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Is it logistically possible to work on two PhD research projects at the same time?
Say someone wants to enroll in two unrelated disciplines: e.g. a Ph.D. in, say, Arabic Literature, and Ph.D. in, say, in Math Education.
I am not going into the capability of the candidate, or whether it is reasonable to seek multiple PhDs.
Is it logistically possible to work on two research projects at the same time?
What difficulties/barriers may come?

Universities are unlikely to allow you to enrol in a course if you're already enrolled in another. Plus I think it's basically impossible to do two PhDs at once. Where will you find the time?!

@Titus, one of my friends thinks that he is an "Einstein" type of genius and the only way to let the world know about it is to have multiple PhDs at the same time.

@astronat: can you state the region for which your statement holds?  In my region, for example, everyone could enrol in every program (including phd) with the exeption of medicine and a few others. (However, you would not get paid and would have to find a supervisor.)

@Titus: could ypu state the region for which your statement holds?

@user366312: are you interested worldwide or for a certain country?

@user111388, which region are you from? I am interested in the Western sphere.

@GoodDeeds, see the OP: I am not going into the capability of the candidate, or whether it is reasonable to seek multiple PhDs.

If your friend is as smart as Einstein, perhaps he should follow in Einstein’s footsteps and pursue one PhD. Or does he think he is even smarter than Einstein was?

@DanRomik Indeed. If one PhD is enough for Einstein, it should be enough for the friend. In fact, double PhDs actually don't look so good, they look as if the person wants to be an eternal student and do not plan for an academic career beyond the PhD (yes, I know there are exceptions); the more so, if they are simultaneous.

Closely related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17232/is-doing-two-phds-a-good-path

Related Meta: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4623/contesting-a-duplicate-question-non-standard-career-path-and-two-phds/4642#4642

Some people do two unrelated PhD, e.g. in optics and later in philosophy of science.. Doing both at once is foolish

Harsh perspective? Frankly its not a good look to have two PhDs that are the same kind of qualification - even if they are on two completely different topics.
Professional accreditation is a bit different (I would prefer my doctor to have a medical degree rather than being an expert on Heidegger's later works (The Question Concerning Technology notwithstanding)).
And sure you could collect 10 PhDs at the same time if you really wanted to (I hear mail-order degrees are great for that ;-)).
Rightly or wrongly PhDs are regarded as opening a door to advanced work in a particular discipline.
The harsh take on that would be to wonder why they kept opening doors and not walking through them (i.e. building their career in the relevant discipline(s)).
However - fundamentally education is about opportunity. If the student needs the opportunities they will have access to through doing a second PhD then I'm all for it. I would never recommend it. I don't think an applicant should be rejected because they already have the same qualification (although this may be an issue in some countries regarding entitlement to tuition subsidy).
Most institutions have provisions in their terms of candidature that specify some kind of commitment in terms of workload and availability. So technically in that respect two part-time degrees might work.
Consider also that in each case there will (or at least should) be a panel of at least three academics. That means six academics signing forms for two projects. If the idea is to enrol concurrently, surely there could be one sensible project proposal which bridges both fields of research and gets the candidate where they want to go?

. I know a high school teachers who does in her free time phd degrees (she is now at the forth) in different disciplines. She enjoys researching but of course cannot work as a postdoc (as that would mean giving up her school work which she enjoys even more). Studying is not for everyone about "what looks good on my CV and what is good for my career".

Well, anything is possible that isn't impossible. But the obstacles would make it extremely unlikely if they are quite different fields. It would also probably result in work that is less than superior, which the same sort of person might achieve had they focused on one field (at a time). Some obstacles:
A single university would have a hard time accepting it, so you need to deal with that. Two different universities permitting you to pursue degrees simultaneously? Maybe you need to hide each from the other. This could lead to problems if either becomes aware.
A given advisor would be likely to oppose it, thinking that the person isn't giving enough to studies in that field. Do you need, again, to hide what you are doing?
You may need to pay for at least one of the programs as getting TAs or whatever in two fields is both hard and would require too much time in itself. (Varies by country, of course)
You need to do what ever coursework is necessary in both programs to be able to pass two very different sets of comprehensive exams (many/most places).
You need, of course, to do the required research in some narrow area in two non-synergistically aligned fields.
And, if your "friend" just wants to do it as a challenge, sure, why not. Spend six or seven years (more?) chasing a crazy goal just for the hell of it. And possibly fail at both. Seven years older, deeper in debt.
Now, having succeeded, you need to find a job, probably abandoning everything you did in one of the fields. This last is what actually makes it sort of foolish. It would be a difficult (impossible?) quest to get multiple appointments in a single university and many universities wouldn't permit you to hold a regular appointment at another.
Some people do get multiple terminal degrees, though usually more closely aligned. Some people find themselves dissatisfied in the field they first qualify in and move to something else. But even these cases are pretty rare.
Fun as a thought experiment, though.

Just to point out that the vast majority of European PhDs don't contain any coursework, so the point about having to pass two different sets of exams wouldn't apply there. I agree with everything else! +1


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What is the difference between permanent faculty positions in the UK and tenured faculty positions in the US/Canada?
Is there any technical as well as practical differences between the two academic positions, one being a permanent faculty position in the UK (or Australia/NZ and other similar systems) and the other being a tenured position in the US/Canadian universities?
I believe most things may come down to the instances when they can be fired. While this question (Would tenured professors who are charged with a crime generally be fired?) addresses this aspect for the US/Canadian system, I don't know a comparison among different systems.
Edit: My question is different than US statute of Higher Education System because that question refers to the authorities and rules in different countries that grant professorships. My question is regarding the actual (technical and practical) differences between 'permanent' and 'tenured' faculty members in different systems.

possible duplicate of US statute of Higher Education System

I think the most important difference relates to "redundancy" in terminations. In the UK, administration can decide to stop teaching a subject at a university, and faculty may become "redundant". There are various protections in the UK such as the need to try to find alternative employment for the staff member etc. but in the final analysis, if they want to stop teaching Vedic Epistemology, the Vedic Epistemologist could end up sacked. With a tenured position in the US, that would not be sufficient grounds for termination (following university rules that I am aware of -- rules are set by each institution, though there is considerable similarity). A correlated difference is that there is a huge tenure ordeal in the US (the "up or out" rule -- either you get tenure, or you get fired), which does not exist in the UK.

That sounds like a fairly rare example. What if you are teaching 'regular' courses such as calculus. Also how do you then define what courses 'you teach'. People may teach different courses in the same discipline. Or you are implying a case when a department itself is closed down?

@John There have been cases of departments being closed down, and people accordingly losing permanent positions.

I think the crucial distinction is that individual teaching areas can be deemed "redundant" in the UK, but with the rules prevalent in the US system, an entire department would have to be eliminated. Needless to say, hard statistics on sackings are difficult to come by.

@Jessica B, do you have some specific examples? That's not a pleasant condition at all for anyone involved. However, I meant to ask if such closing down of traditional departments (e.g., mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.) is possible. If there is a dept of Vedic Epistemology at a university and at some point the university decides to close it down, that may not be too shocking as opposed to closing down the traditional departments.

@user6726, how is 'redundancy' in such cases defined then? Is it the redundancy of an individual who could teach more than one subjects in principle, or the redundancy of a course? And can the redundancy be declared at 'will' by the senior authorities? Or some justifiable reasons, such as lack of students in the course or lack of finance, have to back it up?

@John, as I understand it "redundancy" means being dismissed fairly, and not for disciplinary reasons. I'm a little unclear on the special meanings of "redundant" in UK labor law. If you can teach calculus and Vedic epistemology and they decide to eliminate Vedic epistemology classes, they are supposed to offer you alternative employment in calculus. Redundancy can't be blatantly ad hominem, but as long as you get rid of all of the classes in Vedic epistemology, you can sack all of the Vedic epistemologists (there being only one, usually). They only need a feeling that they don't need area X.

@John Mathematics, yes. Physics, I believe so, but it's not my field. I'm not sure I've heard of a chemistry department shutting, but I wouldn't be too surprised to find one or two had.

Mathematics department closed down? Was it due to financial difficulties of the university or just deliberately used this way to eliminate the unwanted members?

I don't understand user6726 and @Jessica. An academic is a person who does research and may also teach. If a university decides not to teach X, any reasonable academic can very easily simply teach Y. Hence, the closing of an area should be a decision based on closing the RESEARCH group in X, and NOT the need to stop teaching X.

@Dilworth, the problem is that that isn't the official policy in the UK (or US). Research is considered anciliary to teaching; though I'm sure that if the ministry felt that a particular research group was not needed, it too could get closed down.

@Dilworth My answer is slightly different to user6726. In the cases I know, the research group and the teaching were closed down as a whole. Neither exists without the other, as both income streams are needed to support academics. While teaching might be redistributed (in the UK I believe they have to try at least), what you say is not true. I am a pure mathematician. If they don't teach maths, I cannot teach in another department - I am not qualified (ie do not have the knowledge necessary) to teach any other subject at degree level.

