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How to deal with a total lack of motivation, stress and anxiety when finishing my masters thesis?
I am a master's student in Germany. I am currently writing my thesis and am more or less done with it.
Last week, I wrote my Conclusions and Methodology, so the only things left are the Introduction and the Abstract. But I am not satisfied with my work at all. I do not think I serves any purpose and I do not even think it is worth anything. I am very stressed and anxious, and I am really thinking of not submitting at all. I want to do more work and more research but with only 3 weeks left b before the deadline (there is not much to do). I have pushed writing the Introduction for 3 days now. It is Wednesday and I was supposed to start writing it on Monday.
How do I get myself together and just get it done? 20 days left to the submission.

"I do not think I serves any purpose and I do not even think it is worth any thing." The purpose of a Master's thesis is to give you some training in whatever your chosen field is and to get you a Master's degree, which then enables you to do other things. I am not sure what other purpose you are imagining for the thesis. Are you by any chance comparing your thesis to research produced by mature, professional researchers with years of practice? Unless the thesis is truly extraordinary, chances that it will be read by anyone are minimal, so there is no point in fretting too much about it.

Well I just so happened to read the paper of one of research associates in the department i am currently studying, and their research is incomparable with mine. I feel very shallow and weak somehow, especially knowing that he is going to be on part of my hearing committee. I do not even feel like i have the tools to defend myself against his knowledge. That is what is giving me all the stress.

Have you talked to your advisors or professors ?

You are still a student. You have not even finished your Master's degree yet. No-one expects your research output to match the output of more experienced researchers, and it would be non-sensical for you to expect this too.

Might be worth reading about imposter syndrome since it seems like it might be contributing: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11765/how-to-effectively-deal-with-imposter-syndrome-and-feelings-of-inadequacy-ive

"I am a master's student in Germany [and it's costing me $2k a month and that doesn't even include room and board]." - That'd do it for me.

Take 2 days off per week, even 3, so you can work properly the other days. do something enthralling. Rollercoaster, party, whatever works for you. Find some A1 sized paper and write a vision map of all you envision, an emotions map for all you feel, and a page of diagram techniques (pros cons... urgent important not urgent not important... square) to organize your thoughts. do some guided meditations and extreme yoga to feel muscle groups and pieces of yourself that you forgot you have.

Just push yourself to be done with it within the deadline. Don't let your ego that wants to be perfect and never fail to stop you. You are allowed not to be the best researcher or the best student in the world. It doesn't mean anything for your success going forward. Other answers are good but wanted to stress on these points.

This is my own personal and idiosyncratic solution which helped me finish my PhD thesis:  I took a break and re-read the book "Heroes Die" by Matt Stover.  It is a grimdark scifi/fantasy novel.  The main power of the protagonist is his indomitable will.  His mantra is "Keep your head down and inch towards daylight".   After re-reading the book I found myself in the appropriate mindset to JUST GET IT DONE.

Just my 2 cents here. I understand you. I was/am in the same situation. However, it's not the end of the world. Make it as good as possible, and after you graduate if you still want to do research find a PhD position (so you'll also get paid to do your research).
To everyone else: in many cases (eg technical universities) Master students are expected (and many times they actually do) to produce high-quality research.  Lots of them end up in journals, conference papers, etc. It's not uncommon. Combine it with the right amount of ambition, and poof! You have the perfect stressed student.

It is possible that your judgement of the value is flawed. After all, you probably know more about the topic than almost anyone else and so it seems to you, with your knowledge, to be less than it is.
I suggest that you talk to a couple of people. One is an advisor or other trusted faculty member. But the other is a counsellor, who can advise you on why your feelings at the moment might not match the reality of the situation. This is an issue similar to Imposter Syndrome actually, though directed at the work rather than yourself.
A counsellor is good for stress reduction also, I suspect.
You may just need to turn the remains work into a scheduling problem, wading through the swamp of it to reach the other side.

+1. Your university quite probably has professional services for exactly this kind of situation. Just act now, because they may not be able to meet with you immediately.

You are just a master student starting your path in research. From the way your question is worded, your expectations of what your work was supposed to be are extremely high (and probably unattainable). I would suggest you to talk with your advisor (the other person besides you that knows what your work is about), ask him what he thinks about the work you did and about your performance in the program. But, besides everything, try to fix a date where you sit and write what is remaining! For example, promise yourself that this Friday, at 15:00 hours, you will sit down in front your monitor and start writing. Fixing times like that helped me overcome the fear of a blank page. Even if what you write is not good enough, the next day you will not be confronted by a blank page, instead you will have a draft that can be modified. If the thoughts of not being good enough keep lurking you, remember that everybody face that kind of negative feelings.
From Emmy Noether's wikipedia page:

Under the supervision of Paul Gordan she wrote her dissertation, ""On
Complete Systems of Invariants for Ternary Biquadratic Forms", (...)
Although it had been well received, Noether later described her thesis and a
number of subsequent similar papers she produced as "crap".

Poets also sometimes say their earlier work is crap, but it only indicates growth and the fact that you can and should do better with more experience.

Masters in Germany generally last 2 years just fyi. There are 1 year masters but generally only with a 4 year Bachelor which is uncommon

@SirHawrk thank you for telling me, I edited my answer accordingly.

+1 - (very) roughly speaking, as a student, one is still learning; first we learn to actually learn, then, for masters, how to write thesis, and finally, the PhD student is learning how to do real research and write articles that can be published in scientific journals. I suspect even most papers written as a PhD student are fairly insignificant, scientifically.

It might sound stupid but here is something that just might work for you (everyone is different):
Go to a park (now the weather is also getting nicer again in Germany) with pen and paper, without laptop and start writing about your thesis like you would do for an introduction but also just notes or loosely connected thoughts you might have. The pace, environment is different than on a desk which could get you out of the routine that got you stuck at this point. Maybe you can even bring a friend with you and just talk about the thesis while making notes, a little back-and-forth to even further alter the setting that you are in.
Afterwards use your notes and form it into a proper introduction.
I do similar things when writing scientifically but also for songwriting: Just write something now, make it a proper text later. There is a chance that it might not work for you obviously but 20 days seems like plenty of time to write an abstract and introduction to fool around with some other method for one or two days.
Best of luck!

I have a variant of this "routine breaking" advice. I simply open a new document and write a vulgar draft, trying genuinely to explain what I did but not "dressing it nicely", allowing myself to lament and vent all my misgivings in the text. Perhaps this makes a 4 page document. A few days later I copy it back into the main document, giggle at the thought of leaving it all in, and begin deleting unprofessional bits. Most of it thus disappears but some of it will be salvageable, maybe 2 paragraphs. Often I'll then want to expand a bit. But even if I am fully demoralized, at least it now exists.

Try to relax. What you feel is pretty normal.
Most students think they have produced nothing but crap when they are about to hand in their thesis. That's a consequence of the stress you have had in the recent months.

I do not think I serves any purpose

It does. You will get your master's degree. That's the only purpose of a master thesis. Your supervisor will read it, grade it and put it onto a shelf in their office. And nobody will ever read it again. You do not have to hand in hundreds of pages of excellent scientific work. If you want that, continue with a doctorate.

I am really thinking of not submitting at all

Do not be afraid of a bad grade or a failure. At our university, theses usually fail if they are either too short or not handed in at all. As long as your thesis meets the formal requirements (e.g. number of pages) and does not completely miss the point, you  will get a decent grade.
If you do not submit it, you will fail, though. And believe me, that's not worth it.
Good luck!

I felt similar when writing my master's thesis.  I even expressed feelings of having wasted a bunch of time writing something that was so narrow and specific that I couldn't imagine anyone could ever benefit from it.  My advisor shared that this is often the way with research.  She likened each project to a single grain of sand.  In researching, you are illuminating one particular grain of knowledge.  Taken with all the other offerings of the rest of your field, we get a clearer and clearer picture of how things really are.

I gave this advice to one of my friends, who finished his thesis, and thought it helpful:

It's time to write, not read.  Start writing what you can.
You also will have a list of references and/or bibiliography, work
on that.
You likely will have figures, so work on them also.

Also, make a ring on a piece of paper, like a circular pie chart.  Estimate the percentage that you are done and start filling in the circle, this will help motivate you.
Finally, you already have an "emergency thesis" in your mind that you will fall back on.  Commit that to paper, you can improve it if need be.
Be in communication with your advisor, or if this isn't possible, a mentor that you trust.  An "intelligent sounding board" is always useful.
Best wishes!

Also: don't get sidetracked into displacement activities. Now is /definitely/ not the time to- for example- redraw all your illustrations so that their metadata is compatible with PDF.

I do not even feel like I have the tools to defend myself against his knowledge. That is what is giving me all the stress.

