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Co-advising - how does it work?
I was wondering how co-advising works in graduate school, specifically:

Is funding primarily provided by one advisor, or equally shared between two advisors?
Does the student work on two separate projects in parallel or a single project guided by both advisors?

I know it really stinks when the answer is "it depends", but ... Why don't you just ask your (potential) co-advisors?

It's advising with the arrows reversed.

I'm really not sure why this question has been closed as too broad, as a simple overview seemed to me to be fairly straightforward. I have voted to reopen.

Deleted my previous comments and voted to re-open.

My experience with co-advising is that it most tends to emerge from some combination of the following circumstances:

The student's project has some sort of interdisciplinary nature, such that the "primary" advisor does not have the ability to entirely supervise the student on their own at a technical level.
The advisors have a very close collaboration already, such that it is natural that a student working for one is de facto working for both.
The "co-advisor" is effectively the primary advisor, but cannot technically be so for various reasons, such as not being a primary investigator or being at a different institution (academic or otherwise).

Any or all of these may pertain at once.  In essentially all cases that I have been familiar with, however, the supervision is of a single project, not of different projects for different advisors.
Funding most typically comes from the primary advisor (who usually would not have taken on the student without having the ability to fund them), but individual circumstances can lead to any number of other arrangements.

I would add: primary advisor's funding ran out so a co-advisor was added.

@StrongBad Haven't run into that one yet myself, but wouldn't be surprised by it: I'm guessing you have seen it.

In my field small gaps in funding (6 months or so) are pretty common so PIs try and cover for each other.

The UK has a substantial number of jointly held PhD programs (variously Doctoral Training Programs or Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships) - PhD students intentionally shared between a university and another institution (a research centre, museum, etc), with a single project and two named advisors. This seems to be similar to your case #3 but go a bit beyond it.

@Andrew, there are several joint PhD programs here in Chile, by several institutions none of which has the depth/breadth on their own. The PhDs there are commonly under co-advisorship, with funding from the program.

To add to jakebeal's answer that really only applies to specific educational systems.
In mnay university systems in Europe, it is common to have a main advisor and one or more co-advisors. The role of the co-advisors vary but they are essentially there to provide additional support to the consetlaltion around the PhD student. The co-avisor can be called in to advise on specific aspects of the thesis, to complement the main advisor in these respects. This could be lab work, field work, numericall modelling or whatever speciality may have to be considered. A co-advisor may also be a general support for the writing process towards the end of the thesis work. This is probably the most common form. In such a case the person is an additional person with whom to discuss the research when writing papers and the final dissertation. It is thus common that the co-advisor is another person from the same research environment but it could be completely external from the department, university or indeed the country.

authors: ᴅᴜʙᴀɪ ᴀɢᴇɴᴄʏᴇꜱᴄᴏʀᴛᴏ529196300


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Ceeb code for college
I have started filling the graduate application form. When I tried to fill the academic details, I'm required to enter Ceeb code, but I searched on my transcript, and Internet, and I didn't get the code. Without the code, I couldn't save the details.
I sent mail to the department but I didn't get any reply, perhaps due to the vacation.
EDIT: I am from Bangladesh. How can I get that code?

What are you asking here?  Right now, you have simply stated a situation, but no question.

https://sat.collegeboard.org/register/sat-code-search

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What should I do if I'm on the waitlist for a PhD program?
I'm on the waitlist of a top 2 program in my field which has a good track record of accepting waitlisted applicants. They told me to wait until April 15 and then I would hear from them. Interestingly, I got rejected by every other program I applied to, so I have no other place to go to. This is my second admissions season - I applied to PhD programs last year as well, got waitlisted from a couple top programs but it didn't work out.
I'm going to give up after this season if this waitlist doesn't work out. Is there anything I can do to maximize my chances of being admitted off the waitlist?
I don't want to seem obnoxious when I email the director of graduate studies at the university, so I don't want to talk about how I don't have any other plans or something like that, but what else can I do?

"what should I do if I'm on the waitlist" - wait?

If you're on the waitlist, I suggest that you get as much sleep as possible, because you'll lose at least 2400 hours of sleep studying.

It's worth noting that the most empowered PhDs are those who understand the need for their thesis. Consider taking a job in your chosen field, identify a major problem, then return for that PhD when your armed with something you can explain the need for to one of the professors.

@Davidmh's advice is spot on, but I will definitely add that now is time to review your backup plan. (Of COURSE you have a backup plan, right?) There's always the possibility that you won't get into any of the schools you applied to; it sucks, but it happens. You should have a solid plan in place to make sure that your resume doesn't go stale in the interim. This could involve working as a lab tech/research assistant for a lab in your field, applying for internships in industry, taking on academic teaching positions, or even just finding any job to ensure you have income.
Whatever your plan is, now is a good time to start making sure it's feasible, and if it involves applying to jobs or the like, you should probably start doing that as well. You can always state that you cannot start working until after whatever the last date you can expect to hear from the university happens to be. The worst thing that can happen is that you have too many options. That is far better than the alternative.

Being in the waiting list means you haven't been selected, but you came close. If some of the selected applicants declines the offer (because they got somewhere else), they start going down the waiting list.
At this point, there is nothing you can do to change the outcome. The ranking has already been set by Admissions, and the offers have been sent out to the lucky candidates. Just sit tight.

There is a special case where it may be worth contacting the graduate department - more on that in a moment.
First, by being informed that you have been put on the waitlist for admission, they are saying that you have not been admitted at this time - but they aren't saying you are officially rejected yet. So you should indeed keep your options open to the extent that you can, but most of the time you cannot rely on admittance.
The reason they stated the date of April 15th is because in the US this is a special national date, where the vast majority of institutions have agreed (or been required by federal funding agencies) to allow anyone admitted with a funding offer to respond by April 15th without fear of losing their spot/funding by not responding right away. It's probably the nicest part of the application process for applicants, as if you receive multiple offers you can wait until you receive responses from all your preferred institutions before making a decision by the shared deadline.
The downside, of course, is what you experience with the waitlist - institutions are often in the position of not having heard back from all the offers they've made until very near the deadline, so they can't let waitlisted people know of their final status until past such a date.
Generally there is not said to be an advantage to contacting the programs to re-affirm your interest, especially at very popular/highly ranked/prestigious programs, because just saying "I'm still interested" doesn't change anything.
When You Should Consider Contacting Waitlisted Programs
The big exceptions to the general case is when something new has happened that isn't properly reflected in your application. The most common such case is when you have received an offer of a fellowship offering significant funding, such as the NSF graduate fellowship (or any non-trivial funding source of the kind). In such a case if you receive such a recognition, I'd encourage you to notify any programs where you are still in the waitlist. While there is no general rule about how programs handle such a situation, some seem to care and many people claim they were moved from the waitlist to acceptance after receiving such a major award.
However, given the extreme competitiveness of such major awards and the fact that they are often more competitive than PhD programs are themselves, this can't be relied on and there is absolutely no guarantee the program will decide to accept you with outside funding.
You could potentially also want to contact them if other major improvements have happened to your profile, such as receiving other national recognition, major important/prestigious publications, etc. This may be of limited usefulness as I don't know any departments that will reconvene an admission committee to discuss your new achievement, and I don't know that any department will just adhoc re-arrange the waitlist order based on such a thing. If you aren't super annoying about it I suppose it couldn't hurt. The potential here is further limited because anything that could result in such a situation should have already been talked about in your application materials (including in submission/preparation papers, the experience that led to such papers, etc).
Regardless, if you choose to contact the department I'd personally advise you not mention the "if it doesn't work out this time I'm giving up on the whole thing". I don't think mentioning that will help your situation any, even if it's how you feel. YMMV.
Above all, any contact you make should be respectful and professional. Repeated calling (hour after hour, day after day), email after email, or anything similarly negative could actually zero out your chances entirely. Reasonable timely correspondence will not carry any such danger.

You would need to wait till the selection/funding process is finalized. Don't forget that there is a chance that you might not get in, so you need to keep applying elsewhere.

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Do cheats profit from their dishonesty? How widespread is it? Are there any studies of this?
I'm retired and this doesn't affect me personally but I'm curious. I don't remember cheating with an exam or an assignment even once, nor was I aware of others doing it. Going by what I read here and elsewhere, cheating is now something of an industry.
I can't help wondering how people who need to cheat get on when they reap the benefits of their dishonesty. Can they do the job that they are supposed to be qualified for?
Question
Do such people get jobs? Are they easily filtered on interview? Are they easily detected once in post, and what happens to them eventually?
Is there any research on this, formal or informal and, if not, does anyone have any anecdotal evidence?

Personal observation
If I qualified for the Olympics by cheating, as soon as I started performing (at my age I would have to walk the 100m sprint), it would be obvious to everyone that I was an impostor. Surely it's the same for academic cheats.

There are a lot a misconceptions around cheating in your question and a very naive view ;-)

@Massimo Ortolano - Please enlighten me. What are my misconceptions?  Letting me know will help me to improve my question if necessary.

