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Should I be honest with postdoc candidate about awful lab working environment?
I work as a postdoc in a lab that is extremely mismanaged.  The head of the lab micromanages all the staff, often claims successful work as his own, and rejects new ideas that are not from him.  All the employees (both scientists and technicians) are miserable, and some of the team has become destructive, creating regular conflicts between team members that the lab head refuses to resolve.
The head of the lab is hiring a new postdoc, and I, as the only other postdoc, will meet with the candidate as part of the final interview step.  I am already planning to leave, but haven't told anybody yet.
My question is:

If asked by the candidate, should I be honest about the working environment?
If not asked by the candidate, should I tell the candidate anyway?

I feel it is dishonest to let someone enter a destructive work environment without them being prepared.

UPDATE: I had no chance to speak to the candidate alone; the lab manager stuck by the candidate's side the whole time.  Interestingly, the candidate later declined the offer, so perhaps they were astute enough to recognise the environment for what it was.  Thanks to everyone for the help and advice!

Not a complete answer... so: comment ;) Back then, my prospective colleagues were taking me off-site for some drinks to "tell me the truth". They were perfectly honest, sticking to the facts (which I couldn't verify at that time)... and I chose not to believe them - it clearly had to be exaggeration! Possibly one of the dumbest things I ever did. But anyway, I'm very happy they at least tried to tell.

What would be your answer if you were the one who is being hired?

Might your meeting be within earshot of arguing employees?

Very similar, might even be duplicate: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/126720/should-i-warn-new-prospective-phd-student-that-supervisor-is-terrible

I wish someone would tell me, even the guy that was planning their move out at the time didn't tell me and they even portrayed a positive image. If your plan to leave is open, tell him that and he will most likely ask.

The general rule in these situations is that being honest is okay (though consider that it can be risky if word of your honesty makes it back to the boss), but it's important to stick to facts and to your opinions about your own situation/experience.
"The team is destructive" is not something you should say, nor is "the lab is mismanaged". Those are your opinions about other people: stay away. What you can say is "I feel like I've had trouble getting credit for my work", "I wish I had more freedom to choose the direction of my work", etc. Even better is to use specific factual information (note: opinions are not facts), like "I've only been able to get one first-author publication in the past three years."
That said, take care of yourself, too. If you need a recommendation for a future job, it might be necessary to bite your tongue a bit. It's good to want to warn a candidate off gently, but consider that once you are gone someone is going to get that position, and it's even possible that the person who does will have a different experience than you did.
Also related: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/137037/can-i-tell-a-prospective-employee-that-everyone-in-the-team-is-leaving (not an identical situation but I think the advice there still applies).

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

Yes, you should be honest, but you may be able to do it without jeopardizing yourself or assigning blame to individuals. You can also answer "no comment" to questions that you think would leave you vulnerable, and the candidate is likely to get the proper implication. In fact, stating that "Off the record, I'd prefer to be elsewhere" is the poison pill that the candidate will probably find sufficient.
If not asked, it is a little harder to make a recommendation. Don't leave yourself open to retaliation.

+1 I would not mention that you are planning to leave if you haven’t officially told anyone yet, as this could leave you vulnerable.

@KevinMiller: People can prefer to be elsewhere without planning to leave. In fact, one could argue that most employees in the world are in that state for most of their careers.

In this situation, I believe in being a tactful truth-teller but not a complainer.

You are entitled to describe your opinions and feelings (truth) but not those of others (gossip).
Example
Q: What's it like working here?
A: I have to admit the approach here feels a little too combative for me - I'm sure everyone has their own opinion.

If you are worried about your words getting back to the wrong people, remember that they can't quote what isn't explicitly said. I believe that a lot can be conveyed with a pause, a sigh, a wry expression or a non-committal answer.
Examples
Q: What's your supervisor like to work for?
A: Next question!  (blunt non-committal - preferably not in the hearing of the head!)

Q: What's your supervisor like to work for?
A: Mmmm ... We have our moments. (non-committal but more gentle)

Q: What's your supervisor like to work for?
A: What sort supervisor are you hoping for? (evasive - letting the other person specify)
Q: Oh someone who is easy-going, relaxed and generous.
A: Smiles and says "Might not be your type then"

I could give hundreds of examples but what's really important is your mind-set. Vow not to lie. Be calm and act as though you are describing what happens in a movie, i.e depersonalise but answer truthfully (or possibly decline to answer).

Why underplay what seem to be very serious problems?

@einpoklum - I'll add an edit to my answer to address this when I have time - it is a useful question.

If asked by the candidate, should I be honest about the working environment?

Yes, be honest and describe details regarding different aspects of lab life.
However:

You should make it clear you're describing your own experience, and it's possible that others don't see it that way (if others really don't all see it the same way as you do).
Try avoiding phrases like "Professor X always does [Something]", in favor of "Professor X has done [Something] on several occasions when I was involved, and I understand this has happened in more cases."
Prefer describing events rather than than the supposed character of people or groups. Let the candidate draw their conclusions.

So honesty and an attempt at fairness.

If not asked by the candidate, should I tell the candidate anyway?

Yes, but not like in the above. Tell the candidate that, if they're interested in the experience of someone working at the lab, you're offering to have a chat with him/her and sharing yours. If they take you up on it, it's back to the previous scenario; if not, well, you offered.

I feel it is dishonest to let someone enter a destructive work environment without them being prepared.

It might not be dishonest, but it's immoral, in my opinion, and against your collective interest and public benefit.
But - if things are really that bad, then telling potential candidates is not enough. You (= all people working under him) should do something about it together. Possibly with union support, if you're unionized; possibly some kind of in-lab intervention; possibly sending a delegation to the dean or whoever is at the head of your department.

I have successfully left a similar work environment in Europe. When asked by a prospective postdoc candidate I choose to give direct, factual and honest answers. I would have appreciated a similar warning myself. If you feel that you can not safely say anything too negative without endangering yourself, then I think some of the other answers give excellent tips about how to give more circumspect answers. The level of honesty and directness you can use in your answers will depend on the local work culture and your personal circumstances. You could always find an excuse not to meet with the new postdoc (meeting, vacation, illness), in my opinion that is still better than misrepresenting the work environment.
If you are worried about not getting a good reference because of a of conflict with your supervisor, maybe you could ask your supervisor's supervisor or someone else at the University to be your reference. Alternatively, the University might have a system in place where you can report or discuss your work environment confidentially.

Pretend you are going to have a discussion with this person ten years in the future.  At that point, you will be free to discuss everything without repercussions.
What will you be comfortable telling the candidate at that point?  Here are some possible examples:
"My own experience was bad, I understood others to feel the same way, and I was planning to leave.  However, due to the employee-employer power imbalance I feared for my career if I was completely honest about my perception of the lab."
"I did my best to hint to you that I felt the lab was poorly run, but I didn't feel that it was my place to make that decision for you."
What you probably don't want to say is something like "I was scared and I didn't do what I would have liked someone else to do for me in that situation."
If you were really in a highly vulnerable situation, I would not hold you accountable for what you felt you had to conceal/not reveal.  So if that is really the case, I think you can be comfortable protecting yourself.  That's the point of the first couple of responses I typed.
In a situation like this, the ethics are not straightforward.  Am I ethically obligated to sacrifice my safety for the benefit of someone else?  One can come up with any number of situations where it would be very, very difficult to make a blanket declaration that X is the right decision.
My personal approach has been to accept some risk to myself in order to help other people.  Sometimes that has had negative repercussions for me, but I felt good about the decision and pushed forward through those situations.
I agree with other suggestions that you might want to give hints in such a way that you do not expose yourself to legal action but which you can reasonably expect that the candidate will understand.
"Just as personal advice, I highly recommend that before you join any lab you do your best to read between the lines to get an idea of what the culture might be like there.  People don't always feel comfortable saying exactly what they think in formal situations like interviews."
That is, technically, just true advice (in fact, very good advice).  If you are challenged on it, you can play dumb.  "What?  I was just giving him personal advice, do you disagree with anything I said?"
Conversationally asking about other opportunities they might be considering and asking how they assessed the culture there (if they've already interviewed at any of them) might give you cover to comment about the fact that it can be hard to tell what the culture is in a lab because people don't feel completely free to talk about it if they think it's bad.  Then you have cover by saying that you were talking about the other opportunity.
"I don't want to say anything bad about the culture here without the person being in the room to defend themself."   True statement, they should be able to pick up on it.
To protect yourself it might be worth rehearsing a few lines like this and keeping the phrasing in such a way that you can accurately say "I never said anything negative about the lab here."  Phrase all your comments in such a way that that is true so that you can confidently state this should the candidate (intentionally or not) blow your cover.
Here are some other true statements:
"It's not my responsibility if the candidate misinterpreted what I said [this is true--even if you actually intended them to interpret it badly and the candidate accurately interpreted everything, it's still true that it's not your responsibility if they misinterpreted it]."
Is your lab on Glassdoor?  If so, put what you really think on Glassdoor (it's anonymous--but make sure that you don't say anything that makes it obvious that it's you.  Note, however, that if the lab is small it may compromise your anonymity.  Only take this option if you can be reasonably sure that it won't be traced back to you, which is probably only true if there are hundreds of people that could have written the review you wrote.  [this caveat is a reaction to a comment on this question by Bob]).  Then you can casually mention (in the context of that conversation about what other opportunities the candidate might be applying to, for example), that Glassdoor was originally mostly about corporate environments but now some academic labs are on there and that you always check Glassdoor before you accept an offer.
Another example of a true statements that is not directly about your lab:
"People are often under a lot of pressure to keep a lid on a bad situation.  If there is bad leadership, it's even worse, because they probably can't trust that bad leader not to retaliate."
Your defense, if cover is blown by candidate: "We were just talking about the academic interview process in general.  I was trying to build rapport [true statement!].  I didn't say anything negative about the situation here."
In the end, no one can tell you what the appropriate amount of risk to take is.  You want to make sure that you feel good about how you handled yourself.  You should look for a way that you feel is the right balance between courage and caution for your particular situation at this time.  You are a person with particular vulnerabilities at this particular time.  The candidate is a person with particular vulnerabilities at this particular time.  You would have to be omniscient to know what the exactly correct balance is.  You are not omniscient, so you are going to have to make a guess.  Do your best, with the emphasis on how you think you will feel about your decisions in ten years, and recognizing that you are fallible and your approach will not be perfect, and that's ok.