That would make perfect sense... if your thesis was in the discipline of Defence Against the Dark Arts.
If someone on your committee will act like it was a confrontation or a battle, that doesn't make them fit for that duty. So, I sincerely hope that nobody during examination will be openly antagonistic and trying to belittle your work. That's not the way to act, and none of that would be your fault. If they only noticed problems with your work during the examination, they have missed their chance at being useful. That's also why it's important that you make sure the committe is acquainted with the current draft of your work, and that you get as much feedback as you can ahead of the examination. Even the strongest critique - should there be any need for that at all - can be delivered in a professional and courteous manner. Academic environment is also about teaching - that means bringing up successors into the field.
Being prepared for examination doesn't mean cramming. Rather it means knowing what to expect from the examiners by interacting with them previously, enough so that you can be fairly confident that they are familiar with your work, approach, style of presentation, etc. and seem comfortable with it. The examination should not have any surprises for you - not because you've re-read all the subject notes from the entire degree's worth of material one week prior, but because you have a feel for what the edxaminers care about, which of their interests may intersect with your work, and so on. It's more about the human side of things that having your mind full of facts.
Unfortunately, on the Master's examination of one of my peers there was an openly hostile examiner who for no good reason whatsoever tried to find everything wrong with the student's work only then in spite of being familiar with it ahead of time, and not really raising any objections earlier. In my opinion that is unproductive - never mind terribly stressful for everyone, and probably cringe-inducing in other, more level-headed examiners in the same room. This is bad behavior - being aware of it should at least help you understand that none of your work can justify that.

Instead of looking for inspiration or motivation to get you going so that you are riding on a wave of enthusiasm or enjoying the task, forget about all of that and only consider what will happen if you do not submit your work, forget motivation or how meaningful it all is or the meaning of life at this moment, just consider what will happen if you simply blow it off and do not submit your final work.
Also remember, perfection is the enemy of all things good.
If you cannot find the energy to do something because you do not see any real meaning in the reward you will get, or you simply cannot summon the interest and attention span to focus on the task, change your focus to the consequences of not doing it instead.  You are not cherry-picking the perfect existence at your leisure you are avoiding certain disaster that comes from inaction.


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Language requirements for postgraduate studies in UK and Canada?
Universities are autonomous institutions with independent requirements and decision making procedures, on the other hand there must be some widely recognized standards.
What is the most recognized English language certificate for postgraduate (physics) studies in UK and Canada universities?
P.S. EU citizen

IELTS is widely accepted in the UK, and it is also accepted by the UK immigration authorities.
ToEFL is also widely accepted by universities but is no longer accepted by UK immigration authorities.

Should  the immigration authorities language requirements be considered when applying for academic position?

@simplicisveritatis Yes, because if you require a visa to study in the UK then it saves time and money to do a single test which can be used for both the university and the visa application.

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During the defense, how to prove the method I used in my master thesis is correct?
I will have my master thesis defense in one week and today my advisor wrote me he is not sure about a method I used to obtain a result (this will not ruin the entire work, but still will make some results useless).
I explained him the theory behind the method (which I found in a highly reccomended book, and I decided to apply after having written to the book's author to ask clarifications), but still he keeps raising doubts about it.
The fact is that now it is too late to change things, because the thesis has already been registered and anyway I do not understand why the method should be wrong. Therefore I stick to what is written in the book and to the explanation the author gave me.
I thought that maybe he just want to make sure I will be prepared to defend my work that day, but he is actually having words on the method itself, which is not something I have invented: I am just applying it as it was explained.
This is making me really anxious, because I do not know how to deal with this if such a question should be asked during the defense. I mean, I will give the same explanation, but what if someone insist on it?

If you have cited the work you based you method on in your thesis and believe it makes logical sense then you should be solid in defending it. Have you asked your advisor what he thinks you should do? Also have you thought about the method enough to justify your version?

Yes, I thought about the method and also I checked all the equations involved retrieving them starting from the beginning to be sure there were not mistakes in the formulation. Still he doubts about the approach (I have to say also that the case in which I applied the method is really similar to the one explained in the book and this was done on purpose to check everything was done properly)

I think you should ask you supervisor specifically about what he thinks you should do when you're defending it.

What's the name of the method, out of curiosity?

The method has not a proper name. It actually consists of applying the Macaulay's method to compute a theoretical value of the stiffness of an experimental beam. It is explained here (http://ts.gylyxx.com/book/book80/2009875575603.pdf) starting at the end of page 342 to the next page

The part where you say that you do not understand why the is wrong and you are just stick to what is written in the book and the author's explanation is most likely to be the problem. The first step is to understand the advisor's objection to the method. Now that you know that there is a reason to doubt the method, you should concentrate critically on that method, and do your best to find the flaws in the method. Do not be distracted by the fact that it is too late to change anything, and focus on truth. It may well be that there is some minor change in the method that would solve the problem, which you need to discover. That is the purpose of graduate education.

Your position seems to be that you "don;t understand why the method should be wrong", and your basic reason is proof by authority - "I stick to what is written in the book and to the explanation the author gave me. it is not something I have invented: I am just applying it as it was explained". On the other hand, your supervisor (and your examiners) want to know why it should be right, and/or why it is relevant to your research. That's the basic difference between "taking a course and getting a good grade by doing what somebody tells you " and "doing research".

@alephzero, I find your comment pretty condescending. OP says they have worked the mathematics through and demonstrated them correct to their own satisfaction. If the advisor isn't convinced, then they need to help OP show that the proof is wrong. If the advisor doesn't understand the proof, but the result goes against his intuition, well that may just be his problem. Until he comes up with a counterexample or other form of mathematical refutation, OP is free to stand on "the result in proved in the cited reference".

I'm wasn't necessarily referring to mistakes in book's formulation of the method. I had $100 for every time I have seen a technically correct  method used when it was not applicable (for example in statistical analysis of data) I would be a significantly richer person. We don't know what the supervisor's "doubts" are concerning this. Reading between the lines, I would guess the OP doesn't fully understand what the supervisor's "doubt" is either, and you can't fix a problem until you  know what the problem is.

@alephzero: I am absolutely sure the method is applicable in my case since it is a replication of the example showed in the book made exactly with the aim of testing the whole procedure (of which the accused method is a part)

@Rhei: If that's how you're sure it's both correct and applicable, then that's your thesis defence.

This is not something you should get to your defense with your advisor still doubting. You and he need to sit down ASAP, work through the material, and not stop until he is satisfied. I would would hope that he would be willing to take this very seriously. No advisor should let a thesis go to a public defense with this kind of question looming in their mind. No one should be forced to do a defense that their advisor thinks they're not ready for.

+1 Your advisor's job at this phase is to help guide and prepare you for academic success.  You're not ready to defend if you can't satisfy your advisor's questions.  Trying to defend without the full support of your advisor is a recipe for disaster.  I strongly recommend that you do not attempt to defend until you have his full support.  Postpone if you need to -- you won't be the first or the last -- because your #1 goal is to graduate.

If I withdraw I will have to postpone my defense until July and I actually don't want to waste all this time trying to figure out what his problem with this method is. Also because I presented him this part of the work nearly 2 months ago and he did not complain about it at that time (probably because he actually never looked at my results)

Criticism about other scientists methodology is an essential part of any scientific discourse. You should not consider results bullet proof anyways, that have not been verified by other research units, possibly using a different methodology.
You are lucky as your advisor told you about his objections before the defense. Make sure that you understand the reason and the consequences of the criticism, so that you can prepare a response in beforehand.
Your response should make clear that you are aware of the issue and how it would influence (or even invalidate?) the results you've obtained (if it were true). Also think about whether you think the criticism is relevant, justified and what measures could be taken to avoid the issue (as part of future works on the topic).
You might also want to add a note on this to the discussion part of your thesis and a slide about it to your presentation that you may turn to when the question comes up.
If you find out that the approach you've taken is indeed flawed it shouldn't mean that your thesis failed altogether. But you should describe  specifically why and how your approach did fail and how you think future works should approach the research question to be effective. Note that there's even a bunch of journals that also publish negative research outcomes to counteract publication bias.

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Asking for Special Treatment/ Annoying Professors
I am thinking about suggesting to a professor I do security work or an RAship for a Graduate Assistantship (if I am accepted). However I know their use for graduate students is to grade papers and similar tasks. Is this kind of Hail Mary attempt bad? There is a big potential reward (spending 20 more hours thinking and not exerting mental energy on other kinds of tasks). But the negative is that if they mark me as annoying I might not be able to get as much from them going forward. Is this kind of "life hack" attempt not as worth it in an academic environment? This is the only program I am applying to, although I am willing to do a menial job for a year if it means I get more time to think.
What complicates the situation is that this is my department from undergrad. While my main recomenders are pure math folk in the department (which I will need later too), these people are the statistics faculty (and its a stats program). Thus I will only need something from them if I do some nice theoretical stuff during the program, which I would think would make the early annoyance moot.

I had a hard time trying to understand what you're asking. Neither the context nor the question are explained clearly. Could you please reword your text to make it understandable to a wider audience? As an aside, recall that whatever you're going to ask to a professor, you would sound less annoying if you write in a clear and concise way, using paragraphs.

This question reads like the output from a random text generator.

I guess, my not being Wittgenstein, I should do the hard work of thinking.

Yes, a bit incoherent... Practicing coherence is a good thing.