A cheater doesn't cheat all the time in all possible occasions. Most cheaters are normal students who sometime cheat. And good cheaters are smart and hard workers who carefully choose when to cheat, clearly knowing when it's worth it, and you would hardly catch or see them. Those who got caught are the desperate ones, not the good ones. So, yes, students who cheat get jobs and some are quite successful at their jobs.

See also this answer of mine.

nor was I aware of others doing it --- Cheating was extremely well known in the mid to late 1970s (U.S. universities), as there were all sorts of elaborate preventative schemes designed in the large lecture hall classes I took (these not being math or physics major classes, which usually had fewer than 15-20 students), such as signing the test paper and signing a class roll when turning the test in, with graduate T.A.'s also coming around and checking student ID cards during the test (or maybe it was when turning the test in). And I'm sure it was a concern decades before this.

Cheaters tend to thrive in settings where integrity is already nonessential and accountability rarely observed.  There are some places however where cheaters are never to be found (usually jobs that require some difficulty or personal sacrifice.) This makes sense if you think about it: wouldn't it be "cheating" in a way to take a simpleminded approach to helping cheaters cope with their condition?

Look at the history of US presidents over the last 30 years and answer the question yourself lol. Academics vastly over-estimate the value of both their discipline and their approach to living in reality.

They profit and become a government minister in Germany, Austria or the Czech Republic, then they are found out and there's a 50 percent chance they have to step down.

Yes, people profit from cheating, perhaps for a long while. But the jobs they enter aren't as cut-and-dried as claiming you are an olympic athlete and it can take a long time for incompetence to be noticed. And incompetence can arise from other things than cheating.
I don't have evidence about studies but would probably question them unless very well designed. What criteria would you use? Would correspondents honestly admit to it? Could you run a longitudinal study and still be able to check back for prior behaviors.
Some people who cheat actually wind up to be competent, also. They might have actually learned something, or taken jobs for which they knew "enough". Some people cheat once or twice out of panic, but are otherwise honorable.
It is a very complex question. But I doubt that a lot, even a majority, of cheating is caught at the time and those who are clever enough or misbehave seldom enough will get through any gates we might erect. Our processes are designed to discourage the practice, but they aren't perfect.
And, no, I can't prove people profit, but the imperfect nature of the systems and the possible rewards and the panic among students, etc. etc. certainly imply that cheating happens without consequence.

And if you want to assure that cheating doesn't happen, design the course in such a way that it is irrelevant. In particular, in such a way that it isn't necessary to feel that you need to watch people carefully so that they don't. Of course, your evaluation methods are a bit harder to manage in such a system and the things the students do need to require real understanding. Oral exams are probably ideal, but scale poorly, of course. But even in a large, say, calculus course it only takes a few minutes to determine whether a student understands. My old advisor did this, with a line outside his door and a question or two for each student.
My technique was to use projects rather than exams for the bulk of the grade.
It is probably more difficult in the pandemic age, but also more necessary to think harder about evaluation.

I actually see a lot of courses in the new semester switching to project-based grading to avoid issues with exams during lockdown.

@ObscureOwl, mine were team projects making collaboration required rather than forbidden. In CS it is a needed skill in any case.

Yes I see the same happening, like in a class yesterday. The flurry of team formation on the student discord was quite spectacular. I think most people had come to the online lecture especially to see who was in the attendance list. Usually it takes a couple of weeks for teams to form, now it took a morning.

The problem is in courses where "understanding" is not a realistic goal.  I have taught a calculus course for business majors.  If we were to consistently fail everyone who did not have any understanding of calculus, the consequences would be a major budget shortfall for the department which would probably force us to lay off all untenured faculty and close our graduate program.  We have to settle for rote memorization of how to do particular types of calculus problems as the criterion for passing.

Another preventative measure is to do what one can to preserve what self-respect students might have.  (Best not to put the cart before the horse.)

@Buffy - But team projects are heaven for the dishonest. They do very little work and benefit from the labours of their team-mates. I experienced this at first hand as a student. What can you do if your collaborator is a slacker?  If you do less yourself then your own marks will suffer. The only option is  to work harder and let them get away with it.  Reporting a fellow student is going to cost more time and stress than simply doing the work.

@chasly-supportsMonica, there are ways around this, of course. Students need to be taught how to be a proper team mate and that different contributions are OK. One can't assume it will just "happen". I found that a form of peer evaluation was helpful. I found that having at least some of the team interactions occur under my watch was helpful. But if you turn them loose with no instruction or no prior experience, bad things will happen. That should be obvious to educators. A number of my other posts on this site and at CSEducators address such things.

"if you turn them loose with no instruction or no prior experience, bad things will happen" - I agree but, alas that is remarkably common in my experience. Speaking cynically, more than once I have noticed a physically attractive person attach themselves to a shy but studious person just for the academic benefits it brings,

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Review paper in PhD
I'm a first-year PhD student, and while I have an idea of what my research will involve, my path isn't very clear yet. My supervisor suggested that I work on a review paper as an achievement for the first six months of my PhD. I wrote the paper and sent it to my supervisor a month ago. However, we've had several rounds of edits and comments, with each set of comments asking for different things. It's been overwhelming, and I've started doubting my abilities. I'm anxious because dropping out and finding work isn't an option due to my student visa and the funding I am receiving from my supervisor for my PhD. If anyone has been through something similar, I'd appreciate hearing about your experiences and any ideas you have.

What's your field and what type of review are you writing?

Since the feedback is different every time, I think it is unlikely that the issue is your abilities. Changing feedback suggests a problem with communication. It sounds to me like one of two things is happening:

Your advisor does not remember from feedback session to feedback session exactly what the goals of the paper are, and is therefore giving different feedback depending on their impression at that moment in time. This may be influenced by slight changes in wording, their mood, and recent things they've read or talked about with others. Remember, you are focusing on your project for hours on a daily basis -- your supervisor sees this project (maybe) once a week for an hour, and they spend the same amount of energy and effort on multiple projects a week. Assume that they will remember no details at all from week to week. If this is what's happening, then the paper does not have its goals and scope defined clearly enough. In other words, there is a communication problem in the written paper.

The other likely option is that you and your advisor are not communicating effectively in the feedback sessions. Your advisor might actually be trying to communicate the same high level concepts to you through different means each feedback session, but they are not succeeding in getting these points across.

In either case, this warrants a high level discussion with your PI. Tell them that you want to understand why they are giving particular feedback. Gently point out examples where the feedback has been different from time to time and say that you want to understand what they're responding to when they give you those different pieces of feedback so that you will know what to do in the future. If you can, show them the whole paper as it was at two stages where you got different feedback. Sometimes a comment might be triggered by the combination of text in one section and a figure in a different section, for example. If the issue is that the paper doesn't communicate its scope and goals effectively (option 1), the two of you can talk about that and come up with a clear statement that you can add to the introduction of the paper. If there is some other higher-level feedback for you to absorb (option 2), this will help make it more apparent and you should be able to take it into account and move past this stage.
I say to be gentle here because you want to avoid any kind of "gotcha" moment where you imply that they are unreliable or their feedback makes no sense. Go in with the assumption that they have good reasons for all of their suggestions. As I understand it, you don't yet have a reason to think that it's anything other than a communication issue. Addressing it in this way will give your supervisor a much more positive view of you than if you are either critical or accusatory of them (for giving conflicting feedback) or too critical of yourself (for not getting it right after multiple feedback sessions).
There's always a possibility that your supervisor is just fickle or a bad manager, but I think it's best at this stage to assume that they are competent to do their job and are doing it in good faith.

Welcome to Academia and to the PhD world: The disillusion world of impostor syndrome and PhD movie.
Don't get yourself discouraged. Get going at it purposefully.
Although reviews/surveys may differ across discipline, the principles/fundamentals remain the same.
Review papers are not completely at tangent to 'result' papers, in the sense that you still need to be clear about the aim/purpose, key message being passed and contribution to knowledge.
Reviews can be systematic or rapid or scoping or narrative.
Some reviews are reviews of topics while some are review of reviews.

I wrote the paper and sent it to my supervisor a month ago. However, we've had several rounds of edits and comments, with each set of comments asking for different things

Regarding your supervisor, that you're getting feedbacks is a good thing. Keep the momentum.
It might be possible that your supervisor is struggling with the art of supervision. For now, you'll have to keep calm and trust the process. You don't want to rock the boat early.
Nonetheless, keep track of the changes and in doing so

check against the aim/purpose of the review paper. If there're none, that's your starting point: refine the aim/purpose and if there's one, the research question.
check changes against literature in your field.
gently and firmly bring well-researched and articulated views/amendments to the table.

In any case, you'll be going through revisions throughout your research life by engaging rebuttals.

