text:
On-campus or off-campus residence for a married couple?
My friend has been recently admitted to a Ph.D. program at a university in US, west coast. His wife has a specific situation, suffering from Parkinson's disease.
In one hand, his wife needs tranquility, and the chaotic atmosphere of the campus might annoy her considerably .
On the other hand, living alone in a private house sounds daunting for them, because of the unstable status of the aforementioned lady.
He is fully funded, and no concern would be asserted in view of the financial restrictions to rent a private house. An on-campus residency is also available. The situation is messy and they have to decide between on-campus or off-campus residency, as soon as possible.
Any idea to identify the better option?
Thanks for your contribution

In my experience, graduate on-campus housing is far from noisy. I wouldn't assume that it will be. A factor in favor of on-campus housing is proximity to medical facilities. That said, this is a highly personal decision.

@gnometorule: Seemingly, the on-campus residences, with which they are confronting, are not so silent... But the medical facilities really do matter...

If at all possible, they should try to visit the on-campus housing and see what it is really like.

I generally advise anyone before moving to a place they are not familiar with to visit that place in person - specifically during unusual hours. The higher the population density (such as in on-campus housing, apartments), the more important this is! If you are more particular with your living arrangements (such as having children, an ill family member, pets, noise sensitivity, and so on), it is even more important!
The most important times to visit an area are: in the early morning before you usually wake up, after the end of the usual work day (6-7pm), at your usual bed time (9, 10, 11pm - or whatever that time is for you if you have a less usual schedule), and of course "the wee hours" of midnight to 2-4am.
I've lived in many places, and these are the key "pain points" where the neighborhood can cause a problem. In "family communities" where many people have kids, it's the loudest in the morning when kids are getting off to school and after work hours when kids are out playing before dinner. Meanwhile in some more 'dicey' communities going anywhere after 10pm is going to give you something to talk about the next day, at best.
In college communities, this varies tremendously - sometimes even between individual buildings on campus! Most campuses have personnel who are very familiar with living conditions throughout, and if you have a "Protective Services" (campus police) you can talk to they can be a great resource if you are willing to strike up a conversation and explain your concerns or situation.
On many campuses there are even different types of accommodation. Sometimes there are typical undergrad dorms, buildings dedicated to older/wealthier students (at my institution they are called "suites", but this is not a universal term), and yet other buildings that are often only rented to graduate-level students and faculty. Some institutions run their dorms strictly, where excess noise need only be reported to a floor-level employee (often called a "Resident Assistant") and they will handle it - and regular offenders are fined and even thrown out without a refund or formal eviction required.
Meanwhile, other campuses may features areas of rowdy nightlife where noise and late night drinking and carousing is normal and no one calls the cops (and campus police aren't terribly bothered unless things get out of hand). They don't put this in brochures or on their webpage, so you can't know without visiting and/or talking with the right people who are willing to be a bit more blunt about the realities of campus.
Off campus housing is really no different, though! I once lived in a privately owned house where it was well known (to people in the area) that the purple ice cream truck did not sell ice cream - it sold methamphetamine, and the cops didn't bother it so long as it didn't go into certain upper class areas or along the main highway. And yes, this was in the USA and even in a small-mid-sized town.
So no matter where you go, especially if you have an ill family member, it's really advisable that you visit in person, ask around to people who have personal knowledge of common living conditions and experiences, and try to visit during common times that might cause the biggest headaches. Only then can you make an educated decision, rather than making a blind guess and just hoping for the best.

Inspiring and functional...

Resident Assistant = janitor?

@gerrit Hm....more like "Hall Monitor", I suppose. Usually an undergraduate student who's paid to make sure the rules of the dorms are followed, and to warn or write up people who break them. They often have other tasks like informing maintenance/janitorial of problems, calling 'protective services' (campus police) if things get out of hand, etc.

A resident assistant also functions as a problem solver, and supportive person, who is easily reached by students, and who has had a chance to establish a rapport with the residents.

The thing for your friend to do is to have a phone conversation with the university's disability services office.  They are very supportive, they know the campus and surrounding area well, and they are dedicated to helping students or spouses with a disability have a successful experience at the university.


text:
Leaving out unhelpful advisor from acknowledgements?
I’m getting towards the end of a long project and am required to write a dissertation (Bachelor of Engineering) and we have been advised that it’s a good idea to include an acknowledgements page¹. What I’m wondering is: Is it considered a requirement to thank your academic supervisor, regardless of whether they actually helped? My supervisor was not particularly helpful and I ended up not bothering to ask them questions about half way through the project. Is it considered poor form to leave them out of the acknowledgements?
My original question was similar to a previous question asking about whether they should publish a PhD Thesis without acknowledgements due to difficulties with supervisors. My question is slightly different in that I would like to include an acknowledgements page to thank family and friends etc. This would make it more obvious that the supervisor has been left off the list of people who have been acknowledged.

¹ The guidance provided says:

It is common courtesy that you acknowledge assistance received whilst undertaking the project and preparing the dissertation. You should consider carefully all forms of assistance received and these may encompass academic, technical, secretarial, administrative and personal assistance (e.g. family and friends). A set of simple statements is usually appropriate and adequate acknowledgement should not normally exceed one page.

Just write a simple thank you to your advisor and not make it a big deal out of it. He is the one signing your thesis and you will get your degree after that. 10 years from now, nothing of this will matter.

I would not use real name and avatar to ask question like this. If your advisor happens to visit this post, he will be upset like this TA: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/56021/as-a-ta-how-to-react-if-i-come-across-a-facebook-group-in-which-students-insult

Yes, I thought of this after posting. Fortunately, I have multiple academic advisors for this project and I have not mentioned which advisor I wasn't happy with....

OP: That means that when the news of your posting gets back to your department -- as seems rather likely given the way the internet and academic communities work -- it will either be clear who you're talking about or it won't...in which case faculty who were helpful to you will have to worry that you found them completely useless.  In fact the action of posting here non-anonymously is much more precipitous than the lack of acknowledgments you are contemplating.  I urge you to think things through a bit more carefully.

Yes, it is unfortunate that taking the lazy route and using Facebook for your sign in has the side effect of making your posts non-anonymous. I hadn't notice this until after posting but yes, I take you point. Fortunately, everyone I can think of who is involved is thick skinned and there are few 'affected' people. I don't like the word useless, I'll edit the question to make it less emotive.

Note that you can change your username to something anonymous or to go one step further, dissociate this post from your account. (If any comments mentioning your current display name should arise, you may want to flag those for moderator attention so they can be changed.)

If the acknowledgement is customarily included, but you leave it out on purpose, it might get noticed, and it might raise some eyebrows.  That might not work out in your favour.  Consider what advantage/disadvantage might come to you from this sort of protest, and whether it's worth going against the norm.  I don't really see how leaving it out would benefit you or anyone else but I see many (potential) ways in which it may hurt you.

Spite is immature.  Why be immature?  Just add the pro forma thanks in the acknowledgments and move on with your life.

From your comment:

ereading the guidance provided, it says the following: 11.6.5 Acknowledgements It is common courtesy that you acknowledge assistance received whilst undertaking the project and preparing the dissertation. You should consider carefully all forms of assistance received and these may encompass academic, technical, secretarial, administrative and personal assistance (e.g. family and friends). A set of simple statements is usually appropriate and adequate acknowledgement should not normally exceed one page.

As your academic supervisor is the one that probably will sign off on your dissertation (if that is the custom where you are) and at the very least, filled the necessary role of having a supervisor - then at the very least, he/she has helped in an administrative sense. However, consider that there may have been a lot of activity 'behind the scenes'.
But, it is always polite to acknowledge your supervisor in a positive manner - realistically though, it is the content of your work that will matter.

While I agree that from social/professional point of view it is a good choice, I am disappointed that lying to please the authority became a standard mode of academia (supposedly centered around the search for truth, even if it is unsettling or displeases authority).

why is it lying to acknowledge that some nonzero help was received, even if that amount is less than what was hoped for? I wouldn't tell anyone to lie.

@KateGregory Every situation is different (and the OP asks for a case when the relationship was toxic; hard to say to which degree). Sometimes total help is negative (given opportunity cost, bad advices, personal health cost, etc) - don't assume it has to be positive no matter what; and the answer advises to thank no matter what, with no conditions, etc. Cf. - would you like to thank all people you have strongly interacted with?

Thanking your advisor for the times that they helped is not lying, even if their net total help was negative. A thesis is a public document: praise the good stuff, omit the bad stuff.  If you have grievances with your advisor, air them in person, as if you were both grownups.

