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Enrolling in an Online Masters Degree in Math
I am currently an American undergraduate student who is pursuing a B.S. in Mathematics. Upon graduation, I want to work in industry and pursue a masters degree at Indiana State University online. The degree is simply: M.S. in Mathematics.
The link is to that program is here.
I eventually would like to pursue a Ph.D in Mathematics (hopefully from Stevens Institute of Technology or Rutgers).
Since there is an in person version of this degree, my question is, wold a university be able to tell that I received my degree from doing the work online? The classes are the same I believe,  and seemingly up to par with other masters programs in terms of courses.

Would there be any indication that the degree was completed online, or would I receive the same diploma? Accordingly, would an institution like Rutgers or Stevens Institute of Technology know that I pursued my degree online? Is there a marking on transcripts or diplomas that makes note of this? Are programs less likely to admit students who received degrees online (regionally accredited, of course) than traditional residential programs?

I would appreciate different insights from all, but am especially interested in responses from those who have received degrees from completing work online from regionally accredited universities with decent rapport within the academic community.

Short answer: no. Nobody will be able to tell you did your program online. This also seems like a question for the schools you are applying to.

@SeanRoberson Fair. My problem with this, however, is that if I make an inquiry to Rutgers or Stevens, they may be less willing to accept someone who did their degree online. Also...worth noting...is it would be much more difficult (if not nearly impossible) to obtain letters of recommendation and form valuable relationships with online professors. Also....source?

I would think this would be a question for Indiana State.  I imagine it might appear on your transcript, and there's a high possibility one of your letter writers will mention it.  Anyway, I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to hide something like this.

@user37208 ideally, no.


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How do I politely ask a teacher to write a reference letter as soon as possible?
I have 3 days left and I totally forgot I could add more than 1 reference letter to my application.
I need this teacher to write me a reference letter as soon as he can... and it feels so rude asking this.
How can I imply that subtly but clear enough for him to understand my situation?
Should I send him reference letters written by other professors to help him quickly find the form and content for the letter he will write?

Not a duplicate because in his case the teacher forgot to write a recommendation. In my case I forgot to ask him for one.

@truvaking O.k.

as an outline summarizing my good points, is my gpa from the 2 semesters, average gpa and ranking enough? what do you mean by giving a way out? " i understand if you cannot find the time to provide a reference letter, but if you do i would greatly appreciate it "

@StephanBranczyk Please post answers as answers.

Ar you sure late letters won't be accepted? Personally I've never pressed professors about deadlines (though I have had to remind them sometimes after they clearly forgot). Not worth annoying people who are willing to help my career. Some do it immediately anyway, because they're some kind of insane non-procrastinating-freak-person.

I wouldn't expect much. If you have three days left, two of them are weekend ...

Yeah he doesn't seem to respond, and actually I can't find where it was mentioned I could have 3 reference letters. But at least I learned how to politely ask a hierarchally superior person to hurry up :) !

Possible duplicate of No response from Professor; how should I remind him about writing a recommendation for me?

Just go and talk to him.Tell him about how much you need the placement and how valuable his recommendation-letter would be to you (don't try to butter him/her).Be frank and kindly request him/her but be brief and direct. Don't worry teachers don't mind it,They want to help you as well.

i live far from college and i have no idea of his availability...

You could ask the teacher that gave u  the letter or any other teacher for that matter to provide with is contact info..or visit the university website staff section for details

What to say. When you write and ask for the reference letter, tell your teacher when the deadline is and apologize for the short notice. Don't try to be subtle: being polite is about showing that you understand that you're asking for a big favour.
What to do. Make sure they have all the information they will need to write your letter (e.g., details of your grades and anything else that's relevant).

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Missing ECTS requirements, still trying to apply, should I mention it on my motivation letter?
A summary of my situation :

I am currently applying to ETH Zurich in their Data Science and Computer Science programs
I did my first year of undergrad as a Music Major, and my 2nd and 3rd year as a Computer Science Major
My 3rd year average grade is 18.7 / 20 ( 93% ) ranked 1st
My 2nd year average grade is 18.04 / 20 ( 90% ) ranked 1st
The 3rd year school has a better reputation than the 2nd year school.

Because of my music major, I'm missing about half of the ECTS needed in the Computer Science program. I am missing more ECTS than "allowed". I would like to know if I should mention it in my cover letter? I could say something along the lines of " I know I am missing some requirements, but I am willing to catch up on the subjects where I lack knowledge provided I can attend the lectures provided at ETHZ. As you can see I transitioned from a Music Major to a Computer Science without problem despite lacking fundamentals knowledge "
What should I do?

Call them beforehand by phone and ask if you are formally allowed to apply if you are missing the credits and explain your situation. There is not much point for a full application if already the admin people would put it on the "no" stack without a real decision maker even seening it.
If you get a "go ahead" via phone then state this fact in your letter.

understood i will do that

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I have no personal projects, should I mention school projects in my cover letter?
In my current studies I have been tasked with so many projects that I cannot find the time to work on personal projects.
Should I mention my school projects in my cover letter / resume ?

What are you applying to?

graduate school, sorry i should have mentioned that


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Is it normal for students to ask for a lot of reference letters?
I'm currently trying to apply to as many grad schools as I can (France) and all of them require one or more reference letters.
The past few months I feel like I have already bothered me enough with this matter. But unfortunately, some schools requires that the professor sends it personally, instead of having me acting as a middle man.
If I could just get them to write once and send that copy everywhere I would do it but in the current circumstances I cant. And I feel bad for asking more reference letters when their workload is already heavy.
Fortunately, the next deadline is 1 month away.

"Fortunately, the next deadline is 1 month away." That's not that long

That's what I told myself until I asked for a reference letter in Early February and got it in mid April

Doesn't that support my point?

Yes. I misread it.

There are sites that support single (or individualised) uploads of references. Some places accept references from such sites. Sorry, I do not have them handy, but they may be googleable.

My solution as a student and my preferred solution as a prof who might get a lot of requests from a student would just be a heads up that a number of requests will be coming in the future months.
That lets the writer know that it is good to keep copies on file, or even prepare a template file for this student so that it takes little time or effort to send out the next letter. Some professors will write a general letter to send everywhere and some will tailor it for a given institution. As the prof, I would probably do a bit of both, depending on whether I had a relationship with the receiving institution and on whether the student is specially qualified for a position.
Don't make every request a surprise with a short deadline. That could be annoying.


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Would denouncing cheaters from an exam make me less likely to receive penalties?
I aced my undergrad studies and got the best offer I could ever dream of for grad school.
And three **** might have ruined it.
They ran into me and asked for help with "studying". Turns out it was blatant cheating and I helped them anyway. I had my doubts, but my compassion instinct took ever.
I'm looking forward pursuing an academic career, and I don't think this event was good at all. It's nowhere near loving my sleep over this issue, but I want to keep my academic integrity and cover my ass.
Now, if the punishment for cheating was just a failed exam, I would've denounced without hesitation. But in my country, you can get banned for exams and higher education for 5 years. I think it's enough to destroy someone's life. At the same time, they (the 3 ****) put mine on the line so they could pass some exam. (If they get caught and I somehow get involved, I can get banned for 5 years too. Everything I worked for 3 years, gone in an instant)
I'm about to send the email to the equivalent of the Dean, but I just can't know for sure if I'll stay safe. I know him kinda personally and have friends that are friends with him, but still, I'm scared and I fucked up.
What should I do?
Edit:
Here's a rundown of the events

I ate at school self, not my usual spot
The 3 **** ran into me. They asked me to help them with studying and I accepted. I had doubts that it was a cheating scheme but paid no mind to it.
A few hours later, they send me a photo, there were some questions and I assumed it was an exam from previous years. I asked them when was the exam and they said "now lol". Doubts that it was a cheating scheme were almost confirmed. I answered these questions and sent the answers anyway because I was pressured from holding an unwritten contract and instinctual compassion
They sent another photo, I saw the date of the exam and it was the day all of these events happened. I stopped communications.
And here we are now. I helped them cheat and I want to pursue an academic career. This is like a big stain I'd like to clean.

Could you please elaborate on how this scheme worked exactly?

Yes I can. They asked me to help them with a study group. Being hardwired with compassion I accepted. They sent photos, I answered. They send other photos and I see : 'Exam of today' and I cut communications. However I had doubts they were cheating and did not try to get it out of them.

Talk to the instructor. But first gather some evidence that they indeed let you on, eg. the request for a "study group".

I will eventually. I'm still afraid I could be held liable.

They had a stolen copy of the exam to come? I don't see how this is help in cheating if you answer their questions. If you knowingly saw the exam, then you have cheated also!

They had a stolen copy of the exam. But they framed the photo for me not to see the date of the exam. I assumed it was an exam from past years.

So you've also cheated on that exam. Doesn't matter if you wanted to. My advice comes in four words: "Keep your mouth shut!". And hope those others pass the exam, so they will never rat on you. The best that could happen would be you having to re-take the exam.