Add-ons

How to arrange reading for a literature review and writing it?
approaches you can take towards conducting lit review
not hating on supervisor, keep summarising papers

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Would applying for a tenure track position while I am a visiting instructor look bad to the institution and my colleagues if I am not selected?
I am a fourth year doctoral candidate in an Experimental Psychology program at an R2 and am completing a visiting instructor appointment at a small liberal arts college (SLAC) right now. I had seen there was a tenure track position listing at the start of November that was reviewing applications starting November 13th. I sat on applying to it for some time since they specifically said they were open to someone of any background, but would prefer someone in health psychology or biobehavioral health.
My transition to this position has, admittedly, not been the best. However, after a discussion with someone close to me, I am seriously considering trying to do so anyway, even if I do not get it. I was told that this college prefers hiring those who are already inside to promote them but given their preference I am a bit concerned if I am not selected at all. I also saw someone wrote on the faculty door next to me that new faculty interviews are already being set up so I may be too late.
Would it damage professional relationships with the full faculty at all if I apply and am not selected at all? For example, I could ask them for a letter of recommendation and whether they would be willing to write one or not. I am also applying a week later, could that be an issue too?

Look bad to whom? Damage which professional relationships?

@Buffy Edited to clarify. I am referring to the institution itself and my colleagues.

I'm not really understanding the concern.

@BryanKrause The concern is how awkward that would look if I was not chosen at all after I applied in this case. I want an LOR and whatnot from someone there in the future so I do not want that to come back to haunt me possibly. That is not mentioning that I am a week later after they started reviewing applications and they wrote on the board that there would be new faculty interviews. They wrote a question on the door asking, "Email [first name]?"(they wrote a first name so I'm guessing its a candidate).

It's certainly awkward that you're trying to spy on a selection process for a job you're interested in; more awkward if they're illustrating it on a door for public viewing. But I think maybe your question is about applying for a job a week late, rather than applying for a job at your current institution like the title states?

@BryanKrause I think both are true. I might edit it but I am not sure yet. Updated: Edited in another question at the bottom.

I think for many people, there is nothing sentimental in professional relationships. The only thing that it matters for people is ethics. The fact that you apply for a position for any reason cannot be judged by other people. Last but not least, rejection is one of the things every scholar face very frequently. Sometimes, people even get rejected by their co-authors /colleagues for a position/grant/paper submission etc. for various reasons. However, the professional relationship is not damaged unless there is an ethical issue or serious misconduct

@optimalcontrol This was an answer that addresses what I was trying to get at the whole time. If it's noting personal, then I won't take it that way whatsoever.

It seems like you are a lecturer at the same place you are doing your degree, but this answer doesn't depend much on that.
You have to start somewhere. And this seems like a low-risk opportunity. You have a couple of things against you, however. One is that you say your field is fairly different from what they prefer. That, alone, might be enough to choose someone else with no negative connotations about yourself.
But the other is that some (probably many) universities prefer not to hire their own graduates. There are important counterexamples, of course. Some people feel that you will gain more from broadening your horizons and that the university will gain more from bringing in "new blood". Again, that doesn't have negative implications about you.
If they will put you in the pool, even as a rather low priority case, you will probably gain important experience from going through the process and dealing with questions in interviews and such, along with preparation of an application. You might get valuable feedback even if you aren't selected.
People are, hopefully, trying to match qualifications to a job description. You may meet them or not. But at the moment tenure track positions are hard to come by and any experience, even with process, is possibly helpful. I'd guess the positives outweigh any negatives.
Your doctoral advisor may have something important to suggest about this. They know the situation better.

I am not a full time lecturer at the same university where I am doing my Ph.D actually. It's a small liberal arts college that is 20 minutes away from where I am doing my Ph.D. I took this job since my funding ran out for this academic year (because I only have extension credits left). So far, the transition has not gone super well since I am new and did data collection without research assistants on top of that. I've been working a lot of hours and am exhausted constantly with what I need to be concerned with as far as the post graduation job search goes as well. This is why I am worried.

Even better then, since the second thing isn't an issue. Good luck. And, again, your advisor may have good career advice.

I don’t know many psychologists, but if they are like other humans I’ve interacted with, your fear is illogical. There simply isn’t any plausible reason why anyone who has some opinion about you should change their opinion based on the extra knowledge that you applied to their department and were not selected.
Now, admittedly, people can behave illogically sometimes, but with someone who is so illogical as to make your fear in this situation justified, there would have to be a thousand more things to be afraid of. Would this person also resent you for starting your email to them with “Dr.” and not “Prof.”? “Prof.” instead of “Professor?” Or would they mind that you are emailing them after 8 pm, or that in your last paper you wrote in the acknowledgements that you are “very grateful” to them for the advice they gave you rather than “extremely grateful”? Etc. If you have the misfortune to get involved with one of these illogical people, there’s simply no telling how you can mess things up inadvertently. (For all you know, such a person might discriminate against you because you didn’t apply to their department; a chilling thought...)
The only sure thing in this situation is that if you don’t apply, you won’t get considered. And another thing that’s at least nearly certain is that anyone who would write you a useful letter of recommendation doesn’t really care (and most likely doesn’t really have time to think about) where you applied and/or were rejected from; they just want to see you get a job in a nice place and go on to a good career.
Good luck!


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ABD candidate who developed cognitive deficits. Current functioning level is "borderline" with average intelligence. Is there a way to navigate this?
I'm a fourth year neurodivergent doctoral candidate who is also an instructor for this academic year (one year contract). I have had a tendency to make a fair amount of posts related to my struggles (for lack of a better term) and now I have an answer thanks to this neuropsychological assessment.
My intelligence measure was average. However, my processing speed was evaluated as "borderline." The only thing that equalized my overall average from being low average was that I got above average (82nd percentile) on. On the RBANS measure, my score was borderline sadly. I was two points away from being low average. The evaluator specifically note that it was much lower than expected given the intelligence measure.
I was rediagnosed with autism (level 1), ADHD-I, generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder - moderate, and posttraumatic stress disorder (from my experience with my first advisor).
As much as I'm glad I have these diagnoses, I'm concerned about post Ph.D work now. I recently contacted vocational rehabilitation in my state to see what they can do for me. However, I'm worried because of how cognitively demanding and fast paced most post Ph.D jobs are based on what I know about them from my colleagues who've graduated from my program. I don't remember the metrics for productivity (I think they vary from workplace to workplace), but I could easily see myself falling through because I took too long to problem solve for my workplace and/or a client (if it's consulting).
I am conflicted about what I should do. Sadly, my university isn't partnered with the federal WRP program that could place me somewhere so I'm crossing my fingers that vocational rehabilitation can help someone who is about to get their Ph.D soon.
What could I do to navigate my situation? I'm going to tell my advisor this news tomorrow. As for the SLAC where I'm teaching, I already submitted an accommodation request and they're evaluating it with the Provost right now.

What did your career services offices suggest?

@Dawn I have a meeting with them a little over two weeks from now. I have vocational rehabilitation services in the loop in the meantime though

https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4700/how-can-we-better-react-to-askers-who-are-having-a-mental-health-crisis

"Developed" or "recently diagnosed"?

@JonCuster I was recently diagnosed but it is based on cognitive issues that I've developed in this case.

You need to find the right doctor.  It is extremely important that you get help from a qualified professional.  It is very probable it needs to be a specialist physician, or several kinds of medical specialists.
Actions your advisor or employer can take might help, but they will be nowhere near sufficient.

OP already mentioned seeing plenty of doctors...


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How to manage stress during a PhD, when your research project involves working with lab animals?
I'm a first year PhD student in cognitive neuroscience, and I've been working/studying in this institution since my last year of master's degree.
My PhD project is the extension of my master's thesis project, which involves the use of rodents, and extra-cellular invasive recordings. Since the start of the PhD, I've been experiencing high anxiety and intrusive thoughts, for which I decided to start therapy. I recognize that my preoccupations revolve around my lab animals.
My lab usually performs long experiments, with animals performing behavioral training protocols for extended periods of time.
Of course, rodents are living beings, and not everything can be under my control.
This is something that I stress about, a lot. An animal might decide to slightly tilt the head in performing the task, and this can be very hard, sometimes impossible to correct: in this situation, one cannot record neuronal activity, for a number of reasons.
I'm in this situation, and not obtaining neuronal data means delaying my progress, which will be evaluated next year by the faculty, as it happens every year. This in turn makes me spiral so bad into anxiety and anguish. I'm afraid of the judgment of other people in the lab, especially those that are academically older than me.
I know I'm not the first student in a similar situation, and I'm aware that many feel the same as me. Plus, imposter syndrome is hitting hard, sometimes.
I'm asking for advice.

Have you ever been in a similar situation?
How did you manage to de-compress and cope with stress over situations that can't be 100% under your control?
How did you overcome fear of judgment, and fear of not being good/smart/capable enough?

I must admit that I have a positive relationship with my PI, and other lab mates, and that the majority of my problems don't have a very objective, precise, external cause, but they are impacting my quality of academic life. I feel overwhelmed and tired, and feel guilty if working less than my usual (8-5 or 8-4, mon-fri).
If this question is inappropriate, I apologize in advance.

There are many variants on an adage about ephys experiments that goes something like "You only need a month of experiments, but that month take 5 years to collect". Anyone who isn't having trouble is probably collecting junk data or fraud. If your paradigm isn't working, it's worth considering alternatives. Head-fixed experiments are popular for a reason and there is way more equipment available to assist now than 10-15 years ago.