There is acknowledging and there is thanking. Your supervisor presumably has done at least one thing to get you finished, whether it was accepting you into the program, suggesting the idea that you worked on, helping for the first half or so, or just signing whatever has to be signed at the end for you to actually pass.
So don't write a long paragraph about what an inspiration your supervisor was and how amazing the support and guidance was. Just write a sentence specifically for your supervisor. The university is listing all kinds of people they think you should acknowledge including secretarial and admin staff, so leaving off the supervisor would be really strange. While this one may not have set any amazing-supervisor records, that doesn't mean you were actually unsupervised. Save the flowery couldn't-have-done-it-without-you sentences for your parents or best friend or love of your life. Provide one sentence for each person or group you want to acknowledge or thank, and then move on.

I think the guidance is largely intended to prevent some sentimental types from spending five pages with their acknowledgments, and to guide those with poor social skills from forgetting to have an acknowledgments page at all.  It definitely doesn't state any requirements.
You might as well be polite -- but you can choose whom to be effusive about, and whom to be polite about.
And now, please forgive me for quoting my favorite dedication, by P.G. Wodehouse:

To my daughter Leonora, without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

@Apo comments: "There are many shades to this, which the careful reader can interpret as they see fit. Also, consider that your advisor is not necessarily going to read the acknowledgements or care. If they couldn't bother to help previously, what makes you think they will do anything beyond scrawl a signature on a page? The acknowledgements section is the one place where you get to be subjective and drop the dispassionate voice. It's where you get to be you. So try to say something that you mean. If you can't say something positive, try to blur the lines, or consider leaving it out entirely."

What a wonderful quote! :)

source: Stack Exchange

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text:
Personal information (trivia) in the “about me” section of an academic webpage
It has been pointed out to me that several business-oriented websites advise to add a few “interesting facts about yourself" in the “about me” section on your professional webpage.
It seems that the aim of this practice is to avoid being “stiff and boring” and to share some unexpected or humorous details that paint a picture of your personal side (quirks and all).

I wonder if this practice is widespread in academic setting as well (and thus if I should take the advice).

In principle, I don't object to publicly sharing little (not too weird) bits of personal information about myself (such as the music I like, the books I've read recently, what the name of my pet is);
I do know some (quite successful) colleagues and a few professors that include such personal trivia on their webpages;
I think that this might actually have a positive impact on personal relationships with colleagues, senior researchers, and can surely show younger (undergrad) students that we're humans after all!

However, I'm afraid that this practice may be seen as jokey or unprofessional by senior researchers (especially since I'm young, a graduate student). Hence the question.

Such stuff is usually "calculated" for the effect it might achieve. Posing. Think carefully about whatever you include, and the impression it will create, for any kind of professional pages.

"Stiff and boring" is what you're going for, not an impression you want to avoid. To put it in a less joking way: you want people reading your page to get excited about your work, not how cool a dude/dudette you are.

You're probably familiar with the saying "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder". In my opinion, similarly, the perception and reaction that people will get from including interesting / amusing / fascinating personal details will largely depend on the readers' subjective attributes. I am in a situation relatively similar to yours (that is, a beginner researcher), and I think that it would be smart to include somewhat less of such details, rather than too much (which, again, is all relative :-).
From many personal websites of scholars that I have visited, I got a sense that more fancy details are included by either very experienced academics (and it's understandable, as they have/had more time spent on various activities), or by any academics that are "extravagant" in their interests.
Update: In his comment above, @paulgarrett makes an excellent and important point about considering the desired effect of potentially including such information. I would just expand the point and formulate it as "considering the desired effect on the target audience".

So far, none of the other answers have mentioned Security.
Personal information, such as What is the name of your first pet, is used by many online account recovery mechanisms.
Many accounts have been hacked using such personal information:

The following profile elements can be used to steal or misappropriate
  your identity:

Full name (particularly your middle name)
Date of birth (often required)
Home town
Relationship status
School locations and graduation dates
Pet names
Other affiliations, interests and hobbies

...

Best Practices

Assuming you plan to be active in social media, minimize the use of personal information on your profiles that may be used for password
  verification or phishing attacks.
Avoid listing the following information publicly: date of birth, hometown, home address, year of high school or college graduation,
  primary e-mail address.

Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery:
Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google:

Publicly available answers.
Rabkin found that 16% of questions had answers routinely listed
  publicly in online social-networking profiles.
Even if users keep data private on social networks, inference attacks
  enable approximating sensitive information from a user’s friends.

So think very carefully before publically exposing personal information.

Thanks for making me aware of the security risks. I'll think carefully before setting up a password/secret question and even more carefully before sharing certain kinds of personal information online.

I wonder... if I should take the advice.

It's a very individual decision.  Each person has his own level of privacy or publicness that he is comfortable with.  Your post gives me the impression you might be rather on the private end of the spectrum.  There's nothing wrong with that.
Also note, displaying personal information about yourself on the internet is a bit like salting the soup.  One can always add more salt individually at the table -- but you can't go back once you've oversalted at the stove.  Similarly, once you've let people know certain personal tidbits, it can be impossible to unshare them.  So, if in doubt, perhaps it's better to err on the side of being a bit on the private side.  People will get to know the whole you on personal acquaintance!

Frame your plan in terms of what you want to demonstrate to several groups: your students, colleagues, and mentors, potential collaborators and employers (thanks Aleksandr Blekh for this addition).
You only get one message to send out to all of them: if there is any overlap between what you'd like those groups to know about you personally, then this is, ipso facto, what you should write up.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Extracurricular activities in cover letter
I am a science PhD student applying for a workshop on documentaries and video art forms, organised for liberal arts students. In the past few years I worked part time as a reporter; in your opinion, what is the best way to describe my background?
What I have now is

I am a PhD student in bla bla with [a passion for]/[experience in] journalism and multimedia storytelling

But I am not very happy of any of the solutions. Let me know if you have any tips on how to improve the phrase!

My feeling is that both alternatives are fine and that it doesn't really matter (since the chances that carefully phrasing this sentence will change the outcome of your application are very slim).  I'd bet you're really overthinking this.  Is there a reason you are particularly concerned about this sentence?

Thanks for the hint, you're probably right about the overthinking part ;-) Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker, but to me both alternatives suggested an idea of something amateurish... I was wandering if there was a way to express my abilities without giving that impression.

Your extracurricular activities are certainly relevant here, so you can just say what they have been.  You've done so quite clearly here:

In the past few years I worked part time as a reporter.

Now just add a sentence that notes how this connects to your interest in the workshop, and you should be fine.


text:
Meaning of "Degree of approval" in a recommendation letter
Anybody knows what degree of approval means in a letter of reference?

Emphatic
Conditional
Without concerns

My friend has a letter of reference from her former lecturer, but those options were left blank. Is that bad?
It's for a German scholarship, to do a PhD in Chemistry\Forensics.

Would you please clarify 1. What's the purpose of the reference letter? 2. Is your friend applying for graduate school? Or applying for something else?

I would presume that what they're asking for is a tl;dr-style summary of your letter into a single sentence:
I emphatically recommend this candidate. I believe they will be top-quality students and practitioners.
I conditionally recommend. The candidate shows a lot of promise but I have these specific concerns; if thus-and-such happens then I would have no hesitations at all, but if it doesn't you might want to think twice.
I recommend without concerns. The candidate shows a lot of promise; they aren't someone whom I'm sure will be at or near the top of the class, but I have no doubt that they will perform very respectably.

@nateedridge: Not that I can see....?

Huh.  Either my eyes or my browser deceived me.

This is also my understanding, but the ordering of the options looks unusual to me. I would expect them to be ordered from strongest to weakest or in the opposite direction, but here it seems like the worst option is the middle one.

I seriously doubt that the order means anything more than "this is the order I happened to think of them in."

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text:
On the use of hypocorisms on publications and university personnel list
Suppose my legal name is Stephen and that everyone (family, friends, and also colleagues and professors) calls me Steve (being aware that my legal name is actually Stephen).
Suppose also that I prefer being called Steve and would like to publish my papers (starting from the first one) under "Steve Surname".
It seems to me that the academic world (in particular, the mathematical world, as it is pointed out in other questions asked on this website) is very liberal when it comes to these matters (i.e. pseudonyms).
However, I'd like to ask preemptively if -- to the best of your knowledge and experience -- there could be any nuissances of any kind (not necessarily in the form of legal troubles) in signing legal documents (which, of course, include my thesis) using Stephen while employing Steve instead of Stephen on papers or (if in the future it will be the case) monographs (let's assume published by the main publishers -- Springer, AMS, PUP, OUP, etc.) and in the personnel list on the university website.

To make an example of possible nuissance: do Research Gate, Academia.edu, and other similar websites allow you to register under a name that is a shorter form of your legal one?

To clarify: in order to pose this question, I choose

Stephen: because, like my own name, it is a nice name, that is to say, neither too long nor cumbersome;
Steve: because, like my own "calling name", it is slightly shorter, but not very-informal-sounding per se: in fact many people in various countries use it as legal first name.

