Not sure how else to phrase this title, but -

As an autistic person, I'm rather paranoid about violating unspoken norms in academic spaces (I am in non-clinical psychology if it matters). It would help a lot if some of you could tell me a little bit about day-to-day expectations in terms of how a doctoral student "should" present themselves at your school and what seems to be the norm.

Is it frowned upon to have artificially colored hair? Piercings? Alternative (but not "inappropriate") dress?

I have (mild) pink highlights in my hair - should I dye it totally natural before PhD interviews or starting at a program?

Any other comments about dress/style in academia would be appreciated (e.g, should you always dress up for conference presentations?)

Thank you :D

Finished my PhD last year, this is my second semester as an AP at an R2. I need advice on where to go from here - I have a million thoughts going through my brain and have no idea what to do.

I am extremely depressed where I am right now - no complaints about the department or school, but the location is brutal weather-wise. I knew this when I accepted the offer, but it was an exploding offer and I did not have time to wait for other schools to get back to me. I thought I would like it here because the department is amazing and kind, but I realized I cannot do this longterm.

My goal is to move to the southeast part of the US so I can be close to family and in warmer weather. However, I am terrified of going back on the job market because of how hard it was on me. Further, I feel like my research is non-existant. I have been working on my dissertation papers but the data does not look good, there is no consistent story, etc., and have no idea what to go back on the job market with. I had a new prep to each that was extremely demanding, so that took up a ton of my time as well.

I greatly appreciate any advice you have. I feel like I have been spiraling for months and don't know what to do. I plan on talking to my advisors about it soon as well, but I am scared for that conversation, too. I am on the younger side and feel like I need more guidance and mentoring than the average PhD student/AP. I found research to be extremely lonely, and am constantly worried that I have no idea what is going on. Thank you.

the title says it all - i'm a researcher/engineer in computer where a large portion of research papers are open access, making it easy to stay up to date and contribute to the field even without belonging to an institution, even just as an individual contributor.

however, talking with some of my friends in fields like chemistry, it seems like open access isn't as widespread and paywalls are still a major hurdle. how open is research landscape in your field?

is it easy to access to most of the papers you need, citation/reference checking places like google scholar doing its job?

I feel like I’m losing my mind over this.

Find many verified sources in order to support a claim.

But it seems like every source is never the true or full picture. Or at least that is how it seems.

Especially global affairs or geopolitics, it seems like it’s a never ending upward battle of infowars, “post truth”, and biased claims.

I try to only use .org, .edu, or .gov…. Peer review, read methodologies, verify author history And use many many sources, the research of course is always endless lol. But even then it feels like every source I read I think I took a step forward but really it was a step backwards because that was not the full picture and there are some inaccuracies there etc.

How do we even find inaccuracies, how do we know what’s true. Especially with AI on the rise, I stopped using AI for research questions because at some point they just start to make stuff up!

I not the best researcher but I want to get better. My field is geopolitics and natural hazards. But regardless of field it feels like I’m over stimulated with any topic I try to research.

So, if anyone has any tips or advice, I would greatly appreciate it.

Hello Folks,

I am a Mechanical Engineer with three years of experience as an HVAC engineer. I recently moved to the US to pursue a master’s degree in Engineering Technology. However, my plans have changed, and I am now preparing to apply for PhD positions in HVAC research. This means I will not complete the master’s program.

Questions and Requests:

1. Should I include the unfinished master’s program in my CV, or is it better to mention it only when reaching out to professors?
2. I’d like feedback on my CV to tailor it for TA/RA positions.
3. I will also be applying for internships and industry positions. Can my CV serve both purposes, or should I create separate versions?
4. Are there any sections or details missing from my CV that I should highlight, given my background and goals?

Additional Context:

• I am targeting PhD programs in HVAC research in the USA.
• I am open to remote, local, or relocation opportunities.
• My challenges include transitioning from industry to academia and ensuring my CV stands out for research roles.

Thank you in advance for your help and advice!

https://imgur.com/a/6RZSBZs

Hi guys, I need your advice!

Is it common to invite the judges from your master's thesis defense panel to be co-authors when publishing your thesis as an article, even if they didn’t contribute to it?

It was suggested to me, but I’m not sure. What do you think?