Thanks for your kind comment. Unfortunately, head-fixed is not an option for me, for many reasons. This head tilt was corrected, then I had to move the animal to another apparatus (identical to the first), but the issue came back. If I solved it back then, probably I can solve it again. It's just that sometimes I feel so stuck and discouraged. But I still have a couple of months to solve the issue.

Beware of sunk costs and remember what your actual research questions are. Rodents tilt their heads.

It's not an unnatural and uncomfortable position. Rats have to poke their nose in a nosepoking enclosure, and receive a vibration on the whiskers, and then turn left or right out of the nosepoke to receive reward based on their answers. They usually keep their heads straight, and when they begin to learn this task, they learn it with heads straight. Some of them tilt it slightly after months, which is not a problem per se. But with a chronic implant, tilting too much can result in damage of the implant, due to bumping against the nosepoke.

If this is a recurring problem, can you do a go/no-go task with a head fixed rat? What can you do to shore up the implant and make it more robust? What can you do to modify the nose poke enclosure? Both lab animals and humans that repeat a task tend to get more efficient at it by taking shortcuts; if it's possible to take a shortcut like changing head angle to avoid moving the feet, they'll do it.

Loosely related: I don't want to kill any more mice, but my advisor insists I must

Yes! I've been there too. My PhD and postdoc both involved neurophysiology in awake, behaving animals. It can be very stressful to have your "progress" depend on something that's largely out of your control.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Your supervisor has probably done similar experiments! They should therefore have reasonable idea about how quickly and consistently anyone can collect data. If not, consider adding a neurophysiologist to your committee so they can help set expectations; this might be especially helpful if other committee members come from more fast-moving fields. One of mine did human behavior and fMRI and it was very helpful to have another committee member remind him that animal training alone could take over a year.

Ask for feedback on your progress. Directly ask your PI "Am I doing okay?" Since you have a good relationship, I would expect a fair appraisal, but people do tend to forget how difficult things are and some may never be happy with any amount of work. Consequently, you may also want to look at published work as well. My PhD advisor insisted that he recorded 7 days a week and got publishable data almost every time. Looking at his papers revealed that was....not even close and that I was indeed working as hard, if not harder, than he had.

Adjust the experiment The two ways these projects go wrong is to either a) constantly change everything or b) never change anything. Instead, deliberately consider deliberate changes that can improve your odds of success. The problem you describe in the comments sounds like it could be fixed with some engineering: carve a hole in the nose poke apparatus so the implant has more clearance, add some material elsewhere to better constrain the approach/exit angle, or beef up the implant so it's less likely to be damaged. If your institution has a friendly machinist or veterinarian, ask them for advice. Think about changing the task too. Your scientific question can probably be answered in many different ways. Could you (for example), put a lickometer in the nosepoke, so that the animal doesn't need to move? Or perhaps you could explicitly train them not to press against the implant (e.g., by adding a timeout). Discuss any ideas you have with your lab/committee. Not only will the feedback be useful, but it should demonstrate that you're thinking hard about your research.

Adjust your PhD. The stress presumably comes from feeling like these experiments are make-or-break for your PhD, so giving yourself some other/backup options can really help. Could you do some human psychophysics or computational modeling related to your experiment? Analyze some existing data? Write a review? I would consider trying to do (say) four experiments a week and spend Fridays on a side project that's more "deterministic".

Realize how you're being evaluated. A few people may judge you strictly on your ability to produce data and it's obviously part of being a scientist. However, most people——and especially the good ones——will also consider your effort, attitude, and intellectual approach as well. For what it's worth, I would be impressed if I saw someone at their rig, day after day, working hard and intelligently. This impression would only slighly be affected by their yield, especially for a grad student. If they were moving slowly, I'm more likely to think that the project is tough or that they should be getting more help.

Don't compare yourself to others. Ephys is slow and difficult, as is animal behavior, and the combination is infamously worse. Most of the broader field of neuroscience knows this, so don't feel inferior to a classmate doing (e.g.,) MTurk experiments or modeling, where they can quickly bang out papers. Your reference letter-writers should also be able to explain this fact.

You are not alone.
Your title question How to manage stress during a PhD, when your research project involves working with lab animals? was addressed in a recent Science March 2023 article, "Suffering in Silence: Caring for research animals can take a severe mental toll. Is anyone listening?".
The article appears to be free so I encourage you to read it.
Some key points from the article:

Support groups exist for people who work with animals
You're not alone
Tools exist to reduce stress for students and animal care givers in academia

Not an experimentalist, so take from this what you will.
The first question that comes to mind is are you anxious because you're doing experiments on animals (which may feel unethical to you) or are you anxious because you can't control every aspect of the animal when doing the experiment?
If the first case then maybe another aspect of research may be better for you.
If it's the second case (which it sounds like because you are talking about how tilting the head destroys your data) then you should maybe re-frame how you are thinking of this. You seem to be saying, an animal does this behaviour which stops me from taking (neuronal) data. Instead of thinking the animals could destroy my experiment at any time, start a second project focused on: what method could I use to be robust to this animal behaviour. This project itself may end up being more valuable than your original project if you develop a good method to account for head movement when trying to measure neuronal data, leading to a paper describing what might later be colloquially known as Acherontia's method.
Basically what is happening is you try to do some science, find something isn't as well understood or developed as you'd like it to be, and do some science on this alternative topic. Even if you never solve your original project, solving this new problem is science, one of the may incremental steps of it.

For me, the stress came from the fact that so many things can prevent you from taking data (and thus, advancing) but it's impossible to solve them all and many aren't even that interesting. For example, the head tilt issue seems like it might just be the rat smashing delicate gear against hard objects. It'd be good to fix it but a) you/your PI may not care or have the skillset b) it'll just be something else (immune response destroying the electrodes, animals aging or falling ill).


text:
Is it advisable to publish in low tier conferences as an undergrad?
I am currently an undergrad and worked on a project that might get published in a low tier conference. I currently have 0 publications but this work is not something I'm proud of. Is it advisable to have my name on this paper given that I am currently working on other projects that can potentially get published at much better conferences? My only concern is that it might negatively impact my profile in the long term. I plan on pursuing a thesis based MS/ PhD after my undergrad. The domain is Computer Architecture if that's relevant. Thanks.

Instead of not well-reputed conferences, you can submit to workshops held at good conferences or in late-breaking tracks.
The difference, in my opinion, is that in low-level conferences, low-quality papers (e.g. not well written, fundamentally wrong, etc) can be accepted and sometimes without being reviewed. However, for good workshops, you will still need to write a good paper with an idea built on a good basis. They expect, however, that the experiments and results are not strong enough or the approach is not sophisticated to a point that allows it to be published at a good conference.
In summary, a paper at a good workshop demonstrates that the paper fulfils the necessary academic conditions, while a paper at a bad conference does not.
Answering your question, Yes, having a paper at a low-level conference might hurt your profile or at least it won't help at all.

+1. Besides workshops in top-tier conferences, I would say specialised conferences classified as low tier (say a core ranking of B), still attract many good people. What is a complete waste of time in my opinion is general CS/AI  low tier conferences.


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Advisor published some of my ideas (that I am working on in my master's) without informing me
My advisor gave me a broad topic to research. I found a really good question and have done a big part of the work answering it but, have not finished yet, then applied to a prestigious conference to present a poster and got positive feedback and told him so out of happiness.
Before submitting my work at the conference, I sent my advisor a detailed explanation of my ideas, the key question, the abstract, and the poster for feedback. He gave me none.
I went anyway and did my presentation. And by mere chance now, I found out that he published a paper before me in some journal and he used my ideas in there and even uses my wording but cites different people as if he was the original discoverer. Now I am supposed to submit to him my drafts and I don't trust him anymore. What should I do?
Edit: The paper was accepted and submitted after sending my work to him.
My main question:
If I don't trust my advisor anymore, my work is nearly done now. How to get out of that with minimal damage done to myself and my future career?

What level of Graduate studies is this: Masters or Doctorate?

I guess this other thread is related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20391/what-do-you-do-if-your-phd-advisor-publishes-a-solo-paper-on-your-topic

I am sorry to hear that this happened to you. Successful academic relations are built on trust and it is awful to suddenly find your trust betrayed by actions of your advisor.
There is clearly an appalling (lack of) communication from your advisor's side here. Having received materials from you, he did not respond with acknowledgement and/or feedback. This is definitely not what you expected from a supervision process and it is not how this process should be handled.
Your post also implies that your supervisor might have committed an act of plagiarism by using your ideas and your wording and publishing them as his own. It is not easy to tell whether it is true or not. Bear in mind that your supervisor is an expert working in this field for many years. The ideas which you (re)discovered by yourself may have been already known and published by other researchers. You mentioned that your supervisor cites different people. Consider studying those references to see if they contain the same ideas you were presenting to him.
You also mentioned that in this publication your supervisor acts as if he was an original discoverer. It might be a bit of an overstatement, considering that he cites some prior work. Please consider reading the cited papers to get a better feel of the history of development of this topic.
Finally, check the submission date of the Springer paper. Academic papers may spend years in review. It might be that this paper was written and submitted well before your supervisor gave you the problem to consider, and has been in review ever since. In this case, of course, your assumption of plagiarism is less likely to be true.
Having said all that, I want to re-iterate that your supervisor was not right to delay his response and feedback to you. I feel that he might have shared his submitted paper with you to give you something to work on and also to mitigate any possible conflicts, such as the one you find yourself in.