Further clarification: I've seen this question. Mine is quite different though. In fact, I realize that it is possible (and accepted) to publish under a pen-name, and I'm asking specifically if there are any "legal" (so to say) nuissances associated to this practice. To make just few examples, when being included in the personnel list on the university website, when being included in the list of participants to a conference, when signing up to a website like Research Gate, etc.

@EnergyNumbers: I've seen that question. Mine is quite different though, because I know that it is possible (and accepted) to publish under a pen-name, and I'm asking specifically if there are any "legal" nuissances (for example, when being included in the personnel list on the university website, when being included in the list of participants to a conference, when signing up to a website like Research Gate, etc.)

David Z's answer there completely answers your question here. That satisfies the definition of a duplicate.

@EnergyNumbers: If I understand correctly, his main point is "But in general: nobody [publishers] checks (or cares) whether the name you put on a published paper matches your official name". However, I'm missing where he addresses the other "legal" (so to say) concerns mentioned above.

None of those are legal concerns. No one cares about a difference between your legal name and nom de plume. Which is what David Z said.

Typically, you have full choice over which variant of your name you choose to publish under.
I know people who use a shortened version of their first name, substitute their (preferred) middle name, use their pre-marriage last name, etc. Publishers don't care and funding agencies use stronger unique identifiers.  I doubt that places like ResearchGate and Academia.edu constrain you either.
Just be sure to be consistent, and consider ORCID to help with disambiguation.

Thanks for your answer. So publishers aren't bothered by this kind of changes and Research Gate and others shouldn't be [is there any way to check this?]. Do you know anything about other possible annoyances? (e.g.,  if some 'trouble' may arise when being included in the personnel list on the university website, when being included in the list of participants to a conference, etc.)

(FYI: I've just checked and with Research Gate, there're should be no problems.)

@Akio Most universities I know allow people to choose how they self-identify, which would include the personnel list.  Conferences typically care about names even less than journals.  You probably can't get away with a joke name, but mostly as long as you're being professional nobody will interfere.


text:
Previous interests in a subfield which is different from your perspective advisor's
Assume that I'm interested in a certain broad field of mathematics (say A). Also, assume that have done a honors thesis during my BSc in a certain narrow-ish subfield (say A.1).
Suppose that I'm interested in applying to a certain outstanding university mostly because its graduate program offers, among other things, lots of good specialized courses and research seminars concerning various aspects of field A and related areas of mathematics (way more and of way higher level compared to any other university, as far as I know).
Now, suppose that (despite the breadth of the courses offered) the outstanding faculty members of this university who work in field A are interested in a subfield that is different and not very related, as far as I know, (say A.2) from the one I've done my bachelor thesis in (A.1).
Assume that I am eager to know more about this different subfield because it "feels" promising and interesting, but I'm not particularly familiar with it yet.

Would my current (but fixable during
  the courses) lack of knowledge about the main subfield of interest of
  the faculty and my different "specialization" make my statement of purpose (where I've to explain why
  I've chosen the program) and therefore my application weak?

In short, is it acceptable to convey the following "message" in a statement of purpose?

"I love the broad area A, my specialized knowledge
  of which is limited to a narrow-ish subarea A.1; and I'm ready to get the most out of the many courses
  and seminars that you offer. I'm not quite familiar with A.2 (the main subfield of interest of the faculty), but I'm willing to learn something new and I've a hunch that it's going to be fun."

Disclaimer (and clarification): This question was originally raised by a former classmate of mine and I post it on this board (with his approval) because I may probably find myself in a kind of similar situation in short time.

It is dangerous to super-specialize prematurely. One needs to know where one is located with respect to the rest of (related) academia. So doing general broad based courses is a perfectly fine goal.
The way selection works is, if every professor in the institute of interest, finds a person who has already worked in their area of interest, then you may not be selected. But the odds of that happening is low.
Professors always don't expect someone who would be productive right from day one. Most are prepared to spend some time preparing the student for the work. Showing the capacity for doing work, by citing previous work should be strong enough. Most professors can access quality of your work and make a judgement, even if the work is not in their area of specialization.
Also Professors sometimes appreciate talent coming from outside their domain, because they may sometimes bring with them some interesting perspective.
And lastly, one should be as honest as possible, because getting rejected for right reasons is sometimes better for you, than getting selected for wrong reasons. I mean, it could be a disaster, if one gets selected for who one is not!

It is not at all uncommon (especially at BSc level*) for people to go into vastly different areas; their knowledge and skills in one area can often add to their abilities in another.
For simplicity in what follows, let your original field be A and your newly taught field be B.
Things can get a little hairy if you are determined to stay in A for your project (or, at least, it might not be as successful as having a supervisor with strong knowledge within A). If you are willing to make the transfer to B, and if you are willing to accept that further academia in A may be rather impeded (again, compared with originally taking a project in A), I do not see any issue with such a switch at this point.
There might be some circumstances in which "belonging to the same parent field" does not mean that A and B are even remotely related in their approaches and terminology in the modern day, and catching-up might be a lot of hard work. It is, I suppose, up to you and your friend to figure this out with available literature.
I am probably not giving you any information above what you already know - but I had to say the above just in case. What I would really like to say is the following: If you want to follow a path, follow it. Prior knowledge adds something to the group - not only will you have some unexpected tricks up your sleeve, but you may become the "go-to guy" for certain problems, and their knowledge will provide you with yet another set of tricks. Such mixing rarely comes to a detriment of either side of the table, provided you are willing to learn and they are willing to stretch you.
But if you are unsure on a path, do not take it simply because you dont feel you have a choice. I personally fell into that trap - in my case, joining a doctoral training centre in a much more general field than my own (Theoretical Physics -> Nanoscience). It turned out to be so general that most of the material was hand-wavy and useless. Now I'm back doing what I love, but it was half a year of plain old misery for me.


text:
Advantages/disadvantages of bundling source code from separate, related papers?
Say that you have several papers, each with a set of experiments, in which the source code overlaps appreciably. If you wish to release the code for each paper, which is better:

isolate the relevant code and release each (possibly redundant) version independently; or
keep the code bundled with clear instructions of how to reproduce the experiments from each paper (say by indicating which revision number corresponds to the code used in each paper)?

This scenario can arise, say, because each paper includes the same benchmark algorithms or the code was initially developed to be extensible (with, e.g., good memory management). It may be faster to deploy new code by extending the existing code base. One can imagine a public github repository where the software suite is continually expanded.
Some advantages for isolating the code:

Easier to understand in the context of the single paper
Clearly reproducible

Some advantages for bundling the code:

Greater visibility for all the papers
More likely that software from older papers is up-to-date and easy to run
Builds towards a comprehensive software suite
Less redundancy and less overhead (assuming this is the manner in which the code is developed)

Is there clearly a preferable choice among these alternatives? Is there another alternative entirely? Have I enumerated the most important advantages in deciding between these alternatives?

Why not release both versions?

I face a similar situation. I'll tell you what I'm planning to do, although I don't claim this is the best approach. I think it's a reasonable compromise between making things easy for the reader, and making things easy for me.
First, I wrote several libraries that I keep on GitHub. One or more of these is needed to reproduce the research I'll discuss in each paper. I'll create a release for each library, with a citable DOI using Zenodo. A set of instructions is available.
Likewise, I'll have a configuration file, plus some scripts, and maybe some data, that are unique to each experiment. This is where I'll put the README file describing how to build/run everything. I'll create a GitHub repo for those as well, and create a release using Zenodo.
So each paper I write will cite all the library/other releases needed to reproduce the software.
EDIT: One advantage of this is that while the DOI will point to the exact version of everything I used for my published results, it will also be clear where people can go for the latest version of everything.


text:
Leaving a PhD Program with a Masters and Going to Another School
I am currently at a top engineering program in my specific field (top 5) and I have started my program but have come to realize that the faculty that align with my research interests at this school have very different cultural environments that I can not deal with.
I was looking for advice for the following scenario:
I was wondering how I would go about applying to other universities for PhD that I know have the team environment I am looking for (specifically where I did my undergrad). I have worked there before but I originally agreed with my PI maybe its not the best place to go. So coming to my current university, I realized that either my research interests don't align, or I am absolutely miserable in the lab environment.
Yes I have tried looking at other labs. I have my labs lined up based on research interest and unfortunately no others.
Would it be okay if I applied to another PhD program in my 2nd year and also left my current institution with a Masters? It would either be to a top 20 school or another school in the top 5 below my program.
Thank you in advance for any insight and advice.

Thanks, I am also interested in this question. I believe students who leave the PhD program due to failing the quals are more or less forced to take the path you described if they decide to try again.

Yes, it's possible, but not easy. I did similar thing last year(left the previous program with M.S. in the end of 2nd year and applied to another Ph.D. program).

0 . Can I leave my current department with master degree in 2nd year?