I didn't even take the exam. This is just sad.

Please put all this info into the question.

Done @Karl !!!!

I don't get why you say you had doubts about cheating before you saw the date. Did you actually already think they had stolen it? Anyway, you didn't cheat, you didn't steal, you just answered their questions. Tell your dean you later noticed the date stamp to be todays, why should he doubt you if you weren't supposed to take that exam youself?

I had doubts because we were in exam periods, I had already done mine. I have no idea how to got the exam paper. I also had doubts because these 3 were not known to be very bright or motivated. I still asked BEFORE sending the answers when was the exam and they said it was now. At this point doubts were almost confirmed but as I said, I was pressured by compassion and sent it anyway.

That's not compassion.  Compassion would have been "Huh. I need to think about this, but I'm in the middle of something else right now. Let me get back to you in a few hours."

What was it then?

Talk to someone you can trust.
The rules in your place seem to be very severe. Therefore, I advice you not only to listen to people in this forum, but to consult someone who knows the rules in your country. In my other answer, I recommended ombudswomen/ombudsmen or the student union. As in your country, you can be banned from higher education for 5 years, I would advise you to talk to a lawyer. Let them advise you.
In most places, the best way would be to "confess". However, if in your place it is possible to get punished for five years for what you did (which is in my eyes no misdeed at all, as you did not know you helped cheaters) there may be more messed up rules/strange things going on. So please, for your own sake, consult a lawyer (or similar), good luck!
(And yes, of course consult the institution rules and try to find out if similar cases happend before.)

I asked a friend to seek advice to a professor. He (the professor message relayed by my friend) told me to snitch without hesitation. I'd like to do that only if it clears me from any accusation... which I'm not certain it would. These rules are messed up in my opinion, I better tread carefully. I'll ask around seeking advice from people who are in my country. Thank you.

@truvaking: I would absolutely not take advice by a professor. It is definitely not clear if what they say is in your interest.

Aiding people to cheat is the same as cheating in many institutions which is why is it usually part of the policy at the respective institution...
Do consider that you may well face consequences for your part in this situation.
What the consequences will be is something your institution will decide - we cannot guess...

That is just great... I'll consult the institution rules.

Depends strongly on the kind of cheating, don't you think? Compiling a cheat sheet is not a crime, taking it into the exam is!

@Karl having your compiled cheat sheet fall out of your pocket during the exam is cheating, but outside the exam room it is clearly just revision material...


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Just graduated bachelors comp sci. Didn't get into MS. Confused what to do
I just recently graduated university with a bachelors in computer science. I did not participate in the career fairs at my uni,  because I wanted to apply for MS in US/Canada, even though everyone told me to have a backup option. Unfortunately, I did not get admit for any of the MS Programs I applied to. Now I'm not sure what to do. I want to apply next year again but I'm just afraid now.
My parents told me to get a job right now - but my problem is that I have really low confidence. First, not getting an admit really threw off my morale. And also, I'm really bad with interviews. I throw up before each one. I am very socially awkward. Even thinking about an interview makes me want to puke and gives me headaches and fear. Another thing is, I haven't had any revision/practice in almost 2 years - with the DS Algo OS DBMS stuff that they ask in the interviews. This makes me hate the technical interviews even more.
I'm thinking to take a gap year... revise my courses, practice interviewing by applying for jobs, learning ML from MOOCs (and maybe write a paper), and doing some volunteer work in the following year.
Will taking a gap hurt my career or my MS application?

Get a job. You write that you have really low confidence, are really bad with interviews, are socially awkward, etc. These are not reasons to not get a job. The point is that even if you had been admitted, you will still have to get a job after you finish your MS degree. Since you will have to face these demons eventually, you might as well do it now. These things may be scary, but they can also be conquered (see Workplace.SE for more advice). It can even be a blessing in disguise - you might decide that you'd rather keep working than go to graduate school. Remember also that the longer you wait, the less employable you become.
You could take a gap year also and do all the stuff you mentioned, but you would be spending money without earning it. That is not sustainable. Unless you are independently wealthy, you would be burdening your caregivers for an extra year. Your caregivers are likely much older than you (i.e. they need to think about their own retirement). Meanwhile you'd be spending one of the best years of your life on things with uncertain long-term benefits. Is that responsible behavior to you?
You can't postpone growing up forever. Get a job.

First of all congrats on your Bsc Computer Science! You now have a foundation to build upon which is great! I think having a gap year does not hurt from an academic perspective. It would only hurt if you wouldn't pursue a Master because you lost faith.
Because you say you have anxiety towards job interviews I think it would be nice to grow professionally if you would get a (temp) job of your interest. In this way you can get experience how computer science is applied in a real world context. Job interviews are part of this reality too. A (programming) job can give you more confidence in general and it shows you that you have already acquired skills that you can be proud of.
In your free time you can also pursue things like MOOCs or maybe contribute to open source. But it won't give as much incentive to learn compared to an university (in my experience).
I think the master program will be great for further extending your toolkit as a computer scientist and it gives better incentive to really work with these topics. But for now, enjoy and I think this gap year can be seen as an opportunity!


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Thanking supervisor after a year
About a year ago, I finished my Master's thesis, which was supervised by one professor from my university, and two people from a different university. One of the two is a professor, but he was not involved much in the daily supervision. When finishing up my thesis and presentation, times were quite hectic, and only now I realised I may have never thanked the professor from the other university as he was not present at my presentation. I did approach him for a reference letter later, and thanked him for that when letting him know I got the job.
Now I feel quite rude, but I am not sure if I should do anything. Mostly, I am afraid of it being awkward if I bring this up after a year. Am I overreacting? What would you recommend?

There are only two possible options here.

Do nothing. Most probably, the professor never realized that you did not thank him for his supervision. He provided what was probably a good reference letter and you already thanked him after getting a job, so I suspect he does not have a bad opinion of you.
Clear up your mind by sending a polite email stating that you just realized you might not have thanked him for his participation in your master project. I do not think this would be awkward. I think any supervisor would be happy to receive such a message.

Both options are good.

Emilie's options are good, but I don't think the principle of excluded middle is quite given here. If you can contrive it:

Find a reason to thank the professor again for their supervision. Rather than drawing attention to a possible slight that the prof might not have noticed in the first place, use a different occasion, such as updating the prof on your current progress: "Hi Prof X, after completing my master's last year I moved on to ABC where I am now working on XYZ, where your advice to ... has really helped me with ... . I wanted to thank you again for your wonderful supervision!"

The best thank you letters are always the ones that are specific about what concrete aspects you really appreciate.

You're right, there's an interesting in-between option here!


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Using open source code in my final year project
I am a final year undergraduate student reading for Bsc. Electrical and information Engineering. As for the final year project, I am planning to do a project on deep learning. After doing some literature survey I found a research paper that goes along with my research interest, and the project code is also available in GitHub.I want to recreate the research paper and do some additional changes to their research methodology and evaluate the results.I just want to know if it is a plagiarism to use that code, and will there be any obligations, if I am to write a research paper using my experimental results including the additional changes to the research.
Thanks in advance and sorry If am being naive, as I am new to this domain. If some one could be of any help to clarify this, it would be of great help.

It is not plagiarism as long as you clearly write something to the effect of "I downloaded this code from this github" in your paper and cite the paper in question. Plagiarism would be to pretend that you wrote all the code from scratch.
(On a side note, the code on github is most likely under an open source license, but you should double-check this before you upload your modified code to github. If there is no license present in the project that explicitly allows it, it would theoretically be a copyright violation to publish your modified code. This doesn't affect the paper, which you can publish even if you can't make your code public.)

as a quick comment on this, there is a difference between unique code dedicated to a specific problem/dataset and general code. Where that line is drawn is hard to say, though. So probably wise to air on the side of caution. For example, the code for a neural network is widely available online and many people have replicated or independently created it through base R.

@JWH2006: I'm not sure I follow, what is "the side of caution" in this case?

to err on the side of caution is to just be cautious and cite your sources.

How would that differ if the code is unique or not, though?

I will give an example, I read a recent blog post that inspired me to work on a project. The blog post included code. Though I did not copy paste from the code, it was through reading the blog post and working through the coding examples that I wrote my own code and finished the project. I lost nothing by citing the author of the blog as the source of my coding inspiration.


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Is there any way to find changes between two revisions of a book?
I want to find how much it differs between Pocket Medicine 6th edition and the previous 5th one in scale of percent of words or something similar.
I've revised the translation of the book for a publisher and now they want me to specify the number of pages that was beyond a mere revision; i.e. those I actually translated from scratch.

Sounds like you did not agree your price before hand and now they are finding a way to pay you a minimum ie only the full pages you worked on...

So you have editable/searchable versions of both versions? This seems much more like a computing question.

There are whole articles written about the comparison of texts or measuring their similaritiy, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363. I think that your problem may not be easy to solve, unless you are a software engineer.