@Jessica B, so then to get rid of a pure mathematician, the management has to close down the whole mathematics department in that case? Any mathematician can teach at least the calculus courses, and as long as there is a mathematics department, calculus courses are going to be taught!

@John I'm not sure exactly. There's probably someone else who is already teaching the calculus. If the total quantity of teaching goes down, then there is a redundant position, just as in any other organisation. Basically in the UK there's nothing special about academia over other industries.

If a department were closed down (which has happened for large departments as well as small), then typically (wide variation possible) most of the 'permanent' staff would be redeployed somehow. Some might dislike all possible destinations, and resign, some might be 'redundant' in this sense and would lose their job. Losing a permanent job is therefore very unusual rather than (with tenure) nearly impossible, and will (typically) be collateral damage to a restructuring; it remains a very secure job (of course, with known psychos, the university might not try very hard with the redeployment)

Apart from the differences due to the educational systems (expectations for teaching, types of classes, recruiting grad students) and funding opportunities/expectations, one difference is that the UK system has finer gradiations of rank beyond the usual titles (Lecturer, Reader, Professor, etc.) whereas most US universities do not.  This determines your pay grade and salary increases, which is fixed and not subject to negotiation like in most US universities.  In terms of salary in US institutions, merit-based raises take the places of these promotions to higher pay grades, but these are much more fickle in general.

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Is salary of a faculty member increased automatically year-by-year in the US and Canada?
In the universities in the UK, Australia, NZ etc., the salaries of university faculty members increases automatically year-by-year in two ways: 1 to 1.5% increment for inflation correction, and by climbing in the salary level (e.g., lecturer level 5 to level 6, etc.: What is the average salary of assistant professor in New Zealand?).
Is the US salary system similar? Say, someone is hired at a university in the US as a tenure-track faculty member. Does this person get some annual salary increase till he\she gets the tenured? Or they have to wait till obtaining the tenure to get some pay raise?

Every department is different.

Unfortunately not!

@JeffE, so it is also possible to get no increment for the 6 years of tenure-track duration, for example?

@PeteL.Clark, could you please elaborate?

Each university (or university system, or department, it depends) may have its own rules.  The system you mention is more common at unionised institutions.

At my home institution, raises have to approved by the state legislature. IN good years, we get a raise, and in less good years we don't. Often there is both a fixed percentage increase as well as a merit based increase which has to be decided by the department head.

What determines the 'goodness' and the 'badness' of a year for a university? The new student population?

@John  Of course it's possible!  It's also possible that the university will simply shut down before you go up for tenure.

@JeffE, That is of course an extreme case. I am just interested in knowing if it is 'common enough' (however you define) that faculty members don't get any pay raise for many years. That is almost impossible in the British system and in fact research active faculty members climb the salary levels much faster than just inflation correction every year. I am trying to compare it with the US/Canada system.

@John: Well, I meant exactly what I said.  I work at a (large, rather distinguished) state university at which the faculty as a whole have gotten annual raises only about half the time.  There was even one year in which we got a pay cut ("furlough")!  Because entering assistant professors get a rather competitive salary, in some years the average salary for an assistant professor in my department has been higher than the average salary for (tenured, almost always) associate professors.  My department has done its part to minimize this "salary inversion", but the basic phenomenon persists.

It's a regular job, more or less like any other, and the way raises work is also the same.  When there is ample money, people get raises.  Sometimes everybody gets the same raise; other times, it's based on merit (or perceived merit, at least).  Which was it happens depend on the particular institution, the department, the recent history of raises--pretty much anything.
When you are promoted to a higher professorial rank, there is usually a prescribed step-up in salary.  It might be a fixed dollar amount or a percentage--again depending on the institution.  This is just like there is a raise associated with getting promoted at any other large employer.

In a regular job, the salary may depend on the company's turnover. In the university jobs, do you mean to say the salary raise are proportional to the gain or loss in annual students population the university gets?!

@John: No, it depends more on the total budget available for salaries in a given year. Tuition fees (which are related to enrollment) feed into the budget, but I've never heard of salaries being directly tied to the overall enrollment figures of a university.

I'll just note that this just my personal experience but, from what I've seen:

Departments have a formal process for evaluating faculty on the different components of their job, done by a committee of department members and the size of raises will be based on these and other factors (for example, if you have an outside offer, that can trigger a separate negotiation).  My understanding is that usually the department chair has final say on these things, but there is also input from higher administration on setting priorities, and the amount of overall money to be distributed.  Assistant professors are evaluated with their other colleagues, though their place in their career is taken into account.
There usually is a large raise associated with promotions like tenure and promotion to full professor.  At some places this is formalized with a fixed percentage (say 8%), while at others it is a more informal understanding.
Getting a raise every year is pretty typical.  I've gotten a raise every year since getting my Ph.D. with the exception of one year when I changed jobs.  As far as I know, this was true for everybody in my department.  My experience is that everybody in the university gets a raise or nobody does, and the latter happens when the university is under pretty serious financial stress (which is, of course, pretty common these days).  I have heard tell of places where salaries were frozen for many years, and you could only get a raise through some unusual tactics, such as getting an outside offer.  If you wish to find some examples, just google "university salary freeze."

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What are the salary bands specifically for lecturer/senior lecturer/reader/professor in the UK?
This question is related to this question Academic position salaries in the UK (and to some extent to this question too: Academic rank equivalence between the UK and the US systems), but my question is more specific.
What salary bands in http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2210, for example, corresponds to that for a lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor positions? In the salary scales in this website, the grading just runs from 1 to 51, but doesn't specify what positions they correspond to.

How the titles map onto the grading is not fixed precisely - I've seen it vary by a couple of points across the country, but my institution has lecturer as 30-43, SL/Reader as 44-52 (yes, 52 - not covered by that UCU scale). Professors are not on that scale.

What is the fine grading between Senior Lecturer and Reader scales? According to an answer to this question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/48977/academic-rank-equivalence-between-the-uk-and-the-us-systems/49026#49026, these two positions are different in the UK.
Or, is the grading for a Senior Lecturer somewhere inside 30-43?

Again this is institution dependent, but at most places I know the only distinction is in role (Readers are more research focused), not in salary.

But there should be salary difference between lecturer and senior lecturer? 30-43 seems a long range compared to 44-52.

There's a split (often informal, again institution dependent) between "Lecturer A" and "Lecturer B", with the former covering 30-34 and the latter 35-43. A number of places only appoint at Lecturer B and above. There's a substantial salary difference between L and SL.

"There's a substantial salary difference between L and SL." - that's exactly is confusing me here. Where does the salary level for SL (on an average over institutions) start? And where is the distinction in the salary level between SL and Reader?

Or, asking it differently, if I am offered a 'beginning SL level' (higher than L, but just the starting level of SL) position in a UK university, what salary level should I expect?

Beginning L either point 30 (L "A") or point 35 (L "B"). Beginning SL point 44. At present there's a roughly 30% pay increase from point 35 to point 44.


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How common is redundancy in the British (UK/Australia/NZ/Ireland) system?
The British permanent faculty system seems to differ from the US tenured system mainly in that in the former the management can 'fire' one on the basis of redundancy (What is the difference between permanent faculty positions in the UK and tenured faculty positions in the US/Canada?). How common is redundancy in practice in the countries having the British system (UK/Australia/NZ/Ireland)?
Thanks,
John

As far as Australia goes, I have not heard of a tenured professor being made redundant. It would be against the terms of theor contract.  Source: Me.

@Mothermole1, there is no tenured positions in Australia according to this answer: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11785/do-australian-academic-jobs-have-similar-tenure-track-policies-as-usa
Also, according to one of the answers to that question, permanent faculty members do often get scrutinized by the management. I am not from that system so I do not know how rare/common that is. Any idea?

That is not my personal experience. We have had many professors in our department who were ineffective, but due to their tenure, were not able to be fired, even though they were incompetent. It certainly does exist at my university.

@Mothermole1, There seems to be recent redundancy drive by a major university in New Zealand which follows the Australian system http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/7476793/University-seeks-redundancy-volunteers

@stay_frosty Redundancy, at least as used in the UK legal system, has no relationship to competance. You cannot make someone redundant because they are incompetant. An employer makes a post redundant, not a person. It is used where a particular type of work is no longer required.

Redundancies are a standard management tool in UK academia at the moment. A quick Google of the Times Higher Education Supplement suggests that there were about 1,300 academic redundancies in the UK in 2011-12, or an average of about 18 per Higher Education institution in 2011-12. At the moment a number of institutions are making compulsory cuts by closing departments. The University of Surrey is one example, as are Warwick and London Metropolitan. I'm sure there are others. The are also a lot of institutions looking for voluntary redundancies.
This all has to do with economic pressures, managerial/strategic rationalisation and either perceived student demand or disappointing internationalisation experiments.
Academic tenure, such as it was,was phased out in the UK from the mid 1970s onwards.