It depends on your department policy and you should look at those policies carefully. No one on the internet can answer this question accurately.
Issues to consider in your new applications:

Do you plan on changing department?

If you plan on going to a different department (not just different university, i.e. from university of X department of A to university of Y department of B where X\neq Y and A\neq B), you should explain, in your SOP, why do you have the ability to do well in the new field given your experience and knowledge background. If not, you should explain why similar department in a different university will be a better fit for you, in terms of research interest and general academic environment.
In any case, avoid saying "I hate the department I was previously in." or equivalent, that will make your applications look bad.

What's your relation with current advisor and other faculties(in the department you're in now)? Who will be your recommender?

Ideally, if your current advisor support you and your decision, you should obtain letters from your current advisor. That will make things a lot easier. If, unfortunately, one of the reasons you're leaving is having personal confrontation with current advisor, you had better look for someone else. Spend some time figuring out who will write you a good letter that fits your new application well. Avoid people who may write bad letters as personal revenge.
Be aware that you'll be strictly barred from applying to some programs if you don't have at least one letter from the last university you attended. That's a issue to consider if you plan on having people from your undergraduate institution be your recommender.

Do you need to retake exams like GRE?

GRE scores(subject or general) do not expire in 5 years. However some graduate programs may require a much more recent one(for example within 2 years). If you want to apply to those programs, you'll have to retake the GRE. If the new program require a subject GRE you've not taken before, you'll have to take it.

@ajl123 - These comments change the question completely!  Now I'm confused.  Do you maybe need two different questions?


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How can a PhD in Machine Learning and AI help you in a life out of Academia?
I have applied for a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I do not, however, plan to become an academic afterward. What I want to achieve is to try to commercialize my research by founding a startup or find a job outside of Academia, using the knowledge I will obtain for enhancing or building products/services for my employer.
What I would like ideally, is to achieve Academic as well as Industry expertise in machine learning and AI, through a job or by trying to found a startup with a related thematology. Becoming a professor is completely out of my goals. However, I want to be able to study academic literature with ease.
Do you think my goal is reasonable, or a Ph.D. is an overkill that would make me overqualified, losing precious time in case I change my mind in the future?
The reason I want the Ph.D. is to learn more things and receive more hands-on experience in Machine Learning. I believe that this process will also enhance my critical skills and analytical thinking.
I understand this can get difficult and risky but I am willing to try.
Does my goal make any sense or do I need a reality check? I need a hard critique...
Is that a healthy reason for attending graduate school?

In my place and field, it is quite usual for people to switch to the industry after receiving their doctoral degree. However, that does not mean it is just as usual and accepted in your place and field - some more context may be required. One thing that might be somewhat more generally true, though, is that if you indeed want to found a startup, doing a PhD can provide you with some precious time to prepare for that (i.e. develop a core product) and also some opportunities (possibly supported by the university) to build a network and learn about founding of startups.

I'm voting to close this question because it's cross-posted on stats: see Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?

Working at your startup
One thing for sure is that, if you want to start a company (a startup), you should not be afraid of being overqualified, since you will be "the boss" and there is no one to classify you as such.
Working in the industry
While being overqualified sometimes (perhaps, even, often) applies to positions in the industry, a Ph.D. graduate is highly unlikely to be considered as such in ML/AI domain, where it is often a requirement for most positions.
Working for other people's startup
Even though most startups generally don't care about degrees, those, working in ML/AI-related domains, will be happy to consider and hire a good Ph.D. graduate for the obvious reason: due to relatively high complexity of the required ML/AI-related subject domain expertise.
P.S. Please note that my answer addresses only your concern of being overqualified, but does not touch a larger question of feasibility of your plan, factors to consider in decision making and so on. However, it implicitly suggests that this one of possible routes to achieve your goal (whether it's the best or the optimal one, depends on a lot of factors, including your personal circumstances).

Both fields are currently "hot" and have several practical applications. Thinking IBM research, MS research, tableau.com, just to name the few that I've applied to... there is absolutely no shortage of jobs. If you interface that with big data, you should be ok for a few decades, at least...
Full disclosure: My phd was in image processing (well, not quite, but not ML either) and I'm currently changing my research area exactly because of that demand...
I know it is not on your plans, but just to be complete, that is even more true for professors and TT positions... cra.org has at least 1 new opening/day in those fields...
So yes, if you wanna work ML Research, a good PhD, with publications (think CVPR+) is the way to go.

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


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Should I use a not-self-hosted website for both blogging and collecting academic materials?
Several researchers in my subfield (and in mathematics in general) use not-self-hosted wordpress.com subdomains for their 'professional blog' (to blog about their research, their latest papers, or any topic related to their interests). Few of them use some pages of their blog as 'professional websites' too (to upload their CV, list of publications, material for courses, and so on).
I've made up my mind to start blogging myself; also, I'd like to create a webpage 'independent' from the one on a subdomain of my current institution (to make my life easier when I'll change place and to have some more flexibility).
Should I use a not-self-hosted website for both blogging and collecting academic materials?
So far, these are the results of my research (in and outside my department) on the topic (but I'd like to examine some more objective and expert points):
"Pros"

I like that it is easy to use and set up (without any need to set up (and pay) your hosting yourself and actually "code" your website -- which would be hard since my knowledge of computer science and programming is very limited). Plus, some free themes are nice, essential, and easy to navigate.
I like the idea of connecting blogging and actual academic work.

"Cons" (i.e. the points that I'd mostly like you to address)

A friend of mine (who is not in academia anymore) implied that not-self-hosted websites look very unprofessional and cannot be fully optimized and personalized. Is the perception of not-self-hosted websites as unprofessional a real thing in the academic world? (In my opinion, on the contrary, seeing a website of the form namesurname.com could leave the impression of great pretense).
It has been pointed out to me (by a much senior researcher) that having "serious" (or at least would-be serious) research achievements on the same website as "more relaxed, informal, or expository blog posts" may be detrimental to the perception of the research itself. I strongly disagree on this point, but I'd like to do a reality check to see if this is actually a potential issue or just an "old-styled-man's viewpoint".
These subdomains and (mostly) the themes can be unstable (or be no longer updated/supported) and thus force me to redo the set-up at some point in time. Specifically, they may be more unstable than the website of a university. I really don't know about this, so I'd like to check, but I've heard it from a grad student in computer science.

What are your objectives for the academic part of your website? What are your objectives for the blog?

In academia, an amateurish-looking website can almost be worse than having no website at all. Now "amateurish" here does not mean "made yourself"; it instead refers to sites that use bad design practices (lots of garish colors, ill-chosen animations and transitions, poor design choices that make it hard to find information). However, there is not necessarily a strong link between poor design and web host. So, you can and should decide if the web host makes sense for you.
I know a number of researchers who have their websites that are hosted by sites such as Google Sites, but they do look professional enough to pass muster. On the other hand, the main issues for a web site in academia is that you are able to find the information you need. A bare-bones text-based website (which many people still use) is perfectly acceptable if you can access a researcher's CV, lists of interests and publications, and get contact information.

But the OP didn't say anything about Google Sites.

+1 for "don't make something amateurish". My experience, for instance, is that mathematicians absolutely love to write their own HTML, probably because they are used to Latex, even when going for a simple pre-packaged solution with a theme and a visual editor for the code would give a vastly better result.

Many people I kbow have amateurish looking websites. You know what? Nobody cares! I can't agree with you on this.

Wordpress.org gives more flexibility than wordpress.com.  However, if you are going it alone, and are learning as you go, you might as well start out with wordpress.com.  You can always switch to wordpress.org if and when you get frustrated with the limitations of wordpress.com.
If you're concerned about the unprofessional look that a long wordpress.com url might create, I would say, if you can afford to spend $10/year on a domain name, then by all means, buy yourself a nice, succinct domain name.  It will be perfectly compatible with wordpress.com.
Regarding the choice of domain name, if namesurname.com makes you uncomfortable, then choose a name that means something to you.  For example, if you are a researcher, you could name your site after your favorite research method.  Or you could select some object or concept that intrigues you, and honor it in your domain name.  Or if you have a favorite butterfly with an esoteric name, you could name your site after it.  And you could incorporate a photograph of it into your theme.  Etc., etc.

I don't have an opinion on domain names, but I do think you should be careful about mixing information on your research activities with blog content. At the very least, I think your blog should not be the only place someone can find your papers, CV, research interests, etc. Perhaps you could make your blog as planned, and also put up a bare-bones academic website on your department's server?
I say this because the people who want to read your blog and the people who want to know about your research interests are probably not as overlapping as you'd like them to be, and it's annoying for both groups to have to wade through irrelevant information to get to the content they want.

As long as you have a clear menu available on the top or on the side, so people can get quickly to your "current research interests" and publication list, you'll be fine with the one main site.  //  Tip: make the description on the official university page about you extremely bare bones, to encourage people to do that additional click to your own site.  Make sure to put a link to your own site on that official university page.


