, and I learned basic Unix-like commands on terminal.
Never used C++ before, so have to learn this new language. How to bind C++ into a Python module.
Learned to connect to remote server with virtual environment using SSH, and how to set up remote connection on VSCode.
How to manage projects with Git and GitHub.
How to make an executable bash script.
How to make better documentation with Sphinx.
Learning about scientific plot with matplotlib on Python.

Not that I never used those tools before, but because I used all the tools with a copy-paste manner as an undergraduate. Now whenever I do need some tools, they do not come to me right away, and I often have to spare some effort look up and "learn" them again.

It's not at all clear to me what you mean by a "large" amount of time.

What would you do knowing that you are in the 98th percentile (say) for how much time you spend learning these things?

Not sure you're less capable than peers but your list does raise eyebrows. What was the focus of  your BSc studies? I'm a physics major and people would commonly be comfortable with shell (unix commands, ssh, bash scripts) and python (especially numpy/matplotlib) by the time they finish BSc. The rest sounds like a lack of hands-on work experience which may or may not be okay. In the US I would expect it to be more normal than in Europe. FWIW, I look up things all the time after quite a bit of work experience - if you expected to have it all memorized, that's not how IT/CS works, sorry.

I majored in Math. I took minimum course requirement to finish a second CS major.  I was a bit technophobia back then, since I only started using computer for study and work as a a first-year college student.

As a first year PhD student I had to learn all kinds of new things. More experimental operations and data analysis techniques, but.. You will be learning things the rest of your professional life.

Possible duplicate of https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11765/how-to-effectively-deal-with-imposter-syndrome-and-feelings-of-inadequacy-ive

Given your background and the info you provided in your comment, this means that you are likely spending more time on this than your peers. This doesn't mean you are 'less capable', as you put it, but simply that you need to learn this aspect first before you will be able to make decent progress in your CS research. Your peers may already know this and will make some more progress initially.
This is not necessarily good or bad, that depends on how quickly you pick it up and how good your other research skills are (discipline, reading/understanding articles, doing the actual research). Try to learn from your peers who already have this experience. Everybody will have their strengths and weaknesses that they need to work on. No need to worry as long as you put in the effort.

I wanna add a bit to Jeroens answer. With you having majored in Math and not CS you will of course not have as much insight into the practical work of a CS-major, so will need to (re)learn more than your peers. You can still succeed but it might not be as easy for you.
I wanna go into a bit more detail regarding the list of examples you provided us with:

I switched to MacOS from Windows, and I learned basic Unix-like commands on terminal.

This can happen to anyone who isn't used to Unix commands so I wouldn't worry about this.

Never used C++ before, so have to learn this new language. How to bind C++ into a Python module.

No one knows every programming language. That is simply impossible but only knowing Python(I might be interpreting too much here) is quite rare so you will need to put some time into learning the language that is used in your current position. Tho I think it is quite unusual that you only worked with one programming language during your CS studies it is definetly not too bad if you know the theoretical basics of programming.

Learned to connect to remote server with virtual environment using SSH, and how to set up remote connection on VSCode.

This is in my opinion one of the more basic-ish things that one learns while working in CS. As this seems to be your first more practical positions in CS it is unsurprising that you need to learn some more basic things.

How to manage projects with Git and GitHub.

I learned this in my 2nd Semester of studying CS so my guess would be that most employers would expect you to know this already but it is not particularly hard to learn.

How to make better documentation with Sphinx.
Learning about scientific plot with matplotlib on Python.

These two things are somewhat specific to the work you are doing and thus it is not a big deal that you had to learn these things. Most people need an onboarding phase at a new job until they are familiar with all the tools that are used at that specific place. As Jeroen had already pointed out it might take you a bit longer, as you have not as much experience as your peers but it is nothing that you can't easily make up.