No, my supervisor is not an expert working in this field for many years. He is transitioning and he introduced all of his grad students to the area he wants to go in but, seldom helps any.

"You mentioned that your supervisor cites different people" - not in the sense that those he is citing "already came out with that insight he includes as his own" but in the sense that makes him the original identifier of that idea.

So sad you are in this scenario. Not a good space to be in.
Not sure which country this is. Not really relevant.
Since you didn't indicate supervisory committee, we'll assume you have one advisor/supervisor. Probably for masters; could be a doctorate.
Having a frank conversation tends to resolve issues. Parties get to understand where the other is coming from and forge a common approach going forward.
With or without the frank conversation, you can go the 'dispute' route. Most graduate Schools (or universities) will have

supervisory policy (or guideline)
thesis guidelines/requirements
dispute policy/guidelines

You might want to read through them, and then reflect appropriately. If need be, you may take action based on options available to you in them.
Picking at random: McGill has a collation of policies, regulations and guidelines

I was in exactly the same shoe when I was in my master's. That was a small school in the US, ranked somewhere between 200-250, which is not very good. A lot of faculty members are a little sloppy. I graduated with an M.S. degree. My "advisor" stole my idea and published it in a journal with IF > 4 (without my name), using exactly the same technique. I considered asking the chair but didn't in the end.
A lot of people may approach very differently. More for my case, I felt like I can do more than just 1 journal paper, so I thought my reputation would weigh a lot more than just a stupid paper. That was a hard call, especially at the MS level. If I had done differently, my former MS advisor would not get his current position today, more damages would have been done to others behind me, but from the damage control perspective, it was better for me to walk away instead of making a fuss out of it. Had I made reports and complaints, it would also be hard for me to apply for PhD (none of the prospective professors would take a difficult student).
Now in your situation, given that your journal paper has been published, I suggest you also walk away without making a fuss. It was more like a lesson of trust. People get it wrong all the time, not just you.

The only thing I think might be able to salvage the situation would be if you left some sort of paper trail (real paper or electronic. As long as there's some record of accountability). You mention

I sent my advisor a detailed explanation of my ideas, the key question, the abstract, and the poster for feedback

Was it via email? I'm not sure how it would specifically work at your institution, but you could show that to your department's oversight committee and try to get something started that way.
As Dmitry said earlier, most journals will state when a paper was first submitted and when it was actually approved. That information can help you if it's clear that you developed your work before the first draft was submitted. I would definitely look at the work your advisor cited on the publication and make sure the ideas he cites them for are actually there; if it's clear that your work is main contributing effort and your question has no cross-coverage, then it makes your case all the easier to make.
Good luck. I hope things work out for you.


text:
Do you list that you won a competitive funding to attend a conference but couldn't go on a CV?
I won a funding scholarship from a prestigious research institute to attend a workshop in my field. The funding covers my travel expenses and accommodation but, I won't be able to participate because I couldn't find any vacant visa appointment in my country.
I am very sad already that I won't be able to participate. Anyway, should I list in my CV that I won this funding scholarship? Since winning grants is valuable in an academic CV.
I am a graduate student, looking to pursue graduate studies in the US.

I also had issues finding Visa slots for an internship. Email the embassy/consulate in your country ASAP explaining your situation and ask them for an appointment. The fact that your stay is fully funded will help your case. It may not work out, but it's definitely worth a try. Don't give up!

You can list that you won that travel award/scholarship. You do not have to write that you could not travel, but mention it if it comes up in an interview.
Attending a conference is unlikely to be a deciding factor for any hiring decisions.

"There were problems with my visa" is not something that you want to tell a potential employer. They prefer employees who can travel anywhere without problems.

There were no problems with my visa, I couldn't find a visa appointment in my country. In some countries, one has to apply for a visa appointment first to get their visa application reviewed to be considered.


text:
Do you ask for a certificate of participation as a poster presenter in a conference?
I participated in some prestigious conferences as a poster presenter but, these conferences do not issue certificates so, when I list them in my CV, what is the proof for the reader that I did participate?
I once asked a conference for a certificate of participation, the organiser told me "we don't issue certificates but I will check with my team" and she never replied.
Is not it normal to ask for certificates of participation? How can I list them in my CV otherwise?

Do you include such certificates in your CV? Is this usual in your field since I have never seen something like this?

This might be a good question for a canonical question (it's come up before). People from some areas are like "How do I get my certificate??" and everyone else is like "What do you need a certificate for??"

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/154019/how-many-authors-should-attend-a-conference

I have participated in a number of conferences, and never received a certificate of participation. I list the conferences in my CV, and was never asked for proof of attendance.

I used to work with a guy who had decorated his cubicle with badges from conferences he had attended ... that's probably as close to a 'certificate of participation' that you're likely to get from most conferences.  (and not all of them mark who are presenters)

Certificates of participation are usually for reimbursement of funds or otherwise required by someone in the chain of organizations paying for your attendance: universities, grant agencies, etc. It's a way to demonstrate that yes you actually attended the conference and didn't just use the travel funds to be a tourist in the conference city.
You do not need such a certificate to put it on your CV. You certainly wouldn't include any information about the certificate in the CV itself even if you received one.

I would add that in some PhD programs, it might be required that the PhD student justifies that they attended a certain number of hours of conferences/courses/classes/whatever during the course of their PhD. In this case, the PhD student needs a certificate of participation to the conferences they attend. Not for their CV, just for the university who will validate their PhD.

For almost all purposes, people trust that what you put in your CV is correct. If you say you participated in a poster session, nearly everyone will believe that you did. On the other hand, a poster session is a relatively minor thing among the other items there.
In the rare case that actual verification is required, the doubters can contact the conference chair or, perhaps, the poster chair. These people are visible. There may even be a visible record of participation on a web site or a follow up publication.
That's not an excuse, of course, to pad your CV with chaff.

I don't pad my CV with certificates but I thought of keeping them if I am ever asked to verify but, I got the message thanks.

Yep, if anything, someone is more likely to look up the website (especially if unfamiliar with the conference to see what was it all about) than to ask for proofs. And yet far more likely to not bother verifying at all.

Funding agencies ask for a verification of your attendance to a conference. That is not a "rare case" as most researchers pay conference registrations through a project, a grant, or with the help of their institutions. In my case, a payment voucher and a copy (or video) of the poster/talk are enough as a proof of attendance.

@vagoberto In the context of Buffy's answer those "rare cases" are for someone reading the CV yet wanting other documented proof, which was OP's concern. I think those case are rare enough to be effectively nonexistent, unless there was something else suspicious.

'For almost all purposes, people trust that what you put in your CV is correct.' --> ah so claiming to be a presenter in conference Z is treated similar to claiming to work for company X from time T to T+t?

@BCLC, trust need not be blind. But, yes, most people will trust it unless there is something that seems "off". Then they might check and are wise to do so. But that doesn't imply that questions might not arise in an interview about various experiences.

@Buffy thanks for clarifying!


text:
I feel like male professors don't feel comfortable taking me as a student. How should I address this problem?
It has happened in many instances in my education that my male advisors or professors get very uncomfortable around me and some refuse to  take me as their student. They tell me that in a decent way, but it is not on the basis of competence since I am always at the top of the class and my CV is shining.
I suspect it has to do with the fact that I look physically attractive, although I never act unprofessionally and I am conservative in my behaviour. But many times I have had instances where male mentors were interested in me romantically and it made me feel uncomfortable. I am starting to feel I am losing chances for absurd reasons.
How should I address this problem?
Edit: I am a master's student in Italy and am about to pursue a PhD in STEM.
I am conservative in how I dress and this actually comes from the fear of seeming unprofessional or wanting to be noticed for anything else rather than my competence.

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What exactly do you mean by “mentor me”? Are other students in your class receiving one-on-one mentoring? Is this common? (I’m asking because where I studied this wasn’t common, and tutors wouldn’t generally have the capacity for one-on-one mentoring.)

Clarification question: are you seeking to do your PhD in Italy only, or open to moving to other countries?  There are large cultural differences between countries — but most countries have fewer women in STEM than Italy (in particular Northern Europe).  I don't know if the situation would be better or worse in other countries, but I think it might well affect the answer.

Are there know cases of scandals regarding teacher-student relationships on your campus? (a teacher being accused of favoring a student because they get sexual relationships out of it, for example) If so, mentoring an attractive student might cause some ruckus behind-the-scenes, as the gossip of "Teacher A is banging Student B" spreads, even if nothing ever happened between the two.