This article is relevant and interesting and summarises the nature of employment in the UK: http://simonbatterbury.net/pubs/tenurebatterbury.pdf
The current Systems Engineering department at Reading University (UK) is being shut down and the majority of academics there will lose their jobs. They are closing down due to not attracting enough students and funding, this process is standard here, similar to if a non-academic company/business shut down or down sized. Reading has had this problem multiple times, I don't know how it varies across universities but redundancies are clearly linked with the success of the department, something that could be investigated but not predicted before taking up an offer. At a well funded and stable university, redundancy is unlikely.
2010 Reading Physics department closure: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6159106.stm
2015 Reading systems engineering department closure:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-32978132
Australia:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/05/university-researchers-take-brunt-cuts-australian-budget  and a very relevant article about the redundancy of an Australian university Professor who was reinstated:
http://www.nteu.org.au/article/Federal-Court-reinstates-university-professor-sacked-in-sham-redundancy--14702
The article makes it very clear that Professors in Australia can be made redundant for financial reasons.
In NZ:
Government owned industry: http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/rural/275287/possible-job-cuts-at-agresearch
In NI:
QUB's website details that academics can be made redundant.
http://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/HumanResources/PersonnelDepartment/EmployeeBenefits/PayandConditions/LeavingEmployment/TerminationofEmployment-AcademicResearchStaff/
In Ireland the system is different:
http://www.eui.eu/ProgrammesAndFellowships/AcademicCareersObservatory/AcademicCareersbyCountry/Ireland.aspx
"About 80% of the academic staff in Ireland hold permanent tenured positions. All full time academic staff are civil servants and tenured in the sense that they can not be fired without a serious cause, such as incompetence or outrageous conduct. This is very different from the systems of the UK and the US. For example, in the UK only about 55% hold permanent contracts and there is no tenure."

Note that AgResearch is a government-owned quasi-commercial research institute, not a university, and its staff aren't in exactly the same legal position as university faculty. Redundancy does still exist for both, as noted in another comment on the question.

A note about terminology:
Termination of employment
Academic staff in the UK (I can't speak for AUS or NZ) have no special protections compared to any employee of any business. However, everyone has more protection that employees in some other countries. Notably the US.
After you have been employed by an employer for more than 2 years, your employment can only be terminated for a limited number of "fair" reasons, else the employee can sue for "unfair dismissal". The main reasons are:

Gross Misconduct
Capability to fullfill contractual terms
Redundancy of post

Note that dismissal mechanisms similar to redundancy and misconduct exist for tenured US staff as well.
Redundancy
Contrary to common belief, a company makes a post, rather than a person redundant. They say that "we no longer need to employ anyone/as many people to do X". The fact that this person or that person does job X is not supposed to affect the decision. Once a decision has been made to make people redundant, the employer must send all people who do job X an "at-risk" notice. They must then use a fair and transparent process to decide. Here how good you are at your job can be taken into account. Unless the employer is at immediate financial risk, such processes usually take weeks to months. Once this process is complete, the employer cannot then hire new people to replace the terminated employees, because this would prove that it wasn't genuine redundancy.
The University of Leicester recently lost a case around whether or not their redundancy process was fair.
How common is it?
Historically redundancy for permanent academic staff is very rare, although it does happen. When it happens it is almost always whole or fractions (say half, or a quarter) of a department, rather than individuals. A previous answer highlighted that 1,300 staff were made redundant in 2011-2012, however, this was a difficult year for British academia with new government bringing in austerity in the wake of the 2008 crash. Still, 1,300 is only a small fraction of the 234,000 academics in the country.
More common are Voluntary Severance Schemes, where the university offers an enhanced financial package to those that agree to leave. We have had two waves of that in recent years at my institution, one associated with Brexit, and the next with the pandemic.
Things have change a bit in the last couple of years, with a combination of inflation, no raise in tuition fees since 2012, reduced openness to student visas and increase competition from other countries for foreign students meaning that UK academia is kind of teetering on the edge of collapse. The academic union, UCU keeps a list of all the institutions that are making, or have recently made redundancies here:
https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

I guess it's worth noting that (from what I can observe, currently going thru the process, and comparing to other Unis currently going thru it), that the typical process seems to be Volountary Severance (staff opt to leave, with a package, but theoretically could be replaced), followed by Volountary Redundancy (a set of posts is put "at-risk", using the role description but not based on performance, and anybody in that post can volounteer as tribute), followed by Compuslory Redundancy (based on performance, some of the "at-risk" folk from the previous point will be asked to leave).

And while what you write about fractions of depts being put at risk rather than individuals mostly matches my experience (there is that one department which seems to have singled out two individuals); the "fractions" seem to vary a lot -- between zero, small proportions such as 1/30, to quite big cuts (1/4). Some departments had a target of "zero" redundancies because the whole shebang was preceded with a hiring freeze -- so a dept that had a large amount of open, unfilled positions pulled before we started discussing letting go existing staff, was not forced to let go any existing academics.

@penelope As someone I know that works in employment law often says: "They can do whatever they like. A judge can find against them in an unfair dismissal hearing but can't stop them from doing it". There has been quite the uptick recently in tribunals finding against universities.

In Australia, redundancies do happen, but are not super common. Of the hundreds of university faculty I know personally, perhaps half a dozen have been personally affected by redundancies at some point in their careers. These usually happen when the university is in financial difficulty and it has decided to reduce staffing across the board, or when they have decided to close an entire department (e.g., due to insufficient student enrolments or a change in strategy).

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How do I specify that I ranked first in a university which has alot of affiliated colleges?
I ranked first in my university in my undergrads, which had many affiliated colleges. How can I specify that in an essay in a compelling yet precise manner?

Please clarify what you mean by ranked first in University?

@Susmitha Are you ranked first of the whole university(a university exam) or just the college of your affiliation?

@sathyam I ranked first in the whole university

@scaaahu I mean I secured the first rank among all the students who took the same course as I did, including all the colleges affiliated to the University.

@sushmitachaudhari Please edit your question to include this information.

Making a note of the number of affiliated colleges might be fine. But I will suggest including the total number of candidates (students) in your batch that includes all affiliated colleges (if available) within which you've established your rank.

Thanks. I was apprehensive to write something like: "I ranked first among 500 students from different affiliated colleges under my University." Could I make it more precise and compelling?

@sushmitachaudhari: You may replace "different" with the no. affiliated colleges. That might make a stronger point if that's what you prefer.

From your comments, it is perfectly fine to state that you ranked 1 in the university.
In my case I had been asked to provide the number of students. I had no difficulty since mine was a National institute which is a university by itself, all I had to do is to count the number of students in my class. But in your case you might have to give a brief explanation about the affiliation, possibly an attestation from the University and college.


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Is it good to join industry in middle of phd?
I am a third year phd student. I got an offer for an industrial job which is very tempting. The salary is competitive and much higher than my phd salary. I already worked there as an intern, so I know the environment. The only problem is that I am involved in multiple projects in my phd. If I leave the group, someone has to take over those tasks, but there is no such a person in our group yet. What is your suggestion?

Since you have been an intern there and these people know you, they might be willing to keep the position open for you for one more year. Then you can talk with professor about this and get his confirmation that you can finish within a year. This gives professor enough time to hire a replacement person.

Or arrange to work part-time, leaving out e.g. teaching assistantships coupled to the PhD.

Taking the job would probably mean permanently leaving academia behind, and giving up the prospects of ever finishing your Ph.D. If you're okay with that (which you might well be), then I think it's fine to take the industry job.
I also recommend trying to figure out what your future job prospects are if you decide to finish your degree (and conversely, what your future job prospects might be if you take this industry job and it doesn't pan out).
The comparison to your PhD salary seems a bit strange unless your circumstances are unusual (e.g. you really need the money now). Whatever you decide, I recommend putting your own future first, and thinking less both about your present salary and about your PhD advisor.

Isn't it selfish to totally ignore my advisor?

It's nice to wrap up the projects you are running for your Prof, if that is possible. It would be also good to finish your PhD. From experience, finishing a PhD is much harder once you start working in industry, unless you have a Spartan discipline. It's definitively possible, but hard.

You certainly don't want to totally ignore your advisor, but I don't believe that you are obligated to keep working at these projects for another year or two if you don't want. For example, if you decide to take the industry job you might offer to your advisor to put off your start date a few weeks and wrap up some projects and/or train your replacement.