@corey979 thanks for your contribution. Yes, that is exactly what I want to find. Though the revision of medical textbooks is somehow a spectrum and paraphrasing occurs frequently, based on the most recent researches.

There are tools (e.g.http://winmerge.org/) to compare two textfiles against each other. There should be a way to extract the text portion from the book (worst case: copy-paste) into a text file. The tool would then highlight the idfferences line by line. Plagiarism finders like https://copyleaks.com/compare could also work.

There are several out-of-box tools that you can use to check the differences between two or more documents. I typically use the built-in merge feature of Mendeley that gives you a confidence interval when merging two documents. From that you can extrapolate if the documents are pretty similar or extremely different.


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Canadian Ph.D. for a master of engineering science degree holder without transcript
I am master of engineering science graduate from Malaysia and here, the M.Sc. doesn't have any course work so it is pretty much like a 2 years Ph.D. thus I don't have any transcript or what-so-ever, only my publications, thesis and graduation letter. I want to know if it is acceptable to apply in Canadian universities without having any masters degree transcript or grading. Unfortunately the university graduate office is not willing to answer my question unless I pay the application fee and wait for 12 weeks.
P.S: I also have talked with a supervisor (in Uottawa) and he has already stated that he is willing to supervise me.

It is probably up to the school you apply to whether they will accept that. However, on your side, it should be sufficient to submit an explanatory note about this or to ask that your old institution produces one for you.

I see. I have a confirmation letter from my university stating that my masters study doesn't have any transcript. should upload that in the transcripts section while registering in the university website?

Yes, I think that would be a good idea.


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I won't be applying for master's programs until next year. Should I start studying for the GRE now?
I'm an undergraduate in mathematics, and won't be finishing my Bachelor's degree until next Spring or next Fall (2016). I plan on applying for a master's program before possibly moving onto a PhD (if I like the research) after I get my bachelor's.
Should I start studying GRE-type material now, even if just in my free time, to hopefully have a bit more of an intimate knowledge of the kinds of questions it will ask, as well as really solidify my problem solving in those areas? Or is that overkill?

Yes, the sooner the better

It would at least be worth looking at some sample questions and taking a practice test.  This will give you some idea of what you should study and how much over the next year.

The general test? Or the subject test?

@AruRay, whichever is required for most master's admissions :-)

Hard to know how to advise you, since we random strangers on the internet don't know whether you'll have a hard time with the GREs or even whether the places you apply will even want them (my university didn't).

Which university is that? Isn't it more common than not that master's programs want GRE scores?

Most graduate programs will require the GRE General test; as a math major you should find the (math portion of the) general test quite easy - in my opinion this is not worth studying for too much ahead of time (I studied for maybe a day at best), depending on how good a test taker you are. The GRE subject test might be required for a masters program - in general the more competitive programs will require it. This is definitely worth preparing for ahead of time.

One thing to note is that I think the 2005 (?) exam was incredibly easy. ETS has made that exam available for download to practice on. I think I got an 800 on it when I took it as a practice test. More recent exams have been rather more difficult. When I officially took the MGRE, I got about a 700 and I studied pretty well. The problem is that they asked questions that they'd never even hinted at asking (like some really annoyingly complicated planar geometry questions and rather complicated topology questions).

First, the GRE, especially the subject test in math, is a very highly stylized version of a very particular slice of a fairly low-level piece of school-mathematics... Whatever one thinks about it, it is widely used, and its idiosyncrasies and limitations are often over-looked for the sake of the convenience of having a single number to (supposedly usefully) compare people from very different backgrounds. Thus, you don't want to show up and be surprised by what it is, for sure! As in comments, do some practice exams to see what the questions are...
Also, do think in terms of the possibilities for "gaming" a multiple-choice exam. The most successful of your competitors will have some success with that aspect, apart from knowing or not-knowing mathematics.
But do not let the GRE too-much affect studying actual mathematics. For example, things that don't admit "testing" by multiple-choice questions can't make it onto the GRE, yet arguably are far more important in the larger enterprise than things that can.
The possibility of gaming the exam also means that "problem solving" is not really what it's about. It's about doing enough diagnostic stuff to eliminate wrong choices, and then whatever's left has to be right. This is methodologically wildly different from the practice of mathematics.

When you say the subject test, do you mean the math part of the general test? Because my understanding is that the math GRE is quite advanced.

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text:
Is it okay to ask for a letter of recommendation more than a year before applying to a master's program?
Not too complicated of a situation -- I'm graduating with my bachelor's degree (Mathematics) in a couple weeks, but to support my wife, I'm going to get a job for a while before looking at attending a master's program. The soonest I am considering starting a master's degree would be something like Fall semester of 2017.
Since I'm leaving the school, and I may be moving states with a job, should I go ahead and bring up the question of a letter of recommendation with the professors from whom I think would write them? I have a good reputation with them, so it's not like they'll forget me in a year, but I'd rather have it done sooner while I'm still technically a student than a random email they may miss a year from now.

Explain this situation to each of the few professors you plan to ask for letters of recommendation from, and ask what they would prefer. Some of them would probably prefer to write you the letters now, while you are fresh in their memory. Others, (ones who are very well disposed to you, or very generous people) might like to wait until you are applying for specific programs, because then they can tailor their responses to the specifics of what you are applying to. Even in that situation, you will feel less awkward if you have already broached the topic with them. Also, you learn if someone you are expecting a recommendation from is actually not willing to write one for you, or feels that they can't recommend you strongly. This will be better to find out now than a year from now.
Plus, your professors might have advice on what kind of job to take in the meantime in your field, or even a connection for a job. You won't know if you don't ask.

To me, receiving a letter of recommendation while you are about to finish school and while you are still fresh in your professor's mind is a great idea. I would ask your professor to write 5 letter of recommendations (or however many schools you plan to apply to) and put them inside a sealed envelope with their signature over the sealing strip.

I have to agree with @ChrisWhite. I don't think this answer is really valid anymore. I just applied to grad school and I had to provide an email address for every recommendation letter I asked for. They were then sent an email with a link to provide my recommendation letter. I should probably add this is for the US.

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text:
Are masters programs generally easier to get into than PhD?
I'm doing my bachelors degree in mathematics right now at a state school. I know I'm not a top student and have made just pretty good grades in my undergrad career, but fell behind in others (a D in a conceptual physics course) due to numerous reason like 18 hr semesters while working, got married, had some health and family issues, (not to mention my freshman and sophomore years in which I didn't even want to be in school, and even went on academic probation). After retaking a couple core courses, I have a 3.2 GPA out of 4.0. Also, I will have done undergrad research (starting next semester).
However things are calming down too little too late, and I've got about 2 semesters left. I've really come to love the study of math, and I would really like to study at the master's degree level.
Most of the 'poor GPA blah blah' questions around here have to do with getting into a doctoral program. I'm curious though if it may be easier for me to get into a decent masters program than if I were attempting a PhD? I'm not looking to get into some Ivy or otherwise 'prestigious' school, but I would like to get into something good.
I would be doing it part time (2 courses per semester) so I can focus and make good grades.
Is there hope?

It depends on the institution and the country you're in.

Not every STEM Master's program is going to be easier to get into than every PhD program, but on the whole they are easier. Universities are much more likely to take you if you're paying your own way (aka. a Masters) than if they have to fund you. In the US it's  common for students who didn't do so well in undergrad or are from a lesser known international school to pay their way through a Masters first and then go on to a PhD after proving their worth.
That being said, do not discount how helpful research can be. A published paper or a good letter of recommendation from a known professor can go a long way to erasing some bad grades. What counts in a PhD program is your ability to do research.

Thanks for the answer. I'm not too ashamed of my overall math grades, mainly A's and B's (and a C in a Numerical analysis course I took before I had any proof experience).
What's really "hurting" me are my grades in a couple physics courses I tried for the hell of it. I get physics, but since it's not my major I put it on the back-burner and ended up failing a couple of tests and ending up with a D in the (very conceptual) modern physics. Otherwise, most things are not too bad -- A's in Modern Algebra, Real analysis, and Complex analysis; B's in ODEs and PDEs, etc.

A couple of poorer grades in an outside subject isn't the end of the world. Many applications will specifically ask for your major GPA. You should ask your academic adviser and the professor you'll be working with for their advice.

If I were to take a separate (but more mathematical) physics course and do well, will it look better? Or should I focus on my major courses?

@jaska, I'd imagine that rocking an upper or graduate level math course in the area you want to do research in will be better. But a lot of it depends upon the specific schools you want to apply to and your subject. Ask your adviser

I'll add that a funded masters degree (where the student doesn't have to pay) is often very competitive (just as competitive as PhD) adding evidence that funding is the main reason why the PhD is more competitive

Generally, a master program is easier to get into than a PhD because:

You pay for yourself
You don't have to find a supervisor
The university can deliver the same program to many students

That being said, from what I can see, you're very concerned about your academic grades. This is not a good indicator being a good phd student. Nobody cares how many A you have as a phd student, it's your ability to do research matters. Your grades won't matter ("look good" in your words), because every other phd student has the same grades.
Unless you are truly interested in research, you should just focus on master degrees.