The trick with the Glassdoor suggestion is that if the lab is small, the boss might be able to guess who did it, or could go one by one and apply pressure until someone tattles or the leaker spills the beans. So it could become pretty uncomfortable. In general I never treat anonymous review channels as anonymous unless I'm part of a very large pool of respondents from the same group so that I truly blend in. Otherwise it can be very easy to discover your identity. But otherwise a good answer overall.

I think this is the right thing to do, so I would recommend talking to him about it in a pleasant way and to suggest ways for improvement.

Use "faint praise"
For better or for worse this isn't a situation where you can openly speak your mind about the shortcomings of your employer without putting your career at risk. Appearing to be trying to run off potential hires would look doubly bad. There is however a way that you can honestly communicate your misgivings to the candidate while (if done right) minimizing the risk to your career. It's called giving "faint praise". From the Wikipedia article on the topic (note: the word "damning" used here is not a curse word, but means "condemning"):

Damning with faint praise is an English idiom, expressing oxymoronically that half-hearted or insincere praise may act as oblique criticism or condemnation.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise
Basically most candidates in this situation will realize that employees won't be able to say anything bad about the employer, and so will be listening carefully for red flags in the form of less than fully enthusiastic praise for the employer. So if you communicate your misgivings in the form of faint praise, they are likely to be understood. But critically, they are ambiguous, and so are difficult for your boss to weaponize against you in case your words do make it back to your boss.

The candidate has no way of knowing whether your "honesty" is in good faith
Look at it from the candidate's perspective: he/she has no idea whether he/she can trust the OP's "honest" negative commentary on the job. Given that the OP is on the interview panel, any attempt on the OP's part to discourage the candidate may be perceived as an attempt at sabotage to allow nepotism to take place.
If I attended a job interview and one of the panellists were trying to discourage me from accepting the job, I would assume the following:

interview panel hoped to appoint a pre-selected candidate;
however, the pre-selected candidate is manifestly weaker than me;
the panel is thus obliged to offer me the job, but hopes I refuse it so that they can get away with offering it to their pre-selected candidate instead;
therefore, the panel engages in a subterfuge designed to discourage me from accepting the job (this subterfuge takes the form of a junior panellist, the OP, claiming to be "honest" with me about a "toxic working environment").

Given this distinct possibility, it is deemed severely unprofessional for someone on an interview panel to actively discourage a candidate from accepting a job offer.
My advice to the OP
If you feel you must disclose negative information, do it in a way that does not come across as an attempt to discourage the candidate from accepting the job. Express the information in a neutral, fact-based way that makes no assumptions about how the candidate is supposed to react (e.g.: instead of saying the PI "micromanages" subordinates, the OP could say that the PI "is heavily involved in directing the day-to-day work of subordinates" -- then the candidate can decide whether he/she feels that is a problem, and, if so, ask for clarification such as "does that mean that there is not much scope for working independently?" or "could you describe the PI's management style in a bit more detail?").

Morality and self respect have their price.
Ask yourself if you are O.K. with anything you say getting back to your authority chain as opposed to seeing yourself as dishonest.
Every person must answer this for themselves.

I applaud your concern for honesty, and I understand.  That said, I would strongly discourage you from being overly honest about the bad working environment.
First, this is your opinion on the environment; it may be unlikely, but it's possible others would find the situation better than you do, and you coloring the situation at the start wont help them or be appreciated.
But even if you do your best to stick to facts, as other responses have suggested, you stand basically nothing to gain, and in fact have a ton to loose.  You don't know this person, and they have no reason to be loyal to you.  What if you imply something negative to them and they promptly tell others what you said?  What if they decline the position because of you and tell the lab director the honest reason why?
Unfortunately this extends to "no comment" answers intended to be obvious catcalls regarding the bad environment.
Personally, I would avoid lying outright, but also do my best to evade any sort of opinion question with excuses like "oh, I mostly keep to myself" or "I've managed one publication this year, so I was happy about that."

"it may be unlikely, but it's possible others would find the situation better than you do" That was my first thought, but if indeed all lab members are miserable (as stated by OP), there must be something going on that is not merely a subjective opinion.

I think this answer is offensive to the asker.  When people say they are being mistreated, don't just tell them out of hand that they are wrong.

@AnonymousPhysicist This question does not do that.

I think people might be interpreting the wording as "your opinion... may be unlikely".

That could be.  A little reading comprehension goes a long way.

I find that whole paragraph inappropriate, no matter how I parse it.

It might be better to use the word "experience" rather than "opinion". That might reduce the appearance to some readers of minimizing OP's experience.

+1 I think this is a good answer. I've read questions on SE where people have provided answers stating that an environment that one person felt, validly, was toxic/abusive, another person thrived in. So it's valid to state that the candidate might not have the same view toward the working environment that the OP has, and may even thrive in that environment. I think this answer is coming close to the "faint praise" approach. See my comment about wording, which may help reduce the negative reactions to this answer.

And note that I'm not in any way condoning abusive behavior by bosses, just agreeing with Jeff that everyone has different abilities to cope with or even thrive in adverse working conditions, so it's not a safe assumption that one's own bad experience will translate to the experience a potential candidate would have.


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Is my research statement supposed to lead to papers in top journals?
I'm about to start a 2-year postdoc in math with a possibility to stay a 3rd year. This means I will probably be on the job market in one year. I am planning to apply for tenure-track research positions. As I understand it, to get a tenure-track offer I should try to get at least one paper in a top journal. When I look at my research statement, I don't think I have projects that will lead to papers in, say, the Annals or JAMS or Duke. I listed a few projects that I think can get done quickly but are basically extensions of other people's papers, the idea being that these are "low-hanging fruit." I also listed some long-term ideas but they are speculative and aren't concrete problems. If I follow the research statement I probably won't have a paper in a top journal. Am I doing something wrong?
Edit: I should also add that my letter writers all looked at my research statement (they requested it) and didn't say that anything was off.

Pure mathematics, yes?

@Buffy: Yes.....

You do the best you can do with the ideas you have.  Most very good mathematicians can’t come up with a JAMS worthy result every year, and it’s harder when you’re just out of graduate school.  You do need to spend some time on some more ambitious ideas as a postdoc, but “more ambitious” doesn’t mean JAMS-worthy and there’s luck in which ideas pay off and when there’s an unexpected connection that turns up when you’re in the middle of a project.
Yes if you want a job at a top place you might need top publications, but all you can do is do your best with the ideas you have the expertise you developed.  Most of us only get a couple publications at that level in our life.  Aim to be productive and to increase the level of your publications, but thinking about how to get into JAMS or the Annals isn’t helpful.

Thanks. I feel as though I'm just starting out and now I feel pressured to have a paper in a very good journal in only one year.

That’s a very understandable reaction to the current job market.  You’re right that this pressure is there, and you’re right that it’s not a reasonable expectation for most mathematicians.  But there’s not much you can do about either of those things and overthinking it isn’t going to help you get there.

I imagine even the best mathematicians struggle to get published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), or the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), or the Journal of African Media Studies (JAMS), or even the Journal of Atomic and Molecular Sciences (JAMS).

@Mehta Given that the reviewing process is taking so long, even if you write down something ground breaking soon, it is unlikely that the results would be officially accepted in any top journal in one year's time.