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(undergraduate) my graduate student is extremely cutthroat
I work in a lab in experimental psychology at a pretty prestigious research university. I have worked there for a while (this is currently my fourth semester) for about 8+ hours a week, entirely unpaid. I have worked on menial tasks (data entry), more theoretical things (experimental design for complex studies), and of course actually running participants. Despite doing all this and doing it well, I really get the feeling that my graduate student (in our lab, each undergrad is generally paired with a grad from the start) is definitely not aimed at my success.
For example, our PI told me that she would support me in my pursuit of an undergraduate research grant, but there was some miscommunication about what exactly I'd be writing it on, so she told me to consolidate my idea with my grad student's very similar idea and go from there. Grad and I met and she completely shot down everything I said (very odd, since the PI liked my idea and had told us to work together) and actually recommended I write the grant on her behalf for one of her studies that I had nothing to do with. When I pointed out that the grant was specifically for undergraduate-designed research and was not intended to be used for grad students, she gave me some weasel-y response about "that's how things are done." I didn't write the grant, because I didn't feel good about potentially taking away one of the few grants exclusively for undergrads from another undergrad who legitimately deserved it.
I wanted to apply to complete a thesis in our lab -- honestly, that was a large part of working so long and hard in just one lab. However, Grad told PI that I was having problems with communication and that I seemed "extremely stressed," prompting PI to ask me if I really thought a thesis was a good idea. The hilarious part about that is I had literally just had a meeting with Grad that week and told her I was having a great time in life, the semester was going well, etc.; in fact, Grad told me SHE was stressed lately, not the other way around. There have been no communication issues, except once I was late for a participant because a friend had a medical emergency. (The participant was still ran successfully, by the way, and this is 1 in literally dozens of participants I have ran with professionalism.)
I just am starting to feel paranoid she is out to get me, or at least to step on whoever she has to get to the top. I also was kind of expecting authorship of some kind since I have done SO MUCH on this one study (been working on it for 2 years now, from "PI and I were talking about this new idea..." to training other research assistants on the study because I know it so well) but as it draws to a close, I get the feeling that authorship isn't a thing that will happen for me. I feel I have legitimately done as much as she has, and it makes me a little angry that she will get authorship when she sits on her laptop and says "looks good" while I work with other new RAs and has never ran a single participant for her own study. This makes me feel like I could have had a better professional benefit from being in another lab, but as the deadline for formal application for Honors rapidly approaches, I feel absolutely stuck and frustrated.
Thoughts? Ideas? Am I losing my mind?

This sounds like something you should discuss with the PI.

Request a direct conversation with the PI, prepare a list of factual issues; make clear why you worked in the lab. Facts. You might state the fact that the grad student talked about being stressed and you not understanding why she presented you as such; but this is not the core. Make clear that you are very interested in working in the lab, but that you feel that through this dynamics you have been excluded from something that you believe you should have been included in. Your PI seems reasonable, but you need talk to her. Don't badmouth the grad student, just give a status report.

I hate how people rush to close questions as off-topic. It was closed in two days, and yet here I am three years later enjoying the read. It has a great answer, through which I learnt about 'gaslighting', which I had never heard about before. It has plenty of upvotes. And yet, closed.

In reading over your description, a few things stick out to me as very problematic. My concern is not the past issues - but how you'll be able to handle future issues with people like this, because you will encounter people like this no matter where you go.
The first issue is that you do not seem to have a healthy line of communication with your PI. If the PI said, "hey, that's a good idea, write that up as a grant and talk with X for help", and X shot you down and suggested something that sounded unethical...things should not have stopped there!  Directly after you should bring it to the PI, with "I did what you asked/suggested and something odd happened. Do you have a moment to talk about it?" The goal is not "telling on" someone - it's clarifying with someone who is responsible for the work done in their group and has more experience than you. Perhaps you misunderstood the grant process, or perhaps they were trying to con you into getting them a grant in a way that was fraudulent. In either case, it's the PI's role to help you, by explaining the grant system or by revising their instructions to you (and now being aware that their grad student is acting 'funny').
The second issue is your description of that odd conversation you had about being supposedly "stressed"? That sounds like a textbook description of a method called "gaslighting", and yes - it's supposed to make you feel crazy. The point is you are supposed to go "wait, why would they say I'm stressed, I'm not stressed - am I? I didn't think I was stressed..." and then you get stressed, and  you start to doubt your own experience of reality. And you are supposed to start getting defensive and searching your memory for any time you screwed up to try to justify their behavior, and start talking about that one time even though no one asked about it to defend yourself, etc. See what happened there? You'll start to look and feel crazy, because no one sees the crazy nonsense you were attacked with. It's a tool of emotional abuse and manipulation. They are also seeking to do it by proxy and poisoning of the perceptions of others, which is a sign of further aggressiveness.
Add the ethically questionable 'flexibility' which appeared to have a self-serving bent to the use of multiple tools of aggression and manipulation, and you've got yourself a lot of red flags - enough to make me suspect you are dealing with someone with malignant personality tendencies. These people aren't fun to deal with and prolonged exposure is a danger to one's welfare and goals. Take this possibility seriously, and begin taking steps immediately to protect yourself.
The third concerning issue is authorship. This can feel like a difficult subject to discuss, but again this requires you talk with your PI. The relationship with this person is far, far more important than any jag-off grad student - your dealings with them is fundamentally important, as it is with any direct supervisor relationship. Authorship is not a reward for abstract merit or seniority - it's a question of "who directly and significantly contributed to this research effort", and you should not ever be a position of having worked on something for even weeks yet not getting proper acknowledgement - let alone years! Again, this is largely controlled by your PI and you must talk with them about it, not simply allow yourself to dwell in the feeling that maybe you are going to get screwed.
Overall, full and effective communication with your supervisor/mentor/PI is crucial here. If you have it, people like this get put down early and they are like cockroaches - once the light is on, they scatter, because you aren't in a position they can easily take advantage of. If you can't have that relationship with your PI, honestly the research they do doesn't matter. No matter what it looks like on paper, if the PI won't have a good opinion of you because your relationship is poor (due to a lack of communication and the resulting sabotage that becomes so easy for people to pull off), it's better that you spend your time elsewhere so you can have a good relationship and a good, solid reference.
So your task will be to talk with your PI and figure out what the issue is. If you can have a good relationship, authorship is dealt with fairly, you can bring future concerns of an important nature to him straight away, then so be it. You'll need to be careful of your issues with the grad student - don't think they'll just act like a reasonable person all of a sudden.
Once those issues are ironed out, then you can also decide whether or not you want to try out a different lab using your new found knowledge of how to handle things. When you've grown skilled in communication and relationship management with people like your PI, life goes much easier - and you'll find that people like the grad student you encountered seem to just be able to "smell" that their tricks won't work, and more often than not they just focus their attentions on easier prey. But without that core relationship building and communication, you'll be taken advantage of by every unethical and manipulative nutter you come across, and they'll swarm to you like a bunch of blood-thirsty mosquitoes.

Regarding authorship, it's the PI who would determine whether you get authorship, so I see this as a separate issue from Grad's awful (by the sound of it) behavior. As @NateEldredge said in the comments, you need to discuss the authorship issue with the PI. However, I suggest discussing that question on its own merits and not in connection with the fact that Grad was offered authorship. Don't imply that Grad hasn't earned or doesn't deserve authorship -- that is between the PI and Grad -- or that you've worked harder than her, since I feel those are weak arguments that won't help your case, nor will they make you look especially mature or classy. Just make the case that you earned and deserve it. If PI brings up criticism of you that she heard from Grad, be ready to refute that criticism, but do so in an objective, factual manner and without involving your grievances against Grad in the discussion.
Secondly, with regards to the more general problem of Grad acting to undermine you at every turn, that by itself may merit a discussion with the PI, but again I advise you to separate the two issues, and perhaps deal with the authorship issue first if you feel that is more critical. When you are ready to discuss this, I suggest documenting the precise issues that you see with Grad's behavior and having that documentation ready for the discussion. Again, stick to factual, objective statements as much as possible -- focusing less (or even not at all) about how she made you feel, and more about precise things she said or did.
Finally, if you try these suggestions and the PI was dismissive of your concerns, or if experience tells you that these suggestions are certain not to work, you may want to consider taking the matter up with higher authorities, such as the department chair, or recruit the help of various support resources (e.g., student union representative, university ombudsperson). However, given your description of the problem, it sounds like it may not be worth escalating the case to such levels. It will ultimately be unproductive for you to work in a lab whose PI takes advantage of you and doesn't respect concerns that you have about the work environment, so sadly in such a situation the best option may be to simply find another professor to work with.


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What are advantages/disadvantages of Habilitation over PostDoc in case of academic career?
As far as I know a PostDoc in USA is 2 years of research program. Habilitation is 4-8 years program. So, why is this difference in time frame?
What are advantages/disadvantages of Habilitation over PostDoc in case of academic career?

PosDocs usually work on someone else's research programs. Often the program is an incremental or partial step in a larger research framework. Postdocs have some independence in choosing the methods for their research, but are largely supervised/trained by their PIs or mentors. Postdoctoral projects can be rather technical in nature. They usually result in a few journal publications. It is very likely that your colleague next door did or will do a few postdoctoral projects during their career.
Habilitation is a large piece of work focused on a large problem, performed completely independently by one person. It usually contains major theoretical breakthrough (e.g. a completely new methodology) and results in a number of journal publication and at least one major "manuscript" publication (e.g. book). It is not so likely that a random academic next door did a Habilitation (because in most countries PhD is a terminal degree and Hab. does not exist).
tl;dr: Postocs and Habilitation are completely different programs.

What are advantages/disadvantages of Habilitation over PostDoc in case of academic career?

@user366312 if that is your real question, then you should edit the question to reflect that.