GRAs aren't long-shot attempts. Either the professor has some source of funding to offer a GRA or they don't. If they do, you can apply and see if you are hired to work with the professor, so asking them is one way to find out if such a job exists (looking at their website is often another good one). Sometimes departments admit additional students and offer them TAships where they are expected to grade, teach recitation/discussion sessions, etc.
Asking a professor if they have a position open isn't annoying and it isn't a life hack. The only real way to know if such a position is available is to ask. You don't want to be annoying by asking them repeatedly, begging, not taking no for an answer, etc, but telling someone you know that you're going to apply to grad school in their department and would like to work with them is exactly how this gets done.

But what if you know these positions don't "exist" and that you are trying to get a job that doesn't exist? I know this is common in the private sector but seems unusual to me in this circumstance.

Why put "exist" in scare quotes? What are you trying to imply? Your best bet is to approach the prof you want to work with, let them know that you plan to apply, tell them that you'd like to work with them if you're accepted, and ask them what you should do.

Philosophical reasons that are tangential to the discussion. I don't know about current maths so I don't have professors I "want to work with" :( although i will try to work with the professors at the school nonetheless.

@123, if you don't know anything about what you want to work on on who you want to work with, then it's too soon to ask for a GRA for your PhD. It might even be too soon to be thinking of applying for a PhD program. You don't need to know your thesis topic before your apply, but you probably need to know if your interests lie more towards geometry, analysis, or number theory (or whatever). If you at least have an area in mind, then you ought to be talking to professors you like in that area about undergraduate research opportunities.


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How can someone get access to German education system with poor grades?
According to the German education system, applicants are evaluated on the basis of their immediate previous academics grades. For instance, if someone wants to do an MA, his bachelor grades are examined. Similarly, if someone wants to do a BA, his highschool grades are examined.
Now, the problem with this system is: If someone has poor grades in both high school and bachelor's, there is no way he can be admitted into the MA.
How can someone get around this issue?

Does it not depend on the subject and the university, also?

Does this refer to the numerus clausus? It is not used for all master programs.

@Claude, could you kindly elaborate? Which masters programs do not use them?

Why do you want to do the MA? Usually, low grades indicate lack of motivation or unsuitability for a topic, so this is something to contemplate even if you should find an open programme.

@user366312 There is no general rule (except for some cases like medicine), you have to look for yourself as this varies between universities and programs. It can also happen that the numerus clausus is 4.0 (the lowest possible grade), as there might be more spots than applicants.

In your bounty notice, you write that you are looking for information specific to CS. Can you be more specific what you want to know? Is this about admission to a bachelor’s or master’s programme? What difficulties do you think you may be encountering? In many situations, it’s probably best if you ask a separate question to not invalidate the existing answers. Finally, please beware that we cannot answer questions on specific programmes.

In general, this is not correct.

There is no direct equivalent high school in the German school system. The closest to high-school graduation is an abitur.
This is called Hochschulreife¹ (suitability for academic education) for a reason.
Common interpretation of §12 of the German constitution is:
If you have an abitur, you may only be excluded from studying due to place restrictions, in which case the restriction is primarily based on your abitur grade (numerus clausus), but can be bypassed by waiting and other qualifications.
The latter primarily applies to some subjects like medicine.
There is a plethora of bachelor’s programmes that have no restriction at all (besides requiring an abitur).
Admission to a master’s programme also is not grade-based in general. You will probably always have a restriction on the content of your bachelor’s degree though.
With a quick search, I found a programme that automatically admits all graduates from the respective bachelor’s programme at the same university and has no grade-based restrictions for others.

That being said, you will probably find more grade restrictions for master’s than for bachelor’s programmes for the following reason:
On the one hand, bachelor’s programmes are subject-specific in Germany and occur in a similar setting than master’s programmes².
Thus your degree in a bachelor’s programme is a good predictor of your success in a master’s programme of the same subject.
Moreover, most grade thresholds are comparably lenient in light of the common grade inflation.
If your bachelor’s grade does not suffice for admission to a master’s programme, this usually means that you barely made it through your bachelor’s.
In that case it is reasonable to assume that a respective master’s programme is not the right place for you.
On the other hand, since the abitur is not subject-specific, it is not a good predictor of your capability of studying certain fields.
For example, I have seen students with an excellent abitur (particularly the math section) giving up studying math, because they were bad at proofs and this hardly played a role for them before university.
By contrast, somebody with a bad abitur may excel at studying math.
You may also want to read the Wikipedia article on academic admission procedures in Germany.

¹ Hochschule: university or other institution of academic education. There are no equivalents to colleges in the US/UK. Reife: maturity, suitability. Combining these two, Hochschulreife translates to suitability for academic education.
² The separation of bachelor’s and master’s is only around twenty years old in Germany. Most current bachelor’s and master’s programmes originate from a single big programme (Diplom) being split.

I may add that many of the admission rules work actually as admission rule rather than exclusion rule. I.e. if you meet the requirement you can immediately apply. If you don't, you may still be admitted e.g. after passing exams that show you are suitable. (I've met this in e.g. with PhD students either abroad who didn't have a Master since in their home country one signs up either for Master or PhD)

There is no general rule.
Read the admission rules of the universities you are interested in. In some cases, there are ways to make up for not optimal grades by doing extra admission tests.
But if the grades are way below average, it is unlikely that you get admission to a master program.

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Academic Gowns and Hood Colours for Overseas Students Where the University Does Not Have One
My university has asked me (actually, a friend) to process in a graduation ceremony, and expects me to wear full academic dress. However, my home country and home university does not have an academic dress.
Is there a standard hood colour in the UK which means "master's degree; overseas university (unspecified)"? And indeed the same for a bachelor's / doctorate degree?

Ask the university. There will be administrative offices and a secretariat of some kind, and they will be delighted to be able to help. It is a lot more interesting than most of the stuff they find themselves having to do.
The general rule is to wear the gown and hood corresponding to this university's equivalent degree if there is one, so if you are a masters student then presumably you will have a bachelor's degree and so the B.A. dress would be appropriate. But ask them, and they will happily tell you.

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Does McGraw Hill Connect improve student learning outcomes?
I am debating if I should adopt the McGraw-Hill Connect system for my course next semester. On one hand, I am worried about the students' backslash because of the cost. On the other hand, after the pandemic teaching experience this fall semester, I want to utilize every opportunity to improve the students' grasp of the material.
The course in question is a quantitative one, taught to business students. It requires a lot of practice with problems, but in the current situation I cannot simply give a problem and circulate among the desks, helping to those who struggle. Another important feature: I have three sections for this course, each having about 50 students, so individual approach is problematic.
I have already coded quite a few "instant feedback" assignments in Blackboard LMS, but I feel that's not enough. Besides, even just importing and aligning them in LMS takes more time than I would spend lecturing in the classroom. Also, Connect allows me to monitor if the students actually read the textbook, and I expect that it would encourage them to actually read it. There is also an automatic text-to-speech narration, which is bad, but better than nothing -- they can listen to it while commuting, hopefully something sticks.
I will highly appreciate if someone shares their experience with me. Does Connect really improve student performance? If it does, how do you communicate to them that the hefty price is worth it?
Update:
I saw some commenters concerned about the ethics of making the students pay for it, so I have changed the thread name to make my question more clear. More context: I work in a private US university, where the tuition is about $50,000 per year. Hence, the students are paying roughly $5000 to take this class. The publisher price for one semester access to Connect is over $100, which is outrageous, but if this allows the students to make the most of their tuition, I believe the right thing for me to do will be to adopt the system.
Of course, there are long-term consequences of this decision. A significant part of that ever-increasing tuition is what the universities have to pay to LMS and database providers: once their product gets adopted, they keep raising the prices, because switching to another textbook/system is very costly for the university. But I believe my responsibility is to do what is best for my students.

Student textbooks are outrageous anyway. I wonder if the system is more economical per course if several courses adopt it, say, university-wide. You don't say how expensive it is.

On the opposite, if more courses adopt it, it becomes, a standard, and the publisher gets a leverage to raise the price, and this is my other concern. In fact, right how I managed to negotiate a discount for my students, but I am far from sure they will give it to me in the future.

Good point. Sadly enough almost anything that uses "cloud" based resources leaves you vulnerable to decisions outside your control. Google and others dropping "services" without much notice, for example. Maybe it is something for the university to deal with. There may be other open source solutions if the university or department is willing to provide a server for them.

I find the point "Connect allows me to monitor if the students actually read the textbook" particularly disturbing. When I was a student, I seldom studied in any suggested book, but I used my notes (well, someone else's, I skipped most of the lectures too :-p) or books that I chose according to my learning preferences. And now I wouldn't want to impose any specific textbook to my students. So, don't monitor which book students use, just monitor that they are learning what needs to be learned.

You raise a good point about the publisher changing the conditions in the future.and leaving you with no platform (the position you already right now, actually). In comparison, the LMS coding would take a large upfront cost, but it would be a one-off cost, no longer required the following years (I guess). MAke sure to keep local copies of all of them, though.