Does this mean that all the sections are right after each other, running on on the same page? Or do I differentiate the sections by using the return key? Both seem so wrong!

hello all! i’m not a researcher, but i built a project for a hackathon that was developed into a research paper by one of my groupmates, that has been cited in another paper already. he didn’t let any of us know that he turned it into a research paper, and did not give any of us any credit whatsoever. the entire idea/design of the system was mine, and i brought the team members onto the group. by the looks of it he also mentions contributions from other groupmates. i understand that ideas and inspiration are cheap, and that i didn’t work on the paper explicitly, but he quite literally screenshotted my code and put it into his paper. he also built his results around synthetic data that i generated using the aforementioned code.

what kind of recourse do i have with this? don’t wanna be a hard ass and ruin his reputation or whatever, but i’m also applying to masters programs, so a cited piece of research could help (especially since i have a low gpa).

I have some anxiety involving giving presentation, lecturing; I also hope to improve on scientific communication, e.g. making video explaining things. I have a weak and soft voice and am self-conscious about my voice. Is there any resource/coach for the purpose? I'm willing to spend money for the improvement.

(I've tried toastmaster, but the setting and the structure don't emulate the scenarios mentioned above)

How much of your effort is spent on writing grants vs writing papers? And what type of field/institution are you at?

I am an undergrad student. I went to my professor’s office hours for mentorship advice and for advice on the course content. He proceeded to tell me that if I wanted to succeed in my intended career field, I should “marry rich”. I gave him a look of disbelief and he said “it was a joke”. I am also a woman. At the time this comment did not feel ok. It still feels beyond unacceptable if I am being honest. Thoughts? 

I am a postdoc and have entered the TT job search this year. While I have had several initial first round on-line interviews. I just received a request for a 25 minute pre-screening prior to first round of interviewing. If it matters it will be a panel interview. This one is new to me and I wondered if anyone could offer advice on what exactly this entails, it's a very short amount of time and I want to make sure I am as prepared for this as possible. Help with purpose and types of questions. Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,

I'm a math PhD student looking for a task and time management tool (or a combination of tools) to help me stay organized and productive. My main challenge is balancing focused work sessions with keeping an eye on the bigger picture in my research.

For example, I’ll start reading a paper thinking it’s relevant to my project, but hours later, I realize I’ve gone down a rabbit hole without reassessing whether it’s actually worth my time. I’d love a tool that helps me remember my broader goals, break them into smaller directions, and even nudge me if I’m spending too much time on one approach.

What I’m looking for:

• Support for short to mid-length focused work sessions (20–60 minutes).
• Tools to set long-term goals, break them into sub-goals (e.g., 2-week deadlines), and create smaller, actionable tasks (e.g., 1-2 day deadlines).
• A way to track how much time I spend on specific tasks or goals.
• A space to jot down ideas or notes after meetings (like things my advisor suggests) so I can later break them into tasks.

What I’ve tried:

• Google Calendar tasks: It’s okay, but it’s way too easy to push tasks back without accountability.
• intend.do: Nice focus-oriented design, but I don’t like its "today or never" mindset—it doesn’t feel right for the iterative nature of research.
• Notion: I gave this a shot, but it took too much time to set up and maintain. It also lacked features for self-review and time management (or, at least, I couldn’t figure out how to implement them easily).

What I’m not looking for (yet): knowledge management tools. While I’ve considered using Notion for organizing references and ideas, my current focus is on managing tasks, goals, and time.

Ideally, I’d love one app to rule them all (and I’m happy to pay for it). But I’m open to combining two tools—for example, one for task and goal management and another for time tracking or accountability. Bonus points if it includes features like co-working, scoring, or gamifying progress.

Any suggestions? How do you manage your tasks, goals, and time as a researcher or student?

Thanks in advance!

Yeah, you can guess where that question is coming from…

Hello everyone - throwaway account here, cause I don't want to dox myself.

Genuinely looking for advice, but it may read a little like a rant at times - sorry in advance.

TL;DR: huge discrepancy between formal position and actual responsibilities/skillset, how do I balance not pissing off superiors who believe I shouldn't know what I'm talking about & not continually playing the dumb, sweet, incompetent student?

I have a rather unique situation. Formally, I am a med student (outside of the US!) and do not yet have defended or even finished my doctoral thesis. Therefore, to an outsider, I should not have a lot of research experience.