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Short summary of other works that cite/build upon your publication
Researchers (in particular, in mathematics), in general, clearly write their paper in the hope that their results will be built upon and cited by other members of the community.
Nowadays most researchers have a list of their publications and copies of their papers (or links to the Arxiv) uploaded on their websites. Some of them also add a summary (much longer than the abstract, but clearly much shorter than the paper) written by themselves or a mathscinet review. And almost anyone pays (at least some) attention to their citation count (indeed, that's one of the reasons why Google Scholar and Research Gate researchers' profiles exist).
However, It doesn't seem a common practice to include next to every paper a list of the works by others that cite or build upon it with a short summary and some commentary of their content and its relation to your paper.

I think it is very time consuming, but would it be an acceptable and advisable practice (by today standard)?

In case of positive answer: should only the works that build directly upon the cited paper be included in the list (or should one be more flexible and include also papers that are less strictly related)?

It seems to me misguided to worry if it is acceptable. If you feel that creating such a summary will be a good way to present your work in the best light and help it attract attention that it genuinely deserves, then I'd say it is acceptable regardless of whether some idiot will come along who will find fault with this practice. The main thing that matters is whether your intentions are honorable and your portrayal of the impact of your work is accurate. If you create a grandiose, pompous text that wildly overinflates the work's importance, that will rightly be seen as quite inappropriate.

By the way the practice you describe is actually quite common in the slightly different form of a research statement, which is a summary of 3-5 pages that many researchers post on their web pages and/or submit to job applications. The research statement is precisely a place where one can discuss the impact of one's work on the work of others.

@DanRomik: your remark is full of good sense. Thank you very much for your advice. I'd like to see you expand it in an answer.

@DanRomik: Until now (given my young age) I've only used my research statement to highlight my research plans and previous work, but I completely agree that more experienced people may use it to describe the impact of their work too.

The practice you describe is actually quite common in the slightly different form of a research statement. See my comment above.

Would it be an acceptable practice?

This seems to be a common question around Academia.SE and comes up in many different contexts. My opinion on such things is that this is usually not a helpful question to ask. For a practice that is not common (say, reciting Shakespeare in a calculus class), there will likely always be at least one person who finds it objectionable or "unacceptable". So rather than worry if it is unacceptable, I suggest focusing on the separate question of whether it is a good idea. If it is, go ahead and do it. If it's not, don't do it, regardless of whether it would be acceptable or not.

Would it be an advisable practice?

Well, as you yourself say, it could turn out to be awfully time-consuming. However, I can definitely think of situations when it would be advisable. If your result was applied in a key way in Prof. Humperdink's recent proof of the famous Griemann Hypothesis, absolutely find a way to tell the world about that. More seriously, as you create a body of work and your work is applied by others in various ways, there can definitely be a lot of value in creating a short summary that allows people interested in you and your work (e.g. colleagues and prospective and current employers) to get a quick overview of your work and its importance. The precise title of the document ("Research statement", "Research summary", etc.) and how is it formatted (PDF vs HTML, etc.) are not so important as long as it's presented clearly and easy to access. Similarly, whether the document summarizes your own papers or whether it summarizes the use others have made of your results (the former practice being more common than the latter, as you observe) does not make a huge difference in my opinion; you can have two separate documents to discuss those two things, or cover both of them with a single document, which could make a lot sense since in many cases they would logically fit together very well. Or you could just cover one of those two aspects if that makes the most sense to you.
The important thing is that any survey that you prepare of your own work be written in good taste and not in an excessively pompous or self-aggrandizing way. If you make wildly exaggerated claims about why your result is revolutionary, groundbreaking, deserves to win some major award, etc., this will leave people with a bad taste and they will quickly develop a discounting factor that they will apply to any future statement they hear from you. (As an example, a friend I had in grad school used to make wildly exaggerated claims in a humorous fashion, leading to some of his other friends inventing the "log" rule, which was that you had to take the logarithm of anything he says...)

Should only the works that build directly upon the cited paper be
  included in the list (or should one be more flexible and include also
  papers that are less strictly related)?

It's hard to say. My inclination is to say that you should generally focus on the papers that build more or less directly on your work. In certain cases, say if a paper you wrote was used by someone to invent a whole new theory, which now generates hundreds of new papers every year, it may be reasonable to say that your paper played a key role in the creation of the theory and led to the later wave of publications, even though its contribution was of an indirect kind. Again, the key rule of thumb is that your claims should be seen as reasonable and presented in good taste, with the goal of genuinely helping the reader to understand the development of the subjects you have worked on, rather than to make yourself seem important by claiming credit for anything under the sun that your work has touched on in any way.


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Asking for details of an algorithm developed in an article in review
Recently, I have reviewed an article for the IEEE (a very good article too).  Within the article, the authors place great emphasis on a particular algorithm they developed and used, without disclosing any actual code - but explained very well that it could be replicated (which I won't do)..
Now, after I have provided an anonymous review, it occurred to me that I could further test their algorithm in my similar field of research (giving due credit of course).
How would one go about asking for details of an algorithm developed in an article in review?

Related: What to do when you are suspicious about numerical results in a submitted manuscript that you are reviewing? I say related because even though you may or may not be suspicious, the answers/suggested course of action applies here also, at least to some extent.

Have the authors made a preprint of their work available publicly?

@PatrickSanan nope, I checked that first of all.

In a similar situation, I have sent an email to the editor asking to pass on a message and giving permission to reveal my name and contact details to the authors if they wish to respond.
Alternatively, but more problematic, you state that you may be able to replicate it. You could go ahead and do that and by the time your work is complete, the original article is likely to be available to be cited. If you were to go down this path, though, you should still be discussing this with the editor as part of your agreement as a reviewer is that you don't do this.

Good advice - I am definitely not going to replicate the algorithm, for the reason you stated (disallowed), but also it would not be ethical.

"as part of your agreement as a reviewer is that you don't do this" - this is field-specific. In my CS subfield, the common understanding seems to be that the very reason why everyone should review every now and then (beside the idealistic, and thus unfortunately not very strong reason when lots of projects ask for your resources, reviewing being a community service) is precisely because one gets preliminary access to upcoming publications and thus can start building upon them particularly early.

@O.R.Mapper In my CS subfield, the common understanding...can start building upon them particularly early — That may be the common understanding in your subfield of CS, but it strikes me as completely unethical.  It certainly isn't the common understanding in my subfield of CS.

@JeffE: I fail to see what is unethical about building upon published work and citing it properly.

@O.R.Mapper Once the work is actually published, sure. But you're talking about exploiting your access to the work as a reviewer, which by definition happens before the work is published; exploiting that early confidential access is what I find unethical. A similar argument applies to grant proposals; the US National Science Foundation explicitly forbids reviewers from using or building on unpublished work described in proposals.

@JeffE: I can see nothing unethical about this. The earlier the authors are cited after publication of their work, the better for them. Delays from publication to follow-up works are already long enough as it is. I see no need to artificially stall things even more, and I would rather argue it is unethical to disregard a somewhat relevant upcoming publication that would be suitable for citation in your current stage of research just because the only way you know of the upcoming publication is due to your involvement as a referee. Grant proposals are somewhat different as they can be ...

... considered to reflect the state of ongoing negotiations, where you could benefit from knowing about a competitor's position, which would benefit you, but not the competitor. Indeed, the document you linked to explicitly mentions personal benefits, whereas "general benefits" such as learning about the state of research in a discipline (i.e. expanding your knowledge about a discipline so you can build upon that, which would be generally beneficial, both to you, to the authors of the cited works, and to readers of the new works), is explicitly said to be acceptable.

The reason it is potentially unethical is that the reviewer has gained advantage from access to confidential material - new research ideas etc. The paper authors may be pursuing those themselves. This paper is apparently good, but what if it gets rejected? All of these problems make it important to discuss potential use of the material. What if there's an embargo on the results for some reason and the reviewer using that information accidentally releases part of the results? It is likely that everyone will be happy, early citation etc, but that is no excuse to assume that it's okay.

See also http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/24239/is-it-appropriate-to-ask-colleagues-opinions-when-reviewing-a-paper?rq=1 (and probably others) about confidentiality of review process.

@JenB: "The paper authors may be pursuing those themselves." - that's why I would agree it is unethical to implement anything that is already indicated to be pursued by the author in the future work section, or otherwise a likely follow-up. But most ideas that warrant a citation are not direct follow-ups. "what if it gets rejected?" - then the referee has a problem because they cannot publish their prepared paper as planned. That's the drawback one has to cope with in exchange for the benefit of early access. "What if there's an embargo on the results" - irrelevant, as I am not saying the ...