Only some countries have an habil (e.g. Germany or Poland). If you are interested in a career outside these countries then a habil is a waste of time. In Germany there is formally no advantage of a habil over a successfully evaluated junior professorship. However, in some disciplines this formal rule is ignored and you will still get better chances with a habil. So the advantages and disadvantages are very dependent on your circumstances.

A Habilitation is a qualification level (not quite like an academic degree but you can think that it is sort of a grand PhD with additional teaching).
A Habilitation used to be the formal qualification level to become Associate Professor and Full Professor. The position of an Assistant Professor (German "Universitätsassistent") was usually the time when you worked on obtaining the Habilitation.
In the meantime the Habilitation is a bit outdated.
You could also think the Habilitation as the successful completion of your Assistant Professor time i.e. postdoc positions are usually before and you usually cant start your Habilitation time before you completed several postocs.

What are advantages/disadvantages of Habilitation over PostDoc in case of academic career?

You can't compare it like this. It's like comparing a BSc and PhD. One builds on the other.

do you have any proof/link that habilitation is outdated and less common than junior professorship? Just out of interest and because I rather doubt it

You can see it in most professor "Stellenausschreibungen" that they ask for "Habilitation oder gleichwertige wissenschaftliche Leistungen" ie you don't necessarily need it anymore like in former times. But it might still be an advantage in old fashioned departments - also read my answer here https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/128097/is-doing-a-habilitation-a-financially-viable-decision/128151#128151

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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How should someone handle a course failure or prevent it?
I thought about my failure in the course a thousand times and could not think of any solution that could have helped me to pass the course successfully.
Introduction
In 2017, I was studying a graduate course named "Computer Architecture" (syllabus; overview; sample questions). The prescribed book had 684 pages. The course was divided into lectures and Lab sessions.
Each week, students had to go to labs and had to solve the assigned problems in MIPS and x86 assembly languages. The points were assigned on the basis of the number of problems they could solve in 4 hours out of the given five problems.
The challenges
The first challenge for me was to find appropriate learning materials for learning MIPS and x86 assembly languages.
I learned the MIPS assembly language from this youtube channel (this tutorial was amazing).
For x86, I don't remember which material I used. However, I remember that the challenge was to find a debugger with GUI as GDB was a total inconvenience. It took me almost a week to find SASM debugger GUI.
The final and most damaging hurdle was to find concise reading material, and ultimately I failed to find any. For me, reading a 684-pages book was out of the question. I simply had no time as other courses had a similar amount of loads.
How I failed
I learned the two programming languages very keenly. Solved all of the Laboratory problems, and completed the projects very well. However, I miserably failed the written examination.
The final project was a hard problem (image recognition via MIPS and x86), and it took a lot of time for me to solve the project. I think, other students just solved the problem by seeking help from their elders and friends who passed the course already. And, most of them actually failed to solve the project. Some of them scored partially.
I found out that -

some other students were solving lab problems by uploading the solutions to the server the previous night. I.e they were cheating all the way. As a result, they saved a lot of time and utilized that time to study for the written examination.
some other students had been maintaining a database of old questions in a shared online repository. They only solved the older questions and successfully passed the written exam.

Did I talk to the instructor about my problem?
Yes, several times. However, his directions were limited to prescribing a book and referring to some URL links. He even failed to prescribe a proper debugger tool for x86 except for GDB.
Besides, the supplied sample questions were totally different and mostly unrelated to the questions that came in the examination.
My personal opinion
In my personal opinion and tell me if I am wrong:

if there was not any custom reading material supplied, the course syllabus was too broad for a 4-months semester and MIPS and x86 should have been mutually exclusive;
the instructor should have provided a concise reading material instead of an entire 684 pages book if he really wanted to teach both MIPS and x86;
supplied sample questions were absolutely misleading, those shouldn't have been supplied;
the instructor should have kept a tutorial session for GBD and debugging.

In my opinion, the instructor was indirectly encouraging cheating by throwing a gigantic and unachievable load. Guessing and learning cannot take place at the same time.
The question
What was the appropriate way for me to successfully pass the course?

I cannot understand the cheating issue. Did you discuss this with your instructor? Surely they can check server logs to verify the cheating and do something about it, and if they don’t, you would have a legitimate grievance to pursue? In any case, don’t the students still have to spend the same amount of time on each problem, unless they are also sharing solutions with each other (another kind of cheating)?

@BrianDrake, Did you discuss this with your instructor? --- No. Coz, I discovered that later. ...if they don’t, you would have a legitimate grievance to pursue? --- I am not interested in pursuing a grievance. I am here to understand (1) my own fault, (2) the instructor's failure. ... unless they are also sharing solutions with each other? --- they were working as groups. They made sure that source codes look different. Some of them were attending the course for the second time.

“I am not interested in pursuing a grievance. I am here to understand … the instructor's failure.” This seems like a contradiction to me. Also, the answer authors have been critical of your attitude, and I can’t fault them for that – this also suggests you are pursuing a grievance.

@BrianDrake, ...you are pursuing a grievance --- I am not. I doubt (correct me if I am wrong) that (1) the course syllabus is too broad for a 4-months semester as in my personal opinion MIPS and x86 should have been mutually exclusive; (2) the instructor should have provided a concise reading material instead of an entire 684 pages' book; (3) supplied sample questions were absolutely misleading, those shouldn't have been supplied; (4) he should have kept a tutorial session for GBD and debugging. Instructor was indirectly encouraging cheating by throwing a gigantic and unachievable load.

@BrianDrake, Also, the answer authors have been critical of your attitude --- coz, I disagreed with GDB and a 684 pages textbook.

Patterson and Hennessy is a very well-respected computer architecture text.  The MIPS and x86 architectures are real-world examples of two very different ways to design computer architectures.  Learning them, and their respective assembler languages, should have prepared you for any number of "compare and contrast" types of questions.

"most of them actually failed[...] Some of them scored partially [...] all other students were solving [...] all other students had been maintaining a database of old questions in a shared online repository. They only solved the older questions and successfully passed the written exam."
I do not understand how many "subgroups" of students you are defining, nor how many (which percentage in each subgroup?), my general advice is please remember that a tree that falls down makes much more noise than 1'000 trees growing ... are you sure the cheating was so systematic (and succesful)?

@EarlGrey, are you sure the cheating was so systematic (and successful)? --- Oh yeah, no question about that. I also wrote a letter to the dean and the program director with evidence. There were no responses from them.

@EarlGrey, my general advice is please remember that a tree that falls down makes much more noise than 1'000 trees growing --- This is one of the ways institutions and systems generally deflect accusations.

@EarlGrey, I do not understand how many "subgroups" of students you are defining, nor how many (which percentage in each subgroup?) --- Three groups: (1) some of them failed in the previous semester and retaking the course and they understood that cheating is the only way to pass; (2) some of them are new and don't know about the systematic cheating; (3) some are new and know about cheating. However, I corrected my language in the OP.

I don't care how institutions deflect accusations, I care about "the student perspective": either you care about what the others are doing (and become a frustrated policeman or a succesful chinese comunist party/FSB/CIA/NSA middlemen) or you care about your own path as a student. Did you learn anything useful by not cheating? yes, some fundamnetals about MIPS and x86. Did you learn anything useful by complaining about GDB and a book of 684 pages? no. Did you learn anything useful about keeping on complaining about cheating? no, just a righteous, bordering vengeful, atittude.

@EarlGrey, Did you learn anything useful about keeping on complaining about cheating? --- I learned that don't complain and join cheaters as quickly as possible. However, I am here to check if anyone has other opinions.

Please stop your resentment and your "checking your penis length" against the others. It is just human, you will always find someone more succesful, more rich, "better" than you and often the other will be "better" by cheating, by taking shortcuts. Think about yourself and what you do, not what about you could have been if the world would adapt to your wishes/ethics/order.

In order to understand why you failed the course you have to understand what exactly the requirments for passing the course are. Partially solving the lab problem and doing better on the written exam is good enough for passing.
Is a written exam representative of how things work in a real work enviornment? I'd say no. Most of the written exams I had in university are more of academic value and find little application in a office or programming job.
Is a lab problem that you have to solve at home more representative of how things are in a real work environment? I'd say yes. Doing the actual prgramming is of more use in your future job than actually just knowing the theory behind it.
Courses in university tend to lean more towards the academic and therin lies your problem. Your approach of trying to understand and try to apply said understanding on a problem is very commendable. But it was not what is necessary to pass the course...

Yes, I agree. I thought learning how to program will automatically make me pass the written examination. Later, it was proven an incorrect idea.

"Most of the written exams I had in university are more of academic value and find little application in a office or programming job." General true, and luckily so: university courses should teach you how to approach an issue and how to find the solution to the issue on your own.
If you want to "just" learn which solutions may apply to a certain issue, and then picking one of the available soultions to the issue you have at hands, then youtube channels and professional courses are more than enough, you need no university degree.

@EarlGrey I hope the university you visited did teach you the way you described. I didn't have the same experience. I finished recently and I can't say that I was encouraged to find solutions to the issues I was facing. OP described students making databases of prior exam questions and studying those. This was the encouraged behavior students practiced.

