I submitted my ERC Starting Grant proposal for the 2027 call last week. I'd like to share what a relief it is to have it of my chest. The last couple of months had me more and more tunnel visioned to cristalize my idea in what it became. I have been in academia for 11 years now and I have never experienced this kind of tunnel-visioned burden. It became everything, everywhere and everything else had to move. AI tools did not make writing it easier (what I expected tbh), because my reviewing tools kept on seeing flaws in the way how my proposal innovated my discipline and the feasability of it all. It blinded me for some time, making me anxious while I believed so strongly in my idea. It's a strange kind of insecurity that comes with the very low success rate. Through it all, I really felt lonely because while doing research for me, is always a team effort, you have to do it all on your own while colleagus are doing their own work.

I took a few days off after submissions and now I am really eager to go back to work tomorrow and having headspace again for the various tasks I have, going from teaching, setting up a new data project, reviewing papers etcetera, and it is so nice to feel this way again.

I don't know why I write this post. It is my first post in Academia, but maybe other applicants may have similar feelings and it is good to know you're not alone. I would've loved to read some more experiences when I was all down my tunnel. Good luck for everyone who submitted! Certainty of stress, small chance of success, what were we waiting for?

I switched advisors last year because my former advisor had a very toxic advising style.

Some examples of what the environment was like:

• It was very common for everyone at the lab to work through weekends, vacations, and to be sleeping 4 hours a night to reach her deadlines. In my former advisor's view that's a "normal grad school" pace.
• She rewards extreme overwork and was always impressed when we were working late at night, which she monitored through our activity online on a shared platform (and made sure to let us know that she was checking to see how hard we were working).
• She was very harsh, intimidating and had explosive reactions if we made a small mistake, asked for more time to complete an analysis, or even if we asked questioned during a meeting. Everyone feels tense when she enters the room and is afraid to say anything that might annoy her.
  
• At the lab everyone trains themselves in complex skills that usually require hands on, guided training. She doesn't teach us or offer resources, she basically hopes we will "pick up" these skills from each other. However since all other members of the lab are working nonstop to reach her deadlines, no one is available to help.
• She has one of the paid lab assistants who is hired to help run research studies regularly clean her office.
  
• She has made comments on how one of the staff members dresses and asked her to dress differently, implying she might not renew her contract if she doesn't change the way she dresses to better align with the style of the lab. (For context, this staff member dresses completely normally, just not in my advisor's style).
  
• She has retaliated and threatened retaliation.
  • She offered me an opportunity for a publication and later after a meeting where I said I would like more training, took it away.
  • She openly threatened to write me a bad letter of recommendation if I ‘didn’t improve fast enough,’ using a future recommendation as leverage over my performance.
  • She considered writing a bad letter of recommendation for a lab assistant for reasons that were purely personal and not related to his skills, work experience or contributions to the research (I cannot give detail here because it would be too identifiable).
    

Eventually, after being berated for hours for not doing “enough” during a period when I was already sleeping only 4–6 hours a night trying to meet her deadlines, I reached a breaking point and left the lab. Other trainees are still there and are still struggling in the same environment.

During the process of switching advisors, I learned that several faculty members were already aware of my former advisor’s explosive temperament and serious mentoring problems. I also learned that concerns about her interpersonal behavior extended beyond her trainees, including conflict with at least one faculty member.

My question is: if a faculty member already has a reputation within the department for abusive or inappropriate treatment of trainees, does that typically matter in tenure review? If so, how much weight does it carry compared with things like grants, publications, and teaching?

I’d especially be interested in hearing from anyone who has served on a tenure committee or seen a similar case.

So I'm a student at a public university, and am planning to do a research project in the near future. I planned on doing it through a private university in the area, since I feel the data collection resources available at the private uni will be better than the ones at my public uni. I have acquaintances with some of the professors at the private uni so that won't be an issue, but am I supposed to get some type of no objection certificate from the university that I am currently studying in? I don't want it to become a problem in the future if my university is allowed to block such ventures.

I'm a F1 visa holder applying for a tenure track AP position, where the first page of the application is a questionnaire that ends with the question "Do you currently have unrestricted work authorization for the United States which will not require sponsorship at any point in the future?"

I'm wondering if this just means they will hire only US citizens & green card holders. I'd love to get some readings on this! Thank you in advance.

I’d love to hear from anyone who is either tenured, tenure-track, or a professor of practice with a PhD in Personal Financial Planning.

I’m a practicing advisor considering going for my PhD in Financial Planning from K-State. It seems like a relatively new path to be a financial planning professor, and I notice that many of the departments are under the College of Health, Human, or Consumer Sciences instead of under the Business Colleges, so I’m wondering if this led to any hurdles with being hired, tenured, or paid competitively. Additionally, I would need to complete my PhD online/hybrid, which is why I’m looking into K-State.