... referee should submit their related work before the reviewed work has been published. Of course, they have to wait for publication of the reviewed manuscript before they can start submitting theirs, in order to avoid a broken citation chain. The advantage lies merely in making the time between original submission and original publication overlap with the time that would otherwise lie between original publication and related submission. Which is why I think it is completely okay.

It isn't wrong to request for the code of a paper you refer (after it is accepted for publication). I've provided the code of my algorithm for a few myself upon such requests coming from my readers.
This can be regardless of the fact that you've reviewed the article. But this information can be included in your request as a supporting factor thus indicating your genuineness as you could have asked so during the review.
You may request as soon as the paper is accepted to be published and is available online at least in the open archive as facilitated in some journal publishers.

It isn't wrong for a reader of a published paper to request code from the author, but OP is a referee for a yet unpublished paper.  The confidentiality of the refereeing process requires that OP either wait for the article to be published or pass an anonymous request through the editor.

@JeffE: I have made the edit accordingly.


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How damaging is it to have been a co-author of a retracted paper?
Many years ago, when I was very new to the world of scientific paper publishing, I was a co-author to a paper that was subsequently retracted after an investigation of the findings. This was before I did my PhD (was a Master's student in a different field that I am currently in).
To explain, my role in the data collection and analysis was quite specific, and in the investigation it was deemed that my part of the work was verifiable and sound. In hindsight, I have long realised that I should have taken on a more active role in proof-reading the article as a whole, cross checking the findings and being more active in the article writing process. For that, I have always taken responsibility - so, even though I do not have anything to do with the lead author anymore - I am not blaming anyone.
Since then, I have been co-author and first author of over a dozen more papers - many are published without difficulty (we check, cross-check and check everything again nowadays).
But, the question remains, in terms of applying for postdocs, funding, grants and the like - how damaging is it to have been a co-author of a retracted paper?

Was it an entirely different field, a closely related field, or just a different sub field in the discipline you are still in? If it's 1 or 2, it seems unlikely people in your current field heard about it. Be honest when asked (in the way of your question), but don't promote the story. I assume you were the most junior (education level) author - what level were your co-authors (probably PhD student and up)? This should also factor in your favor.

Yes, it was an entirely different field, and yes, I was the most junior - the lead author was an Associate Professor, a co-author was a PostDoc and the other a PhD student.

The effect of retractions on scientific careers has been studied, and the conclusion is essentially that retractions don't hurt scientists who are behaving carefully and ethically.
For your case, it sounds like you were clearly exonerated, and that your only fault was being a junior researcher who wasn't proactive about ensuring honesty on the part of your collaborators.  Since you've since gone on to be more fully educated as a researcher and to establish a good publication record, I would not expect that this past retraction is likely to have any significant effect on your current prospects.

You do not mention the specifics and what exactly the investigation was about, but a reasonable person would expect the reason (pun intended) for the retraction to be of importance:

"It seems that our equipment was faulty; it turns out that the results of our 6-month long experiments on whether frumbling the meerps is more efficient than just frobbing them are not statistically significant after all".
This happens all the time. Depending on the situation, the authors might  repeat their study from scratch, they might publish a study on why their previous work was invalid and how to avoid the same issues - or they might decide that retracting the paper is a better solution, especially if they cannot provide a follow-up in a timely manner. I would expect this behavior to be expected and even applauded - provided that it does not happen too often in which case it would indicate lack of due diligence when researching.
"Immediately after our theoretical paper was published, Dr. Jones from the Coruscant University pointed out a contradiction with the well known and frequently repeated experiments performed by Dr. Hamil."
While slightly more embarrassing, this also happens all the time. It could be a simple error in the arithmetic, or it could be that the author was not aware of all the implications of their results in all fields, especially if they have limited access to online libraries. Depending on the field and the actual cause an author might follow-up with work that expands on the original assumption ("Let's see what happens in a universe where two parallel lines actually do intersect at a non-infinite distance") - or they just retract the incorrect paper to avoid references of the "here why that paper is wrong" kind in the future.
"Noted anesthesiologist Dr. Palpatine was relieved of his position yesterday, after the revelation that the clinical studies on rectal constructs referenced in more than 200 of his papers never actually occurred."
Now this is a bit different. It would certainly help if an investigation has cleared you by ascertaining both the validity of your own contribution and your lack of knowledge about (let alone participation in) any fraudulent activity. But keep in mind that some people would always be reluctant, (rightfully?) assuming that in many such cases the absence of proof of guilt is not equal to proof of innocence.


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How to be efficient as a graduate student juggling classes, TA and research?
I am a first year PhD student, and it's the fourth week of school. I am taking two classes, doing one grad class TA and doing a lab rotation. I am in Electrical Engineering (Controls and DSP).
I start my day thinking- "I'll go to class from 10 am to 12 pm, solve 5 homework problems from 1 pm- 3 pm, do some TA work from 4 pm to 6 pm, and read a bunch of papers from 7 pm to 9 pm, then cook and sleep. How optimistic.
In reality, when I start the homework problems at 1 pm, I end up having to read a bunch of textbooks to understand stuff in it (I'm doing Convex Analysis), and by the time 3 pm rolls around, I have finished only one problem. Feeling discouraged, I keep at this homework, vowing to stop only when I'm done with my quota of 5. My efficiency starts to drop severely after a few hours, but since I'm in school with my laptop and stuff, I can't go anywhere to 'relax', so I just keep sitting and start redditing or something. And then my concentration further drops when I try to resume real work. This goes on, I miss dinner, I sleep late, and the efficiency just plummets through the week.
My past couple of weeks have been so inefficient, I want to do something about it before it's too late.
In short, my question is, when your work is way too difficult to achieve your goal of the day in your allotted time, do you switch work, or do you keep going? I have always believed that output is more important than input, that is, putting in two hours for each task without achieving much in anything is not as good as putting in, say, eight hours for just one and finishing something in it nicely. However, this strategy of mine is failing me for the first time in my life, because even if I put in eight hours, I am not able to finish anything. The work is so difficult. I'm not complaining, just really need guidance.

one thing's for sure - reddit is dangerous in your situation. However, a little reddit in moderation... granted as a reward upon completion of some decent work, might actually be a useful carrot to use. I played with the idea of letting myself "reddit" (really, news/facebook,YT, etc) for around 5 minutes a day upon completion of target objectives.  Up to you in any case, gl

I like to go back to a simple analogy. Imagine that you have a big empty glass pickle jar. Every day you have 24 hours.  You need to sleep, eat, and tend your hygiene. Those are pebbles in jar. Then. You have 3 main priorities - these are tennis ball. And of course, some reddit and Miley Cyrus news - these are rice grains.  This jar is limited space, and if you fill it with rice first, then there won't be enough space for the balls...

I'm with you OP (same field, even).  I'm not a TA - somehow managed to get a full RA position my first semester - but I'm struggling in just the same way and have been asking my profs the same questions.  +1 for reading my mind!

Hey OP, this is unrelated to this question but I have no other way of messaging you. I saw your question last night (the one about how to handle criticism of your work), and started answering it because I've had similar experiences/issues being a woman in STEM grad school. I've worked past the issue and was happy to give you some tips; however, the question was deleted as off-topic before I finished posting. If you're still interested in chatting about it feel free to email me at jj0808080808@gmail.com.

add a spouse and children into the mix, and the complexity will go up exponentially. :)

When your work is way too difficult to achieve your goal of the day in your allotted time

... get used to it. If you are an interesting person doing interesting things, there is never going to be enough time for all the things you want to do. And as soon as the work you're doing now starts to get easier for you, you'll get new, more challenging responsibilities :)
You won't be able to manage your time more effectively until you get a little better at estimating how long things will take, so start there. It's pretty common to underestimate how long things will take - try quadrupling your initial estimate, and see where that gets you.
When you can judge more accurately how long things will take, you will be in a better position to manage your commitments. Once you realize that your homework takes you 8 hours, not 2, you will be able to plan your week accordingly, without feeling guilty when you invariably have to drop something else in order to do your homework properly.
In the meantime,

Keep forgiving yourself and keep working

That's from this answer by Piotr Migdal, which I highly recommend you read.

I miss dinner, I sleep late, and the efficiency just plummets through the week.

You don't need me to tell you the answer to this one. Take care of yourself. For more details, see How to prevent physical/psychological health side effects of workaholism in academia and research?.

do you switch work, or do you keep going?

It helps to have tasks you can work on when you are low on intellectual energy, but that are still more productive than staring at reddit. Here's a list of ways to procrastinate productively.
Ultimately, though, if you need to take a break to recharge, just do it - then you'll get back to work and be much more effective.

Yep indeed - sometimes a little walk of 10 minutes can do wonders !