It is quite natural. Note that there is no reason to learn anything in a PhD if you do not think you should use it. In my experience, the first step when facing a problem that is of a scale or complexity where automation is useful, is to find whether there are standard tools for this, ask you supervisor and your colleagues, and if not, make it yourself. When programming, I prefer simple yet powerful tools in languages with large libraries and a just strong enough type system to make it easy to understand your own code half a year later.
For example, graph drawing is a difficult problem, even if all you want is a "nice" drawing of a planar graph. There are many tools, but most of them use the same techniques, which are simply not suitable for your case. I managed to make a quite involved toolchain in Blender, Mathematica, Python, and Yed, but there are probably simpler solutions with e.g. CGAL in C++


text:
Citations in Open Source Code
When writing open-source software, should the author(s) cite the sources they get help from?
This might make sense if an author forgets how to implement a basic data structure and winds up fetching the solution from the internet, but what if an author simply forgets the signature of a common function call?
Suppose IntelliSense isn't working and an author must look up the C# TotalMinutes function on Microsoft Docs or the Java FileReader object in Oracle Docs. Does the author need to cite usage in those cases? On one hand, I suppose if the author copies example code from online documentation pages, a citation would be needed. On the other, if only specifications are referenced from Microsoft, Oracle or Amazon Web Services documentation, a citation would be superfluous even though such specifications were used as a reference.
EDIT NOTE: Please pardon the massive edits. Many members of the community have encouraged me to narrow the scope of this question. Some comments may temporarily seem odd or out place while the fate and scope of this question is determined.

I don't know what anything means in the last paragraph, but who told you each file of an open-source program is an academic paper?

And this would seem to vary based on if you are implementing code to do science or if the point of the science is the code.

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

@AzorAhai-him- - "who told you each file of an open-source program is an academic paper?" - No one, but what if we did make such an assumption? As one example, what if I completed an MS in CS assignment for a professor and copied source code off the internet for parts of some files and failed to alert my professor and/or TA?

@ShawnEary I don't think that's a worthwhile assumption to make, and your example is not an example of an academic paper, but a piece of homework.

@AzorAhai-him- It seems to me that OP means that each file of an individual open source program is treated as an individual source which can be attributed with a citation, similar to a citation for an academic paper. OP, can you clarify?

@Snijderfrey I don't think so.

Why wouldn't you just treat each open source program as an open source program??

@ScottSeidman - I guess I need to rephrase this question, but is it ethical to write an OpenSource program and publish it to GitHub never giving any attribution to references used along the way? I was using homework as one possible example above, but this concept could also apply to personal projects done just for the sake of fun. It seems to me that publishing source code to GitHub with zero citations would often result in plagiarism.

@ShawnEary Personally, I don't think what you described in your most recent comment is an academic activity, hence why I am pushing back on your question a little and trying to get you to narrow it down. If your goal is to publish an open source program, you might find better answers on what is necessary to reference on a different stack, compared to this one. For example, none of the things you mentioned would seem even remotely necessary to be referenced in an academic work describing a tool you are making available to the academic community. Is that what you are doing?

You should. You are using an intellectual property of other(s) for your software. That is basic integrity.
People I know who wrote statistical packages for different programming languages also acknowledged the authors of books, papers and official documents, which they used for producing the code, in the documentation of the packages.

Suppose IntelliSense isn't working and an author must look up the C# TotalMinutes function on Microsoft Docs or the Java FileReader object in Oracle Docs.

Think about it this way, if IntelliSense was working, are you going to cite IntelliSense as well? If I was using a Dishwasher as part of an experiment, do I need to cite the Dishwasher's manual? You will soon realise that this is a ridiculous concept.
It is pretty clear that if you are using a feature that is part of the language, then referring to the official documentation isn't plagiarism because it is built into the tool itself, you just weren't familiar with its existence. If you need to cite the documentation, then should you cite Dennis Ritchie every time you write a C program? After all, he did create C.
However, if you were copying chunks of code into your software then yes you do need to cite it. Even outside of academia, it is still good etiquette to cite non trivial data structures/algorithms you use that you didn't create.