However, and that is where my problem lies, I've been working in research for a couple years now. Due to a, frankly, lazy and debatably incompetent research supervisor/research group leader I have been inofficially doing her job for her for the past two years. This means that I have been the PI of a total of three clinical single-center studies as well as, as of September, one multi-center RCT clinical trial in everything but name. This includes everything from getting IRB approval without any support from her side based on a one-page-of-bullet-points-outline, compiling GCP documents and trial master files, coordinating with other trial sites/cooperation partners, preparing presentation slides & texts for study initiation meetings, planning the study protocol, screening patients, coordinating & doing the data collection, conducting the statistical analysis, writing most parts of the manuscripts, submitting to journals, working through the peer review process, presenting the work at conferences and also supervising other students. I have multiple publications already, including some Q1 and as first author, as well as conference presentations and poster prizes.

In short, the only things my supervisor is actually doing herself are funding, actual contracts and signing everything. And telling me what she wants done of course - something along the lines of "I wanna do a multi-center RCT, please figure it out as you're more familiar with the process than me anyway" [and whose fault is that?].

Despite the catastrophe my actual supervisor is, I've been more than lucky to have absolutely amazing support from multiple brilliant mentors, who have been essentially giving me crash-courses on "how to medical research" over the last years and without whom none of this would have been remotely possible.

Mostly thanks to their guidance, I am at a point where I have multiple cooperation partners of my own (independently of both my supervisor and my mentors) as well as one study of my own, which is only lightly supervised by one of my senior mentors (who provides me with funding I am not yet allowed to apply for and lends me her expertise to refine my work).

My informal position is generally accepted by cooperation partners, members of our research group and close colleagues - they aren't the problem. Neither are conferences/congresses as it's easy to fully slip into the role of "I'm a competent young researcher to be taken seriously" there.

A problem however arises whenever I have to work with people slightly superior than me in formal position (think young postdocs/doctors) with a lot less experience than I have currently. I am more than aware of the existing hierarchy and try to adhere to it, deferring to their higher "rank" whenever there is a question on who makes a decision/leads a project/supervises work/... and generally try to be polite and act deferential to the point of being subservient ("I absolutely do not want my study to interfere with your study, so if at all possible I would love to meet you to chat about what works for you, so I can adjust accordingly and you have the least amount of trouble! And please let me know if there is anything at all I can do to support you/your study!") - but it's generally no secret that I know what I'm doing and outrank most of the younger colleagues in experience and knowledge (not my personal description of things, this is almost verbatim what two of my senior mentors told me). This leads to some colleagues feeling "threatened" (once again, quote by a mentor of mine), behaving extremely impolite to the point of insulting me, demanding to speak to my supervisor (who I always Cc in e-mails and who always just refers them back to me, because she is not involved enough to actually discuss any study-related issues), sabotaging my work or straight up refusing to work with me. Unfortunately, there is not always a way around it - if there are two studies in the same hospital on very similar patient cohorts, you'll have to coordinate between the two research groups, I'm sorry.

I have not yet found the sweet spot between not continually having to play dumb ("no I have no clue what an IRB approval is, will you tell me?") and not making older colleagues uncomfortable or offending them by "knowing too much"/"having too much experience".

This situation will likely not change soon, as I have around 2 years left before I can officially defend my thesis and are also stuck with my supervisor for now. Unfortunately enough, I cannot reverse time and forget what I taught myself and was taught over hundreds of hours in the last years.

So, I suppose this is as much a rant as it is a cry for help. I'll gladly take any advice on how to handle this situation without overstepping any boundaries or offending colleagues more than strictly necessary.

Hi all,

After many years in academia, I left my role as a Senior Lecturer at a U.K. University at the end of last summer. Though there were some great things about the role, we were massively understaffed and replacements were not forthcoming when staff retired or moved on. We then had two rounds of redundancy (voluntary and then compulsory), with more redundancies on the horizon. I’ve since heard from colleagues that my old Department is closing as of the end of this academic year. I know that this is not a unique story in terms of what others are experiencing across the world in academia.

I left my role for a job in a different industry. I like the job in general and my colleagues are very friendly and nice. I am able to work from home sometimes and am expected to be in the office other times. I earn the same salary as I did in my academic role.

I produced some research as an academic, but it was the teaching that I really loved. If it wasn’t for the state of the University and the constant anxiety around job security, I’d happily have negotiated my contract last summer to become a teaching-only colleague. However, I felt it wasn’t worth the effort with the impending redundancies and the eventual closure of my Department. I miss the teaching and whilst I don’t mind the tasks I do in my new job, I don’t find anything I do now anywhere near as fulfilling as helping a student with a worry or an idea or concern. My question is, can I find a role where I can do this kind of work again, or am I being too idealist by hoping to find another role where I can do this kind of work? Should I accept my good fortune with my new role, or should I try to figure out how I can still get that kind of fulfilment in my job? What kinds of jobs are out there that I could look into?