This is orthogonal to the actual question, I realize. The answer of Noah Snyder is direct and seems correct to me. But I'd like to make a couple of recommendations about what to do during the postdoc so that when you enter the actual job market you are in the best possible position whether or not your research has resulted in completed high level papers.
First, your current backlog seems appropriate with both short and long term projects. You want to maintain and extend that.
The first recommendation is that you keep a research notebook in which you record ideas, as they occur to you, that might be exploited later when you have time. Researchers in large companies like IBM keep a "patent book" in which they record "possibly patentable" ideas when they occur. You can do the same with any sort of research. Periodically review the entries in your notebook to see whether you have additional extensions of them or can now develop them more fully. This notebook can form the basis of your next "research statement" when you are in the job market. Having a good backlog of projects of various difficulty and in various states of development can be an asset. Research in most fields, including, or maybe especially, mathematics can't really be time boxed. The results come when the insights come. But one big insight is knowing what might be possible to develop - and not forgetting it in the heat of other pursuits. Keep a notebook. Update it constantly.
And if you get blocked for some reason on your currently most important project, go to the notebook to see what you can do now while the main project gestates for a while. Have several irons in the fire, some hotter than others.
The other recommendation is to use your time as a postdoc to develop collaborative opportunities. Talk to a lot of people about your and their ideas. Think about whether it is advantageous to work with them. And make sure you capture anything significant (even slightly significant) in your research notebook. But one important benefit of such collaborative relationships is that you might eventually take a job at a small institution that doesn't have a lot of local opportunities. If you have a lot of prior relationships then you can still carry on a rich research program even if you are somewhat isolated. Even a relatively large department can be weak in your particular research area.
The notebook is useful for another reason, actually. It is useful for a new faculty member to have some ideas available for student research. If you have several partly developed ideas, perhaps they can be taken over by students. You already have given them some thought so it is easier to advise and guide them.

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Dealing with unpleasant people in conferences
My current strategy when seeing unpleasant, toxic academics in conferences is to ignore them, but I'm wondering if people have other suggestions.
When I was a grad student, I spent a few months at a research institution. I was in the computer room trying to print something, but it wasn't printing. Then a senior academic (mathematician) came in and I told him that the printer wasn't working. It turned out that he just wanted to make a photocopy, and that was fine. He told me, "It's working." Then he proceeded to get very angry and said, "You're lying! You're a liar!" I wanted to explain that it was the printer that wasn't working, but he interrupted and continued to call me a liar and stormed out.
Well! I continued my work but in later talks at the conference he would be quite nasty. For example, he would sit next to someone and tell them, "I want to sit here, not over there" referring to me. This was a senior mathematician who spoke at the ICM at some point in the 1970s.
I just ignored him but the whole situation was unpleasant and over something very petty. What is the correct protocol for dealing with people like this?

Indeed, all that you can do is just try to stay away from them. As always, "being a jerk", and even "being a jerk to junior people" seems not to be illegal...

@paulgarrett And fortunately it isn't. A lot of people would be felons otherwise. Furthermore, as unpleasant as these cases are, I have learnt to see them as a good opportunity to build resilience.

Are you sure that he was not trying to tease you (in an unwanted way)?

@HighGPA That is, of course, a very unexpected interpretation, but indeed, there are some people that are very bad at getting irony over in the right level. You might work that into an answer from an alternative point of view. Still, the style is uncalled for, but it completely changes the perspective.

@High GPA Yes, I am sure he wasn't.

@paul garrett: You probably know this man, too.

@user541686 Yes, people recommend being candid with emotions, but when they indeed follow this advice, then it's perceived as weak, especially in a work environment. It may invite a bully to push further, it may create pity in bystanders (that's not what you want, either). Not recommended.

I would talk to my advisor or boss about a person like this. It often helps to discuss a bothersome situation, and your boss or advisor may have a good idea of the most appropriate action (or inaction) in your specific circumstances.

Just for fun, I might even be tempted to move again, and sit close to him by his new seat. Continuing a couple of times could create a bit of fun, but not for him.

@Mehta, sigh... Sadly, I know sufficiently many unpleasant people that I cannot begin to guess...

This is an example of a question that does not fit with the Academia SE as for unpleasant toxic academics (whatever it means) are found in any environment. This is more for Working Place SE, but I am not even sure.

Unpleasant people? If you are convinced that you did not do anything to deserve their castigation (and from your story, it sounds like you didn't), purse your lips, raise a slight Spock brow, wait a second, and go/look somewhere else. Nothing shows your opinion about them more clearly than this wordless sequence. They will be seething, but you have better things to do.
If you can not avoid interacting with them, be unwaveringly polite, but distant. You may even exaggerate the politeness by using "Sir" etc. This increases distance.
It's not your job to educate someone who failed to learn basic manners at school. Their manners are not your responsibility.
If they stalk you at a conference, indifference is another strategy. Non-reactivity is boring and they will look for a more reactive victim.
Of course, many conferences have these code-of-conduct declarations now and you could try to invoke them, but I have no idea how effective that is in a case like yours.
Personally, I distrust the effectiveness of formalized rules of behaviour for anything but really egregious and obvious breaches of conduct, and even then I am not sure they really work, unless you belong to a well-delineated group that is seen as requiring special protection. But, your mileage may vary.

And always be aware that 'Sir' might be spelled 'Cur'...

@Tim Yes, but that requires people to know Ye Olde English insultes.

I'd suggest that if you are a junior person and they are senior, then ignoring them is probably your best option. Be polite if you have to interact with them, but otherwise just stay away.
You might ask some neutral person if the professor is jus a jerk generally. Some people have a reputation for being unpleasant - especially to junior people.
Nobody really wins a public shouting match.

Handle it the same way you'd handle an unpleasant neighbor or coworker, be civil.

Many conferences these days (at least in my field) have a code of conduct which all attendees agree to abide by when they register. An example from a recent conference is here: https://www.cosmologyfromhome.com/code-of-conduct/
If an attendee breaches the code of conduct (and shouting in that manner at another attendee would certainly constitute such a breach) they can be reported to the conference organisers. The most severe consequence would be asking them to leave the conference.
So, if you are now in a position where you are organising conferences, including a code of conduct would be an excellent thing to do (or suggesting it to the organisers if you are not on the committee).
While the tactic of ignoring the person is another possibility, I worry that this is something of an easy way out. By doing nothing, we are giving tacit approval to harrassers and bullies, effectively emboldening them since they face no consequences for their actions.
We get many questions on this site about how to deal with abusive PhD supervisors and the advice then is never to silently put up with it. Imagine being the PhD student of the person who called you a liar and didn't want to sit next to you at the conference. You were only subjected to that treatment for a day; they could have been subjected to it on a daily basis for years. Think how demoralising it must have felt to have everyone around them ignore this person's behaviour.
I do not, therefore, advocate for ignoring harrassment if you are in a secure enough position to challenge it. Obviously if the harrasser has or could have some power over you in the future, it is sensible not to confront them. But if you are a peer or the senior party, you can at least have a quiet word with that person, or ask them not to talk to people in that way. They probably won't change overnight (or perhaps ever), but it's important not to give the message to junior people that you don't care about harrassing and bullying behaviour.
Another practical thing you can do, if you are now senior in your field, is to warn junior people about the behaviour of such a person, especially if their harrassment is particularly targeted towards junior people. Dissuade them from approaching the person in question. Dissuade them from doing a PhD with or collaborating with them, if you can.

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Can I pay a professor for revising my paper?
I have written a manuscript but cannot find someone to help edit it, but I want to submit to a good conference. So can I pay an unacquainted professor to help revising my paper?
Thanks!

Consider what you are asking, do you want to pay a professor to correct relatively simple errors in spelling or grammar? if so, then you don't want a professor... If you want the logic of the theory etc evaluated then yes pay a professor...

If you need to ask, you almost certainly can’t afford a professor’s consultancy fee (~ 2000 USD per day).

I suggest you look for a retired professor.  He might enjoy the project and maybe would like some beer money.

@KonradRudolph, why not knowing implies something about affordability?

@GuillermoMosse It doesn’t but asking the question implies that they thought it would be a lot cheaper: professional proofreading services are available at a fraction of the price.

Yes you can pay someone to edit your work. It doesn't matter that it is a professor or not. But a professor might rather want to become a co-author than a paid editor. If the other person contributes content it might be a more valid thing to do.
You would need to acknowledge such help in any case, I think.

+1 - I like to add, most likely, the prof is the prof because credit is more important to them than money. So, don't expect them to jump on your offer, unless either paper or pay is very good, and even then, they still may not be interested; life is too limited to correct other people's work if you have your own to do.

I think it will be very hard to find anyone who'll take you up on your offer.
In some cases professors are contractually limited in the amount of outside consultation work they may perform (I think what you're suggesting falls under that). Unless you're offering a really large sum of money, you probably cannot match the amount of money that professors can get from companies. In addition, professors' true currency is credit (though money is a wonderful incentive!). Spending two weeks consulting for Google is worth more than just the money; it's a line on their CV saying that they consulted for Google.
In addition, what you're suggesting may come off as scammy to some people - if I were to get an email offering me a large sum of money for editing a paper, I would most likely chalk it off to some online scam and ignore it.
Your best bet is most likely to be convince a professor that your paper is worth the time and become a coauthor.
If you simply offer a collaboration I think you may have a chance. For example, does this work stem from some applied problem? Academics are often interested in applying their work on real problems. Do you have access to data that may be shareable with a university? Do you offer resources/contacts in industry that might be useful? If any of these apply it would significantly boost your chances.
If you're just looking for someone that understands the academic jargon, try looking for a graduate student in a related field. Do any of your friends go to graduate school and work in a related discipline?


text:
Are Asian-Americans considered an "underrepresented minority" in academia in the US?
As an Asian-American I sometimes feel as though I am "stuck." There are certainly many Asian academics, but only a few Asian-Americans. This is complicated by the statistics. In absolute numbers, I think the numbers of Asian-American academics are small. Asian-Americans only make up a small percentage of the overall population of the U.S. (about 5%), and so from that perspective, a statistic that says something like, "9% of academics are Asian-American" (I made this up) can be regarded as saying that Asian-Americans are overrepresented.
At the same time, to my knowledge, I was the only Asian-American in my entire PhD program while I was there (not just my year - the entire PhD program), there were to my knowledge no Asian-American faculty in the department, and I can count on my fingers the number of Asian-Americans I see represented in my field.
(Edit: I also want to add that I understand that even the term "Asian-American" is messy because it lumps together several different ethnic groups)

I don't think there's a simple answer to this question, what is the context that you care about?  (There's also a complicated issue here of domestic Asian-American students or international Asian students, which I don't feel qualified to say much about but is an issue.)