text:
How can I get a job reviewing math or comp sci articles and books in advance of publication?
I spend a great deal of time identifying and figuring out how to fix mistakes in published papers and specialized books. Time and time again an author's careless error has sent me down a rabbit hole. In fact, finding the mistake and fixing it is often more interesting to me than the research itself. It dawned on me that I might be able to make a career out of editing working papers and books in advance of publication. However, I am not quite sure how to find such a job.
I am not seeking to publish my own research; I prefer revise and improve others' work. It seems like a useful thing to do: authors' mistakes become my personal headache, so that a dozen or more readers down the line do not have to independently run into the same issues (after publication). It is better to fix this sort of problem at compile time rather than run-time.
However, most peer-reviews are unpaid and done by collegiate professors. I am not seeking a professorship; I don't even have a Ph.D. The highest degree under my belt is a baccalaureate (it is in mathematics).
When I took the GRE, I was in the 98th percentile for verbal reasoning. This and other indicators seem to show that I might be a good copy editor. However, I really would like to review papers in mathematics and/or computer science. Although editing at The New York Times, or at Tor Books™ might be someone else's dream job, I very much love math. I would like to focus at least as much time on the rigor and correctness of the mathematics done, as time spent on English grammar.
I am very good with logic (the formal kind), comfortable writing proofs, and unperturbed by equations which make the general populace groan. I am better with graph theory and theory of computation than writing code; my math skills are strong. I have no previous job experience as an editor (other than a pitiful stint at my high school newspaper) and I am not sure where to start looking.
How do I find a job editing working papers and books in advance of publication?

I took the liberty to edit out duplicate paragraphs. Please double check if I made any mistake.

I might be a good copy editor. That sounds like you answered your own question.

Major textbook publishers do employ copy editors. It isn't a very high level position and I doubt that it pays especially well. OTOH, you might be able to do it without having to go to an office, or move to NYC. They can greatly improve the accuracy of the writing. You are unlikely to meet any of the people whose work you edit, nor have many responsibilities than accuracy.

The kind of thing you're looking to do can be fun, but does not pay. That's because your progress will be painfully slow. For example, say I have a 300-page mathematics monograph. How much do you think is fair to charge for your content editing? Don't forget the total revenue of that book is likely to be less than $10,000 in total. Further, how many more copies of the book is one likely to sell if they engage you? In the best-case scenario, you'll catch every error, and the reviews will be glowing ... but translating that into books-that-are-sold-that-would-not-otherwise-be-sold, I'd estimate that to be ~5-10 books. From there, we could say that the publisher might be willing to pay you $100. For a 300-page monograph, it's just really hard to see it as worth it.
You could make more money by handling the entirety of the publication process. You'd need to do copyediting (i.e. English editing, not just content editing), send proofs to authors, liaise with the typesetters & printers, and so on. Publishers have people whose job scope is to do this ("editors"). Unfortunately, you still won't be able to do the kind of content editing you want to do. I used to work in academic publishing, and when I did this, I handled 8-9 projects at the same time. There's just no way you can treat each manuscript in the detail you want to.
Having said that, one part of the job scope of editors is to acquire more projects. If you do a good job with editing, you can impress authors who might in turn either write more books or refer their friends & colleagues to you. This will be good for your career. If the project you're handling is aimed at the general public, or at undergraduate level, you have more of a chance to offer content critiques, but you won't have time to understand deep mathematics.
If you still want to do this, then you can find such jobs the same way you find other such jobs: by reading job advertisements and writing to employers (in this case academic publishers). You can also put up your own advertisements to do this kind of checking, in which case you'd use message boards that mathematicians or computer scientists look at.