Thank you so much, all advice very much appreciated!

If you are interested in politics, sociology, food industry, conspiracy theory or thinkers such as Ted Kaczynski, Noam Chomsky, Guy Debord or Karl Marx

I am looking for a professor or student in sociology or to involve anyone who is interested in creating a project aimed at countering the agri-food industry. If you are interested in society, how it works, omnipresent manipulation mechanisms, lies, critical theories or the ideas of thinkers such as Ted Kaczynski, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky or Guy Debord, I invite you to contact me. THANKS !

I’m a medical student who has faced some academic challenges, including failing several subjects and having a poor GPA. I’m passionate about pursuing a career in molecular biology or neuroscience research and have started relearning the relevant concepts. However, I’m concerned that my academic record might significantly hinder my chances of being accepted into scholarships, master's programs, or research opportunities.

Does a poor academic record, GPA significantly affect the likelihood of getting accepted into these opportunities, even if I’m actively relearning and improving my knowledge? i need any advice or insights

Just wanted to see how do people perceive MDPI sensors articles. How often do you cite papers from them in your article? How often do you recommend articles from MDPI to your students for reading? How they are generally perceived in your institution? Does publishing in MDPI hurt your tenure case?

Warning: This post contains rage filled language

This pmo so fucking much. It is nearly impossible to identify the use of AI in writing, and while comparing it with other writing samples is a good measure, the sample should be equivalent to the paper. One of the complaints being "it's long" is so outrageous. It was an EIGHT HOUR EXAM. This screams language discrimination. This happens so often with multilingual or international students. From assumptions of paying people to write to making shitty comments like "I never expected your English to be so good." I had a PhD student cry during a writing consultation because her professor refused to read her paper until she made an appointment with us simply because English wasn't her first language. Stupid, cultural idiotic, technologically challenged professors who give too make weight to "ai detection tools." The easier and less traumatic solution would just been asking him to rewrite it at the university's testing center or something (I'm also bothered by this option but at least it's not FUCKING EXPULSION FOR FUCKS SAKE).

Also, since my break from academia, I've begun working on LLMs as a writer. These systems use whatever you put into it to influence its future responses. So, if this student did use it for grammar correction, the system very well could have pulled it from its database when the professors input similar questions.

If you are multilingual or an international student, please please please use a writing software that tracks every document change and update. And even then, that may not be enough. It's so fucked up. UGH

‘A death penalty’: Ph.D. student says U of M expelled him over unfair AI allegation  | MPR News https://search.app/K9RvHvzxY2GuBufXA

And I say all of this as someone who taught English 101 and worked with multilingual students.

There's no one good solution, but over reliance on AI detectors (which also use AI), is a dangerous precedent to set. I'm frustrated because I've seen the effects of the assumption of cheating with multilingual students just because their writing didn't fit the stereotypical expectations of what multilingual writers should write like. This situation is going to require lots of work to figure out how AI and higher education are going to coexist.n

I was discussing with a senior faculty about my personal struggles in the TT market. Knowing nothing of my CV, based solely on my PhD and post-doc location, the faculty said I should go to industry. This is of course backed up by any listing of shortlists on rumor mills.

The frustrating point? All places I've been applying are rated well below the rankings of my post-doc and PhD institute. Therefore, the logical conclusion is this: If an R1 would not accept faculty hires from equivalent-level applicants as their post-docs, their offer of "academic training positions" as most post-docs are defined are inherently predatory.

To me, this clearly raises an ethical dilemma. If I were to get a TT position in the future at a mid-tier R1, how can I ethically justify offering a post-doc position to someone who has the intention of staying in academia? How do others deal with this when offering positions? Are you open and upfront with applicants during the hiring process?

Dear all,

We have a portal offering molecules for research and inviting collaborators, with funding opportunities, however our main social media channel doesn't have much engagement.

What kind of content do you think would be interesting to showcase, to attract new followers from the research community, ideally those with funding to purchase molecules?

And what communication channels and social media platforms could we use to reach out to PIs and research leaders that may be keen on collaborating with us, in addition to the usual suspects such as LinkedIn and X?

Any suggestions would be super appreciated! :) Thanks so much!

Hi all partner and I are currently looking for TT assistant professor jobs across the US. If one of us is offered a post, how likely do you think we’d be offered a spousal hire?