To be fair, though, as an undergrad (with no research experience yet), "good grades" is all I know :-) I'm starting undergrad research soon, hopefully, so we'll see how it works out.

I'd disagree with the statement "You pay for yourself."  Although some programs in the US don't offer TA/RA support to MS students, there are many graduate programs in mathematics that offer TA and/or RA support to MS students (the program at my institution is an example.)  In departments that only have an MS degree this is particularly common.  In departments with a PhD program it is typically the case that PhD students get the first pick of these funding opportunities and in many cases there's simply no money left for MS students.

"You don't have to find a supervisor" also isn't true in all cases.  Some MS degree programs in the US are by coursework only, while others do require a thesis or significant project.

@BrianBorchers and these types of masters are generally more competitive than ones you have to pay yourself in my experience.

There are also diversity fellowships/scholarships available for Masters students. Being you completed your undergraduate in spite of personal hardships, this shows strength of character and dedication which is what some fellowship/scholarship grantors are looking for. I managed to get my masters program covered in full with a stipend. So do some diligent research on what fellowships/scholarships are available, and apply to as many as you can. Also think about doing volunteer work, to show how you are passionate about the subject and how you want to give back. For example, tutoring high school students from poorly funded schools could be an option.


text:
Which format(s) for citation files should I offer for my references?
As I want to make my publications easily available for citation, at my website I am offering, together with my references, a citation file. For the moment I am offering a .bib BibTeX file with every citation.
The question is, if it is recommendable to use further citation formats. I have seen that Google Scholar offers 4 possible formats: BibTeX EndNote RefMan RefWorks. Is it recommendable to offer such a variety or it is enough to use BibTeX?
Thanks.

Field is crucial, there are tendencies. Next, is the effort helpful? Do you have some kind of a statistics from where people source your papers? Official journal/organisation websites, social networks such as researchgate, repositories such as arXiv, website your institution, your personal website, or do they just google-scholar and take the first hit with pdf? You would typically cover those, who go to your personal website. Are there many?

@OlegLobachev sorry I do not possess any statistical data. (I wish I would!)

My take on how to promote and make accessible your works for citation is as follows:
For your global library:
Pick a format. You won't get it always right. Mathematicians and physics will prefer bibtex, biologist and health-related researchers probably will rather have something that works directly on their word (EndNote). In any case, I feel that getting all the citations of an author from his/hers webpage is not that common. People will just pick those articles that are really relevant for them.
If you want to, at least, provide those two and you feel comfortable adding javascript to your personal page, you could use something like enw-to-bib to automate the translation upon user's request.
For each individual article:
If you don't want to complicate yourself, just add the DOI. Most journals have citation tools to download in multiple different citation formats. If you want to get creative, this same citation tools will provide the links for quite a lot of formats (I guess some journals will offer more options than others).
This option should be that much easier and allow for a more flexible way for your visitor's to actually pick whatever they are really interested in.

The citation tools of most journals tend to give horrible BibTeX entries.

Well, I guess it depends on the journal, but true, they are not always top standard. Still, I was suggesting this as very non-intrusive option that would not require to add any local software.

I agree that the easiest way for a personal page is to display a DOI link next to each reference.

Thanks for giving me an insight of the preferred citation formats related to disciplines. I find a very practical solution the idea of directly linking to the formats present in the journals.

You can use reference management software like JabRef or BibDesk to export your BibTeX file in a number of different formats.
In my opinion, a BibTeX file is a great resource that is more than sufficient (provided its entries are strictly better than the ones offered by Google Scholar, ACM, IEEE, or Springer, and many others, which are all abysmal, IMHO).

Ah, sure. BibDesk also support exporting in some of those formats. I edited the answer to mention these.


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Finding Mistake After a Conference Proceedings
Do conferences such as IEEE allow authors to change/update a published conference paper due to some minor issues and mistakes such as equation caption errors or footnote mistakes that do not alter or affect the actual paper's data and information?
If yes, what would be the procedure?
Regards.

From what I've seen so far, conference proceedings are full of unfixed mistakes and it seems nobody cares about them. If the paper worths reading, it is very likely that you will find its fixed version published in a journal a while later.

@polfosol This depends heavily on the discipline.

@JimConant Ironically, I was talking about some highly-disciplined conferences. Anyway, point taken

Obviously you cannot change the printed version of a conference paper as soon as it has been printed. Whether or not it is possible to change the online version (or to add an errata list) depends on the publisher. Check the publisher's web site and/or contact their author support by e-mail.


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Conference/Journal publication author's name (surname)?
I am just wondering if I can legally use a nickname or not to use my official name (Passport name) as the author's name of a conference or a journal publication?
My official name is quite long and I am planning to change it in the future. Is it possible to put the name that I am going to call myself in the future as the author's name?

There is no requirement to use your full, legal name when publishing a paper. Many people who get married continue to use the same name they used before marriage, even if they change their surname to match their partner's, to ensure all their publications can be found easily. It actually would be quite unusual for authors to use their full name when publishing. English "middle names" are usually omitted or shortened to just an initial.

I agree with MJeffryes.
However, I had a similar case in which the spelling of name was different than that in my passport for 2 journal articles. For years this issue never hurt me, except when I was applying for a job where the search committee asked me to submit a formal letter explaining the issue of the misspelled name and acknowledge that it was in fact me who is the author. This issue was also raised when I was applying for Green card (NIW-based) where I needed to list my full publication list. My attorney has asked to fill a formal form that discusses the misspelling of my name. I don't if you will ever experience similar cases, but who knows?
I know that you can always refer to the time frame and school/company at which the article was published from. I doubt that a certain school will have two different guys with the same name working with the same professor/s on the same problem! The odds are very slim!!
I hope this helps!


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What universities are recognized by USA universities?
I just completed my bachelor of Electrical engineering with first class honors at The University of Western Sydney. I am now thinking of doing a phd in one of the good universities in the USA.
When I look at the minimum entry requirement for graduate admission in MIT, Stanford, UCB, ..., they all indicate that I should have a bachelor from a recognized university. How can I know the university that I completed my undergraduate degree, is recognized by these American institutions?

There is an official list of accredited US institutes of post-secondary education, the database of accredited post-secondary institutions and programmes, but according to that page, the Department of Education does not maintain a list of recognised institutions worldwide.  Instead, there is an educational NGO, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, that maintains a list of accrediting bodies that are recognised by its member organisations (which include Stanford and UC Berkeley, but not MIT), the Database of Institutions and Programs Accredited by Recognized United States Accrediting Organizations.  The institutions recognised by the member organisations are the institutions accredited by one of these bodies, which are national in scope.
As a state university, the University of Western Sydney is accredited.  For other institutions with less international visibility, rather than look up this information yourself, it is better to contact the HR department of the institutions to which you apply to get their direct judgement on whether that institution is recognised by them.


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How to publish algorithm
I have a new algorithm which I would like to publish.
I'm not a student, so I wanted to know a few things:
1) What should I publish? Just the algorithm with explanation? an academic paper? What are the principals of writing such one?
2) Where to publish?
3) What are the outcomes of publishing the algorithm? Legally or any other aspects I should be aware of.
Any other tips and helpful things I should know will be welcomed

Why do you want to publish? What's your objective here?

To let other know\make use\enhance the algorithm, and to get recognition on it.

You could put the code on github to achieve "letting others know/enhance/getting recognition"

Making an algorithm public is easy: you can put it on your webpage. By having it published as an academic paper (either conference or journal), you can  get reviews, which is interesting. Reviewers may help you evaluate the novelty of your approach. I thus suggest a paper, with at least:

a motivation for your algorithm,
a review of the related approaches and the explanation for its novelty,
the algorithm with explanations.

It is always a plus if you implement it also in a common computer language, so that others can check its efficiency, find bugs, allow improved versions. A working version of your algorithm in the shape of a code (compilable with instructions) can be put on GitHub for instance, for better versioning.
There are several algorithm related journals and conferences, for instance at the ACM Society:

ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software
ACM Transactions on Algorithms

and you can easily find many more, depending on the subfield your algorithm belong (combinatorics, optimization, real-time computing, etc.). Some are listed at the List of computer science conferences: Algorithms and theory.

Conferences are the primary venue for disseminating research in algorithms, not journals.  See, for example, SODA.

@JeffE True. When I wrote "published as an academic paper", I had in mind conferences too, because they often count as "papers". In computer vision, machine learning, many conferences indeed publish algorithmic papers

To @LaurentDuval - If algorithm is published as academic paper in journal (as version 1.0), is it possible to later publish its new upgraded version? (2.0, 3.0 etc.) ? Would the editors of mathematical/IT journals make a complain that it is "not novel enough" ? Do you have any experience with such scenario?