The good thing is that you do not need to pass university exams to be a decent programmer.
The bad thing is the requirement of having an university degree to apply for a programmer position. It is just a extremely cheap way to filter candidates, and also quite uneffective. I heard from people working in the private too many times the sentence "I don't care about degrees from applicants" and then the first requirement in the job opening they should oversee is "degree in informatics/computer science or similar".

YouTube videos do not a tertiary education make
The elephant in the room here is the fact that there is a prescribed textbook for the course and you didn't read it.  It is okay to try to use alternative learning sources in cases where there is reason to believe that alternative learning materials are more succinct but are also sufficient to cover all the topics and skills you are learning.  However, if you go down this path and then experience course failure, it worth considering whether your choice not to use the primary materials may have caused or contributed to that failure.  It is a bit of a worry that you do not identify this as even a possible cause of your problem, and it is certainly a problem that you consider reading the prescribed textbook to be "out of the question".
It sounds like you have already made some good progress in learning some skills from video instruction, and so you probably already have a smattering of useful knowledge for this course that you can build on.  I would recommend that in your next attempt you take the time to work through the prescribed textbook to ensure that you are learning all the material, and all the details, in a systematic fashion.  You will typically find that autodidactic learning can give you useful knowledge, but it is often a bit patchy and non-systematic.  One of the benefits of formal education in university courses from academic experts (supported by detailed textbooks) is that they generally cover material in a systematic fashion that ensures that you get all the core knowledge of a subject without any "gaps".  Consequently, I would recommend that you reconsider your stance and try to work your way through the textbook for your next attempt at this course.  If you break this down and do some reading each week, you will find that you are only reading about 50-60 pages per week, which should not be too onerous.  (Since you will need to repeat the course, you can even get started on the reading prior to restarting, which will get you a head-start and reduce the per-week load even further.)  More generally, take advantage of the readings prescribed to you by your course lecturer.
With regard to the cheating of other students, you need not let this prevent you from learning and understanding the material as well as possible.  It is certainly disheartening when other students cheat on exams and get passing grades in courses as a result, but it need not prevent you from passing on your own merits.  In the long-term, there are significant advantages to learning university material in-depth and succeeding in your degree without cutting corners.  If you approach things this way then you will find that in a few years, you have significantly more knowledge of your subject matter than students who rely on cheating.  By eschewing cheating when others are doing it, you are already developing good character, which is something that is just as valuable as the academic material you are learning.
To supplement this advice, I cannot help but comment on some aspects of your post that indicate possible misunderstanding about the realities of tertiary education.  Firstly, a 684 page textbook is quite long for a university course, but not so much as to be a substantial outlier.  (For example, for some discussion of reading requirement for law school, see here.)  If reading a book of this size is "out of the question" in your education, you might need to rethink whether you actually have the time and inclination to undertake tertiary education right now.  YouTube videos are well and good for learning certain things, but these types of materials are presently insufficient to give a student an entire tertiary education.

(For example, for some discussion of the reading requirements for law school, see here.) --- This is misleading. This is not an appropriate and similar example. Law is not science. Law doesn't have Lab sessions. I studied TESOL also. I can summarize a social science or humanities book in one night.

Like other answerers, you didn't touch the cheating phenomenon. This is taking place for a reason, and, in my opinion, the reason is - the way this course has been conducted, is not healthy for students. Also, as I already mentioned, the passing rate in this course is low.

You wanted advice for how to pass; you have it.  If you would like to be dismissive of that advice, feel free.

I am not being dismissive. I just pointed out what you missed.

I have updated this answer to add an additional paragraph addressing the issue of cheating by other students; I hope this helps round out the answer.

Law LLMs have lab sessions, they are just called something different.

Since you ask for the student's perspective, this:

As a result, they saved a lot of time and utilized that time to study
for the written examination.

They learned one of the most fundamental skill in life: time management. It does not matter if you use the saved time to enjoy your hobbies, to do drugs, to prepare for your exams.
If you learn how to save time, you are ready not to be crushed in life because time will never be enough (ah, those biological limits), what you will do will never be enough (the mandatory increase in productivity required by the western world, always!).
Without knowing you, since you state

I learned the two programming languages very keenly. Solved all of the Laboratory problems
However, I miserably failed the written examination.
The final project was a hard problem

your issue is not learning how to use a tool, but how to build something with that tool. The final project was hard but somehow a "cool" topic (image recognition), the instructor surely thought "the students have been exposed or have interest in that topic, let's challenge them".
There would be much to say about using past exams to learn a topic, surely someone can chip in or point out to other qustions/answers here on the site, bottom line is "when they ask you to perform the calculation 6*7, do you calculate every time 42 or do you answer 42 by heart"?
EDIT AFTER READING THE COMMENTS TO ANSWERS:

GDB was like an added pain in the a**. Debugging without a GUI, not
my cup of tea

GDB is the foundation stone of whatever debugger, to understand whatever programm you write. You even stated

"It took me almost a week to find SASM debugger GUI."

... well if you managed to survive MIPS through an youtube channel, you can learn to do something with GDB in a week, do not understimate yourself, stop looking for cheap&quick short-term solutions that costs you a lot of time in the long term. Time managment, again.
Abrahm Lincoln may (or may not) have said “ Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” but you are spending the first four hours in looking for tricks "how to avoid sharpening the ax while having a working ax"!

I actually had a first year university student who could not multiply 6 times 7, and this was the explicit task. So they multiplied 3 times 7, getting 21, then added 21 to that, getting 42.

Were they doing "3 times 7" by heart or were they calculating it :D ?

They were in the front row of my class. I saw them write 3 x 7 = 21. Then they put 21 underneath and added to get 42. That was a real eye-opener.

It seems that they were actually the only one that could multiply 6 times 7, exactly because they did (3+3) * 7 :)

"He even failed to prescribe a proper debugger tool for x86 except for GDB."

GDB is a proper tool which many use to great success. Being able to use it makes you better prepared for industry jobs, if anything. Growing accustomed to nonstandard tools imposes a higher bar on the quality of your work: the team has to adjust to you, it is time and effort (=money), so your work better be good. That is not to say you never ever should do it if something else works for you better, but I really do not see how this would be a teacher's problem and not yours.
It is still expected people can and would read (or at least sift through the text), as opposed to finding an online video tutorial, which is a massive waste of time most of the time. Working with good ol' text is a skill people are expected to have in engineering jobs - eye-candey GUI and pretty visuals are neat but they cost resources and, most importantly, time to develop; technical papers have an advantage of being easily searchable. There is no way you would find a great explanatory video on each electronic device, coming with full annotation in order to be able to even remotely compete with someone just using Ctrl+F on the pdf coming with that device. Sometimes you have wade through the sloppily written README.md, if even that. Also, sample problems don not have to be similar to the exam problems, sorry.
My point is, after you complete this course you are expected to do some (many!) of these things on your own. In any given month, be it industry or academia, I would easily have to go through hundreds, if not thousands of pages of documents; in any given year - have to learn tools I am not very comfortable with or seek alternatives (in your case, that was GDB). This all comes with the territory. Some people choose to be heavily mentored as they continue their careers, but that is very, very limiting. Professors usually do want to better accommodate their students, but at some point, it comes to the point of sink or swim. Better now, while you still have a modicum of support, than as you are kicked out to that cold world, starting your career and not getting as much mentorship as you were hoping for.
EDIT: This is largely a professor's perspective still, but at least personally, I has very similar views being a student and I believed that my professors knew what they were doing. So I pretty much always had a mentality that it is my responsibility to find supplementary material if the course alone does not suffice, that my fellow students are in the same boat and that I should not look around for what others have done differently and blame my failures on that, rather focus on finding what works for me. Maybe it is something others do, maybe it is none of it. Reflecting a bit on "is it normal" is a good thing to do as long as it does not prevent you from just putting more work in when it is needed.

GDB is a proper tool which many use to great success. Being able to use it makes you better prepared for industry jobs, if anything. --- True, but not fit for passing a 4-months semester as it takes a lot of time to debug.

GDB is a great tool and about as good a debugger as any other. But there are also good graphical front ends for GDB, for example in Eclipse. In any case, however, the user interface of GDB (or any other debugger) is not very complicated and can surely be learned in much less than 4 months.

@WolfgangBangerth, In any case, however, the user interface of GDB (or any other debugger) is not very complicated and can surely be learned in much less than 4 months. --- unless GDB is the only thing I had to learn! Sorry, I humbly disagree. x86 assembly is already hard to learn. GDB was like an added pain in the a**. Debugging without a GUI, not my cup of tea.

@user366312 "Debugging without a GUI, not my cup of tea." passing courses will often involve activities that are not your cup of tea. Learn to appreciate (or at least tolerate) other varieties of tea.

Compared to learning assembly, learning GDB is surely easy enough. But if you want to use a GUI, then why don't you just use one?

@CharlesE.Grant, Learn to appreciate (or at least tolerate) other varieties of tea. --- actually I appreciate the cheaters, who uploaded the solutions overnight, more.