I would say this is true in Australia as well.  At least in my areas, domestic students do not continue onward to PhD.  There is simply no incentive for wanting an academic job.  Hence, universities tend to source 'talents' from countries where students are encouraged to aim for higher degrees.

Your question is question-able. Let's say an Asian came to US to study, got a PhD, found a postdoc, got TT job later, got a green card, eventually that Asian is naturalized to be an American citizen. Is that person an Asian academic, or Asian-American academic?

What discipline are you in?

@DanRomik pure math

The first rule of the science club: anecdotical evidence is not evidence.

Domestic, US students of Asian decents doesnt continue to PhD. 90% of US PhD asian students are international

@scaaahu From Wikipedia: Asian Americans are Americans of Asian ancestry (naturalized Americans who are immigrants from Asia may also identify as Asian-Americans) - I think this is the most reasonable definition.  To the OP: this page puts Asian-Americans at 6.5% of the US population in 2018, not 5%.

On the subject of representation of Asian Americans in mathematics, you (and anyone else looking for statistics on the subject, as opposed to anecdotal evidence alone) might find this article interesting: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200608/fea-goel.pdf

@MarkMeckes Thanks. Lots to think about. It's time for that article to get an update!

One question here is how people are supposed to know (without looking at your HR paperwork) that you're Asian-American or an international student who happens to speak English well?

It will depend on which state you're in: Kentucky or California? and which department you're in: Chemistry or Spanish?

I like the question, I dislike the starting so I downvoted it.
<< As an Asian-American I sometimes feel as though I am "stuck". >>
It's time to avoid delusional thinking. Academy is composed for its 99% of ocmponents of stuck people, then there is the good/lucky 1% that got a full professorship.
If you are stuck, you are only one anedoctal point in the great treacherous sea of the statistical truth. What's the statistical truth? we shall see ...

As long as we have to accept self-defined ethnic or racial identities there is no solution that doesn't allow for at least 1 underrepresented minority, when acceptable solutions are discrete. I think it would be futile to expect anything else.

I found an interesting article https://www.sciencenews.org/article/asian-americans-science-data-invisible-demography-violence

@MarkMeckes It makes no sense to take the proportion of the entire population. You have to take only the proportion of the most capable population

There is no universal definition of "underrepresented" and also no universal definition of Asian-American, so it's impossible to answer this question accurately. A very rough answer is that it depends on the discipline (eg computer science vs anthropology) and also on which ethnicities are considered Asian-American.
Your personal experience notwithstanding, it is likely that Asian-Americans are overrepresented in academia overall, simply because Asian-Americans are overrepresented among Americans with advanced degrees. But this isn't a very useful metric from the point of view of diversity and equity.

Edit:
The NSF has a breakdown by race and discipline of US citizens awarded doctorates in 2016:
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/report/which-fields-attract-students/minorities.cfm
As for faculty, another reason it's going to be hard to find good data on whether Asian-Americans are underrepresented is that schools love to pretend that their faculty is more diverse than it is, so they often have rather creative definitions of "underrepresented."

Strong agree with the first paragraph.  For example, in the US context, Filipinos and Hmong are pretty clearly underrepresented minorities.

You made an important point about counting faculty and not just numbers of PhD's. When people discuss a "bamboo ceiling" they are referring to what they regard as barriers to people of Asian descent to getting into "executive" positions in industry like CEO that involve more leadership. So in academia, I guess this would mean tenured faculty, deans, provosts, university presidents (or I guess the Board of Trustees...).

@Mehta The criteria for who gets tenure are very different from the criteria for who gets an upper administrative position. I'd be very surprised if tenure review committees were systematically biased against Asian-Americans.

If 'under-representation' was defined as 'representation lower than that found within the population as a whole' then I'd be on-board with that.

@ElizabethHenning I don't know about systematic bias, but in terms of percentage of PhD holders, there's a lower percentage of tenured Asians (I don't know if it's Asian-American) https://issues.org/realnumbers-asian-women-stem-careers/

@Mehta The question is whether Asian-Americans are more likely to be either be denied tenure or to drop out of academia because they feel it is racially hostile. This is the case for BIPOC PhDs. I doubt that it's true for Asian-Americans, and your link doesn't address this issue at all. In fact, it seems to show that in absolute terms Asians are overrepresented as both postdocs and faculty.

Your suggestion that Asian-Americans are under-represented in US universities sounds wrong to me — more likely they are an "over-represented minority"
To really answer this question in detail, you'd need to clearly specify the scope of interest (i.e., which set of universities, which fields, etc.) and get admissions/employment data to compare with the demographics of the host population.  Your choice of the specific group of Asian-Americans is also somewhat curious (and could be considered cherry-picking), insofar as it combines a race/ethnicity with citizenship status.  In any case, doing a proper analysis of this issue would be quite a big project and I do not propose to make any attempt here to take that on.
Setting aside that caveat, if you are confining attention mostly to the most elite universities in the US, or the STEM fields in most universities in the US, there is pretty clear evidence that Asians are heavily over-represented relative to their population numbers.  This is a consequence of what the economist Thomas Sowell has referred to as their status as a "model minority" (i.e., a high-performing racial minority with a number of high outcomes across various social indicators).  You might be interested to know that a recent lawsuit against Harvard university involved a controversy over anti-Asian discrimination occurring as a result of affirmative action for other race groups.  The materials in that case show that Asians are already heavily over-represented in the university, and would be more so if not for favouratism of other race groups on "diversity" grounds.  An internal report at Harvard University in 2013 found that Asian-Americans were 19% of the student body, and if the university were to assess admissions applications purely on academic factors, they would have been 43% of the student body (see e.g., news coverage of report here).
So, your hunch here sounds wrong to me.  Whenever the matter has been subject to analysis of admissions data, the results have generally shown that Asian-Americans are heavily over-represented in university admissions.  Harvard is certainly not an aberration from the norm on this issue.  It is certainly possible that Asian-Americans might be under-represented as students in some sub-fields, or at particular universities, but the general stream of evidence is the opposite of what you are supposing.  As to faculty positions, I'm not sure there, because obviously it takes about a generation for students to flow through to become faculty.  It might be that high numbers of Asian-American undergraduates have not yet flowed through heavily into higher degrees and faculty positions, but at least anecdotally, in the STEM field my observation has been the opposite.

Thanks. To clarify, my question was referring to tenure-track and tenured faculty, not undergraduate students. It's true that I don't have hard data.

Okay, fair enough.  I also don't know the data at that level.  My suspicion is that ---regardless of the present situation--- the high representation of Asian-Americans as undergraduate students will flow through to those areas later.  There may be cultural differences that lead more Asian-Americans away from academia (or the opposite), so anything is possible, but I'd be surprised if they're under-representated at any level in academia for long.

The concept of a "model minority" can be a harmful stereotype.  Many Asians are from backgrounds which place them at a disadvantage in Academia.  A few Asians are from backgrounds which place them at an advantage in Academia, and they are commonly seen in American universities.

Okay, but the very nature of the generalisation is that it is a generalisation, so it is not intended to cover all cases.  Obviously there are going to be exceptions, but the question is about representation relative to a host population, so it is reasonable to generalise in that context.  I think your observation here really applies to all race groups --- only a small elite (often from high socio-economic backgrounds) become academics.  Nevertheless, the "model minority" concept has a broad factual basis (rooted in observed correlations of race/culture) and I see no problem with it.

The critique of the group that "it combines a race/ethnicity with citizenship status" is quite weird, as it's a common way of discussing ethnicity in America and here draws an important distinction between American-born individuals making their way through the American system and international students (a high proportion of whom are Chinese [as others point out "Asian" combines a lot of ethnicities that are certainly underrepresented]).

This "it combines a race/ethnicity with citizenship status" is not at all special to Asian-Americans.  The same thing often comes up with respect to Latin Americans.  For example, funds tied to the NSF's broader impact goals which encourage participation from underrepresented minorities are typically explicitly restricted to US permanent residents and citizens.

Fair enough, but notice that even in the above two responses on this issue two different definitions are given; one where the "-American" suffix is obtained by birth in America, and the other when it is obtained by citizenship.  As far as I'm aware, those aren't equivalent, so again, detail on the exact meaning would be needed.