It is not ethical to require your students to pay money to a private company.  Using open educational resources is ethical.

It is not ethical to require your students to pay money to a private company — I'm a huge fan of open educational resources—I've produced a fair amount myself—but even I find this position is a little extreme. So it's unethical to require students to purchase printed textbooks? Lab kits? A computer? A calculator? Their own paper?

On the other hand, I find the argument "I already pay $50,000 to be a student here; shouldn't that already cover stuff like this?" completely persuasive.

Agree with @JEffE on both counts.  When it comes to things like this, it is really striking how vast the differences in academic culture are between different types of the world.  Europeans will find the amount of money that it is "standard" for (some, not all!) American students to pay for their undergraduate education to be borderline insane.  Americans will find the European lack of institutional responsibility for student success to be borderline insane.  I think it is really important to remember that we can both be right -- and both be wrong.

I use Connect for one semester. Some comments

About the cost: what is the alternative if you don't use Connect?  Probably a printed textbook.  Connect is probably cheaper than a printed textbook, at least it was for my class.  I did not have any students complain about the cost (out of about 80)

"Also, Connect allows me to monitor if the students actually read the textbook".  Yes, but it doesn't monitor if they understand the textbook. I had many students asking questions during class that made it obvious that they had not understood the content from the book, even though nearly everyone had done the reading assignment.

The instant feedback feature is very nice. I personally gave students several attempts at the problem.  i.e. if they got it wrong they had a chance to correct it. At least for me, this ended up driving a large number of students to attend office hours.  i.e. without instant feedback, they assume they have done it right, turn it in, and a week or two later I grade it and they see they're done it wrong, but by that time we are already onto another topic.  With instant feedback they know immediately that they are wrong, and then come to office hours to ask questions.  I think this is a plus for student learning.  You can, as you mentioned, code this into Blackboard or Canvas yourself, but have pre-coded questions will save you a lot of time.

I do plan to use it again.


text:
Issue on conditional PhD admission
I am an international student who has recently been officially admitted to a prestigious school in USA as a PhD candidate. I have sent them my transcript except my last year, which I was passing my courses by the application time. I am now in the second semester of that year. I haven't failed any of my courses in the first semester of that year, but I have failed the semester. The failure grade for a course is 10 from 20 and the failure semester GPA is 12 from 20 and my semester GPA is less than 12. The truth is I had too much work, TOEFL, GRE, IELTS, national entrance exam and also I was hospitalized and lost one of my courses in medical drop and other exams as a matter of fact to being ill! Please also do note that I will be matriculated in time and without any problems! In my admission form there is a sentence where it is said:

This admission is offered subject to your maintaining your present level of academic achievement. If you have not already done so, you must provide proof of satisfactory completion of any studies in progress.
In the conditions of admission part: --verification of all your previous post-secondary degree(s) earned outside of the United States is required. You must satisfy this condition of admission by engaging the International Education Research Foundation or World Education Services to verify your credentials.

I wonder what this sentence means. Does it mean that in my case, which I have had a rough semester, I should be worried about my admission and they will reject me because of my first semester bad GPA? Does a bad semester in the last year of B.S mean that you will lose your admission? Or is it just saying that you should finish your B.S and attend your new university in time? I should say that I have received my I-20 form and official admission!
Will they consider my case or will they just reject me even if I bring evidence of this fact? I am asking this because I have other admissions and it is best to know where to put the eggs. My question is how much should I be worried. It is also useful to say that this happened before my admission came and it is not because of having a good time.

I wonder what this sentence means. — What did they say when you asked them?  (You did ask them, right?  After all, they're the only people who know what they meant.)

I do not know what they will do in your case. However, in general, the procedure is such that when the application process for PhD happens, most students doing Bachelors or Masters degress in other countries are in their final year and do not have grades to send. However, if you do fail, then the offer of admission no longer stands, in general.
For a PhD program, the minimum required standard is a bachelor's degree and if you fail that degree then why would they allow you entry? Having said that, now consider this. In certain countries, there are make-up exams for failed courses in a particular semester. If these make-up exams are taken before your offer of admission stands, i.e. Fall 2013 then you are good to enter. If not, then its bad luck for you. An offer of admission to a doctoral program only stands (in general) for that mentioned semester. You could potential defer the offer of admission another semester or year in order to take the make-up exams and then join the program. However, your chosen program may not allow this or may not have funds for you if you choose to join at a latter stage.
Basically, it all boils down to this. Contact the department immediately to ask for advice and tell them what options you have to finish your BS degree at home and whats the fastest route thats possible. Then see, what they have to say and take it from there. I speak from anecdotal evidence of a close friend who was forced to leave the offer of admission because he failed a couple of courses in his final year.
Do not try to fake your way through. I-20 or visa means nothing really for this problem and you will not be checked in general for proof of degree during your visa application process. But, be rest assured that you will be asked for proof of bachelor's degree once you join the program.

Dear Shion, sorry if I could not tell you properly! it is the fact that I will definitely get my degree in time and properly without any problem! consequently I mark your response irrelevant and I politely ask you to delete it!

Or you could help me if you are fully aware of the situation ...

I am a little confused. If you would get your degree in time, then why bother posting this question?

It is the fact that failing a semester will only mean that you have had a critical semester but nevertheless you have passed! either you had a problem or you were just not studying enough! only like a warning that you should study harder! I will be matriculated in time ...! but the warning is received and will be shown in my final transcript showing that this fall semester was not a good one!

Aha. I got it. Seems a little strange system to me but as long as the university is good with it, you are good. If you receive your degree in time, then its all good. You should have clarified in your question, the first time.

the question is identical to "Do some bad grades in the last year of studies given that you are officially admitted, jeopardize your admission"?

I am sorry about the misconception in my first question, I hope so! I am super excited about joining the university but nevertheless I am stressed as hell too! BTW I am a fellow cs student, nice papers you got there in your page ;)


text:
How many papers should a PhD student in math try to publish before graduating?
I am wondering how many papers does an average academia-bound PhD student in math try to get published? I want to eventually work in a research-oriented university rather than a teaching-oriented university. Obviously the more good mathematics one gets published the better, but what would be average for someone who goes on to work as a professor at a research university?
I am particularly interested in the field of combinatorics.

My guess is that for the majority of "academia-bound PhD students in math", their first publication is their Ph.D. thesis.

@GEdgar: That's certainly an oversimplification.  In my case, for example, it would be more accurate to say that my Ph.D. thesis consisted of (an expansion of) my first three publications.

In any case, this varies a lot.  A "paper" is not remotely a constant unit, and practices vary a lot by subfield as well.

In an answer to this question, user Pete L. Clark states that "Many people get a PhD in mathematics before having a single accepted paper (I did), and if they have an eminent advisor who goes to bat for them, having no papers need not be much of a strike against them in the postdoctoral market."

I appreciate your input Mark. What would be a normal range though? From GEsgar's response, I am assuming in some cases one big publication is normal. What about on the other extreme, or what would be an upper bound for a normal number of publications?

You really need to clarify whether you are pursuing applied or pure math and what subfield you're interested in. Applied math students publish a few papers as grad students on average; pure math students maybe publish none to three, depending on the field. In geometry, it isn't uncommon to go unpublished at the time of PhD conferral (but with a paper near completion) so one or two publications is really good; however, in analysis, being unpublished is really not good, one or two is pretty standard and three is considered really good.

You'll need to say more than "combinatorics".  The graph theorists publish 2 or 3 times as much as people like me (let's make the category "Rota descendents", because "algebraic combinatorics" has two distinct meanings) tend to.  Then again, the graph theorists probably consider me an algebraic geometer.

I agree entirely with the answers of Mark and Brian.  Since my name has been uttered three times and I've been summoned here already, let me add a few nuances.
1) Asking for a number is certainly the wrong question.  What you want to show as a graduating PhD student seeking an academic career is substantial results and the promise of more (and better) such results to come.  Multiplicity is not the point at this stage of the game.  Better one very good result than five pretty good ones.
2) Zero is a very interesting number nowadays.  It corresponds both to people who have not done any publishable work (note to academics in STEM fields other than mathematics: the standards for publication in a non-predatory math journal are quite high; the most common number of publications for a PhD in mathematics is certainly zero, and many PhDs are awarded for theses which could only be publishable with a significant amount of additional work which the PhD candidate is almost certainly not going to do) and future stars at elite places who do not need to show their partial work because their superstar advisors will tell the story for them.  So zero publications is very common...but it's most commonly bad.
3) Publication quotas have been rising dramatically in mathematics, even in the last dozen years.  I wrote elsewhere that I got my PhD in 2003, my first publication was in 2005, and I did well on the tenure-track job market in 2006 with five accepted papers.  Well, it's true....but that story is so 12 years ago.  Most postdocs we have hired at UGA in recent years have had some accepted papers or at least an arxiv preprint that the interested parties can look at and convince themselves is going to be accepted.  Also at UGA we have numerous, highly systematized opportunities for graduate research, which results in a substantial number of publications co/authored by graduate students.  We also give 2-3 graduate research awards per year, and these awards are usually given for preprints or publications, not just "promising thesis work".  All three of my graduated / soon to graduate students have had arxiv preprints or publications by the time they went on the job market; two out of the three had more than one.  In the limit, Princeton students will get five years of postdocs and be able to release their Annals paper while they're on the tenure track, and everyone else who's serious will have some tangible product upon graduation.  Well, obviously that's an exaggeration, but there's some truth to it.
4) It is true that numbers of publications are sensitive to the subfield.  They're sensitive to a lot of other things as well -- e.g. the length and quality of the publications -- but if we want to sling generalities: applied math people publish way more than pure math people (and they cite each other with enough frequency to make the stereotypical pure mathematician want to roll her eyes every time she hears "impact factor"); they may even publish some of their good papers in conferences, which is almost unheard of in pure math.  In pure math, combinatorics is one of the highest publishing fields, and the papers tend to be shorter (and often lighter, but even a weighty breakthrough paper is probably going to be short compared to other fields).  Algebra and number theory publish a bit more than average, generally.  Analysis is a broad field and seems roughly in the middle.  Geometry depends sensitively on the subfield: discrete geometers publish a lot; differential geometers less; algebraic geometers really less.  Topologists seem to publish very few papers.  Well, it was fun to play but I wouldn't take any of that very seriously (though argue if you want, that's part of the fun).