Set your goal. If you want to pass the exam, then always keep eye on what others are doing. Be friendly with old students who were taught by the same teacher and get old notes, old exams, solution manuals of you text book or even get tips how to pass this course. Later on, only grades matter, not how you get them. Learn from other students and instead of considering them cheats, follow their footsteps to success.

This is actually the ultimate truth.

"Later on, only grades matter, not how you get them." unless you got them illegally, and they may be revoked.

@EarlGrey If you are the only one doing something different, you will be noticed and you get the consequences. But if a majority is doing something and nobody around cares, even nobody listens to your complaints, then it is not so illegal and you will not be a target.

Or the grades won't matter at all and what you have learned will. But given the premise of "set your goal and follow it" - yes, absolutely.

I have upvoted answer by Imtar.
Just want to add, professors have a typical style of teaching, quizzes, mid term and end term. Most students, if not all, try to catch up with that, rather than really study the subject for its own sake.
If professors keep things too simple, they will be seen as adding less value.
If they keep things difficult too many will fail and their own teaching incompetence may be blamed partially.
Thus for clearing exams, the pattern recognition helps.
My advice to people in similar situations is to look hard and see if you are sure to pass the course (judging by the load you feel, time for assignments etc). Sometimes other students are just more prepared already or are devoting most time to this course.
For myself, I have dropped several elective courses after a few sessions when I got the hint.
When it was not possible, I tried to follow other students.
And your question is helpful. Every one thinks differently. What tool appears great to one can appear intractable to others. And often, for me, alternative textbooks have been saviours.


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Why do some PhDs programs pay monthly salary, some don't?
I found that

some Ph.D. programs pay monthly salaries like real jobs (EUR2300/month for a period of 36 months): Medical University of Vienna, AT

many pay minuscule monthly stipends like pocket money (PLN2600/month for the first two years, and PLN3600/month for the next two years): Jagellonian University, PL

Why is this difference? And, how can I distinguish between these Ph.D. programs?
In the second university, why should someone spend four years of his life surviving only on pocket money when they can earn more by enrolling in the first program? I.e., if the above programs want to attract students, why would someone apply for the second one? I mean, what would be their motivation?

Do you mean even within a particular country and field? Or are you asking why different fields and different countries handle this differently?

@cag51, I mean, in the EU; irrespective of field in STEM.

I can't quickly find the values you're referring to at those links. Can you quote or link to them?

@AzorAhai-him-, plz give me a few minutes.

It looks to me like the salary for #1 is 2800 Euros, though that figure is over a decade old. Assuming the 3600 PLN is correct, that's 772 Euros. Adjusting for the cost of living (~1.8x), the Austrian position pays about double the Polish position.

@cag51, Most likely it is EUR2300/month.

While it is true that the two universities you cite are only 400 km apart, they are in different countries with different economic abilities and histories. As a consequence, things cost different amounts, education works differently, and there are many cultural differences as well -- in other words, one should surprised if salaries were the same, and indeed they are not in nearly every job one would consider, graduate student stipends included.
This is, in a sense, not so different from what you would expect the salary differences to be between, say, the University of California in San Diego (in the United States) and a university in Tijuana (in Mexico), or between Tel Aviv University (in Israel) and the University of Amman (in Jordan), or maybe between universities in Bangkok (Thailand) and Yangon (Burma). Rich and less rich countries quite often neighbor each other, and they will not be able to pay the same salaries.

Just for reference, average gross wage (according to wikipedia, data from 2020/2021) in Austria was €4540, while in Poland it was PLN 6644). Thus both universities offer almost precisely half of average wage in their countries.

The EU is a diverse place. It is a monetary/economic, not a political, union. So, policies differ. You can't judge a program based on a single number in any case ("salary" in this case).
To distinguish between the programs you have to look at the bigger picture and do some research. Jagellonian, for example, is an excellent place, but the Polish economy in general is different from the Austrian one. There may be other financial issues distinguishing between places as well as between programs. There may be social programs outside the university that account for the difference.
A country (or an individual university) will try to set its policies in part to be attractive the the people it desires to hire and to teach. The policies will differ in many ways.
And, if you find, after some research, that the policies don't suit you, then you probably want to apply elsewhere.
I can't speak to the specifics between these two institutions, but if you do some research then you will probably get an idea of why they differ as they do.

I think nearly every European will object to the statement that the EU is not a political union :-)

@WolfgangBangerth, why is that? Every country has maintained its own national government and sovereignty. They have separate votes at UN. Etc. Some of their problems, in fact, come from the lack of political union. Germany lording it over Greece a few years ago, for example. They speak with many voices, not one.

@Buffy The political integration of EU countries is far greater than among countries joined by more regular multilateral treaties. Whether you want to call that a political union or not is a matter of definition, but the EU is clearly more than an economic union. In fact, there is a specific term "supranational union" that was introduced to describe this situation.

@Buffy The United States also has different states that all have their respective state parliaments, laws, and governments. And, like the countries in the EU, they are bound together by a Constitution, which in the case of the EU happens to be a multinational treaty that lays out rights and restrictions on the member states. There is a European kind of Supreme Court (the European Court of Justice), and there is an executive (which in the US is called government with secretaries and in the case of the EU is called the European Commission with commissioners, both headed by a president).

Separately, the European Union is definitely not a monetary union. Not all member states use the Euro, and there are countries outside the European Union who use it. EU and Euro are separate things.


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Why do some PhD programs recruit only a handful of students and other recruit more than 100?
See this. This university recruits only 5 students in the Faculty of Education.
Now, see this link. They admit 110 Ph.D. students per year. They have 79 faculty members.
Why do some Ph.D. programs recruit only a handful of students and others recruit more than 100?
Is the recruitment size only dependent on the number of research-faculty or some other factors that are also involved?

It depends on the size of the faculty, certainly. The number itself gives no indication.

Some faculty, from departments which has something to do with experiments, would take more than 1 student per year.. So, I do not see what could be a problem here...

A PhD program that admits 3 students per year is not necessarily good either. It’s pretty context dependent.

The polish graduate school has 10 potential supervisors in the faculty of education, so the student/supervisor ratio, for what it's worth, isn't hugely different (0.5 vs 1.4 graduate students per supervisor).

Also, are you sure both programs admit new students every year, every semester, or every three years...?

@henning--reinstateMonica, so, is it only about the number of faculty members and nothing else?

@henning--reinstateMonica, the Polish program is admitting 5 students each year from 2017. I am not sure about the Portuguese program.

@user366312 no, I wouldn't say so. It's just that the raw number of admitted students doesn't say much. The ratio of applications and admitted students would give an indication of the school's exclusivity or how "in demand" it is. but there are many other factors that matter, like the school's resources, the reputation of its teachers, the job placement of its alumni, it's network, etc. If you are asking because you want to decide where to apply, however, your individual "fit" is more important than those "objective" indicators.

@henning--reinstateMonica, the things are u indicating, are generally uses as parameters in the university-rankings. r u suggesting me to consult various university rankings?

Basically nothing in the real world is ever dependent on only one other thing.  Think more broadly about all the resources, beyond just faculty headcount, that are needed in order to educate graduate students.  Realize that different programs have different amounts of these resources.  And many of these resources can also be used for other things besides graduate education, so it also depends on how the program chooses to allocate those resources.

Lisbon may be limited by state funding in different departments?

@JonCuster, what? Lisbon is limited? It charges tuition fees.

The reliability of a program depends on many things as does the number of slots available in a given year. I have no reason to doubt that the University of Lisboa is anything but reputable.
But, if they are willing to admit up to 110 students in a given year it doesn't necessarily mean that they will. They will apply some standards to every application and might fall short of the goal. The goal might change from year to year depending on graduation and drop-out rates. It might be half the next year, though unlikely.
But the reliability depends on the rate of graduation and where the graduates wind up and not on the absolute size of the program. In fact, there may be many specialties within such a faculty, so it may not seem so large to any particular student.
But a given faculty member can probably handle three or four (more?) doctoral students at a time if they are in different stages of their programs. Some can handle many more, depending on the organization.
Look to other factors.
I was in a large program, though not quite that big. Things have gotten bigger since that time, also. But the research seminar I was in had about three faculty members and half a dozen students. Graduate classes had about 30 students, and the entire graduate student population was spread over many courses. It can work and still have high quality. In fact there can be a certain synergy that comes with a large faculty.


text:
Do STEM professors generally hold training in teaching from faculty of education or not?
I have studied at 4 universities, and in 3 different programs.
I always observed that STEM professors are not good at teaching. I suspect this is because they do not have degrees in pedagogy like MEd and so on.
Do STEM professors generally hold training in teaching from faculty of education or not?
If YES, what am I missing?
If NO, why?

Define “training”. Does a period of several years of working as a teaching assistant under the supervision of experienced instructors, followed by additional years of gaining more experience as a postdoc and junior faculty member, potentially still receiving mentorship and advice from more senior colleagues, count as training?

While teaching is one part of their job, it is rarely the part that gets them tenure.