Whatkind of mentorship are you seeking? Does it have some connection to your MSc. thesis or just some informal mentorship relation? Or are you actually seeking a PhD advisor?

You assume it is because of your look (which might be true) but I think one should question this (medicine for false diagnoses dont work). Self assement is not alway possible, so one indicator: Do you have any male friends (inside/outside academia)?

Just keep looking and don't get discouraged
(Most male academics can behave themselves around pretty ladies)
I suppose this shows the kind of spectrum of variation that men have when encountering an attractive woman in a professional setting.  Some men exhibit their romantic interest (sometimes to an extent that is unwelcome), and some go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and act in a very stoney-faced and awkward way to make absolutely sure that no romantic interest is conveyed.  Obviously both reactions can be annoying in certain cases, so I sympathise with your plight.
In fairness to the men you are dealing with, I would say that it takes quite a bit of practice and courage as a male to learn to be comfortable around attractive women, without exhibiting too much or too little interest in them, relative to what is appropriate in the situation.  Many academic men were "nerds" growing up, and even in adulthood, some are not particularly polished in their interactions with women.  There are also external pressures that apply in professional settings, which can punish men who err too much in the former direction, so they compensate by retreating into excessive stand-offishness.  Alternatively, for people who are single, some (quite reasonably) see their professional setting as a place where they might be able to find a romantic partner, and it is not unusual to hear of couples who met through attendance at university (even as supervisor and student).
In terms of trying to find an academic "mentor", this is usually done through the supervision process for a research degree.  Your post does not specify whether you are an undergraduate or postgraduate student, but most academics are time-poor, and many would be reluctant to mentor an undergraduate (irrespective of any of the issues you raise) simply due to the time cost and low reward.  If you are a higher-degree research student then you will need to find a primary supervisor for your research work and a larger supervisory panel, and that may lead off to getting an academic "mentor".  I recommend you wait until you are pursuing research work, and then approach some potential supervisors who are interested in the same topics as you are.  Supervision relationships can sometimes lead to more general "mentoring" roles, though not always.
Unfortunately I do not have any brilliant solution for the general problem you are encountering — it is a complex cultural issue that is impacted by a number of external pressures and internal shortcomings of human-beings.  I suspect that if you continue your search you will find plenty of male supervisors who are confident around attractive women, who are able to interact with you comfortably without romantic interest or its antipode.  And of course, you can also look for a female academic as a mentor as an alternative.  The kinds of problems you describe should not be the norm, so keep looking and don't be discouraged.  If you would like to find a good academic mentor, then it is worth pursuing a research degree (if you are not already doing this) and casting a wide net until you find someone you are comfortable with.

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

It seems as if the advice here is the OP can't do anything except to keep looking -- most male professors will be uncomfortable no matter what. Maybe make that more prominent, or if there's advice here I missed, highlight that?

What's the answer to the question "How to address this problem?"?

The answer would be much improved if it would emphasize the actual answer (or lack thereof) and cut short the apology.

@OwenReynolds if it's most and not some or many, then the OP has been really unlucky.  Respect for (younger) attractive colleagues and sticking within appropriate barriers is a common theme, even if nowhere near as universal as we'd like.  Rules that deem your own students off-limits help to pre-empt issues (and may be self-imposed)

@henning: A good suggestion --- I have edited to put a title on the answer and some additional bolded advice so that the student can locate my advice more easily amongst the general discussion of the issue.

I'm sorry you're in this spot, and through no fault of your own what-so-ever.  I wish there was an obvious answer, but here's a few thoughts:

Look for a female mentor.  This may be hard depending on your field and country, since many academic departments skew male.  Even if you find someone who isn't directly related to your area of interest, they may be able to help guide you through how they managed academia successfully.
Find a women's group in your field, or at your university.  My department has all sorts of groups like this, and there are some in my area not tied to the university as well, e.g. women in programming
Take advantage of the COVID era and deliberately arrange a mentor remotely, relying heavily on email and your existing work.
You don't mention your country or region, but if circumstances permit, you might try to look for a department in a country with different social standards regarding this.  I'll avoid mentioning details, but I've worked in two very different parts of the world, and one of them was unequivocally far more accepting of inappropriate behavior toward women than the other, though neither was by any means perfect.
Lean into it.  I hate even giving this as an answer, but as other posters have said, we're not going to be able to solve misogyny, sexism, inequality, and awkward/inappropriate male professors all in a SE post.  It's grossly unfair if the way others behave toward you due to physical appearance hinders your career.  So, the only practical option for you, right this moment, may be to do the best you can with what you're dealt.  If a professor is "merely" being awkward (as opposed to being grossly inappropriate), can you just roll with it and continue working with them?  It should get easier as time goes on, as they learn that you're a normal person and successful candidate in your field.

One more advice to add to this measured response: seek out groups with a higher number of women students (even if the mentor is male). That's usually a sign for someone who knows how to mentor women and with whom women are comfortable working.

@CaptainEmacs "someone who knows how to mentor women" - what is that even supposed to mean? As if mentoring women is inherently different that mentoring men. Views like that propagate sexism and gender divides not only in academia but anywhere else. Someone who is a good mentor is able to mentor all kinds of people, independent of their gender, and mentor all in the same way.

@Sursula It's a thing, esp. decades ago. There were male professors (the only kind back then) who were interested and good at finding and encouraging women who would clearly be great in their male-dominated field.

@Sursula as OPs very question shows, women have different mentoring needs than men, because they face different challenges.

@Sursula I completely agree that it should not make a difference at all. But clearly, for OP it does, and it is supposed to help OP, not a person living in a good environment.

@henning, no, as OPs question shows, women have the same mentoring needs as men, they just face challenenges getting them that most men don't.

@Sursula perhaps you interpret my words as saying they need more or less mentoring. I take no stance on that matter. What I mean is, for example, that women need mentoring on navigating sexism in academic hiring or in access to educational resources, that they need career advice that is conscious of the fact that unlike most men, they can't take for granted that their partners provide most care work in the family etc. Men, largely, don't.
I'd be surprised if we disagreed about this.

From personal experience, I second both the 'roll with the awkward' (after my  PhD supervisor screwed up, I was dumped on a lecturer who was desperately shy, he'd blush talking to me. I ignored it, as he clearly found it embarrassing and but he was obviously trying)  and the 'seek out groups with a higher number of women'. My (male) other half works in one of those and he ends up with a higher than average number of female students as a consequence of this. Being a trail blazer is very hard as an undergraduate/PhD student, and I would not recommend it.

@Sursula I'd disagree, because mentoring a person well requires socially interacting with that person. I remember a professor who said he was working with a trans male to female student, and after the transition he realized that he should be less likely to give a celebratory slap on the back or high five. A lot of men are probably not willing to behave appropriately, but some literally just don't know how to act should be or don't know how to quash the anxiety from feeling like they don't know how to act.

One of the underrated issues is the fear of accusations.
If the male advisor would be accused of sexual misconduct by a female student, especially one that's not unattractive, everyone would believe her and his career would be over. It is really difficult to never meet with your advisor one on one in places without audiovisual monitoring. And even if advisor manages to do that, he will not have an irrefutable proof of not meeting in such circumstances if accused. His career can be over whether he is actually guilty or not. Males are removed from jobs without a court finding them guilty thanks to #metoo movement while females are not (most famous example — Johnny Depp and Amber Heard)
If you want to alleviate this fear, you really have only two options:

Only ask male professors that know you for some years and find you trustworthy or
Try looking for female advisor

I'm sorry we have to live in a world where male professor mentoring female student has legitimate reasons to fear losing his reputation and position, and I'm sorry you hurt from it. Sadly, that's how it looks like. Outside academia is not really better.

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Let me note something that the other answers seem to have ignored. You describe the things that have been your experience in the past, up to now. But you are moving to a new situation and you have some power to arrange the parameters of that, since you have a stellar academic reputation. Don't, for example, assume that you can't change institutions, or even countries.
Not every male academic is either so insecure nor so predatory as to make them unsuitable. Some of us can actually deal with students properly. Not every academic is male, of course. Since you are on the cusp of changing institutions (I suspect), you can look for places that are more welcoming, either with an advisor (male) who doesn't give off weird vibes or with a woman.
Another option that might have potential is to set up co-advisors so that weirdness is less likely to get triggered.
I don't know if it is possible in Italy, as it is in US, to join a program and only choose an advisor later. In that case, you have an opportunity to look around and make some judgements as well as get advice, possibly from other women among students or faculty. It is even possible, perhaps, to have a mentor who is not your advisor. The mentor can give you advice and to keep aware of things so that you wind up with better experiences. I had such a person, who was in a different specialty than I was. I didn't have any of the same issues that you did, but he was both helpful and a powerful role-model who helped shape me.
But, the main advice is to cast a wide net for a program in which you can feel comfortable and do good work.

I think that due to the sensitivity of the issue, and that the answer is written by a male who uses a female nom de guerre, it would be better if this more clearly indicated it was written by a man.

@DanielR.Collins, Perhaps you should read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darren_Robinson_(rapper).

I wouldn't say that linking to the bio of a man famously charged for sexually abusing a minor is exactly helpful here.