Since OP has clarified that they’re in pure math, I wanted to point out that the AMS has great surveys with extensive information about PhD demographics in math and first job outcomes.  Here’s the most recent survey

Among the US citizens earning PhDs, 6 were American Indian or Alaska Native, 81 were Asian, 27 were Black or African American, 34 were Hispanic or Latino, 2 were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, 754 were White, and 31 were of unknown race/ethnicity.

That summary is all math, but they do later break out statistics, biostatistics, and applied math separately, so you can work out that in pure math their are 47 Asian US-citizen pure math PhDs that year out of 672 total US-citizen pure math PhDs.  That’s almost exactly 7%.  Among all American Millennials, 6.4% are Asian.  But this calculation is actually quite sensitive to whether you include permanent residents.  If you do then it changes to 70/710 = 9.9%.
So Asian-Americans are slightly over represented among US math PhDs by a factor between 1 and 1.5.
(As other answers have said there’s nuance to add to this about more specific ethnicity  which I won’t repeat.)

Edited to fix several errors I made misreading the table.

Note that I think the number of Asian-American math PhDs is lower than what a lot of people would guess based on other math-heavy fields and top undergraduate schools, which I would speculate plays a role in OP’s anecdotal experience.

Thanks. That matches the statement that Asian-Americans are overrepresented in pure math PhDs, but that in terms of absolute numbers, there just aren't that many. So I guess they are a minority for sure, but not an "underrepresented" minority. Of course there is also the question of what percent of the tenured faculty is Asian-American. There is a term "bamboo ceiling" that describes barriers not to "junior" positions but to "executive" positions in industry.

Are Asian-Americans considered an “underrepresented minority” in academia in the US?

Both "yes" and "no" are wrong.  In my discipline, physics, Asians are over-represented among both non-American and American physicists.  But if you look at most social sciences or humanities, you will find far fewer Asian academics.  This can be readily seen by searching for pictures of conference attendees at various disciplinary conferences.
There is also a lot of regional variation, and variation by rank.
And yes, you are quite right that the concept of "Asian American" is unclear, as are many other supposed identity categories.  National, cultural, language background, etc. vary and should be considered.

Much of the variation by rank is due to Asians being relatively recent immigrants.

Sure; but don't treat all Asian-Americans like they are recent immigrants.  Plenty of people immigrated in the 1850s.

The bamboo ceiling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling. Some variation by rank may just be good old fashioned prejudice.

@ElizabethHenning I don't see how you can instantly make such a sweeping conclusion. Weren't you just saying elsewhere that we can't draw these kinds of conclusions without actual statistics?

@knzhou No sweeping conclusion, just mentioning an obvious contributing factor. If you think there is discrimination at the P&T level, provide the evidence.


text:
Do academics look down on applicants who leave academia and try to go back?
For example, if I do a postdoc and then leave for a year and then decide I want to go back to academia, is it possible, or will researchers look at my file, say, "Oh, a year not in academia," and throw my application away? My experience in grad school is that academics are very social-status oriented and consider any non-academic job as "low-status." My own adviser once said, "I don't know why anyone would go into industry." I know grad students who wouldn't tell their advisor that they were considering non-academic jobs, because they were worried their advisor wouldn't take them seriously. Should I do whatever I can to stick to a very linear career path?
Edit: I'm in pure math but this question applies to all fields.

While the question might apply to all fields, the answers might not.

This might vary by country and depend a lot on what sort of industrial research is done there. It would also depend on what you do for that year. If you do this, don't lose contact with academics as potential letter writers.

While I do share a certain academic arrogance, in my honest opinion, a year or two doing actual, useful work should be mandatory... Science for science's sake alone is philosophy.

It depends - basically, it is country dependent. (And may even depend on the institution.)
In the UK it may be more accepted than at a traditional German or (possibly also) French University. Then again, Germany has "Fachhochschulen" (plural spelling) where I believe industry experience is appreciated. So I do not think there is a blanket answer.
The discipline may matter as well: someone coming back from a large engineering firm will potentially bring along useful connections.

I'd probably look up to them in my field.  I mainly teach programming, but have never worked in industry.  I think I would gain a better appreciation for the subject if I worked in industry for a year or two and went back (but after being an academic for 25 years, would industry want me?  I suspect industry's view of academia may not be entirely positive ;o).  So I think this may also be subject-dependent.

My experience in the US (and basically in CS) is no, especially if you've used those not in academia years to become financially independent.  And I've known a number of people to have parallel careers:  my MS PI was also a practicing medical doctor, a project leader at an industrial lab also taught a grad course at the local university, &c.

Do you consider either national labs, or industry labs such as IBM Research (or Bell Labs in the old days) as stepping away from academia? If you do, I know plenty of folks who did post-docs or early career work and then went back to academia (often with immediate tenure).

A few years outside of academia, and you might not want to go back...

If you manage to teach 1 class per semester on a part-time basis, or during the summer term, it's a good way to stay in touch. If you publish brilliant papers, you'll get back in easily of course.

No, it's not looked down on.  It rarely happens, but that is because switching from a nonacademic job to an academic job is usually a poor economic choice.

...although sometimes a good life one :)

If it’s a poor economic choice to switch from a nonacademic job to an academic job then it’s equally a poor choice to take an academic job in the first place (instead of taking a nonacademic job), so your logic would seem to suggest that only very few people should prefer an academic job to an industry job. And yet, aren’t you yourself a person with an academic job? Hmm…

@DanRomik That isn't implied; entry-level positions tend to have similar pay, but the difference becomes significant once you have experience and aren't applying for entry-level jobs. And once you do have some work experience, you can switch from academia to industry if you do want to ("lecturer" doesn't look bad on a resume!). Also, an entry-level academic job may well give you more opportunity to develop knowledge and skills that improve your earning potential than an entry-level job in industry. So taking an academic job in the first place isn't necessarily a poor economic choice.

@Dan Some people value the economic aspect more than others, that's why some decide to stay in academia and some leave, even in similar conditions. A change of career means that someone's priorities changed and suddenly they value money less. Sometimes priorities shift (especially when one starts to have a family), but more often towards industry than in the opposite direction.

@DanRomik I would note that decisions are not always entirely rational, and are based on experience. People get used to higher salaries. It is one thing to choose a lower-paying job in the first place; it's another thing to go from a higher-paying job to a lower-paying job.

@Stef: Also after looking at available jobs and talking to faculty about the job market, and seeing that industry is not as bad as some academics say it is, I am starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I should learn about data science.

Who said industry professionals don't value doing research? The only thing being in industry usually prevents you from doing is publicly publishing the work you are paid for.

@DanRomik Yes, I make poor economic choices.

It's also the case in some fields that individuals will go off and accumulate a comfortable nest egg in industry, then come back and teach as a sort of semi-retirement.

"entry-level positions tend to have similar pay" -- in many fields that is indefinitely untrue, e.g. computer science. I've never heard of a computer science position in academia (for fresh PhDs) that can compete economically with what those same people could secure in industry (when they were fresh B.Sc.'s).

As a quick example, median salary for Asst. Prof. of Computer Science in California is $93k, while a fresh-from-college starting salary at Facebook is $114k. I'd guess that most people becoming an assistant professor could have gotten similar quality job offers. The people who choose to go into academia are clearly doing it despite economic incentives for the alternative.

@AnonymousPhysicist exactly. My point was that a lot of people are happy to make “poor economic choices” (viewing them as actually very good life choices from the perspective of what sort of lifestyle and level of happiness and life satisfaction they lead to). Hence your answer doesn’t really offer a credible explanation of why transitioning from industry to academia “rarely happens”.

@DanRomik If you are claiming most people make decisions the same way I do, well, that's not credible.  I am an anecdote, and a poorly chosen one.

The difficulty is that academic positions are determined by your recent work. If you have left pure math academia then unless you have been publishing pure math papers on the side then you don't have any recent work to merit a new appointment.

This would not make much difference if the gap was only a year.

I was in pure math academia until a few years ago. The year I got my PhD there were 2000 phd grads + returning postdocs competing for 200 post doc positions in the US. So, sure, I'm not questioning OP's qualifications based on a gap year, but the competitiveness is questionable in light of things. My recommendation to OP is to get a day job and to work on math nights and weekends, it's what I do and I find it much more enjoyable.

@John_Krampf While I agree it's quite competitive, I don't think the numbers are that bad, from what I recall from the AMS data.  Also, not everyone tries to get a postdocs--there are other kinds of positions out there and some people only look at industry jobs.

@Kimball My figures are based on AMS data. It's easy to compute with a few key figures:

Look at how many ph d s are graduated each year. (In the past 15 years this has gone from about 1000 to 2000 in the US)
The AMS also surveys phd grads on what their intentions are (industry, academic, teaching). Academic Research intentioned students start at 50% (until reality hits them later at least).
Look at MathJobs for how many PostDoc positions are available. Be sure to read them because sometimes they are advertising 1-3 positions at once.
(continued...)