A possible occupation is suggested by these searches: "test editor" + mathematics AND "mathematics editor" + test. See also this web page, although to be frank, they vastly overstate the desire of employers to want math majors, and the part about a graduate background in abstract algebra, real analysis, etc. giving you "an advantage over other candidates" is especially naive. I say this as someone --- 9 years full-time college teaching and 4 years full-time high school teaching and Ph.D. in math --- who has worked in this field for the past 13.5 years, 12 of which was for a very well known company, from which I was laid off 1.5 years ago and I have since had great difficulty in even finding part-time contract positions.

I think they did the analysis of "is it worth hiring someone with a PhD instead of someone with a BS who'll accept a much lower salary?" and decided it wasn't worth it. Sad, but unfortunate fact of life. There are things one can do with a PhD that others cannot, but in my experience, they're heavily acquisitions-based.


text:
Continuing with a postdoc with my PhD advisor, but have not got any official offer letter. Should I be worried?
I am an international student who's currently in a bureaucratic mess regarding my work permit application. I will get my permit possibly in February end. I completed my PhD thesis submission in December. Now, my PhD supervisor offered me a postdoc position soon after my defense, but I cannot officially sign a contract till I get my work permit. So, I don't have any official offer letter with me at the moment.
Should I be worried that I currently have no letter indicating the appointment and how can I handle the situation better?

Please specify the country.

@scaaahu Canada

No, you should not be worried. It is perfectly normal for official offer letters to be delayed.  Ask your supervisor if they submitted the necessary paperwork.  Ask HR what needs to be done.

My guess is that this will be a 3-step process:

you get an offer letter that is conditional on you having a work permit
you use this offer letter to get the work permit
once you have the work permit you sign the offer letter

As you would be without any permit (maybe even without visa?) it is perfectly reasonable if you check the status of the various steps and ask people nicely to speed it along.


text:
How to cite a revised second edition?
So, I am trying to cite a book in the References section of my paper, and the publication information on the book cover is really confusing, which is as follows:

AN INTRODUCTION TO WITTGENSTEIN'S TRACTATUS
Copyright(c) G.E.M. Anscombe 1959
Printed in the United States of America
This book was originally published in 1959 in the Philosophy division, edited by Professor H. J. Paton, of the Hutchinson University Library, with a second edition, revised, in 1963. It is here reprinted by arrangement.
First Harper Torchbook edition published 1965 by
Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated
49 East 33rd Street
New York, N.Y. 10016

How should I cite this book? (say, in Harvard style).

What is the Harvard style for a reference? And why do you think this will not fit?

Okay, forget about the Harvard style. Regardless of the style, what's exactly the year of publication of this book? 1959? 1963? 1965? and What's the name of the publisher? Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated <--- this whole thing?

You reference the book you are using, not any one of 50 previous prints.

Great question!
Among other challenges, citing this book is not easy because it is part of a series, and the publisher's name is very similar to the series name.

Publisher: Hutchinson & Co.
Series: Hutchinson University Library (Philosophy)
Series editor: H. J. Paton

I prefer the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (2017) (hereafter, Chicago), Notes and Bibliography format. I consulted Chicago to write the citations below.
I would cite the book in a note (footnote) like this:

G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 2nd ed. (1963; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 27–29. Citations refer to the 1965 Harper & Row reprint.

If I were to cite the book a second time, I would use a shortened citation ("short form") like this:

Anscombe, Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 34.

In the bibliography I would cite the book like this:

Anscombe, G. E. M. [Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret]. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. 2nd ed., repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. First published 1963 by Hutchinson (London). Page references are to the 1965 Harper & Row reprint.

Notes

Professor Anscombe preferred initials instead of her lengthy given name, but since her full name appears occasionally, I chose to provide it in the bibliography.
I made up the page numbers for the note citations.
The names of both publishers are not required for the note, but should be included in the bibliography.
Chicago states that "2nd ed." is enough, i.e., "rev." (revised) is not necessary because most readers assume that a 2nd edition includes revisions.
Chicago advises against citing the series name and editor in most instances.

Sources consulted

AbeBooks.com
Google Books
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Chicago Manual of Style Online
WorldCat.org