Actually, I chose my username here to be purposely ambiguous to see if there was sexist reaction to some posts. "Buffy" isn't "female", but "puppy". I don't understand why you think there is a "male" viewpoint here, rather than a human one.

(sigh) The name "Buffy" in English is clearly most connoted with women. E.g., BehindTheName.com: "Gender: Feminine... Diminutive of Elizabeth, from a child's pronunciation of the final syllable. It is now associated with the main character from the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)."

... Moreover, you admit that you're trying to obscure the gender of yourself as an author, in a way we might think is harmful in context of a gender-critical question from a vulnerable OP. Why argue instead of making the tiniest improvement to an answer?

You seem to be putting a lot of effort, this week, into setting rules for me. Thank you for the effort, but I don't think I've misled anyone. Not even yourself. And a careful reading of my answer indicates my gender already. Please. If you want to make new rules, try meta.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

@Daniel R. Collins: FYI, when Buffy started posting here (about 1.5 years after I began), I assumed "a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan" or "to see if there was sexist reaction to some posts", very possibly both. It wasn't immediately clear to me whether Buffy was male or female -- oops, man or woman -- and I didn't really try to determine this (however my initial inclination was male), but for me at least it became clear within a month or two.

@DaveLRenfro Seriously, what's the point of finding out whether a poster is a man or a woman? Either they have a point or they haven't. I immediately understood Buffy to be a man when they joined. But, isn't it much more important whether it makes sense what they write? I will even concede to a person I have massive issues with (certainly not Buffy, he's very polite) if they make a point that convinces me. Please do separate topic and argument from any random features of a person. If you feel an argument carries an agenda, then attack that, not the person.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. It was more a response to the whole thread than to Dave, actually, but we cannot address the response to more than one person. Probably not the ideal decision (as you correctly noticed), but I had to make a choice.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. I didn't intend to contradict Dave, it was just an addendum at the end of the thread. I found their point a bit indirect, so I decided to be more direct. In any case, you convinced me I should have at-ted Daniel.

As you may imagine, there's no silver bullet for your situation.
My best suggestion is to use the advice of trusted friends and colleagues, as well as sites such as Rate my Professor to establish a list of advisors with whom it may be worth contacting for mentoring your research. Your network can also be expanded by doing conferences, volunteering to help organize symposiums or forums, etc. By making efforts to maintain and expand your network of colleagues and contacts, you increase the chances that you may successfully find a suitable place for you (although unfortunately nothing in life is guaranteed).
It's important to look at the bigger picture, since there are students who are not dealing with your specific problem of physical appearance, and yet often find themselves shunned/disregarded by mentors and supervisors for many other reasons. In other words, finding a decent mentor can often be hard in general, due to various factors (including the one that is affecting you right now).
Despite your situation, all I can say is:

maintain a positive attitude and your sense of humor at all times if possible (despite the way things look right now!), and maintain your productive work ethic, do not allow the current situation to psychologically drag you down;

explore your network of colleagues in order to outline a list of potential mentors who would be likely to give you a fair treatment, and start contacting them whenever possible;

keep/maintain updated backup records in your computer of all communications with colleagues and mentors (just in case someone tries to be a bit more forward than they should);

Check if your university (or nearby universities) has affiliate groups or teams devoted to improving inclusivity in your field, and see if there is a way for you to get involved, or benefit from their advice;

Maintain a portfolio of work done in your free time, which is available for other people to check on the internet. If you feel that opportunities are dwindling within your immediate surroundings, then it pays to have a professional website and a professional email account that can project your work to as many people as possible, and help you to make more connections.

Contact accomplished female scholars in your field by email or in conferences, they might be able to help you out in some manner.

I wish I had better advice, but this is all that occurs to me right now, and I'm sure others will add their voice as well.

Related to tip 2: If OP knows other women in the program, they might be able to help.

Many good ideas, but don't use websites like "RateMyProfessor" to form any kinds of judgement.

A small auxiliary, perhaps practical, answer.
The context for my comments is that I've been in academic math in the U.S., at research-oriented places, for almost 50 years... though in earlier years I did not think in terms of the explicit or implicit biases in the milieu. And, yes, such nasty craziness is all too common.
My point would be that some "older" mathematicians may have "moved beyond" the adolescent idea that people of a suitable sort are targets for "hitting on". In particular, they may view 20-something kids as more like their own children (in a very positive emotional, protective sense), rather than as sexual objects. But, yes, "sometimes age brings wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone"...
Similarly, but differently, surely some younger faculty have a different social viewpoint, in which not all co-workers are potential targets... A failure of this I've seen is that quite a few of the grad students are still in such an adolescent frame of mind that their outlook is pretty unreasonable in this regard. I would have hoped that ambient progress would have had some impact on this issue, but it may well be that even greater push-back is necessary to counter rather crude instincts. I have no idea.
Anyway, in summary, look for "grown ups", perhaps likely to be a bit older, with some visible experience in "human relationships"... though the latter does not guarantee sense. Lack of experience may make sense unlikely, though.

@Trunk, yes, direct action is needed, but/and in my observation, the vast majority of faculty "do not want to get involved" ... It is hard to mobilize people. Believe me, I've tried, on and off, for some decades now, about various issues within academe...

Something which makes no sense but I have noticed is that in mostly male technical majors, female students who fit in tend to look like tomboys. They'll generally not wear make-up, perfume or nail polish since they were never interested in that stuff and never learned. Sneakers or flats, jeans and a T-shirt, no-nonsense haircuts, a backpack, no purse... .
Women's dress codes are just a maze. A female department secretary can be made-up and slightly sexy; professionally many women are supposed to work hard on their appearance. Female professors (in mostly male fields) have a completely different set of rules for students to take them seriously. But for no reason female students in technical fields don't feel right if they seem to care about their appearance. I can remember female students who wore old tight T-shirts and no bra. That was fine -- they seemed like serious techies who don't have time for girly stuff like dressing nicely. But the few female students who confirmed to upscale womens' style just didn't feel quite right, like maybe this field wasn't really for them.
It's completely unfair. Any man can go into Electrical Engineering and it seems normal, but if a women wants to be there something must have put her off female professions -- maybe her parents wanted a boy, or she's a stubborn non-conformist who thinks make-up is part of a plot.
So maybe look around at other women in your field and see if you stand out as far as grooming and wardrobe habits.
As far as the rest, very, very few professors will actually hit on grad students. Cheating on your wife, sure, that happens. But with one of your students is unethical. I've known more male professors who were simply a bit uncomfortable with female students who gave out the wrong vibe. I've also had no problem with stunningly beautiful female students, even being alone with them, as long as they had either black nail polish, or possibly cut their own hair, or liked wearing spandex biking shorts and a vintage sweater -- anything that wasn't "professional woman making an effort to look good". I don't think general attractiveness is an issue.

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The answer seems all over the place and buries the actual advice somewhere in the middle.

@Nadine first let me say I am sorry that you are experiencing such sexism and inappropriate behaviour from superiors at your university.
I would try contacting the equal opportunities officer of your institution — at least in my country, they exist — and talk to them about your problems. As trained professionals in creating an equal and inclusive studying environment for all, they might be able to help you navigate this situation and get you the academical guidance you need an deserve.
Looking at the answers of this question it is generally rather not appropriate / ethical for supervisors to have a relationship with a student, especially if they are the ones initiating it (given the power gap) and making you — the person they should be teaching — uncomfortable in the process. What they are doing is treating you differently because of your gender (and your appearance, too from what it sounds like), creating a toxic work and study environment for you (and probable other women, too). This is not OK, and in many countries not legal (although things like that are notoriously hard to prove and often do not result in consequences for the offenders).
Moreover, if they refuse to mentor you, they are not doing their job — especially if you have the grades and skills. They are supposed to mentor students, not male students.
So even though this might not be the easiest way, I would try to collect as much evidence as possible that you are not treated equally to your male (or less attractive) fellow students. Talk with other (male and female) students, ask if they ever had to face similar problems, and if not, ask them to write a statement that they haven't, or if they would be willing to support you and accompany you when making a complaint. With all this info go to the above mentioned equal opportunities officer and talk about strategies to confront the supervisors in question about their behaviour. Although this might be the hard and uncomfortable way to go, if those treated unfairly don't speak up, things will not change, or only change very slowly. And those treating others unfairly will not be held accountable.

(-1) OP is not asking for advice about how to deal with this with regards to a specific individual with a history of problematic behavior, but rather about how to move forward in her career despite these things happening. Although it may (or may not) be the right thing to do, reacting to every instance of possible sexism by immediately gathering evidence and filing a report is unlikely to be helpful to OP's career

@DreamConspiracy the only thing OP asks is "how should I address this?", nothing about the carreer, nothing about not takling indiviuals. And yes, it is the right thing to react to every instance of sexism, racism, or otherwise problematic behaviour.

@ Nadine:  I have no idea of situations there. I would be pro-active. . prepare a SOP type report in advance of an interesting project presentation you may have had in mind, calling  for a meeting on a date given in notice boards to meet interested people from a wider circle..