I cannot say for all algorithms. But this happens often in optimization, and for instance with the FFTW. Of course, editors can complain, however if the novel version is shown more efficient, with better convergence, implement in parallel, formally proven.  Maybe a short note could be good enough for a V2.0

I suggest you to go for arXiv. However, you cannot just publish a plain algorithm. You need to format your document as a research paper. This link might give you an idea of what to include.


text:
Was supposed to do an oral exam, but was instead presented with my grade
Me and a group of classmates (each of whom including myself had been active participants of the course) got called to the professors office half a week before our oral exam and were each presented with a grade. We went there together and could accept or deny the professors suggestion.
It was clear from my friends that they were happy to accept it (the real oral exam is very difficult). I was personally very unsure how to feel about it, partly because we had just written a "pre-exam" in the morning of the same day and I had made some really sloppy mistakes. The grade I was given felt unjustified in how high it was. Of course by the difficulty of the actual exam it felt stupid in a practical sense not to accept the professors offer. I still made a meek attempt to protest, after which he insisted and I essentially made the choice to accept. Also partly because of my friends who I in the moment realised would look worse off had I not accepted.
The exam is not especially important, it is a course like any other in the end. And I know (which was the professors point) that I would have studied to take the exam and probably done ok. But I cannot shake the feeling that I made the wrong decision. Having done some thinking, it feels unfair towards the people who have to do the real test, and I imagine this situation is precisely why terms like "kissing up to the professor" exist. I feel shame because I participated very much in the course simply because I love the subject and for no other reason.
Was I right or wrong to accept the grade?

This is a little confusing because it defies all grade-giving conventions. Only a subset of students were selected to have the option to waive the oral exam, and these students were given their final grades in the presence of one another. So let's say you got a B - you could decide to take the exam to try for an A, but might wind up with a C? Why does your decision impact your classmates at all? Are you concerned that you made the wrong decision because you could have gotten a higher grade, or you feel it wasn't right that you didn't have to take the final exam?

You have the idea correct. I don't care about grade, for me the issue is your second point.

During my undergraduate days,I had one professor who excused the best students from the final exam. This was a course in moral philosophy, so I think this procedure was ethically justified. Whether it was justified in your situation depends primarily on the professor's criteria for choosing the students who get the option to skip the oral exam and for choosing the grades to offer them. In any case, it's not your problem; students can't be expected to correct for unjustified grading procedures.

@AndreasBlass Some students perhaps were so good that they would have received A's unless they totally blasted the final exam (i.e. fail or get a C or something), so I see why they should be exempted. From both the student and the professor's standpoint, having a few less oral exams would result in people having a much, much better time :-)

There is no ethical issue here if no one was disadvantaged by this. Accept that grading can be an inexact science even in the best situations. The professor made a judgment about the quality of your work overall and suggested a grade. His expectations, apparently, were that the oral exam wouldn't change his judgement. Orals can be subjective in any case, and he  perhaps wanted to avoid that as well as lessen his own work load in the face of it not very likely to affect the outcome.
This would have been different if the suggested grade were lower than your expectations or if someone else were disadvantaged by the system.
In my own practice, I would set a grading rubric that was clear to the students. For example, 700 points earned would be worth a certain grade. Students knew how many points they had accumulated. But if someone earned 695 points they would get the higher rather than the lower grade. My assumption was (a) that the difference was not consequential and (b) minor changes in evaluations along the way might overwhelm the few points lost. Furthermore, I would occasionally let students who had already attained highest marks skip the final exam. It would give them the opportunity to work in their other subjects and was unlikely to affect anything. I think this is somewhat common practice.
Far worse to be overly strict and leave students disappointed in the course, in me, and in themselves.
Furthermore, if the grade "offered" was less than highest marks, you had the choice to take the exam. No harm, no foul.
I'm not sure I'd feel the same about this if the offer was made to only the lowest performing students. In that case it seems more like work avoidance than justice. But even then, I'd want more information before deciding.
And congratulations. I hope that you impressed the professor in some way.


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Should I mention in my letter of recommendation that my student has bad handwritting?
A student I taught is really a good student but writes like he is writing with his wrong hand.
The college where I teach requires every one to administer a subjective final exam for 60% of the grade. Its a 3 hour exam and people usually fillout a 30 page booklet. I know many lecturers gave him bad grades because they were too impatient to read his answers they gave him B+ or a B when he deserves at-least a A. I know this cause I taught him Data structures using C and he performed very well while he got a mere B grade in a C language course.
Should I mention this in my LOR or will mentioning this have some bad consequence for him.
I can easily grade 3 students in the time I grade his one paper. So I can imagine how some universities could see him as a liability.

As much as I hate to say it, I feel that handwriting is normally a skill you can practice and improve, so mentioning that a person has horrible handwriting is almost akin to implying that he "doesn't take writing seriously."

Aside from whether mentioning it is wise, your evidence seems a little flimsy.  There are various reasons he might have deserved a B in his C language course: maybe he knew C well but didn't complete the coursework, maybe he didn't know C well at the time but has since mastered it, etc.

Is there anything I could do for him? I really think he deserves to get into a good Grad school. You should see his assignments, projects, presentations.

@AnonymousMathematician I spoke with his C instructor. I saw his lab work and I saw his Answersheet. He got a A+ for the C lab, the highest. For all the assignments everything included he got 38/40 in internal evaluation which didn't require him to write anything

@Mr.Byte: That suggests that he is bad at writing.  Is it clear that handwriting is what is knocking his grades down?  If I can't read what someone wrote, I postpone the evaluation until I figure out what it says.  So do you.  How do you "know" that others are different?

Presumably, he's studying to be a programmer, so beyond frantically scribbling down essay answers on timed finals and writing up a grocery list, his handwriting abilities will never play a part in his adult life.  That's generally true of people who aren't computer professionals, too.  The question is good.  I'm just trying to figure out why anyone cares about handwriting at all in this day and age.  To say he "doesn't take writing seriously" ignores the fact that we all tend to "write" with keyboards!  Ahh, the pedantic world of academia...

I would not mention this no, this should not have any consequence to the students application, it may be a little out of place. It would be worth advising the student to inform any future places of study about his handwriting he may be able to get some alternate support with regard to exams.
I would not see this student as a liability, just maybe needing a little extra support in this area, it is fair for an examiner to not spend ages marking one students paper due to bad handwriting, so long as they give it a fair go and a good effort.

Also in many respects, hand-writing isn't all that important anymore. If the student can type well, that'll get them far in life. I also agree with your comment that this seems out of place.

Especially on a more technical course, my entire 3rd year of my Computer Science bachelors was coursework which required no writing, and in previous years I only had a few written exams which were in maths and software engineering.

Should I advice him against pursuing a higher degree? I kinda feel like I am obligated to do something for him.  Should I ask him to see some help or something?

@Mr.Byte If he is a bright student you should do everything in your power to encourage him into a higher degree. Just speak to the student, voice your concerns and offer solutions such as practising, alternate exam arrangements etc. At the end of the day you can only do so much as their teacher, ultimately the student is responsible for his education. In most cases handwriting can be improved - maybe introduce him to LaTeX?

He has already passed out of college with 3.2 GPA. I am worried if college systems in US would accommodate his special needs. Like all the professors.


text:
What can I do to be able to understand conference presentations?
(I wish to remain anonymous, so I've omitted many details here. If those
details make this question unanswerable, please don't hesitate to vote it
down or close it.)
I've been a PhD student in mathematics for about two years. Whenever I am at a
conference, summer school, or a small seminar talk in our university, I
usually don't understand anything about the talk after the first two minutes.
Sometimes the speaker goes quickly through some basic concepts about group
theory, finite fields, or similar, that I'm able to follow because I know the
stuff already. But when the new stuff starts, most of the time I get so lost
that I can't even answer the simple question "What was the talk about?" when
my friends ask. So I just sit there with an open notebook, and after the
first few minutes of each talk, I start scribbling some unrelated things to
kill time before the next talk. If I see an interesting formula or similar on
the slides, even if I don't know what the speaker is talking about, I
sometimes try to see if I can figure out what that formula means, just because
simple mathematics is still fun - what I do still does not help me understand
the topic of the talk.
The problem might be partly about being able to focus, but I guess it's mostly
about the actual scientific content. When taking courses as an undergrad, I
never had problems of this magnitude while attending lectures because I had
time and material for studying the topic before and after the lectures,
and the lecturers had a decent estimate of what the students know before the
lecture.
Do you have similar experience? Is there something I can do to actually
benefit from listening to conference presentations? I hope this is not the
impostor syndrome - if everyone in the audience feels like this, conferences
are horrible waste of money, time, and natural resources.
I came up with a few ideas but they don't seem practical.

"You're not really supposed to understand anything as a PhD student.
Just sit there and wait for a familiar term, theorem, concept, whatever to
appear. Conference by conference, talk by talk, you'll probably encounter more and
familiar stuff, and before you know it, you don't have this problem any
more." If I had to decide, I'd never fund a learning process this slow. Or probably it is much quicker than I can imagine.
"Go to conferences with topics closer to your research." Well, they don't exist, unless I organize a conference about my research. And the point of going to conferences is to learn about things in your field that are not exactly your research (of course in addition to telling others about your research).
"When the conference schedule is published, pick one interesting
presentation title for each day and try to learn something about that topic before
conference." It might take a few days of focused study for each talk, so some weeks before the conference. I guess that time would be better used doing research.