@Kimball (continued)
(So a conservative estimate of fresh phd grads worldwide applying for postdocs is 1500)
3. Look at MathJobs for how many PostDoc positions are available. Be sure to read them because sometimes they are advertising 1-3 positions at once.
(continued...)
4. It is becoming more normal for Tenure track candidates to do between 1 and 2 post docs now.
5. This means that on top of the roughly 1500 phd grads looking for a postdoc, there at least 100 postdocs also in that pool who will be much more competitive than the phd grads since they already have 1 post doc position

@Kimball (continued)
So estimating there are 1500 fresh phd grads and 100 well qualified post docs competing for the 200 post doc positions.

@John_Krampf Last year may have been an anomaly, but I got rejected from a postdoc last year and they said, "Sorry. We had over 500 applications for 6 spots." Meaning that 494 out of 500 did not get a position there.

@Mehta That's not an anomaly, same thing was happening back in mid 2010s when myself and a lot of friends were in the same market.

@John_Krampf This is a site where people freely share their knowledge built up over long experience.  Don't get upset because your comments didn't get many upvotes---that's true of most comments on this site, whether they're useful or not.  Visibility/timeliness plays a large role in how many upvotes a comment or post gets.  Moreover, comments don't usually get many upvotes unless they're short and pithy and "above the fold" on popular posts.

@John_Krampf If those comments are important to your answer, then edit them into your answer instead of leaving them in the comments. That's not what comments are for.

@John_Krampf +1 to F1Krazy's comment. If you wish to have your research visible to everyone please add it to your answer. Note that most people viewing the site won't even see your comments due to how SE software collapses long comment threads. Visitors will, however, see your (highly upvoted) answer.

@AnonymousPhysicist The degree of "recency" would also not make much difference if the gap was only a year, so this answer isn't too wrong.

In general, my impression is that people overplay the idea that non-academic jobs carry some sort of stain to professors. Professors do like the idea of their ex-students staying in academia, but much more for practical reasons (continued collaborations, etc.) than because a student going into industry is seen as a failure of some sort.
It is objectively hard to switch from a non-academic into most academic roles. However, the reasons for this are similarly practical rather than ideological:

If you have not published during your stint in industry, your CV may have "fallen behind".
You may lack current references, or, more generally, connections in academia.
Your salary expectations may not match up with academic realities.
You may lack up-to-date "hive knowledge", e.g., how to write a good research or teaching statement, what to emphasize (and what to downplay) during interviews, or how to interpret a specific job posting, making it harder to write a strong application.

None of this is going to be a huge problem after only one year in industry, but taken together these factors make a return to academia increasingly unlikely the longer somebody stays in industry. You quickly reach a point where trading whatever career you have in industry for what you can realistically still get in academia is simply not attractive.

How do I acquire this "hive knowledge"?

@Mehta In my experience, the "water cooler" conversations in an academic context are good for this. Talking over lunch, in the pub, downtime at conferences, in the halls where you work, etc. Both conversations by others and those you start yourself. You hear a lot of people's experiences with different academic norms at different times from all sides. You get the same in industry, but those industry conversations will be focused on the equivalent industry norms.

@Mehta As a fresh graduate: by talking to your advisor and your colleagues. As a person in industry, you largely don't have access to these resources (hence the problem).

Since the question applies across all fields...
There are many areas of engineering where the "state of the art" in academia is a long way behind industry. Industry has the context to make practical use of the technology, and where required, the resources to carry out the experimental work needed to push the boundaries.
Aviation is the obvious example here. If you're interested in any aspect of how to design a plane then academia is the place you learn how to do the basics, perhaps at most with a PhD, before you join Boeing, Airbus or wherever and start working with up-to-date technology. Staying in academia is a recipe for stagnation.
Speaking personally too, I currently work in nanopositioning. (FYI, a major application is focusing mechanisms, some for microscopes and some for particle accelerators. Also near-atomic resolution surface scanning.) We see a lot of academic papers stating as "fact" that nanopositioning systems can only be used for closed-loop positioning (reading back a position measurement and driving the actuator until it gets to where it wants to be) at speeds of up to 1-2% of the system bandwidth, and they get all excited about getting their speed up to 5% or maybe even 10% (usually with horrible effects on accuracy as a trade off). In fact the leaders in the field in industry have routinely been achieving 10% since the 1990s, and we're pushing 40% today. One of our current areas of interest is a feature of piezoelectric actuators which as far as we can tell hasn't even been spotted by academia yet, because academia focuses on slow movement or static positions, and this behaviour only happens when you're hammering it at high speed.

+1. I suspect this is the case in many academic fields which are studied and researched because they're useful in industry. I lectured for six years at an ex-polytechnic university where many of the courses had a vocational focus, and the culture there considered it as a good thing for an academic to have spent time in industry.

@kaya3 Certainly that was my experience when I went to uni to study engineering.  The course was still very lacking, but there was no sense that industry was somehow "lesser".

In applied Maths it is the opposite. Discontinous Galerkin methods are still not very common in industry and it took a decade to apply multi-grid methods at least for some applications. A computer scientist in industry usually just uses addition and multiplication and nothing learned in university - with exceptions in big data and AI applications.

@usr1234567 Then the phrase "applied" is something of a misnomer. ;) I think that's very much the difference between highly theoretical subjects like maths, and more hands on subjects.

@usr1234567 " Discontinuous Galerkin methods are still not very common in industry" - I don't know what part of industry you are referring to, but have you heard of Finite Element and Finite Volume methods?  (But note there are often more insightful ways to formulate FE and FV methods than Galerkin, even if the formulation is identical)

@alephzero FE and FV can be understood as special cases of whole family of more general DG methods. So no, this is not what I meant.

Just FYI your final paragraph means nothing to me other than 40 >10

@DanielHatton I gave a presentation at EUSPEN a couple of months back, about some work we did with NPL. We'd acquired an image in 40s which a typical AFM would take an hour or so. The moderator was a surface scanning guy, and he said he just about fell off his chair. :)

@AzorAhai-him- Yeah, I know. Might rewrite to improve that. Thing is though, if academia is teaching that any "state of the art" is an order of magnitude or more below the actual state of the art, then academia isn't where you're going to find how to do better.

I know of quite a few examples of people who went into industry for several years after their Ph.D. in pure maths or after one or several postdocs, found the experience soul-crushing (albeit well paid), and successfully returned to academia, usually with renewed enthusiasm and ambition.
It is, however, not easy! These people are forced to compete with those who have been churning out papers in the meantime, learning new mathematics, developing new collaborations... Those who successfully return are usually quite brilliant.

I personally laid witness to my phd supervisor trashing another professor for going to a public sector/government position and then returning to the university faculty.
My phd supervisor is a small, petty person that would trash anyone at anytime for any reason (never to their face, of course). This is not specific to academia. Some people are just that way.
The best way for you to mitigate the worst in humanity --in any industry-- is to worry about your research/value first and foremost and hope that you are surrounding yourself with the people that are right for you. Personally, I would make exactly zero apologies for pursuing my own interest, but I dont fit in well in academia either :)
Your example of a postdoc-away-for-a-year would be much less subjected to your concerns, as this is generally a transitional period and not an established faculty member. Established academics would definitely encounter this more so than a recent postdoc.
edit: Heres the real question. Is your time away going to result in more funding or less? that is what actually matters.

Out of curiousity, what field was this in?

This is a story from the US, Electrical Engineering PhD.  It can happen.  I applied for a professorship after several years in 'industry' and I had to justify going to industry in the first place.  At the time I graduated there were about 800 applicants per tenure-track opening, so I couldn't get one.  [800 may be a bit high of a count, but there were dozens of applicants per job].  I went into industry to earn a living.  To a certain extent, such industrial experience is 'valued', but they also want to know that a person wants to be in academia.  This can be a hard circle to square.  In my case, I wound up going back to industry and similar organizational work.

800 applicants/opening sounds a bit much, especially for electrical engineering.

I edited the post to reflect that 800 isn't intended as an exact number, just that it was very difficult to get an academic position at that time.

Some of the best math in recent times was done by Mandelbrot on fractals while working in industry.
So this roughly corresponds to my current mission and trajectory:

Academia has a bloated job market that underappreciates the talent
Industry has a weakness in long-term thinking

Solution: Leave academia for industry to make both better

Some academics look down on other academics who look down on applicants who leave academia and try to go back.
First, looking down on someone, even for unrelated reasons, is not academic in itself, as it distorts the meritocracy. Looking down on someone for leaving academia could be seen as someone leaving the meritocracy. But that means coming back means entering this meritocracy again. It is about the actions, not the person.
In this situation there is a very real reason to actually look up to the person, because he has experience outside academia.
That is of value almost by definition.
The best case is real world experience of the application of related science.
I have seen that as natural cause for genuine admiration.
Independent of that, the person demonstrates strong long term interest in the topic.
There is one problem in relation to hierarchy between scientists. Like with any other occupation to, you need some time to get up to speed, for many reasons.
That is obvious to your peers, and expected. Technically speaking, your level of competence dropped, and you in a meritocracy.
So, in the end, academics may indeed look down to the person. But for different reasons in a different way you may have worried about.


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Why is it not the norm to pay for travel expenses for academics moving to new jobs?
In industry, when someone is hired, it's typical for the employer to pay for the flight costs of the new employee. But when grad students and postdocs are moving to different countries, typically they have to pay with their own money. Why is this the norm in academia and not industry?