@Sursula The fact that you refer to something that might or might not be sexism as "an instance of sexism" is telling.

@forest If anything, it is telling you that I (just as almost any other female person on this planet) have had enough sexism to be fed up with it and not tolerate it in the slightest.

@Sursula the fundamentalist approach yields fundamentalist results. Total war is a poor strategy if you have something worth losing, IMHO. You do not at all mention the risks involved in following this course of action: It is entirely possible to become a persona non grata in academia, and that would make having a career in it very hard indeed.

@StianYttervik this is not a fundamentalist approach, and that you think it is is part of the problem. From what I can deduct from user names and pictures, not a single woman has disagreed with this, only men.

@Sursula it is basically a declaration of war on the possible advisors. How is that not a fundamentalistic approach to a problem with getting good advisors? A problem that is, as of yet, defined as a feeling. A feeling that for the OP certainly is a problem, but it does lack objective measurables. But let's agree to disagree then: If you cannot see any potential bad outcomes from your approach, disregard my comments altogether. But then you know where a down-vote came from.

(1) According to the OP, it isn't clear if any professor ever told her his reasons to refuse her candidature. If there is no written proof of a sexist behaviour, how would you suggest confrontation? (2) Should an "equal opportunities officer" force a professor to accept her? Do you think this is would create a good relationship between them? (3) No, professors are not "not doing their job" by refusing a candidate, in many countries (Italy included) they have the freedom to select whoever they want. (4) "not a single woman has disagreed" is not an argument!

This could be a good answer in some circumstances if it were in response to specific misdeeds by a particular staff member.  In the present case, it is difficult to see what exactly has occurred and what the OP would find as evidence.  It might be worth editing to soften and to consider what to do if the actions and reasons of the men are unknown (and not in evidence).

+1 academia.se is a US-centred, male-dominated place. Female perspectives from Europe therefore have a hard time to be regarded as reasonable. But what is written in this answer is exactly the way to go. And that a woman, by just living her life and demanding equal opportunities, may be considered a persona non grata is part of the problem. But that should not be the basis for proposing a solution (which can then only be a submission to partiarchy).

OP is aware of his attractiveness to males (in principle it could apply also if OP was a male, I honestly think the gender tag is misplaced).
Let's stretch the situation, drawing the two end members:

Male advisors and professors are intimidated by beauty;
Male advisors and professors are aroused by beauty;

Regarding 2, there is not much to do, your beauty will only trigger their looking for a romantic liaison at the very onset of your working relationship with them. They would look for a romantic liaison even if you would not be so beautiful, because they would find you intellectual stimulant, at a later point of your working relationship. So your beauty is a good way to filter them out. You do not need to hide it.
Regarding 1., I feel that the relation that builds up when you meet these persons is not so linear as you present it: you are aware of your beauty, you are somehow trying to hide it (I do not mean you are wearing a burka, I am just trying to depict a "conservative dress") ... and that unconscious message you have in yourself is passing to the professor, who is a human being and apart from your CV is evaluating you as a person and the feeling he (or she) would got is that you are uncomfortable with a part of you. To say it bold&plain, every man has a dick, not every man wants to use his dick with you. They would recognize you are beauty, it would be just one of the many physical attributes, you are smart enough to realize when someone will try to hit on you, get over your beauty, do not hide and do not show it, focus on your brain.
I am not very helpful, I know, I am all against the body positivity messages (fat people are beauty and can do anything!) as well as to offensive messages (fat people are ugly and can  do nothing!) and I am very lucky that I manage to say the balanced (you are fat, or thin, or normal-build, it does not matter, you can do what you can do, which is extreme rare to coincide with what you want to do).
Disclaimer: mid-50s, western country, accepted myself, ready to accept positive discrimination against me and against my (2) sons, to fix the crap me, my "boomer" peers left, without forgetting that past choice are not set in stone, they are perpetuated with every-day decisions...

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authors: Vladimir F Героям слава


text:
Is this plagiarism or common way of expression?
I have submitted my essay via Turnitin. Subsequently a similarity report was generated where all similar bits in my work were flagged up with the work of others. There is one bit flagged up where I did not cite. Is it considered plagiarism?
This is what I wrote:

This theory is applicable to educational institutions where students have limited exposure to L2 culture, for instance they do not live in an area where L2 is spoken.

Below is the source which Turnitin compared my words with:

Visual media can provide a valuable source of
authentic input for students who do not live in the country where the L2 is
spoken.

The words in bold are the bits flagged up by Turnitin.
On a side note, 'this theory' in my sentence does not refer to the same argument in the source. In my opinion it is just that the author of the source and I happened to use the same expression to describe people who do not live in an L2-speaking area. When I was writing this essay, I did not even know the existence of the source!
I hope it is not considered plagiarism. Although the same phrase was used, the two sentences mean different things!

If that software was just a little bit worse, it would flag all occurrences of the "phrases" "I have", "do not", "will be", etc. as plagiarism.

This is only slightly less ridiculous than that old satirical Onion article about Microsoft patenting 1's and 0's, thus claiming royalties on every bit of digital data in existence...

That's clearly not plagiarism, though it might have been appropriate for some kind of wide-spectrum trawling software to flag it up for human oversight.
In terms of "plagiarism" consider also, "common way of expression…"
Does "common" mean "frequently used" or "uneducated" or something else?

TurnItIn is weird. About 10 years ago I submitted a paper into it, and it flagged a whole bunch of things. It was all websites I had never visited, but none of my citations (that I quoted verbatim) had been flagged!

In particular, not that this question gives a good explanation of the fact that Turnitin does not detect plagiarism.  https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/29723/what-is-the-acceptable-similarity-in-a-mathematics-phd-dissertation-when-checkin

It is unlikely to be considered plagiarism or improper in any way. It would be unreasonable to claim that it is. It actually highlights the limitations of tools like TurnItIn.
Such short phrases have little to do with plagiarism, which is the misappropriation of ideas. There is no complete thought in the phrase that TurnItIn flagged.
Moreover, plagiarism is necessarily a conscious act. You didn't plagiarize if you were unaware of the other text. That doesn't, in general, prevent a claim of plagiarism, but it would seem not credible here. Relax.

"plagiarism is necessarily a conscious act" -- that sounds like too strong a statement. It isn't just plagiarism if someone is out to commit plagiarism, just like you're not only committing tax fraud because you were planning to commit text fraud. The next sentence clarifies what I know you want to say, though.

Indeed. I do assume that only a smallish minority of students would (deliberately) plagiarize... and, then, these "turnitin games" make other students crazy for no good reason... A large waste of mental energy ... and self-esteem, too.

@WolfgangBangerth, actually I meant what I said. You can't "plagiarize" by accident. It is something you "do", not something that "happens". Leibniz didn't plagiarize Newton since Newton hid his work on the Calculus. The work was  equivalent, but independent. IANAL, but I think fraud also requires intent under the law. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud

When a human marker is prompted by TurnItIn, this is definitely correct.  If your work gets an otherwise borderline score it will take more of the marker's time (but this is common when marking non-native speakers who tend to use wording they've picked up in cases like this.  The one problematic situation is the - thankfully rare - one where automatic similarity scores are used as a metric rather than a tool

I think Buffy and @Wolfgang are probably talking about different things. If you read a paper closely, and then use many of the same phrases to describe the same ideas, it is absolutely plagiarism, even if, for example, you did the writing a few days later and didn’t realise you were doing so. However, if you never read the original paper, and (somehow) just happened to use the same (long and complex) phrases to describe the same ideas it isn’t plagiarism. Of course the latter is probably very rare (except for incidental amounts text as in the case here!), and also very hard to prove.

I was really just lawyering around words. "conscious act" sounds a lot like "with intent", but no intent is necessary for plagiarism. But that's nitpicking, @buffy's answer is just fine as is.

I am very curious how tools like GPT-3 will change the way we think about plagiarism. It can ingest any document and rewrite it in different words while maintaining the premise and structure of the original. Now that this is possible, what does it mean for the concept of plagiarism: should new research be mandated to make completely original claims? Will it be possible to create tools that determine the originality of sentiment and theory, independently of the words used to convey the message? I believe that it will be possible, and even inevitable, in the next few years.

I have had times where I composed a tune I thought sounded good, only to realize it was an unintentional copy of a song I had heard days earlier. So what about the case where I read a paper a few months ago and inadvertently copy some ideas, genuinely believing I had come up with them myself?

There is no reason to see this is plagiarism. Turnitin just found two phrases that also appeared in other documents before.
I would like to stress that services like Turnitin cannot detect plagiarism. They are essentially "dumb" programs that just try to find the same phrases in other documents it was fed. This can assist in finding documents a text was copied from. But on the one hand it will frequently flag things that in the end are just more or less common expressions or phrases (though the developers try to minimize this), and on the other hand you can definitely plagiarize by e.g. rewriting things in a way that this service will not detect.
So please do not equate plagiarism with getting a flag from a service like this. It is merely a tool but it does not replace a human who can actually understand what you're saying.