Are you saying conferences don't exist in your research area?  Just at your university or anywhere in the world?  If it's the former, you need to change your research area.

Anyway, yes, everyone has this experience, and it's a slow process with little noticable progression. 2nd year in your PhD studies is still early.  Be patient. Try to hang on to little victories, and go to student seminars.  Focus on main ideas and think about specific examples when you can't follow the details (most talks).  Sometimes you may not follow most of a talk, but thinking about a particular comment the speaker makes (or even your misunderstanding of this comment) can be very fruitful and make your time there not wasted.

@Kimball I'm saying that conferences that are closer to my research area than those I've been to don't exist.

Don't underestimate how bad the presenting abilities of some people are. They can turn anything into an incomprehensible mess. Unfortunately, many programs don't put any good effort in improving this.

It's not your fault if you don't understand a talk
Unfortunately, many speakers at scientific conferences do a poor job. Most speakers I've seen talk more for themselves than for an actual audience. Unwittingly, they focus more on exhibiting knowledge than on being actually helpful towards the people sitting in front of them.
This mostly happens because people don't know. They see bad examples, which they assume must be good because everybody does it and just do what other people do.
So if you did not understand, don't blame yourself. It's the speaker's job to make you understand something. It's quite a paradox that many speakers thank the audience for their attention (!) after a talk—as if the audience did them a favor by paying attention. Instead, good speakers should be thanked by the audience, because they made things understandable.
Become a better presenter yourself
What I recommend to understand other's presentations better is to start giving better presentations yourself. Effective scientific communication cannot be explained in a simple post, but here are some basic principles:

Before starting to introduce yourself or reading the title of your talk (which is unnecessary anyway), draw the audience's attention. Explain to them in a way they can relate to why your problem domain is relevant.
Then, explain the problem you are addressing (and why it is a problem).
Next, immediately state your conclusion. Don't make your presentation a cliffhanger. Tell people the main point upfront; this helps them (decide to) focus on the remainder of the presentation.
Continue with a preview of your main points that support the conclusion. This is a mental map for the rest of your talk.
Elaborate on your points as necessary.
Close the story by putting your points and the conclusion into perspective.

Many speakers fail to do one of the points above; especially postponing the conclusion towards the end is a common mistake that makes it hard for the audience to follow.
Why should you do this with your own talks?

You become part of the solution. Other PhD students will now finally see a presentation they understand.
You will inspire people to give better talks, which you will understand more easily.
Doing the exercise for your own material, will eventually help you do it for others. If you see a poorly structured presentation, you will mentally start rearranging it into a better talk—helping you finally understand what others do more clearly.

Why is the above presentation structure relevant?
By stating the conclusion first, you give people a mental map. If they get lost during elaboration (like you often do), it's not a disaster: they know the most important thing already. Furthermore, the preview will help them get back on track if they get lost during one of the subpoints.

This. Many presenters are more interested in sounding "learned" than in "teaching" - reaching out to the audience and bringing them along on the journey of discovery of new and exciting knowledge. "Doctor" means "teacher" but many people with that title have forgotten. Truly great scientists (Richard Feynman always comes to mind) understand their subject so well, they can make it seem easy. Anyone who can't, probably doesn't understand it terribly well themselves. OK - that is an unfair generalization. Still, the advice in this answer is very good. "Become the solution".

"It's the speaker's job to make you understand something" I thought the speaker's job is to make their target audience understand, not everybody.

@user26497 Well, if you're in the audience… you seem like a pretty obvious target :-) The target audience consists of the people who are present. It's very ineffective (and impolite) to target your message only to a part of those in the room. Your message should be broad enough to be understood by everybody in there—after all, people or their institutions have paid a lot to attend.

Conference talks are not tutorials. You cannot explain a specific research area in 20 minutes.

@Alexandros Of course you can—that's the whole point of a talk at a scientific conference. You explain the progress you made in a specific research area.

It's been almost 8 years since I got my doctorate and every now and then I still sit through a conference talk without understanding anything. I have colleagues who are way more senior than I am and confess that the same thing happens to them on occasion. Obviously, the more you know and the more experienced you get, it will happen less and less frequently; since you are at the very beginning of your career, you shouldn't worry too much.

@RubenVerborgh I think "explain a specific research area" and "explain the progress you made in a specific research area" are very different goals.

@user26497 One needs the other; you can't explain progress before explaining the current situation. This is also a very important point for the introduction: explain why it is crucial this problem is tackled, i.e., what is missing in the current research area.

In brief: conscientious study and engagement with mathematics, perhaps more broadly than one imagines one's specialty requires, eventually makes most conference talks intelligible. The process takes some years, to say the least. At the same time, many conference talks, even the better-quality ones, are very specialized, maybe not of terribly great interest even to the immediate specialists, but are "novel" in a sense that makes them publishable and thus evidence (to deans and department heads and funding agencies) that one is doing one's job. But their extreme particularness is easy to misunderstand, if one is hoping for persuasive, enlightening reports, rather than CV padding.
And, almost surely, the much-less-senior people in the room, and many of the more-senior, have no real idea what's going on, almost all the time. The chief trick of relatively-senior people is to know that what they're missing is not terribly valuable, to say the least, except as CV padding for the speaker.
At the same time, trying to stay engaged, to become accustomed to a great variety of terminology and apparent goals, is a very good enterprise. For one thing, many "programmes" of course inflate their own importance enormously, whatever their actual, perhaps great, importance may be. In particular, they are presented in a fashion so as to be impressive, rather than "easy", all the more insidiously when the presentation pretends to give a shortcut, but doesn't really quite do so. But/and, especially in the face of hype, mere acclimatization to the buzz-words is psychologically reassuring, and eventually one will notice the repetition, and realize what the game is.
That is, for example, an array of ideas and definitions and notation that is impressive and baffling the first 5 or 10 times is much less so around 20th or 30th, especially when one notices that the scary/impressive/baffling part is 95% of all the talks in a given genre, and that the new stuff is small and innocent by comparison.
And, somewhat more subtly, by paying attention, one can eventually discover the discrepancy between the impressive hype and "how it's done in practice".
But there're few "textbook-style" approaches to reaching any good level of sophistication, for various understandable-but-also-complicated human-nature-based reasons.
In summary: (1) don't presume (impostor syndrome...) that everyone else is understanding, although a few might be, and the more senior people have learned to not worry about it. (2) Don't presume that what you're not understanding is incredibly valuable, magical stuff. Probably is not. (3) Do try to make yourself stay engaged, so that your brain can process things a bit, and not be so baffled next time you hear essentially the same things again... or maybe 5-10 times later.

I've read paragraphs 3-6 five to ten times now, and still fail to get the point. Are you saying that I should use my processing power to actively seek for signs that certain speakers present their research in a "wannabe-impressive" way?

No, I'd not recommend bothering to "see" that people are (perhaps subliminally) trying to be impressive, rather than explanatory, because it is the style, and should be taken for granted. So make this a general assumption on your part... but that doesn't preclude the chance that there is some useful content, only that that chance is not great. In fact, one of the genuine "practice"'s for a listener is to become acclimated to all the standard set-up stuff, which is completely routine, but which might be incomprehensible to a novice who's not heard it a zillion times before.

What does "bother to see" mean? What is "because it is the style" - the fact that I shouldn't bother to see or the fact that people are trying to be impressive? What is "this" in "So make this a general assumption on your part"? How are the parts of your comment that are separated by "In fact" related to each other?

That is, I'd recommend not trying to see subtle signs that people are trying to present "new" work in a maximally impressive fashion. Just assume that this is what people do. Instead, use the terse presentation of standard set-up formalism as a rehearsal for comfort with it (regardless of the purported "new result"). Familiarity may breed comfort.

Ironically, this comment is almost an example of something which sounds impressive and knowledgeable, but fails to communicate. Even the reply is long-winded...which is not to say it is incorrect, just difficult to parse.

The standard conference talk format is simply too short to give a presentation that can be thoroughly understood at a deep technical level.  As such, I generally see people falling into one of two modes for conference talks:

Attempt to present everything and make a horrible unintelligible mess that nobody can follow.  This is especially true for mathematical talks, where few people can actually digest a complex set of symbolic manipulations in the minute or two that a slide is shown, let alone do it while their linguistic centers are being jammed by the speaker talking.
Treat the talk as an advertisement for the associated paper(s), presenting a lot of intuition and motivation, but omitting most of the technical details.

When I am listening to a dense mathematical talk, I simply do not try to follow the math at all.  I look at the motivation, I look at the results, and I look at any intuitions the person has presented.  If it seems interesting, then afterwards I will go and read the paper to actually understand the material.
If the person doesn't give a motivation or concrete results... I'm not going to bother to try to understand.