I don't think this is so much the norm in industry as you think. It's only the norm in particular industries where employers are strongly competing for employees, perhaps only when they are trying to tempt them away from a current employer. Grad students are also only "sort of" employees, depending a bit on the system. In the US for example, they are primarily students, not employees, and just happen to also have a job that comes with tuition remission and a modest stipend.

I don't believe mining workers or steel plant workers get relocation expenses paid for in most of the world, and they are certainly working in industry.

Every TT offer I had included some money towards moving expenses.  The postdoc I had at the time didn't include money for moving expenses, but that has been changed and it now does include money that can be used towards that.

The premise of the question is incorrect.  Both industry and academia use a variety of strategies for funding moving expenses.  The strategies are largely based on niche economic conditions.
In my experience, moving expenses are provided for many postdoc positions, but my experience is not a random sample.  The dollar amount varied greatly.
Positions that are easy to fill usually do not come with moving expenses.

Postdocs at my national lab get full relocation benefits.

@JonCuster Which lab? I've never heard of a postdoc with full relocation benefits.

I know that Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia all relocate postdocs. Standard for all staff-type hires, can be requested for technologists (nominally hired locally, but specific skills are recruited nationally). Not sure about Office of Science labs.

@JonCuster I know Oak Ridge provides relocation benefits for at least science postdocs and staff.

@Anyon - seemed likely to me, just no direct knowledge. Certainly AT&T Bell Labs and IBM Research did as well in the old days.

FWIW, my experience (in a different country) is also that relocation expenses for postdocs are often available, but probably the maximum amount is relatively small.

As others have said, practices vary considerably. A couple of factors may be at play when academia doesn't pay relocation costs:

Salaries for grad students and postdocs are often derived from grant funding. Typically, funding organisations impose detailed rules about what can, and cannot, be paid for using their money. It may not be possible to pay for relocation from grant funds. Alternatively it may be allowed, but only if the PI thought to include it in the budget when they applied for funding.
Typically, national tax authorities impose strict rules on relocation payments (to avoid them being used as a back-door to paying 'golden handshakes'). Academic institutions tend to be risk-averse and may decide to err on the side of caution here.

Cynically, a third factor may be: academic hiring is a buyer's market. Most applicants for PhDs and postdocs aren't negotiating from a position of strength, and won't see a lack of relocation expenses as a dealbreaker. That being the case, why not spend the money on upgrading the oak panelling in the Dean's office?

It's the third factor.


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Are undergrads applying to top math Phd programs expected to have taken core graduate clases?
Is doing well in the standard core undergraduate math courses (complex analysis up to the Riemann mapping theorem, abstract algebra including Galois theory, point-set topology, and algebraic topology, as well as integration on real manifolds and Stokes' theorem) good enough to get into a top-20 math PhD program?
I started with linear algebra after placing out of second-semester calculus. I ended up taking almost all the undergraduate courses offered at the liberal arts college I went to but I still think it's not enough, because most of the Harvard PhD students apparently take lots of graduate courses while undergrads.
To be competitive, are applicants expected to have undergraduate research and do additional math programs in other countries (Budapest Semester, for example), and/or take graduate courses while still an undergrad?
In American universities there are more distribution requirements, whereas in universities in Europe, my understanding is that you declare a major right away and only take classes in that subject. Because of that, they learn a lot more math than American students. I've also noticed that at places like Stanford or Harvard, the undergrad senior theses that students write are super advanced and get into current research. Here are some examples: http://abel.harvard.edu/theses/index.html
Are math undergrads expected to know things like Galois cohomology, the Local Langlands Correspondence for tori or Lubin-Tate theory or the Jacquet-Langlands correspondence?
What could I have done as an undergrad to be able to write a senior thesis on stable homotopy theory or the moduli stack of G-bundles? I am thinking that I did not get a good math education in college.

The "undergrad" background that you describe includes most of what I'd consider core graduate material in a US PhD program (measure theory and basic functional analysis being the main omissions), plus some things I would consider second-year graduate material or later, taken only by students with certain specializations.  I'd expect that good grades in those courses puts you in a good position for applying to top PhD programs.  But the grades on the transcript are of secondary importance to recommendation letters.

You might also find the answers here helpful, although the question is coming from a rather different perspective than yours: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/45476/101

Let me say something about distribution requirements.  Even though I'm a math professor, I think the single most important course I took as an undergrad for my development as a mathematician was not a math course but a philosophy course on Wittgenstein (where we did not discuss his contributions to the philosophy of mathematics except in passing).

The thing about math PhD is, unless you have the motivation to learn material independently - you really shouldn't be doing it. Anyway your class list is missing Real Analysis(lebesgue integration) which is arguably the most important for applied programs.

@FourierFlux I have motivation to learn it, but there is nobody at my college that can supervise learning about moduli stack of G-bundles...

Books are better teachers than most professors,

No, possibly except for Princeton.
Berkeley in particular has a long tradition of accepting domestic graduate students who have less background but strong potential.  (I had not learned Galois theory or anything about manifolds when I started graduate school there, and I still have never learned the Lebesgue integral.)
Graduate admissions committees in the US trust what recommendation letters say (with evidence) about the potential of students, and take that into account a great deal, in many cases attaching more importance to this than any actual achievements of students.  Their statistics based on how students have done in their programs and after finishing is that how much math you know coming in actually doesn't make much of a difference; much more important is your demonstrated capacity to learn math and solve problems.
Keep in mind that it is quite possible to do quite impressive undergraduate theses despite not knowing much mathematics if one has a good advisor (who can explain how the problem can be reduced to an elementary(*) one), works hard, and is clever.  (It's quite common for PhD advisors to complain that their weaker students don't actually understand their own dissertations.)  Keep in mind that undergraduate admissions at Harvard or Stanford is extremely selective - generally more so than graduate admissions in fact - and every student at Harvard or Stanford is very clever.
(*) elementary meaning not requiring knowing lots of mathematics, not meaning easy.

Why do you single out Princeton?

Princeton has a very small (by US standards) more European style program which is known for not having regularly scheduled graduate courses.

When I was a graduate student at Princeton, I knew of one (but only one) student who came in not knowing any Galois theory.

Not necessarily, but it could help.  Examples would include getting exposure to a field of interest that you wouldn't be able to get in your undergrad, or if you are doing it as a combined undergraduate/graduate degree program where doing so would count for credit towards both degrees.
If you are applying to a PhD program, you'll take the graduate courses only during the first couple of years generally, then coursework will take the backseat to research, which is what the degree is all about (unless, you leave early with a masters, which you still will likely get research experience out of).  So while it's not a bad thing to take graduate courses, don't fret too much on this, and try and get some research experience/exposure as well, since that will be primarily how you get the recommendation letters that you need to apply to PhD programs.

I ended up taking almost all the undergraduate courses offered at the liberal arts college I went to but I still think it's not enough, because most of the Harvard PhD students apparently take lots of graduate courses while undergrads

This is very dependent on the situation with regards to where you did you undergraduate.  If you did it at Harvard or another very top research institution, you'll have such opportunities to do research or take graduate classes.  At smaller liberal arts colleges, from my understanding, people don't have as much of these opportunities readily available at their own institution.  Graduate committees are generally aware of this and factor this in when making admission decisions.
So no, you're not expected to take graduate classes as an undergraduate (although if you have the time to do so, you could definitely get your feet wet in this), but you should have some research experience in order to demonstrate the ability to do research at the graduate/PhD level.

Some small, liberal arts, places might organize a seminar for a small cohort if there is a faculty member with expertise. There won't, of course, but the wealth of options as at an R1, but probably there is a way to go a bit beyond the listed curriculum. Independent study is another option.

At my small liberal arts college they didn't have much in the way of research for undergrads. I just went home for the summer. They did have it in physics/biology/chemistry, just not math.

Generally, in this case, people in such situations, if they can get to know faculty well enough, would be encouraged to apply to REU's at other (usually larger) institutions so that they could gain the research experience necessary.

I guess my question is: what do you have to do to be competitive when applying to top-20 math PhD programs? What is necessary and sufficient? What do the "average stats" look like?

In general, you have to show potential to do research, which would generally be backed up with research experience and recommendations, as well as good grades in coursework. Beyond this, it's also luck as well, as graduate admissions can be a crap shoot. I am also kind of in this situation, although for CS and not pure math, but it is more or less the same for me as well.  I have heard of people with lower GPA's (including 3.2-3.4 and below) getting admits to top PhD programs, especially if their research/recs are stellar.


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Is BDAS a good conference?
I find a conference BDAS (bdas.polsl.pl/default.asp). Noticeably, almost all the papers published in the previous conference proceedings are from the host country . Can anyone give some comment on its validity and level? Another question is how to verify that sponsors listed on the website really sponsor it? Thanks!

In case of IEEE, you can simply check their website, the conference is there: https://conferences.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/conferencedetails/46854

When will you get the idea about what to ask? See https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/123011/72855

And this : https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/122955/72855

You have placed several questions on Academia.SE of the form: is X a good conference?
There are several ways of finding out: one is to simply ask Dr. Google, see if it's on Beall's List or just google  predatory or  ranking to get a better idea. Still not sure? Google some of the organisers' names. If they're big-name people, then the conference is likely legit.
As a general rule, if you need to go and ask on Academia.SE whether the conference is any good, after getting inconclusive answers from doing the above, the conference is likely not very good. Good places are, well, well-known.