Deans with backgrounds in science and engineering also tend to roll their eyes whenever they hear mathematicians trying to defend their assistant professors who haven't published much...  I think a lot of what is driving the change in expectations is normalization of expectations across fields.  It's easy but incredibly naive to blindly use bibliometrics to compare faculty and departments without thinking about differences between the disciplines.

"...algebraic geometers really less." I should inscribe this pronouncement on a magical amulet, and use it to ward off university administrators.

Not just geometry, but I think (almost?) all areas depend quite a bit on the subfield, including applied math (which is a pretty broad, vague term).

I agree.  Although I'm not math, we just did a search, and the CV's we got were such that if we held our current faculty to the standards that are currently acceptable, we'd have a very empty department.  These days, academia is a full contact sport.  Publications aren't even enough -- young investigator awards are almost de rigueur.

A short answer is that you should publish as much quality work as you can before going on the job market.  Piling on junk publications in unknown journals isn't going to help much, but having at least one or two publications in reasonably high quality journals is important.  In mathematics, expectations for what a PhD student should publish have grown in recent decades along with competition for post-doc and tenure track positions.
For example, when I completed my PhD and interviewed for my first (and current) tenure track position in 1992, I had two papers submitted, but neither had yet been accepted.  I defended my PhD over the summer before starting my first job as a tenure track assistant professor.  That would never happen today.
During a recent search for a tenure track assistant professor, I interviewed (by Skype and in person) 14 candidates.  All of them had at least one year of employment post-PhD, and most had 3-4 years of experience and a dozen or more publications.  I believe that all of them had coauthored at least one published paper before the PhD.  I would expect any successful candidate for a tenure track position in my department to have a similar record of publications at similar stages in their career.
You can look up my affiliation in my profile, or just trust me when I say that you've probably never heard of the institution where I work.  In my experience (based on serving on a search committee once every few years)  expectations have risen dramatically in the last decade.  This is the new reality at a broad range of institutions.

FWIW I'm an applied computational mathematician in a mainly applied department.  My experience in hiring has been in analysis, applied mathematics and numerical analysis.  YMMV.

Since I was asked to clarify my comments, I'll respond by saying that you're not asking exactly the right question.  Both Brian Borchers's answer here and Pete Clark's answer linked by Mad Jack give good advice, but if you read them carefully you'll see that they're talking mainly about what your application should look like when you apply for your first tenure-track position, which -- if you're aiming for a research-oriented job -- you will probably not do from grad school, but from a postdoctoral position.
As Pete points out, you don't need published papers to get a postdoc.  (The difference between accepted and published is immaterial and I'm ignoring it.)   Many, maybe most new math postdocs don't yet have any published papers.  But to get a postdoc you do need results which will lead to published papers, and to get a tenure-track position, you should have published those papers and written newer papers that aren't derived from your thesis.  There used to be the idea that the first year of a postdoc would be spent turning your thesis into one or more papers and submitting them; as Brian hints, these days that would have you rather behind the curve.
In any case, the bottom line is that as a Ph.D. student, your first priority is to write a really good thesis.  How that work gets divided up into papers and when it gets published depends on too many factors to get into here --- and that's part of what you have an advisor for.
You seem to really want me to quote a numerical range, so I'll say that in my subfield it's pretty normal for the work in a Ph.D. thesis to correspond to anywhere from two to five eventually published papers, but I know of at least one person whose thesis consisted of nine papers.  But as I said, these things can vary enormously by subfield.  Talk to your advisor!
Final note: I just saw your edit stating that you're going into combinatorics. That's not my field so I don't know very specifically, but (certain parts of) combinatorics have a reputation for larger numbers of shorter papers than most other subfields.  Again: talk to your advisor!

"you don't need published papers to get a postdoc. (The difference between accepted and published is immaterial and I'm ignoring it.) Many, maybe most new math postdocs don't yet have any published papers." Is this still true, 8 years later?

"Many" is still true.  I'm less sure about "most".  However, it's also true that many new math postdocs do have published papers by the time they apply for postdocs.

What about the first sentence? My impression is that to get a postdoc you need to have a publication, or else it looks bad.

@cgb5436 No, you don't need a publication, but you do at least need credible evidence that you have done work that will result in publications.  The best such evidence is your advisor and/or other letter writers saying so.  And of course, it's better to have actual publications than not to, and you'll be competing for positions with people who do.

@cgb5436 To put it another way, it's not that having no publications looks bad.  It's that having any publications looks better.


text:
Is there a standard of professionalism in academia requiring me to hide self-harm scars if I'm otherwise comfortable leaving them exposed?
I'm a student intending to stay in academia, and I'm reaching the stage where I've begun to TA classes. If all goes well I'll be teaching courses for the rest of my career, so I want to make sure I'm doing it right.
I have a series of scars across my arm that anyone with experience or awareness of the issue will immediately realize were self-inflicted. I have not added to them in enough months that they are old and a little faded, but they are still very visible. Personally, I've grown comfortable with leaving them exposed – a stare from a stranger now and again won't hurt me.
But in a classroom environment I'm uncertain – is it possible that the emotional vulnerability implied by the scars would compromise my relationship with my students as a teacher, that they might lose respect or trust in my competence? Should I perhaps cover them because they may bother students who have been affected by the issue?
I understand that a great deal of this is based on the individual: whether they're comfortable, the way they wish to present themselves to their students, how private they wish to be, and so forth. Setting this aside, is there simply a standard of appropriateness with respect to how much I should implicitly reveal? Obviously it would not be appropriate to launch into a ramble of my mental health history while holding office hours, but would the existence of the long story implied by my scars be something I should take measures to keep from my students? And are there guidelines that would generally apply to people in similar situations (for example, if a recovering addict had obvious needle marks)?
I should add that I'm a Canadian studying in the United States and that I have seen one instance of a graduate student in the same situation as I am – she did not choose to cover her scars.

is it possible that the emotional vulnerability implied by the scars would compromise my relationship with my students as a teacher, that they might lose respect or trust in my competence? – Yes; people may negatively judge you for far lesser things (not that you should let this alone influence your choices). There are a lot of sentences ending with question marks in your question, some of which are questions like this, which have a clear, plain and rather useless answer. To avoid answers rambling about such things, I suggest that revisit such sentences and leave only the relevant questions.

My only concern is to ask whether displaying those scars could possibly psycologically related to the impulse which caused you to inflict them upon yourself. If there is, then I'm not surd that's good for you."Enough months" is not an encouraging phrase. Don't paint yourself into a corner.

I am protecting this question because it is on the network-wide hot questions list, which we know from experience makes it liable to get lots of answers from drive-by users who aren't necessarily familiar with academia.

As a general American cultural thing - not just in academia - asking people about visible scars of any kind is rude.  I would expect people not to bring it up at all, and if they do you would be perfectly entitled to say "I don't want to talk about it", "that's none of your business", or something even more blunt.

I would be less concerned about people judging you for having the scars, and more concerned about a student throwing a tantrum because you've "triggered" them by exposing the scars.

You should do what you are comfortable with. If you want to keep them hidden, that is fine. If you want to sometimes wear clothes that reveal them, go ahead, assuming the clothes are otherwise appropriate. Your colleagues will probably not care, and if they do, they need to - and will - get over it.
I would caution that letting students know your history could be problematic, in that it could increase the likelihood that they come to you about personal issues. No matter how supportive you are, no one wants more students dropping by to talk about personal problems.

"You should do what you are comfortable with." - honestly, that's a pretty terrible advice for anything except the privacy of your home. I'm most comfortable with being in my boxers, do you think it's smart for me to go to work like that? "they need to, and will, get over it" - or they can bad mouth you and actually destroy your reputation and career. Being ignorant of office politics is not a virtue.