I'm thoroughly in camp 2. I really dislike approach 1. At the same time after 2 years in you really should start getting at least the gist of what the paper is about. As an exercise, try reading (and comprehending) the papers independently of the talks.

Why is this upvoted? This answer contains some rant about bad speakers and a short list of what one person who is able to understand parts of the talk wants to hear. What is relevant to the question?

My personal attitude to conference talks is that I attend them for those 10 % to 40 % that I either understand since I am very familiar with the topic or that are not utterly horrible. I have found many people, including experienced scientists agree with me. As those numbers heavily depend on the field and scope of the conference (the conferences I attended range from medicine to applied mathematics) and given my experience with talks going in that direction, I find it easy to belief that conferences on pure mathematics have an even lower turnout rate. And yes, this is sad and mainly due to bad presenting skills.
Also, at least in my field, it’s quite common for senior researchers (and everybody else) to plan to use half of the time alloted to talks at conferences for other activities such as planning and discussing collaborations, sleeping, touristic activities, preparing their own talks or doing regular work. I would wager that the main thing that experience gives you is the capability to better predict which talks are a waste of time rather than understanding more talks.
So, as long as you understand some of the talks, this may be perfectly normal. And even if you don’t, this is not necessarily something to worry about: People approach and learn about new stuff in different ways. For example, if you prefer assessing new mathematics in small steps but with understanding these steps rather thoroughly, conferences may just not be made for you. (I once heard about a theory that there are two general ways to understand mathematics and similar, but I cannot find it right now.) So, if you do well with understanding papers and similar (still keeping in mind the impostor syndrome), I would not see any reasons to worry.

At the end of this answer I will try to give some advise on what you can do to understand a larger part of the talks at conferences and seminars (and this advice will be fairly specific to mathematics). But first, I would like to mention some things that influence how much of the talk you can reasonably be expected to understand. This is both because it is useful to have a good idea of this to see if you are doing enough to understand talks, but also because some of the advise is related to these points.
Factors that determine how much you should understand:
1. The topic of the talk.
This one should seem obvious, but the closer the topic is to your own specialty, the more you should understand.
2. The purpose of the talk.
There are various types of talks, with various purposes. The most common talk is the "by experts for experts" talk, where the purpose is to explain the speakers latest research for others who do work in the same or related areas (most seminars and conference talks are of this type). This type of talk generally sets a fairly high bar for the prerequisites needed to understand the talk, since usually the speaker will have at most an hour (often only 45 minutes), and they want to actually present their own research rather than just give an introduction to a topic a large part of the audience will already be fully familiar with.
In the other end of the spectrum are the talks specifically aimed at students, which generally do not present any new research but gives an introduction to some topic. Foe these, one should be able to understand most of the talk as long as it is not a topic too far from ones own specialty (note that these should not be confused with seminars or conference talks given by PhD students or early postdocs, which can often be even harder to follow since the new results obtained by people early in their career are often of a much more technical nature than for those with more experience).
3. How far you are in your studies.
Again a fairly obvious one, but the earlier you are in your studies (or your academic career), the less you should expect to understand of any give talk.
4. The speaker.
This has already been mentioned by others, but it bears being reiterated: There are some really awful speakers out there. If the talk is given by one of them, even those who are intimately familiar with the topic (or even the results presented) will not understand the talk.
On the other hand, there are also some amazing speakers out there who can make you understand a talk on a topic you really should not have been able to.
Figuring out where on this spectrum the speaker lies can be tough, but often one can tell by trying to get a feel for how much attention those in the room, who ought to understand the talk, are paying. If they seem to lose interest (even though the talk does not seem to be about something elementary), then probably the speaker is not doing a good job.
What can you do?
So, what can you do to understand as much as possible of a talk, relative to what you ought to understand, given the above? These will be some generic pieces of advise on how to get the most of a conference (I will mention single-talk seminars at the end).
Before the conference, make sure you get abstracts for all the talks (if possible). From these, single out a reasonable number of talks that seem the most interesting, or where you know the speaker tends to be really good. Look more closely at these abstracts, and do some reading prior to the talks, but not by necessarily looking at the relevant papers (unless the talk is on a topic very close to your own). Instead, you should look up all those terms in the abstract you are not familiar with (or which you are not familiar with in the context). This will give you a better idea of what the talk is about.
Next, see if you can find some of the main results about the objects mentioned in the abstract (often one gets a better understanding of an object if one known the "rules" it obeys rather than just knowing the definition). It can also be good to find some of the main conjectures about these objects, since this gives an idea of what sort of questions are considered the most interesting (not because it is likely that the talk will present a proof of such a conjecture, though it can happen, as I have experienced myself).
Further, one of the things that often causes a lack of understanding of a talk at a conference is simply being tired from seeing too many talks. To alleviate this as much as possible, I suggest you bring something to the talks that you can entertain yourself with in a non-obvious way once you get to a point in the talk where you have no chance of understanding more.
This might sound a bit rude to the speaker, but this is why I mentioned that it should be non-obvious. It should preferably be such that if the speaker looks at you, you will just seem to be taking notes (unless you are way at the front, you can often have your phone lying in front of you without the speaker being able to see this for example).
Along with the above it should be mentioned that it can also be quite alright to not see every single talk at a conference (though you should probably check with your adviser what the culture is at the specific conference to be sure). Which talks to skip can then be based on which abstracts seem to suggest that you will understand the least (or if you happen to know that some specific speaker always gives terrible talks, you can also skip that).
As a final note on this, I would advise that you try to see as many talks as you can. As long as the speaker is not completely awful, you will actually learn more than you notice as long as you pay attention.
In case of single-talk seminars, most of the above of course does not apply. I would say that for single-talk seminars, you can better afford to spend some more time on getting acquainted with the subject of the talk beforehand, so you should treat it like you would a conference talk that you have deemed to be of high interest to you (and don't bring anything to entertain yourself, but really try to pay attention all the way through).

You are definitely not alone in not understanding most of the presentations at a conference. Especially if you're new to a field, you tend to be very much focused on your particular research, and you don't have a wider view just yet. This is especially true if your work is highly specialized (and therefore is just a small subset of the material covered in a conference).
Additionally, most speakers are there to present their work and latest results, not to give an introduction to the field. Especially in smaller fields, you see the same faces at each conference, so the speakers will tend to focus on the latest and greatest rather than making a lengthy introduction for newcomers. The fact that unless you're a keynote speaker you probably only have around 20 minutes to speak further reinforces the issue. Every minute spent on the introduction is a minute less for the work you've actually done (as introductions typically tend to consist mostly of literature research and old results).
The understanding of conference talks will improve with time as you learn more about the wider field and the work of the conference-regulars. In the mean time, if you want to speed up the process you can go and talk to one or more presenters after their presentation and ask them to fill in the blanks. Almost every researcher will be happy to explain their work to a colleague from an adjacent field, because colleagues tend to have a sufficient level of thinking and plenty of general background knowledge (compared to a layman) to allow the researcher to quickly get to a decent level of conversation.

"you can go and talk to one or more presenters after their presentation and ask them to fill in the blanks" The blanks being everything in their research, I think they just explained them to colleagues who in their opinion have "sufficient level of thinking and plenty of general background knowledge" in their presentation.

First of all, it is not overly surprising that you are having trouble understanding research talks as a 2nd year PhD student. When I was at that level, I found talks to be completely incomprehensible. That being said, I do think attending them is worthwhile.
I wouldn't recommend randomly writing down formulas in an attempt to decode them. Instead, a useful exercise might be to to keep track of terminology that appears in various talks. If the same terminology appears in different presentations, this is a good indication that it is important. After the conference, you can follow up on what the term is all about, where it comes from, and why it is important. Ask your adviser.
The key is to look for recurring themes in talks. Say, in one talk, the speaker defines "hefelumps" and goes on to state three (incomprehensible) properties that hefelumps have. In another talk, the speaker defines "woozles" and goes on to list a very similar list of properties. It may well be that this list of properties are part of a standard argument in your field that gets a certain theory going, and knowing this will cue you into what the speakers are planning to do next. When you see these patterns, it's worth asking your advisor what the relevance is.
This has been said before, but I don't think it can be emphasized enough--many talks are "for experts, by experts". In particular, it is entirely possible that there are two or three people in the audience that the talk is directed to. These are potentially not going to be very useful. To recognized these, you need to know who is who in the field and what they are working on. It may be helpful to go over the conference schedule with your adviser before you attend. Maybe s/he can clue you in to some of the politics.
On the other hand, the expert-to-expert talks can also be some of the more amusing, especially if the experts involved are rivals. I was recently at a conference where three different groups were jockeying for the credit for a certain result. The interactions were priceless. With that in mind, I'll finish by saying that not everything you learn from a math talk involves mathematics.