In addition to the suggestions of the other answers, I'm going to suggest a more vicious piece of triage.  If your TA is a full 20-hours per week commitment, then you probably can't reasonably both do significant research and perform strongly in classes.  Instead, you're going to have to pick something to triage.
You don't say what country you are in, but if it's the US, then the first year or two of graduate school is typically expected to be essentially full-time coursework.  Rather than think of this as a distraction from your research ambitions, think of it as a foundation for those ambitions: you are doing (early) work on your research by studying well in class. Try calculating how much time you'd need to spend reading the literature to obtain the same knowledge that you are gaining in class.  Then give yourself some slack on the research front: don't do nothing, but let it be the thing that you do last, after your fulfilled your other responsibilities, and don't have high expectations for what you can achieve in research while working full-time on TAing and coursework.
Obviously, this only applies if the class is at least somewhat related to your research interests.  If it's not, consider slacking on your coursework.  Not so much that you get a grad-school-threatening grade, but since you're in a Ph.D. program, it's likely that you're the sort of personal who habitually works to a very high standard in all your classes.  Now, however, you need to learn how to relax into a B when appropriate.
Finally, if your TAing is not a strong 20-hours per week commitment, you need to consider whether you are being too committed a teacher.  Teaching is wonderful and important and can be very rewarding.  It's also not your primary responsibility as a Ph.D. student.  There were certainly times, in my graduate career, when I worked very hard on teaching because going above and beyond my responsibilities there was easier than facing my other, less well-defined research tasks.
In short: you don't have time to be excellent in all three at once.  Pick two, and just make sure you don't fail notably at the third.

I second the triage notion.  Early on I told a few classmates who were struggling with their course work that if they were getting all "A"s in PhD classes, they were probably spending too much time on their classes.  I don't know if this applies to the OP, but regardless you need to recognize that you simply can't accomplish everything to the highest level at the start of grad school and not burn yourself out in the mean time. You probably have to prioritize and leave some things less than perfect, and that's just fine.

If it's not against the rules of your program or classes (which I doubt), you need to start doing your problem sets with other students. You then can still work on all questions if you feel like it, but getting pointers when stuck from someone else, then finishing in a 1-2 hour meeting with your group or fellow student, should help you tremendously. If you're lucky, you even find friends like this, and have a beer after your meeting which might be good for your psyche too.
In my experience, those planning to work alone through the coursework of a STEM grad school soon notice what you just did: it's a bad idea.

Excellent idea in principle, but for this to be effective, you need to find people at around your level. If the other persons are much better or worse than you, working with them will not be so useful. And in a small cohort, finding people at about your level may not be so easy.

I agree with this answer! I too am finding my way around in my coursework, and a professor encouraged me to discuss with peers when working on assignments- he said the assignments were deliberately tough, and the point of having them so is to show that research is seldom done by the lone wolf, and mainly done collaboratively, involving you talking to others at a board, saying something stupid at times, but also building up on each other's ideas to arrive at an understanding greater than the sum of the parts of the individuals involved.

Honestly, I'm just going to pass the piece of advice my adviser gave to me when I took up a 6 courses per quarter year: only consider the time that you're writing as work. The rest of it is interesting, but as a graduate student you're only judged on what you write, so only consider that time as actual "working time". And to add to that: only consider what you write as work if it's pushing some research.
So outside of lecture, just write. Write down homework answers, spending more time on things closer to your research (maybe answering things in more depth and addressing side questions when it's related to your research, and just kind of meh if it's not). Don't just read publications: actively take notes, get ready a seminar presentation on the paper, make your own "little HW" filling out some detail on one of their proof sketches to see if it can lead somewhere new, etc. One page a day towards a publication gets one out in about a month, so just keep writing! Undergrad is for reading, grad is for writing.
Since adopting this strategy, I have been much more productive. 16 hour days of writing produces a lot of material, and you'll learn things in much more depth too if you're drafting and re-drafting your ideas.

As a person with the same responsibilities this semester, let me tell you that the reality will be efficient time planning and figuring out the shortest path to get the work done.

For your course you have to find the way to solve the HW as fast as possible. Talk to the TAs and the Professors for hints. It would be great to read all the textbooks and get all the knowledge required for the answer. But, in reality you will only have time to read/look up what you need and figure out the answer as fast as possible.
For your TA responsibilities - Grade or evaluate, a x number of students, every one or two days. Don't let the work accumulate. Make sure you're there for your office hours. But, try to keep other time outside of office hours for yourself. Don't accommodate requests from students to discuss problem 1-on-1 outside of office hours unless it's rare occasion. TA'ing can be great reward when you get to re-learn the basics to teach someone else. Also, it helps at those internship interviews ;)
Research - Reality is that your research will suffer. This is why fellowships or RAs are such a great thing. A funding source like that gives you so much more time for your actual research. Coming back to the matter at hand, the time you have left, after doing (1) and (2) will go for research. This means sacrificed weekends, and semester breaks.
Health - Lots of people ignore their health. I always take 30 mins a day for exercise. If you do it like drinking coffee/tea in the morning, it gets done. Don't ignore it.

This is the life of a grad student. It can be awesome or disappointing depending on how you approach it.

To begin with a note of encouragement, you're just starting out and some things will get a little easier over time.  Reading papers is a skill, so is teaching, and so is doing research.  At the beginning, it's going to take a lot more time than anticipated to do some of these things and you'll get more efficient at them as you practice.
Next, one strategy to try is to break your tasks into much smaller chunks.  For example, instead of saying, "I'm going to solve 5 homework problems from 1-3pm," you might try an approach of making a list of the things you're trying to complete that day.  List each problem as a separate task.  If they require a considerable amount of backreading, list the backreading as a separate task as well.
This will do a few things.  First, it'll start giving you a much more accurate idea of how to make time estimates.  Second, it will allow you to give yourself permission to switch contexts/tasks.  And last but not least, it'll help to keep from feeling like you're not getting anywhere.
By making smaller tasks, it also gives you more natural break points where you can try other strategies, like changing locations or going for a quick walk to keep your brain from turning to mush.  There were times in grad school where I felt like changing contexts (e.g., I finished writing the related work section at the office, now I'm going to go to the gym and read a paper while walking, then I'm going to go to the lab to grade a quarter of these papers) kept me from losing it.  There were also times where I'd try to chunk out work that was too much and then I'd end the day feeling like I hadn't accomplished anything because I had only gotten one thing done.  If that happens, break it into smaller tasks.
The task list will also help you to prioritize.  For example, if you've finished four out of five of your problems and you haven't done any of your TA work, maybe you up the priority on getting one of those tasks done next.  Hang in there and good luck! :)

I am in a similar siutation (Second year PhD student in EE) and I think it is simply a problem of having too much on your plate. Problem solving takes a long time because of how it is. It is meant to take that long. At this point, I would drop the TAing. You simply do not have time to do it. Focus on your courses and research.


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Outcomes of the Greek Life for a graduate student
A graduate student's main task would be the concentration on the research and scientific stuffs for stepping on the path of progression, as well as possible.
Social programs within the university would be effective in cultural view point, but could distract the student's concentration and waste his/her time. One might assert that a typical social program would be such useful (in perspective of the personal and social denouements) that the risk of the imbalance within the time sharing between expecting research and extracurricular activities could be neglected.
Greek Life is just among both the most intriguing social programs and most time-consuming ones.
What kind of outcomes could be conceived for a graduate student, who takes part in Greek Life, actively?

Are graduate students even eligible to join most fraternities / sororities?  I had the impression that they were generally restricted to undergraduates.

When you say Greek life, do you mean fraternities/sororities and the like? It's my impression that most frats are undergrad only, at least in the US.

Most of the social Greek letter organizations at U.S. campuses that I've seen don't include graduate students.  Whether this is by design or by outcome I'm not sure, though I would think it's a combo of the two.

@NateEldredge: Greek Life has been defined for graduate students in some US universities. Please find Naraht thread here:http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/showthread.php?t=133906

If it's true that Greek Life is an option for grad students, then this question is surely useful (and shouldn't be downvoted). I get the distinct impression that people are downvoting this because they think the idea of joining a frat as a grad student is absurd...(maybe it is...)

@APrioriRainbows There is also the problem that the OP assumes that we know what "greek life" is. I as an European academic honestly have no idea. Question that I don't even understand equals downvote until fixed.

@xLeitix I see your point.

To restate what everyone is saying in an answer:
this usually isn't an option for graduate students.
To say a bit more...
Your time in graduate school should be career focused. There will be plenty of departmental activities that will provide an outlet for socialization (and dare I say drinking). If joining a frat/sorority is even possible, it's a bad idea.
You should be making connections with your academic peers and professors--not other university students generally.

It clears the situation...

I think it's good to make some social connections outside your department. I joined my university's outdoors club and karate club and really enjoyed my experience, including meeting a range of students. But I agree that joining a fraternity or sorority would be a bad idea (if it were possible).