@Davor you are correct, if the question was about teaching in your boxers, I would not have answer "do what you want", although you missed the "otherwise appropriate". At research intensive universities, research is what matters and personal opinions carry little weight. It would be hard for a single colleague, or even a group of colleagues, to destroy your career over visible self mm harm scars, it is just not how academia works.

@Davor, it's neither advisable or even smart to take quotes out of context.  I really hope your research skills improve.

@Mr.Mascaro - it is purely your opinion that these quotes are taken out of context. I disagree.

@Davor, yes taking a quote in reference to not hiding cutting scars and drawing the line all the way to showing up to work in boxers... not out of context at all.  That is, in fact, the very definition of out of context.

@Mr.Mascaro - I pointed out how the truism "do what makes you comfortable" is a pretty bad one for the workplace. Even if it was applicable in this situation (it's not), it still wouldn't be out of context. But like I said, you opinion, I'm not gonna argue any more about it.

Comfortable with boxers in front of a class... cool....

-1 for "No matter how supportive you are, no one wants more students dropping by to talk about personal problems."  This is your personal opinion and should not be asserted as universal.

@mweiss I have never met an academic who has told me they like it when undergraduate students drops by to complain about personal problems, so my answer is not my opinion, but rather my observation.

"Complain about" ≠ "Talk about".  And in any case you have 'met' one now.  Personally I am honored when a student feels that they can trust me enough to look to me for support (even if all I can offer is a sympathetic ear) on a personal matter.

Thank you for this answer. Personally I agree with @mweiss in that I personally wouldn't mind a student coming to me for a personal issue. Having been on the other side I know how valuable it is to feel comfortable talking to someone, so if I can be that person for a single student I'd be more than happy. Regardless I appreciate your affirmation that it's mostly a matter of comfort.

"no one wants more students dropping by to talk about personal problems." - Not necessarily.  Some of the very best mentors support students in personal aspects of life in their "home away from home," too.  It's unusual, but special.

In support of StrongBad, few of us have adequate professional training to help students deal with their personal problems, especially if they veer into the area of self harm. I care about my students, but I am obligated to refer certain issues to professionals.

There's nothing unprofessional about dressing in a way which shows your scars, and it's unlikely that anyone, professor or student, will object to or think less of you for dressing in a way that shows them.  (It's not impossible, because there are unreasonable people everywhere.)  (In particular, most of the people who would see self-harm as evidence of emotional vulnerability won't recognize them anyway.)
On the plus side, some of your students will be struggling with self-harm themselves, and will really benefit from seeing someone like them to who has also been successful in academic life.  As StrongBad says, that's a mixed thing for you, because some of them are going to come to you for emotional and practical support.

In particular, most of the people who would see self-harm as evidence of emotional vulnerability won't recognize them anyway. – I do not know about the situation in the US (which this question is about), but in Germany self-harm as described in the question received a considerable amount of media attention a few years ago. I myself, for example, know of it through media coverage only.

It's not about showing scars, it's about how they got them. Your answer is answering the wrong question.

@Wrzlprmft: That's good to know. What I said is currently the case in the U.S., though it's easy to imagine that changing quickly if it gets media attention here.

Regarding the edit replacing "who's been successful" with "overcame the same problem", that's not what I mean here; I mean successful as in "was academically successful enough to go on to grad school and perhaps beyond".

@Jasper: Oh!  I hadn't seen that reading.  Good catch.

Is it possible that the emotional vulnerability implied by the scars would compromise my relationship with my students as a teacher, that they might lose respect or trust in my competence?

Highly unlikely.
There's 2 categories of people:

Those who know what those scars mean (fairly small percentage, IMHO) - who would be extremely unlikely to judge you negatively for cutting in your past; most (in my experience) would be former cutters, or their support persons; or people involved in mental health professionally.
And those who don't know, who simply would have no reason to suspect you as a former cutter. It's not a very widely known situation with publicly recognizable signs, unlike intravenous drug use.

Should I perhaps cover them because they may bother students who have been affected by the issue?

Now, that's a valid concern. However, it's not nearly as black and white - a person who's been affected by cutting is just as liable to be reassured by knowing you share the experience - BOTH because they can relate to you and you to them; AND because the fact that someone who used to cut is now a teacher in academia is a positive and reassuring example for them that they have a future if they strive for it.

P.S. The only consideration I would have would actually NOT be specific to cutting, but has impact on whether seeing the scars is an issue at all. Specific considerations of professionalism may vary, but (especially if you are male), wearing short sleeves is probably NOT the best approach to dressing professionally IMHO. But I spent more time in business background than academia ones so I'm biased in my views on dress code :) For women, dress code standards are far more relaxed, but often also discourage lacking long sleeves.

As a side note - I don't think you asked it explicitly, but an implied side question seems to be "if I'm asked about the scars, what should I answer?"
My suggestion would be

If asked about scars in general, answer "long story" and don't elaborate. You're there to interact with people in professional capacity, not to swap war injury stories.
If someone explicitly asks whether they are from cutting, use your best judgement. Personally, I'd recommend saying "no" (since there's a stigma attached, and you don't know what the views of the asker are); but this really is your call.
And frankly, if you don't want to be asked about whether the scars are from cutting, you're better off pre-empting that by wearing long sleeves and not displaying the scars at all. A slight restriction on your clothing options (endured by nearly 100% of people employed outside academia :) is surely worth avoiding a conversation you'd rather avoid (this is an issue of your personal emotional comfort, NOT professionalism, so it's not directly related to the meat of your question)

There's 2 categories of people: […] – See my comment on Henry’s answer.

If asked about the scars, Sorry, I do not wish to talk about this topic is a perfectly acceptable answer.

The claim that expectations for professional attire are more relaxed for women is simply false. It's probably true, though, that they allow for greater variation within the bounds of professional attire (which perhaps is what you meant). But the boundaries are policed much more strictly than for men.

Regarding long sleeves: I can only speak authoritatively for the United States, but having lived and worked all over the country I have never been in an academic setting where short sleeves were considered less than professional for men.

@tom no offense but if u don't know please don't contradict people. Every company I was in, short sleeved shirts were explicitly prohibited for men. Women wore short sleeved blouses and dresses all the time and there was no prohibition. Shorts were prohibited for men. Short skirts allowed for women though that's less relevant to topic at hand

@Corvus - Yes, I was expressing my personal view (IMHO), not academic consensus :)

Short-sleeved button down and collared shirts are considered as business casual in every agency within the DC area.... and if you are a technical person (as I am) short-sleeved polo shirts are not only tolerated, they are expected. I disagree with "nearly 100%", as it is categorically untrue.

I agree with @CGCampbell. Dressing code are field related and different between countries. In biology, shirt with long sleeves are strange. Teachers and TA often wear t-shirts.

If you want to have an entire class of students asking you about (or wondering about, or thinking about instead of course material) your scars, go for it. This isn't a question about your right to express yourself, or having to worry about showing who you truly are without hiding it. I'm as PC as the next guy, it just looks like you're getting a lot of PC answers. There is a time and a place for showing "who you truly are" but I don't see this as being any different than getting a corporate job and hiding that tattoo on your arm or your ankle or any other place that wouldn't be covered by the corporate uniform. You are in academia, and you want to be judged by your knowledge and your experience. Making your scars visible to your students and colleagues will invariably change their opinion of you. As human beings we all make snap judgements about people, whether we like to admit it or not. I just hope that when people first meet you, they judge you based on your experience and your perceived character, not on a time in your life (theoretically in the past) when you were cutting yourself. While tattoos may not be frowned upon in Academia, the point is that it is a personal feature that you should not be ashamed of but still might not be something you want to show everyone

"I don't see this as being any different than getting a corporate job and hiding that tattoo" - Academia tends to be fairly tolerant of tattoos, long hair, etc

The tattoo was an example of any personal thing that you should certainly not be ashamed of but at the same time should think twice about offering up to the public eye about you. the tattoo which is acceptable in academia but perhaps not in a corporate environment is tantamount to the cutting scars that are acceptable somewhere else but perhaps not in academia

but thanks for explaining your downvote because it really tics me off when people dont

My point was that academic workplaces tend to be fairly tolerant when it comes to judging others based on appearance, personal idiosyncrasies, and other things that would likely be an issue in a "normal" workplace (not just the specific examples I gave). This answer doesn't sound to me like it reflects the academic culture I'm familiar with. Is this coming from your experience in the academic workplace? If so, perhaps you could clarify what academic field and what country, since that may be part of the cultural difference.