Are sessions from previous conferences ever filmed and made available online? If not, are particular presenters (those who sessions you thought you might want to see) putting any talks of theirs online ever?
If so, try watching one of these, from some previous year, very slowly. Pause, copy things down from the slide, look things up. Rewind when the presenter connects what they're saying to something they said before. Try doing some of it yourself by hand or with the appropriate tool to "follow along." Work out how much effort it takes to figure out how the title of the talk connects to what is actually presented. This may be easier if you have access to the actual paper of the same title.
Once you've "deconstructed" one talk like this, you will know a lot more about the issues in the talks you attend. For example, perhaps the structure and organization of the talk is terrible, and you could now give the presentation in a way that would make sense to people who don't already understand the material. Perhaps there's a simple visual aid (diagram, graph, table) that would illuminate the topic tremendously.  Or perhaps it's just insanely difficult and requires hours of work to even begin to understand. In some fields, that would make it ineligible as a topic for a one-hour talk, but apparently not in mathematics.
In my industry it's normal to leave talks that turn out not to be right for me. If I'm not sure a talk is going to work well for me, I sit towards the back so I can slip out. For the sake of the speaker's ego, I will usually pack up quietly, everything except my phone, then wait for a moment when the speaker is not talking (eg the pause right before/after a slide change) and stand up, holding and looking at my phone, frown, and run out of the room apologizing to those I go past. This allows everyone to tell themselves that I had to deal with an urgent call or email or something. I find that staying in a talk half listening while trying to do something else just wears me out and leaves me with nothing accomplished. Who knows, you might even have a great hallway conversation with someone else who couldn't follow the talk and left!
If you manage to "crack the nut" of presenting complex topics in a way that can be understood by those without the background, you'll surely have a long and successful career. Even if all you manage to solve is the shorthand and assumed background that these presenters are drawing on, you'll understand more talks in the future. And if you career depends on understanding talks, then it's a skill you should learn. Just keep in mind you're almost certainly not expected to understand every single talk at conferences you attend.


text:
Is it OK to use fonts, i.e bold, italic, in an email to a professor or to any other academic?
Is it acceptable or appropriate to use fonts, i.e bold, italic, in an email to an academic in order to do emphasise or organise the text ?
or would it be perceived as offensive ?

I (and many of my colleagues) typically don't spend much time on, or even open, emails which are not in plain text, especially if they are coming from unknown senders.

I think this cartoon answers best your question

In summary, unless absolutely necessary, use a plain text. I you feel you need to organise your text it means your email already too long. If it is a draft of the paper, use an attachment.

The comic is funny but it doesn't answers to the question.

Some people hate attachments.  Your mileage may vary.

@Leth The main point is the length of your email. Some people (e.g. me) are annoyed by long emails, and they probably won't read it.

@Leth It doesn't directly answer the questions, but it makes a point about people overthinking emails to professors too much. The bottom line is: Keep it short and simple.

ok but I am not talking about length of the text in mail but rather using fonts, which is used mainly do emphasise so that writer can use less words.

@Leth Yes, Rama and mwormser do understand your question and are answering it.  Fonts make it shorter but less simple.  In general it is better to to keep it both short and simple.

Unless you go full crackpot (multiple colors, fonts, all-caps in places) I don't think it's offensive.
And I occasionally italicize a word for emphasis, but only in a long and carefully written email to collaborators where we are discussing science.
I just looked through a few hundred emails that I've received, and I found that

faculty almost never use bold or italic
graduate students do it occasionally, especially when emailing about bureaucratic subject matter increases
administrators do it a lot

Draw your own conclusions.


text:
Is it common / advisable to add my personal web site to my curriculum vitae?
Generally one puts more things about itself than s/he puts in his/her CV, and I think a CV should standalone and be a guide for someone who is trying to learn about me, so

Is it common / advisable to add my personal web site to my curriculum
  vitae ?

See this other question, where he questions even including date of birth and marital status ... https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95510/why-is-personal-information-dob-marital-status-listed-on-cvs-in-europe-and-ca

@GEdgar I actually added my date of birth to my CV :)

Well, what's on your personal website? Anime reviews (just going off your profile picture) or a link to all your articles?

@Azor-Ahai Sort of usual staff for the time being. Links to my accounts on some web sites (like github, researchgate etc.), my contact address, my photo, and link to my CV.

If it is a research oriented website, or even the website of your research group (where you are PI), it could be useful and won't do any harm. If it is your anime review website (see comment by @Azor-Ahai) the CV is probably the wrong place for it. That is, unless you apply for an anime related position.


text:
"Write your future plans with less than 51 words": what is the purpose of this question?
I'm an undergrad who is applying a scholarship for Phd. I have already sent heck a lot of documents ranging from my academic background, letter of purpose, research statement etc.; it took more than two months to prepare them. There I - more than once - explained my future plans extensively.
Now, we are called for an interview, and we, again, need to fill a document where there is this question:

What is the purpose of this question, exactly ? What do they expect to see ?
I mean I have already explained what I wanted to, what are my plans extensively, and now they want me to (I guess summarise) write it again with less than 51 words.

I suspect there are two purposes.

To make it easier for the committee by giving a synopsis. They are busy.  A short blurb is helpful to keep track of the different applicants.
To test your ability to synthesize and present information concisely.  (The "elevator speech".)

Question 1: Why the prompt?
I had similar prompts during grad school when I had scholarships, both through the university and third party foundations. Another answer noted two reasons, but I would add more possible reasons:

To help them better know you. They probably don't have a hidden agenda.
To make sure your goals line up to the scholarship's mission (e.g., if the scholarship wants to train future research scientists and you write "become a corporate intellectually property lawyer"  you probably won't get the scholarship).
To have something to share on their webpage if you get the scholarship (e.g., a University page about their scholars or a foundations page about the people they help).
To have something to share with their donors or funding agency. People like to hear about those who they are helping.
Sometimes universities have scholarship pools where all students apply to the same pool and a committee matches applicants to scholarships. Both my undergrad and graduate programs did this. This is related to my first point as well.

Question 2: What should you write? What you want to do. Try to match the scholarship's mission or purpose if the provide one. Examples might include:

I want to work towards discovering a cure for cancer as a researcher at the CDC. Specifically, I am interested in examining molecular carcinogenesis of throat cancer and how it may be used to predict cancer risk.
I aspire to become a professor who teaches young minds about importance of conservation in a changing world.

Also, make sure you have 51 words or less. If it's a web form, their software may truncate without telling you. If it's a paper form, they might disqualify you if you go over.


text:
If I delay my graduation for one semester and get accepted to a Phd program, can the submission be delayed?
I'm in my third year, and I was originally planning to graduate end of my 5th year, but now I changed my plans, I'm going to graduate at the end of my 4th year.However, there is a pair of courses called Turkish I and Turkish II that every students needs to take in Turkey in any university, and I didn't take the first one the fall semester. Now, the next fall semester, I'm going to study abroad for one semester with Erasmus (hopefully).
If I apply for a Phd program next year, and get accepted, at the end of my fourth year, practically I'm a graduated, expect officially I still need to take Turkish I course, which I'm hoping that I can take it in the summer term at the end of my 4th year (or maybe the fall semester of my 5th year). In such a case, is it possible for my submission to be delayed for one semester ? What are my options in this case ?

This can only be answered by the institution in question. Some (maybe most) will say fine. Others will just say no. Ask them.

If you are not officially graduated from a degree which is required for beginning a doctoral degree, you can ask your new graduate program if you can defer your start, explaining your situation.
In some cases, they will simply say no - some departments have a standing policy that they do not defer unless there is a medical emergency, and otherwise you are just welcomed to re-apply the following admission period (some departments do that only once a year, but some allow rolling admissions or once every semester).
On the other hand, in many cases they will allow you to defer and start the PhD at a later date. The main issue here is that some departments have strong policies in favor official cohorts - sets of students who enter all together in the same semester. Other departments have strong policies that you can only start a doctorate in a given semester each year, so you'd have to wait 1 full year to start (so if you planned to start fall of 2020, you'd have to wait until fall of 2021, etc.).
These should always be used as a last resort, because departments are generally free to change their policy and often decide on a case by case basis, and that sounds like an unpleasant amount of stress to volunteer to have to deal with (if you can avoid it). If you are still in the position that you have a choice of whether or not you need to be in this position, it is better to contact them in advance to see what kind of option you might have - or, if possible, just don't be in that position in the first place. If you only need one course, check with your University what option there may be to get credit for an equivalent course taken elsewhere, or take an online equivalent, or take a class in a summer/interim period (if your University has such a thing).
So you have a number of options, and be sure to investigate the most conventional ones (being able to graduate on time) while checking on the others as a fall-back plan, just in case.

+1 for the idea that taking the course in another university.

See if you can start the Ph.D. on time (sans bachelors) and make up the Turkish in the summers.  Maybe grad program will let you enter sans bachelors.
Worth an ask.  Otherwise good chance you will lose a whole year.  It's no usual per the rules, but rules were meant...  Plus they know you, want you, and it may even be an irrelevant course to your new program of study.