@Anonymous Yes. I didn't mean that you avoid all non-departmental social activities. But in terms of how Greek life relates directly to your success in graduate school? It doesn't. Just as joining the outdoors club doesn't relate directly to a graduate program. But it's a nice social opportunity that you can take advantage of through your university.

In my experience, I don't know of any graduate student Fraternities (I attend FSU). However, as a grad student your experience has some similarities of a frat, at least in my experience. You are in classes with the same (or many of the same) people every day. Our business school has many gatherings and social events for the entire business school as well as within each specific department. I am now in the PhD program and there is a PhD student association that also has many gatherings. The people you go through these types of degrees become your brothers, as you both struggle to overcome the same obstacles. So it's similar to a fraternity, but instead of "obstacles" meaning sliding down a slip and slide with another drunk guy into a human pyramid of cheerleaders, you are trying to pass a quantitatively intense test with another person seeking a professional career. Yea, they're basically one in the same ;)


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What should one do when the professor uses condensed terse notes in a graduate class?
I am in a graduate course of functional analysis (in the abstract setting of topological vector spaces) in which the professor uses his own notes. The notes are very condensed and terse and there is no reference. Classes consist of student presentations in turn and the professor does not lecture.
I struggle with the materials in the notes and try to read related books (e.g., Functional Analysis by Rudin, Topological Vector Spaces by Schaefer, Topological Vector Spaces by Narici and  Beckenstein) as much as I can, so that I can somehow understand it. I find this ridiculously time-consuming and painful. The worst thing is that approaches in the notes are usually quite different from the standard references I can find and I am not even familiar with those references.
Is such situation common in the graduate schools in US (especially for math majors)? What shall I do to deal with such difficulties and (maybe) benefit from a class like this?

Functional analysis texts frequently are terse. "Time-consuming and painful" sounds very familiar to me in an FA context. Have you discussed this with your classmates and the professors?

Welcome to how research is performed?  Seriously, that's pretty much how it works, though not every course is taught like this.  The vast majority of papers are dense and terse expositions which are perfectly fluid to the authors (one hopes) because they have spent so much time working it all out and reading the literature.  You have to put in a similar amount of effort and time to get to a similar level of understanding.  Making sense of it all, especially by untangling how to understand it in the at least 8 different ways of stating and doing things, is just a necessary skill for research.

Terse doesn't necessarily mean bad. I had a lecturer who managed to condense an entire course onto 4 sides of A4. It was easily understandable; it sounds like your lecturer isn't that good at explaining the material...

Does your professor hold office hours? Why not go and ask him/her to help you with the concepts you have trouble understanding? Make sure to use up as much of his/her time as is diplomatically possible; maybe that will help drive home the message that the materials your professor is providing you with are not adequate. And if you find the professor's teaching quality (in the broad sense that includes the lack of lecturing and inadequate teaching material) to be sufficiently disturbing, it seems reasonable to complain to your graduate program chair or department chair. Good luck!

Have you tried Introductory Functional Analysis by Kreyszig? It is one of the more readable books.

I came to say what @yoyostein said. Try Kreyszig.

@yoyostein: Thanks for you comment. Having looked at the content, I think   Kreyszig's book is more about Banach spaces and Hilbert spaces, not in the "abstract setting of topological vector spaces".

To directly respond to your first question: yes, "density" is quite common in middle-to-top tier grad programs in math in the U.S., once one gets beyond the "required/core" courses. There is a lot of backstory for almost all subjects, and faculty want to catch up to somewhere close to current events. It is also common that one's conception of an incisive, efficient, insightful course is not mirrored accurately in existing textbooks, so one writes notes to match. (This is better than "in the old days", pre-TeX, when most often there were no published notes of any kind, not even hand-written, so note-taking in class was critical.)
About "abstract" functional analysis in particular, yes, I think it is fair to say that the style of many of the standard texts (and of practitioners) has drifted in a certain direction, including a sort of "density". The hilarious and not-really-helpful opposite, from an older time, was the Dunford-Schwartz 3-volume extravaganza, which treated nearly every bit of mathematics as though readers would not have heard of it. Determinants, polynomials, etc. Naturally, this low-density high-volume approach created its own problems, not the least of which was locating the key examples that were not part of "general" mathematics, but specific to the functional-analytic ideas.
The subsequent decades' monographs or texts on "topological vector spaces" have always struck me as peculiarly unhelpful in making connections to other parts of mathematics, though "maybe it's just me". I cannot keep all the possible adjectives straight, and I do not see the point of many of them, nor are examples clear to me. Again, maybe it's just my own limited interest, since I care about "functional analysis" for "applications" (to automorphic forms and related matters) rather than to itself, or to "applications outside mathematics".
A point that was not clear to me for a long time is that the "more exotic" types of topological vector spaces (and families thereof, as in Sobolev-space theory) are not merely "handy", but essential in making many innocent-seeming discussions legitimate. So, not merely Frechet spaces, but LF-spaces (strict inductive limits of Frechet) already appearing as the correct topology on $C^o_c(\mathbb R)$, for example. The notion of quasi-completeness really is necessary, since LF-spaces are never "complete" (unless they're secretly Frechet), but are always quasi-complete. And quasi-completeness is enough for many essential things to still work, like the Gelfand-Pettis (or Bochner) ideas about vector-valued integrals, and Grothendieck's results about holomorphic vector-valued functions, and the strong operator topology (weaker than the Banach-space uniform norm topology on operators on a Hilbert space). Holomorphic distribution-valued functions, and so on. (My on-line functional analysis notes certainly go in such directions.)
In short, examples are critical, both to illustrate adjectives and theorems, and to see the necessity of introducing various seemingly-exotic types of topological vector spaces.
At the same time, I think building up a resistance to random counter-example demands is good, much as with point-set topology. Some counter-examples are significant, others aren't. Much time can be killed, not terribly profitably, by trying to illustrate every possible logical distinction. Don't do it.

And as @user37208 notes, there are many ways to organize a "functional analysis" course. The genuine meta-point there is that there is no canonical logical/serial ordering. The same absence is manifest in most more-serious mathematics, despite the affection we may have for trying to impose such an order. Apart from maybe worrying about grades and "what the instructor wants", better to realize the absence of large-scale logical order, and learn to see things as a "reality", and cope with some disorder.

Many thanks. (Typos in the second last paragraph?) I've been struggling with the terse notes line by line and almost word by word. I happened to read your online note about the bipolar theorem which is very helpful to me recently by the way. Are you saying that in the US, a course like this is supposed to be beyond the "required/core" courses level which implies that it has to include sort of density?

Oop, yes, a delayed verb never appeared! :) I edited. But, no, it doesn't have to be dense... it's just that there are many forces that will cause it to be dense. After a year or two in grad school, density should be welcomed (up to a point) I think because it is pushing you closer to the present. Easy-going courses all too easily (but not always! appearances can be deceiving!) create a warm fuzzy feeling but dis-serve people attending. That is, there's a lot to do, and not enough time to do it... :)  (I'm glad my notes were helpful!)

... and, yes, a serious functional analysis course (as opposed to a too-retro mere introduction of the notions of Hilbert and Banach spaces, for example), whether it emphasizes operator theory or topological vector spaces, is not ordinarily a "first-year grad course", even at nearly-top places, because one needs some grounding in "what can go wrong" that is at least the first part of a fairly serious real analysis course.

Functional analysis is one of those subjects that can be organized in so many different ways that two randomly-chosen textbooks will almost never have the topics in a similar order, logically or pedagogically. For instance, one textbook might prove Theorem B as a consequence of Theorem A, where another book (or your class notes) might prove Theorem B from scratch, and use it to prove Theorem A. For that reason, your outside references could be confusing the issue more than they're helping. Seeing a different presentation may be very helpful after this class is over, but for now, I think you should double down on understanding the professor's notes, such as they are. Study groups can help tremendously with this, as can asking your professor questions in office hours (which he hopefully has).

Find a book to supplement the professor's notes? I used J.T. Oden and L. Demkowicz. Functional Analysis. CRC Press. 1996. when I took the course from Prof. Demkowicz in ~2000. I found it useful and still have occasion to reference it from time to time.

The OP explicitly mentioned that he is reading related books "as much as he can" - apparently this doesn't help him...

Maybe he needs a better book. He didn't say which books he was looking at.

I was not able to find a book with the title and authors you give.  There is a book Applied Functional Analysis by Oden and Demkowicz.  That you recommend this book for a functional analysis course "in the abstract setting of topological vector spaces" seems quite curious to me: the book contains the definition of a topological vector space but less than ten pages of material on tvs's which are not Banach spaces.  It does not speak of Frechet spaces, completeness in the non-metric context, tensor products, nuclear spaces....It looks like a great book for some course, but not the OP's.

Thanks for your comment @Bill Barth. I added the references I've been looking at in the post.

That's it. I blame various distractions for my failure to transcribe the spine correctly. It was in a very applied context.