+1 for "ask Dr. Google" ... so many questions can be answered by Dr. Google and Dr. Pillow.


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notification e-mail and invitation letter
I submitted a manuscript to an international conference. Later I'm told to download the invitation letter and attend the conference. The question is I have not recieved a formal e-mail notification, presumably titled Acceptance or Rejection Notification, of the paper. So what do you think of this? Are there any international conference that notifies authors by the provision of only a downloadable invitation letter but with no formal e-mail notification?
Thanks!

So what do you think of this? Check your spam folder, then contact the organisers. Are there any international conference that notifies authors by the provision of only a downloadable invitation letter but with no formal e-mail notification? Predatory conferences probably do (you should avoid those!)

The conference website is https://waset.org/conference/2019/02/rome/ICWAIM. So please help judge its validity and level, thanks!

@user2768 nothing in the spam folder

I don't want to presume, but a quick look through the conference website makes me suspect that it may not be the top of the line for its field. Take a look at the program committee, are they reputable people that you know? If you're a student, can your advisor comment on the conference's value? Can some expert comment on the conference's quality?
Did you receive any reviews?
Were you asked to pay a lot of money to attend?
If any of the above hold, this raises some red flags.
If it's indeed a disreputable venue, I would avoid publishing there. Retract the submission and thank them. There are some places where you wouldn't want your work published.
Again, I'm really not from the field, but not getting reviews, the general look and feel of the conference website (conferences that go out of their way to tell you that they're indexed by all of these libraries is not a good sign) etc. would make me think twice.
As my own advisor wisely said: there are some conferences with a negative impact factor...
EDIT:
This conference is sponsored by WASET, which is almost certainly a predatory publisher. Do NOT publish there.
See here. It is also listed on Beall's list - see here.

The registration fee is 350 euro for students and 450 for nonstudents. It says the conference has been held 21 years.

Not sure, you need to check with someone in the field.

I'll add my own skepticism to @Spark 's.  Follow the very bottom link to "Similar Conferences about xxx..." at the bottom of the page.  I have no idea why they would have ~40 different conferences running simultaneously.  When I click on a couple of different ones, they have the same papers listed.  It's a two day conference and they are running 40 different concurrent or sub conferences?  Maybe someone in the field will come along and tell us that, no, this is a venerable conference, but I would not bet on it.  I don't know that it's a scam conference, but I am suspicious.

@Van definitely predatory. Host publisher listed on Beall's list...

Thanks. I see. Now I find another conference BDAS (http://bdas.polsl.pl/default.asp). Noticeably, 95 percent of the papers published in the previous conference proceedings are from the host country Poland. Can you give some suggestion on its validity and level?  Another question is how to verify that sponsors listed on the website really sponsor it? Thnaks!

It's normal even for some very top/good conferences to just want you to go to the conference and to not hold you hostage with the conf. paper review.  Even if your paper is rejected for the proceedings (very unlikely, they need papers!), you still can do the conference.  Also, some conferences do the reviews on site, using participants.  So it is not unusual to not have a pre-reviewed proceedings paper.
They want you to go.  If you like the trip pay the money and go.

This is a predatory conference, OP should not attend

That's very possible.  However, to the original question, it remains that there is nothing wrong with going to a conference that has not pre-reviewed a proceedings paper.  Normal in chemistry and materials for instance.  They accept you based on topic/abstract.


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Assessing a penalty for inquiries regarding exceptions to deadline policy
My problem: Though it's made explicitly clear to my students that I do not accept late work and do not grant extensions, I get at least 5-10 e-mails a week asking about extensions. I want to deter these emails, I feel obligated to respond, but my response is usually "See the syllabus regarding missed assignments". Dealing with this is costly in terms of time spent replying and clearing my inbox.
I make it very, very clear in my syllabus that I do not give extensions for assignments under any circumstances except limited administration excused cases and that I will not respond to requests (a blatant lie, I do respond because I care what they think of me and the course). I remind my students at the beginning and end of every class of their impending deadlines. I also regularly remind my students in class that deadlines matter and there are no extensions and no late work. My assignments are brief, and are available for over a week for the student to attempt, I don't feel my demands are unreasonable. I stress in the syllabus and in class that the way I accommodate the various life issues that cause missed deadlines is that I will drop their lowest X assignments, where X is a very generous number
My question: is it unfair of me to put a syllabus clause that specifies a minor penalty for e-mail inquiries regarding an exception to the deadline rule?
Something along the lines of "Each e-mail inquiry asking for an extension on a late assignment may be subject to a Z point penalty on your overall homework grade" where Z is not an unreasonable number.
Would I be a total jerk? Is there a better way of solving my problem?

Seems like it would be more of a pain to assess the penalty than to just ignore them.

I don't disagree with that !

Is it unfair? IMHO no. Is it something a jerk would do? IMHO yes. How about an autoresponse (only to student addresses) saying "thanks for your email, I normally expect to reply within $time, but I will not reply if your question is answered in the documentation"?

A colleague had a phrase along the lines of:
"Any email question or request that is already answered in the course documentation will not be replied to".
Seemed to work well for him.
But I would not do any type of downgrading for that.
Students do talk to each other and it soon gets around "well don't send that, as it won't be answered.."
Relevant questions that did warrant a response did get answered to the student and, sometimes, repeated to the class as necessary.

I'm editing my statement above, I already say that I won't reply to the e-mails, but I just feel so bad ignoring them. Maybe I should just stop caring?

My colleague had good feedback from the students for his courses so it did not mean that he did not care or that the students did not appreciate him... An occasional reminder does not hurt.

I do appreciate the suggestion, but I already have that in the syllabus and it clearly is doing little for me. I'm not sure my deterrence policy would do any better.

Reply to the "good" or "useful" questions and let the others lie. Some questions will be useful enough to bring up at the next class : " Had this question, which highlights X, so let's look at that for a moment"...


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Unable to present accepted conference paper after mentioning it on submitted applications
I'm applying to PhD programs in Computer Science. I recently had a paper of mine accepted into a conference workshop. In my graduate school applications (which I have already submitted), I mentioned this paper, citing it as "To be presented at [Conference/Workshop name]", with a link to the paper. I have it in my CV, and said a few words about it in my Statement of Purpose as well.
However, due to unforeseen circumstances, it's likely that I will not be able to attend the conference to present the paper. Might this be an issue with admissions, and if so, how should I go about notifying them?
EDIT: Workshop papers are included in the proceedings in this conference, but only if the author is able to register for the conference and present the paper.
Thanks!

If this is something like a doctoral symposium in which papers are discussed but not printed in the proceedings, then you should just inform everyone who matters of the situation. It shouldn't be a problem. Acceptance actually means something in a situation like this. And you can always, in this case, submit the paper elsewhere if it doesn't appear or if acceptance is withdrawn by the committee due to not being able to attend.
On the other hand, if the paper will be in the proceedings whether you are there or not, which may be the case in CS, then you don't really need to do anything. You could still inform people, but the acceptance for the conference and publication in the proceedings is all that is really required.
But in general honesty and forthrightness is a plus.

Accepted workshop papers are published in the proceedings of this conference, but only if the author is able to register for the conference and present the paper (which I am likely not able to). Does that make a difference? My main worry is them cross-referencing the proceedings (if they are published before the decision date) and not finding my paper, and then suspecting me to be dishonest about being accepted into the conference. Do you think this is a possibility to be concerned about?

Very often your paper is removed from the proceedings if you do not attend the conference that otherwise publishes proceedings. That would be a third case because you have more or less promised that it will be published, but it will not.

If you have a medical or other compelling reason that you can't attend, I'd first contact the program committee and ask for guidance. If the paper is to be withdrawn, just notify everyone who need to know of the situation.


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How to discuss an error of my previous supervisor's paper with the new supervisor
I have been recently working on my Master thesis. The idea for it was approximately the following: take a recent Nature paper of my supervisor, reproduce the results and add them to my Master thesis. This is exactly what I did, and I improved the experimental setup significantly, as compared to previous studies.
Unfortunately, during the final stages of the thesis I became increasingly confident the paper my work was based on contained a critical error. As I am an experimentalist, and rigorous investigation of this topic required a considerable amount of non-trivial theoretical work, I decided to stick to the original methodology of the paper in my thesis in the remaining time, while highlighting the possible problem in a suggestive way. I discussed this with my supervisor, and he agreed this might have been the case.
This year, I applied to US grad schools in physics, and I got into a top-1 program in my field. I will probably have to present my results to those people in order to get into the lab I like. As these people are literally the best in the world, I am sure they will spot a mistake, if there is one, and I am 99% positive this is the case.
Though the people from that lab seemed to like me initially very much (I had some other results to brag about), I am worried their opinion might change if I present this questionable methodology I used.
My question is: if the questions arise during my presentation, how can I discuss the issue in a tactful manner, being an excellent representative to my previous workplace?

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