While the tattoo example may not carry over to an academic environment, my point is that there is a time and a place for everything. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a tattoo, the corporate environment is not the place for it. And while there is nothing wrong with being a cutter, and getting over it, and being perfectly OK with that part of your life, I feel it is unfair and incorrect to assume that everyone else will be OK with it as well. I have been a student for several years, and I can tell you that seeing self inflicted scars on a teacher would paint my opinion of them

And I'm not the only one. And if OP wants that part of their life to paint their picture of them to people they haven't met, that is fine, but I think it is incorrect to try and tell OP that it won't. Because it will. This isn't about being accepting. I'm not going to slight OP because of their scars. But I will think differently of them, because I know what those scars mean, and whether or not I accept them or think it is a good or bad thing, it will certainly factor in to my judgment of that person, not necessarily in a negative or positive way, but it will be a factor

And I guess my main point is that there are 2 factors, the opinion of your academic peers, and the opinion of your students, which come from 2 very different viewpoints, but are both important

Perhaps you can edit your post to clarify that you are speaking from the students' point of view.

@ff524 this reminds me of http://individual.utoronto.ca/somody/quiz.html the point bein that academics generally do not care about outward appearence.

@ff524 - I have to vehemently disagree with that. Academia is full of rigid old people. Compared to colledge, everywhere I've ever worked was much, much more relaxed. Unless you're customer facing, no one cares what you wear or anything similar.

You're fine. Anyone who knows what they are probably won't judge you. Everyone else won't know and probably won't bring it up, as is common with any kind of unusual physical characteristic.

"Everyone else won't know and probably won't bring it up" certainly, but internally, they will most likely be making a judgment about OP

Is it possible that the emotional vulnerability implied by the scars would compromise my relationship with my students as a teacher, that they might lose respect or trust in my competence?

I'm sorry to say that yes it will compromise you relationships with many students. There will be those that understand but most will see you in a completely different way than you want them to. And once you've lost the confidence of your students you should start looking for a new job ASAP.
But students are the least of your worries. You are putting yourself at a HUGE risk with your employer, you colleagues, the parents of your students... the list is endless. While many people claim to have evolved in their thinking about mental illness, they really haven't.
Not to mention, your employer might not want something like that getting out about one of their employees. It puts them at risk as well of being accused of hiring someone who "is emotionally unstable" (even if you're not anymore).
Unless you really want to take on the challenge and responsibility of reforming the minds of the populous and get your face on CNN, you are really endangering your livelihood.
If you really feel as though you need to be open about this, you need to talk to your employer first since you are a representative of them. It's only fair. Especially if you didn't disclose this to them when you where hired/signed on to be TA.
FYI, I also have self-harm wounds and was a high school teacher for many years. I did have some students ask me about the scars (which are faded white now) and have come up with a story to cover for me. As long as I use that story in a confident way they will believe me.
Depending on how your scars healed you can use things like cat scratches, surgery scars, gardening accidents, etc. And you can have different explanations for different scars.
As for hiding the scars, that can be a hassle. Mine are on the inside of my forearm so unless I wear long sleeves all the time they're gonna be visible. I'm fine with that because I have my story ready to go.
Another option is to tattoo over them. That doesn't always work and could draw more attention to them but it could work if you find an awesome tattoo artist.
I know none of this is PC but it's the truth. Unless you want to and have the ability to be a crusader, don't take on that role.

I think your missing the absolute monumental gap between high school teaching and teaching at a university that has PhD students. While a slight over statement, the opinions of undergraduate students do not matter at an R1.

Thank you for the answer. The course I'm currently TAing is for incoming first-years and, in accord with the professor I've been dressing casual. The students, who are mostly seventeen and eighteen, have therefore definitely had ample opportunity to see my scars, and I have neither noticed a single stare nor been asked a single question on the matter. Honestly, this surprised me, but I'm glad for it. The reason I'm asking this question now is that I was wondering whether I had simply violated some unspoken rule.

@vaxquis but this undergraduate teaching at a US university with PhD students. If it was outside the US, or a US college, things would be different.

@user37152 - I have found that one overriding principle helps me (and others) live life with much higher quality once you learn it: people just don't care that much about you, as a rule. You're really just Not That Important to most people, which is a good thing :).   Really, outside your direct social circle, very few people would bother analyzing a TA for minor details outside of glancing curiosity.

It puts them at risk as well of being accused of hiring someone who "is emotionally unstable" (even if you're not anymore).
Um, what? It puts them at risk of being accused of NOT violating the Americans with Disabilities Act?


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Do US professors/group leaders only get a salary, but no group budget?
I was reading an interview with MIT Professor and physics Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle in which he explained that he gets no budget, has to acquire funding even for his secretary, and this is one major difference to Germany (where he was offered to be director of a Max Planck institute). In Germany, a professor has a budget depending on negotiations before he was hired and negotiations when other universities try to entice him. A small average group has around 500k €, a professor around 100k €, employees around 200k €, investments around 200k €. This can vary, but roughly the right order of magnitude for experimental sciences.
Now I also heard professors at Ivy League universities often get a multiple times the salary of German professors, even in top universities like TU Munich. I expect they see this also only as their salary.
Is the case of Prof. Ketterle at MIT representative, and what does this mean when comparing PhD or postdocs in both countries? Are PhD students in graduate schools rather financed by the institute? Or does the number of PhD students in group already depend on the funding success of the professor?
It’s interesting to me to know, because it implies in my opinion a very different necessity of activity and career planning when being a PhD student or postdoc in Germany vs. the US to keep yourself financed. The brain drain and comeback of German academics from the US is a neverending story in German academia.

A small average group has around 500k €, a professor around 100k €, employees around 200k €, investments around 200k €. Where on Earth did you get these numbers? They are far from true in my discipline. While I can imagine that startup packages may be this big, a yearly budget is (where I am) an order of magnitude lower.

@Dirk: Seriously? A 50k€ budget? That hardly pays one salary. Add associated costs like healthcare, pensions, etc and the 100k € sounds like the true cost of a professor. And indeed, one professor does not make a group. Investments of course can vary a lot between disciplines.

Ah, I see the misconception: The salaries are not part of the yearly budget (at least for all I know). A typical German professor gets a number of assigned positions (for students, assisting teaching staff, even a part of a secretary position) and the budget for equipment, travel, guests (and so on) is extra. On the other hand: Even within Germany the system with staff funding and budget may vary a lot.

@Dirk 500k overall! :-)

Certainly the US and German systems are very different. For starters, there is no US national system for higher education (or for lower education, either). The individual states here all have individual systems of higher education, but funding can be problematic there and can vary with the political climate. Also, many of the top institutions, including MIT, are private institutions, without regular government funding. It is too broad to say that no US professor gets a budget, but generally speaking, in most fields, it would be rare to get a budget beyond salary that comes from general university funds.
Instead, those fields that require such things as laboratories rely heavily on grant funding from NSF and other, similar, agencies as well as private funding. Grant writing becomes a treadmill. In some places your tenure decision may be heavily influenced by your success in getting grant funds for yourself, your lab, and for student support.
It is true, however, that some departments in scientific disciplines do maintain general laboratories. Chemistry and physics labs, for example. I know of one cyclotron run by a physics department, but I assume they require lots of grant funding to keep the particles going round and round.
Many, probably most, graduate students are funded as teaching assistants, paid, modestly, by the university for the services they provide. Research assistants might also be paid that way, but, more likely, are paid by grants of the PI of a lab.
There is very little secretarial and staff support in most fields in the US unless it is grant funded. The once exception, I think, is that universities have offices that manage grants awarded to faculty as assurance to the funders that funds are properly spent. This office may even be responsible for managing private grants, as has been my experience. It is also likely to offer help in obtaining grants and for seeking out grant opportunities.
Postdocs and other limited-term positions might be paid out of grant funds or out of general departmental funds for faculty. This would depend on the field. But, I would guess that it leaves an individual some room for negotiation, being less regulated.
I'll make a guess that Germany, as a society, puts a higher value on education generally than is true in the US. Certainly relatively few tax dollars go to education at any level. This wasn't always the case, but seems to be a continuing and increasing trend.

"there is no US national system for higher education" neither is there in Germany. Education is one of the responsibilities of the states with the federal level having very little say.

@Maeher, thanks. I didn't know that. In the US, states do run and fund much but not all of higher education. Private institutions educate quite a lot of students, including graduate students. I hesitate to say the majority, especially at the doctoral level, but it is a large number.

Yes, you are correct there. There are essentially no private universities in Germany that are held in any high regard. I just wanted to point out that almost everything about universities is governed by state law in Germany. This means that things can differ significantly between states.

Consider noting briefly that for its services, the grants-office will likely take about half of any grant awarded to a researcher.

That "half", however, is to provide not for the grants office, but to provide for general university support - buildings, heat, student recruitment, etc. It isn't a rip-off as it is sometimes portrayed.

@DanielR.Collins It's actually 2% at our place, for the portion of money that comes in on a grant and goes straight to somebody else who doesn't use University resources.

@DanielR.Collins: A typical number these days is that the university adds 50-55% to the "direct costs" of a proposal/grant. So the university actually only takes about a third, not one half of the money. And as mentioned before, it actually provides a service for it.

@WolfgangBangerth That would be in a university with teaching: the OP mentions Max Planck institutes and in the US you can easily see 100% at non-university research institutes or centers that don't have tuition dollars to share costs with.

+1. It may be worth mentioning that faculty in some fields may negotiate start-up packages, which can include potentially a lot of one-time money for something analogous to OP's "group expenses".