@JonCuster, if that is true, then you probably can answer my question with your argument, but this is bad for Education as a whole.

Is there a known correlation between the quality of one's teaching and having training from a faculty of education? Maybe this should be a separate question, but it seems to be presupposed in the present question. I'd be interested in this for just about any measure of "quality" --- student evaluations, success of students in subsequent courses, students' retention of what they learned, etc.

Do STEM professors generally hold training in teaching from faculty of education or not?
No. Even at institutions that privilege teaching over research, it is unlikely that professors would receive formal training from colleagues in the Faculty of Education. Many universities have some sort of support unit (i.e. a "Centre for Teaching Excellence") that provide training to professors as professional development. While there is probably more attention these days towards pedagogical issues, few places make this mandatory (apart from perhaps a few introductory seminars). In fact, there is unfortunately a bit of a bias towards seeing teaching training as remedial.
Why is this? For better or for worse, at many research-intensive universities, research takes priority over teaching. Faculty members wanting to get tenured and promoted need to be well received by their community of peers, often external letter writers, who will focus on research as it's the main way to evaluate a faculty member (i.e. if I am writing a letter from another university, it's hard for me to know if a professor is an effective teacher or not; but I can situate them in the profession much easier based on our community norms).
As comments have noted, most professors learn how to teach "on the job" in an apprentice model, similar to how they learn many parts of their job. Starting out as a TA and then increasingly gaining autonomy in the classroom (until they are thrown in the deep end as a professor, of course).

As a wise professor once told me, "With a few exceptions, teaching doesn't get you tenure."

@Notagradstudent That's a good way to put it - that said, I think bad teaching can easily tip a case over to negative (and exceptional teaching can tip a marginal case over to positive).

In the US, at least, there is seldom any requirement for formal pedagogy training for new faculty. Most of us "learned" how to teach by observing the professors we had ourselves and we normally tried to emulate those we found most helpful. We also got a bit of practice with some of the "art of teaching" by serving as TAs while in graduate school.
At some, but not all, universities, the student opinion of your teaching, as reflected in questionnaires at end of term, have some impact on tenure decisions, but normally aren't decisive. A good researcher may be a good teacher for advanced students, but not for beginners.
Some places are also trying to offer some help with online pedagogy at the current moment, but I don't have any feedback on its success.


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What is the purpose of lectures at the Graduate level?
Overview of the problem
This question is about 90 ECTS credits and a 2 years long MSc in CSE program with a thesis.
At the university, which I am in, the teachers deliver lectures but most students, including me, don't understand anything. There is also no room for asking questions as the teachers consider asking questions as an interruption in the lectures.
In addition to that, the lectures don't correspond to the prescribed books. Imagine, going home after listening and taking down notes from lectures, and then finding either different terminologies or different arrangements of chapters or different themes of the book altogether. Also, teachers cite/refer to lengthy and huge books which most students, including me, don't either understand or don't have time to read as it is literally impossible to read such huge books in a 4-months semester.
Therefore, what we do is, contact senior students and collect sample old questions or notes from them. Sometimes students go to private tutors. We also listen to YouTube video tutorials which are much more effective and helpful than our university lectures. This has been going on for years in our faculty from one batch of students to another.
Therefore, I am confused about the purpose of lectures at the university.
Main question
What is the purpose of lectures at the Graduate level? Is it:

to explain something to make it easy to understand to the students?
to just make the topic familiar to the students (with no intention of making it easier to understand)?
to outline the syllabus?
or something else?

Note: I am adding two examples of how the quality of lectures directs the learning curve of a student.

American Literature by Dr, Cyrus Patel at NYU
American Literature by Ayesha Iqbal Vishwamohan at IIT Madras

Anyone who watches the above two video lectures are able to perceive the difference. The 2nd lecture seems to be all over the place which is evident from the confused looks of the students.

Needs more context. What type of degree program is it? In what subject? If what you are saying is true, it sounds like the lectures in your program are pretty useless. I certainly believe some lecturers are this bad but I have a hard time believing all the professors in a department are this bad.

I agree with @setholopolus. I've attended 4 graduate programs and, with the exception of 2 or 3 classes out of several dozen, each had a specific textbook assigned (although maybe 1 out of 5 or 6 of these classes didn't follow the text much at all) -- e.g. Ahlfors for complex analysis, Royden for real analysis, Hungerford for algebra, just to name three. I realize graduate math in the U.S. may be different from your situation, but that's why you need to give more context.

@setholopolus, This is about CSE. This is 90 ECTS credits and a 2years long MSc program with a thesis. What else do u want to know?


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How to find references for known facts?
It occurs sometimes that I am in possession of a factoid for which I know all of the standard terminology and can express the factoid in that terminology, and also know that the factoid is prior knowledge, but do not have a reference for the factoid.  This is especially problematic in my field (machine learning) where the online resources for learning things are very good, and quite extensive.  However, citations are sometimes sparse in these blog-style articles, and I find myself knowing the subject matter, but not knowing the appropriate citation for it.  Note that the blog is not the appropriate citation, because they're just paraphrasing it from elsewhere.  It would be nice to lean on the experience of the community, but "Does anybody know a citation for fact X?" is generally an inappropriate question on stack exchange sites.
Surely this is a problem in other disciplines as well.  As such, I am mostly interested in general "citation reverse-search" skills, tips and tricks.  However, field-specific answers are also welcome.
NOTE:  This is specifically for situations where the problem is known to be a prior one, and where the terminology is known.  Linking disparate fields with differing terminology of basically the same concept is a known Hard Problem™, and I am not trying to solve it here, except insomuch as those same skills relate to "reverse-search" of problems with known terminology.
To reiterate for clarity:  What are handy tools, tricks tips etc for finding references for known facts?

Leaving a comment on the blog post works sometimes, as do search engines.

On Mathoverflow, "does anybody know a citation for fact X" is a perfectly acceptable question (provided it is a research-level one); we even have a tag for it.

In your specific case, https://www.amazon.de/Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0132071487 might be the answer to all your questions ;).

I believe "as any fule kno" is traditional ;-)

Yeah, can you explain why you think such questions are generally inappropriate on the discipline-specific Stack Exchange sites?  My experience is that they are appropriate and generally received well.  Note, however, that the right answer to such a question is sometimes "this is too well-known to need a citation".

@NateEldredge, "this is too well known to need a citation.", depends on your audience I suppose.  I'm spoiled by the stack exchange convention on links.  They're less for credit-giving and ego-boosting and more for just educational purposes.  "Here's a good place to learn more about this topic if you need to."

Also, @FedericoPoloni and Nate, this is interesting and unknown to me.  I have requested citations for answers to questions, but have never posted a question that strictly requests citations.

@Scott Are you speaking about citations in academic papers, or in blog-like articles? The educational purpose is less emphasized, in the former. It would be useful to specify because the answer may be different.

I would be using them in academic papers.  "The educational purpose is less emphasized, in the former." I personally see this as rather unfortunate.  Just my 2c.  :)

I would also draw a distinction between empirical facts (which need to be supported by data) and logical facts (which need to be supported by a proof).  In the latter case, you have the option of giving a proof yourself, or leaving it for the reader to work out.

Note that one (of many) reason that "does anyone have a citation for fact X" is an acceptable question, is that just because "everyone knows it" and "all the blogs assume it" and "all of our research is based on top of it" and "it always seems to be true in every case I've seen" (you can probably see where this is going ... ;) ) doesn't necessarily mean it's true, and certainly doesn't mean that there was at some point research supporting it.

Discovering that a widely held belief is actually not based on any research is a valuable realistion and something that should be called out in whatever academic paper you are writing that would otherwise be using a citation

Actually, there are often many "facts" that really aren't. It is a fascinating research question to dive into the internet and libraries to verify the origin of something taken as a fact. This happens in every field and especially with pithy "quotations" that appear on calendars. Just for fun I like to look for the true source, in one instance I came up with five different supposed authors! This is also why you should reference your facts: So that others can verify that you are stating it correctly.
In the area of machine learning you can use the ACM or the IEEE digital library to dig around and look for a source. There are no shortcuts, this is research :)

Wikipedia. Go to the bottom of an article to find references, open the first paper cited and then find the references on that paper.

I usually have this problem when the fact is not so obvious as to not need a citation (i.e. standard undergraduate coursework material) but not so difficult as to have been addressed in a seminal paper. Textbooks are a good way to fill in the gap, and I think this is how seminal textbooks work their way to so many citations. In ML, ESL is a good book to check against. BDA3 crops up in Bayesian stats papers a lot; a "fact" I might cite this book for would be the asymptotic normality of a posterior distribution under certain regularity conditions, which is about at the level we're talking about.

Since you indicate that the relevant terminology is known, you can search for this terminology online to find other academic sources that discuss the fact (and hopefully reference its origin). Of course, doing so using google would probably just lead you back to the educational blogs that you picked up the fact from in the first place. Instead use (something like) google scholar, or potentially better a subject specific abstract indexing service (I don't know which one are common in machine learning and computer science).