@user71659: Out of curiosity, what research centers have overhead of "easily 100%"? The only ones that I know of that charge a lot of overhead are the DoE national labs, though the situation there is complicated by the fact that they don't actually break down salaries etc.

@WolfgangBangerth This 2014 slide deck gives Salk at 94%, Scripps at 89%, Scripps Florida at 98%. Those are typical independent centers.

@user71659: Wow. I didn't realize...

Maybe it would be helpful to trace the path of an academic in the US through their education and career, noting how they might be funded along the way. Differences with those coming up in other systems will have to be left to those familiar with those systems.
We'll skip through so-called "K-12" education and undergraduate education and start with graduate school. Students are admitted to Ph.D. programs usually with a tuition waiver and a stipend. Tuition and the stiped are guaranteed by the admitting institution at some level, but where the money comes from varies.
One source is teaching. Having graduate students help with teaching (serving as recitation leaders, graders, teaching assistants, sometimes even as lecturers) is seen to serve a dual role: Helping deepen the graduate student's education in the subject but also to help fund the graduate student. The tuition paid by the students in the courses the graduate student helps teach often will not flow to the graduate student directly, but through the department in which the graduate student is studying to offset the stipend. Graduate students will teach in their first year or two.
Another source is grant funding. This pays for the student as they join a research group and begin to work on funded (or fundable) projects. Some external funding may be awarded in the name of the student directly, but often the funding is to the principle investigator that oversees the research group the student has joined.
A student in a well-funded lab may only have to teach the minimum amount, getting most support from the lab's grants. A student in a poorly-funded lab may have to pick up teaching even several years into their studies.
Generally though the view is that the student is working for their stipend in parallel to doing their thesis work. When things are going well, this is the same work.
A graduate student might also pursue a master's degree only. Very often this is more of a professional degree (even if taken in a program alongside those pursuing Ph.D.s) and the student will pay graduate tuition themselves and not be awarded a stipend, similar to students pursuing those more widely recognized as professional degrees (MBA, law, medicine). Sometimes, a student admitted to a program in pursuit of a Ph.D. does not succeed towards candidacy to pursue a Ph.D. (doing poorly in classes or candidacy exams, or choosing not to move forward). In this case, they might be awarded a master's degree for their work to that point, or with a little more work.
Those getting their Ph.D.'s then typical do post-doctoral work. This is even more of a hybrid between further education and a straight-up job. Here, there are few options for funding: Either the PI has grant funding out of which they can pay the post-doc, or the post-doc has applied and been awarded their own funding.
Finally, a post-doc that pursues a tenure track faculty position at a research university will apply for jobs. If they get interviews, and offers, and accept an offer, typically they will negotiate a "start up" package which includes some combination of money and equipment with which to equip and stock their lab, and to hire people (students, technicians, or post-docs) to help them begin their work. Depending on the discipline, the department, and the new hire, this can be quite a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, easily, into the low millions). The idea here is that this is "seed" money after a fashion. The new hire is expected then to write for grant funding, eventually bringing in enough grant money to pay some fraction of their own salary, to pay for further equipment and supplies, and to pay salaries or stipends for lab personnel. Start up money is usually the only money that universities pay to support research. Everything else (and, to be honest, even probably some of that) comes from grants.
What fraction of the lab head's salary comes from grants depends. Nine-month appointments are typical, and the faculty needs only draw "summer salary" to cover at most 3 months of salary. At academic medical centers where there is no undergraduate program, faculty teach much less, salaries are higher, and more of the salary is meant to come from grants or other external funding (eg, government contracts).
Now, about the start up money that comes from grants--here's the kicker that seems to not be well known despite its prevalence. How does the university pay for the start up? Well, it has some money from endowment. This is significant at the old, large, prestigious private universities, like the Ivy League. It might also cross-subsidize from tuition. But also, a lot of money flows through the university via overhead. Overhead is money the university takes off the top of individual grants for administering the grant, providing space, support staff, utiltity service, and the like. What percentage this is, and what it covers, is negotiated periodically between the university and the granting agencies, but in general it isn't unusual for it to be over 50%. Overhead is also referred to as indirect costs, or simply indirects. (I see this is briefly mentioned in some of the comments to another answer).
What mix of endowment income, gifts, direct grant funding, indirect charges, and tuition goes into paying for any given thing at a university is deep, dark, magic. Someone might be able to give an answer, they might even be willing to give an answer, but I'm not sure how much credence I'd give any set of numbers passing through such a tangled skein.

+1 for mentioning overhead (which is also a concept not used in Europe AFAIK)

@AndreHolzner: "not used" in Europe? It is at my german university.


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Is it possible to get into neuroscience PhD program without any research experience?
A little bit of background. I did my undergraduate degree in medicine i.e. MBBS. I was always inclined towards academia and research, so I went for masters in human anatomy from UK (it was a taught program). My thesis was on the neural pathways of fear and anxiety as a result I ended up reading so much besides neuroanatomy, which turned out to be in the realms of neuroscience.
Edited
Now I want to pursue PhD in neuroscience either in Canada or EU and most if not all of the PhD programs that I've looked into ask for some sort of research experience and knowledge about Matlab or Python. But the problem is I don't have any research experience and there is no research taking place in this field in my country let alone my city. As far as programming languages are concerned, I have just started learning Matlab on my own.
Here are my questions: What are the chances of getting into a neuroscience PhD program (specifically) without any research experience or should I go for MRes in neuroscience, gain some research experience and then apply for a PhD.

I am just looking for someone to guide me in my current scenario. Nevertheless I just edited my question, attuned it a bit more to my current situation.

First of all, something about the programming aspects of your new endeavour

Neuroscience research would indeed expect you to be very comfortable with at least one major programming language in use today. When I say major, I refer to the extent of its use and acceptance in a specific research community.  For neuroscience MATLAB and Python do come with a wide variety of tools which can be used out-of-the-box by a researcher.
Another important point is that, programming is essential because otherwise there is no reasonable way to verify and test your research findings and intuition.
Of course there are some areas where maybe programming is not a very major issue such as behavioural psychology, but in general neuroscience would expect some programming background.

Something about your Medical Background

Your medical background does give you a perspective about neuroscience. However during research you would many steps aside from what you learnt at medical school. Neuroscience research would require you to go inside the behavioural and working attributes of the brain in different cases. Your medical knowledge might be an aid there, but do not think that it would be a very big gap for anyone else to manage.

I think that a masters is a better choice, unless you want to fully dip yourself in core neuroscience. A masters would give you a perspective of the subject and would allow you to gain some more experience so that when you go for choosing your thesis topic at the time of your PhD, you are clear about every perspective of your degree and make full use of it.
P.S :- I work in medical imaging on the visual perception side. Hence, I have some background in computational neuroscience on the basis of which I have given this answer.
Consider what response you would give me, if I put the question to you by asking that can I go for a code medical research because I am fully interested in it ? I believe you understand the perspective now. Best of lucks

Point taken and thanks. I guess I already knew the answer but i wanted to ask someone else, just too make sure that pursuing another masters wasn't a crazy idea.


text:
Recommendation letters: The more the better?
Is there any upper limit for the number of recommendation letters for an application?
Does the strength of an application get enhanced by containing more recommendation letters?
What if the additional letters are coming from less-related (to the field that one is applying for) staff, but impressive enough? For example suppose one is going to apply for Physics and 2 recommendation letters are required. He gets two letters from physics professor and besides he is sure he can get a good letter from a math professor. What should he do?
Thanks.
PS: The target is a Grad school.

Yes there's an upper limit: Whatever the number of letters the announcement asks for.

possible duplicate of How many recommendation letters are enough?

Apply for what?  College?  Grad School?  Postdoc?  Tenure Track?  The answers are very different.  I guess you mean grad school?

Vote to close as "Unclear what you're asking" because the OP did not specify the use of the recommendation letters.

In practice, I would set the upper limit as the number they ask for, plus one.  As others have remarked, you don't want to overwhelm the people reading your application.  //  Yes, it is helpful to include a strong recommendation from a math professor when writing a physics application.

@Noah: Well, indeed it's a Grad school.

Does the strength of an application get enhanced by containing more recommendation letters?
Not necessarily. Having too many recommendation letters can overwhelm the person reviewing your application and it may leave a bad impression of you in a couple of ways. One example is you do not know if the the reviewer will go through all of the letters that you provided. This may lead to the reviewer not being able to have a clear picture of who you are, what is your work ethic and how driven you are (these are just some general examples of what a reviewer could be looking for). Generally, most applications ask for 2-3 letters of recommendation.
What if the additional letters are coming from less-related (to the field that one is applying for) staff, but impressive enough?
If it doesn't specify what kind of letter you need to submit, the letters of recommendation that you think will help the application the most is the ones you should send. If you are still unsure, you can call them and ask how many letters of recommendation people usually send them.

I'd place a limit at around three. To add too many might come through as bragging about the people you know, or trying to add weight by collecting all fluff you can get your hands on. Make sure you get strong letters from people who really know your work.