Im a first year social science phd and earlier this year my abstract got accepted into a small online journal. It's a bilingual journal mostly on French (which i don't speak) and isn't recognised by anyone in my department. At the same time my primary supervisor went on leave for three months.

While she was away i was working on the article and started to get unsure - i can't use a lot of the evidence i want to and I don't think I can make it a strong enough argument with what I have by the deadline (Nov 1). I do think it could be something good that I'm proud of with more time and without the limitations of the journals theme.

I spoke to my secondary and another member of faculty and they both said to keep working towards the deadline but to submit it elsewhere.

My supervisor has come back and decided I should sent it to the original journal. I explained the reasons I had for not wanting to do it (I also my first presentation this week so I don't have the time I would need to make it good anyway) but she said there was no excuse and to just do it because it had already been accepted.

I have my appraisal next month and am going to talk to them about changing supervisor teams because we're just not a good match but I want to keep a good relationship with her and I do understand her reasoning.

Now im stuck- is it work pushing myself for a subpar publication or should I save what I have for somewhere else???

I am currently busy preparing a fellowship application, and I have a meeting soon with a professor who could act as a potential host and supervisor. To give more detail, I have not previously worked with this professor, but I am highly familiar with their work, which shares many similarities with my own work, and we both work in a STEM field.

My current preparation mostly consists of reading their most recent work, seeing what their group publishes, and how I could connect this to my own work. I was thinking of preparing a short presentation on it, but I am quite unsure if this would be the best strategy. So my question to you would be what you think would work best. For example, does someone have similar experiences and was successful, or, if you are a professor, what would you like to see in such a situation?

Master's student here. I always seem to miss something. I search for stuff and am absolutely sure I checked all the common search engines for academia (Jstor, researchgate, academia.edu, university- search engine, hell even the library's old handwritten catalogue) but I still miss something that then my supervisor finds.

And I keep wondering, HOW. Because she is the one who taught the methods class and told us about all the ways to research studies on a topic but somehow she always finds more than any of us can 😭

How do the actual academics do it? Like how do you keep up to date with every publication there is, analogous publications I'd understand. You subscribe to them or get the newsletter the publishers send etc. But how do you do it with digital publications?

First, I wish AI did not exist and I think it is highly detrimental in so many ways. However the reality is I need to use it to maintain productivity in a very competitive field and am also aware that the educational landscape has changed and different skills are now valued. So I don’t want this to be a debate about that. I’m a teaching focused academic and my university has a license for Copilot when it comes to AI. I use AI mostly for research to categorise or find themes for structuring papers and to look for feedback on methodology or find ways to strengthen research design etc. I’ve found Copilot incredibly shit at every task. Claude works a bit better but I reach limits very quickly. I was wondering if it’s worth getting a personal Claude pro account and this would be tax deductible in my country. Or is it just as shit as copilot (surely not?) for things? Any thoughts?

I am a 20 year old undergrad student who has aspired to go into academia since high school. I am at a top canadian university studying languages and philosophy, and had originally aimed to pursue comparative literature at the post-graduate level. However, over the course of the past two years, I've grown quite disillusioned by my experience in university. I won't go into too much detail, but I think that my school particularly is very impacted by institutional politics in a way that I feel undermines the integrity of the education we are receiving, and of course, the advent of AI is really impacting the general habits of my peers.

I guess I've come to the understanding that passion isn't necessarily correlated with success in this field (or in any field, for that matter), and that I don't know if academia will really guarentee personal satisfaction for me, especially considering how taxing this career can be. At the same time, though, maybe I'm just getting older and becoming a little less naive in my expectations.

In short, despite being a top student, I haven't found my post-secondary experience personally fulfilling, and I'm questioning whether I should just reorient away from academia toward law school or something similar. My academic passions will always be my first love and mean the world to me, but I'm starting to think it may be more realistic to pursue them alongside a different career. I don't have anyone that I can talk to about these issues. No one in my family is associated with academia, and I don't think asking my profs is a wise course of action. So, any insights are welcome. Thank you in advance.

I am writing a paper with my professor in a PhD program and we are basically done with the writing. I took over the proejct from her undergrad a while back, retained 2 experiments that student did, and did 2 more experiments myself. The undergrad won't be a co-author, and she already graduated. I got the data file for the first 2 experiments from my professor, but upon examination, I realized they are modified files, not the original files. The professor also sent me the link to the online surveys the student used to collect the data, but the surveys don't match all the data and some questions in the survey are missing form the data. I want our submission to contain clean, clearly-labeled raw data sources without any modifications and asked my professor to reach out to the student for clarification. My professor never got back to me, presumably because the student didn't respond to her since she graduated.

My professor is the first author and she wants me to be the second (and corresponding) author. I am fine with her being first because she came up with the idea of the paper. But I'm much more hesitant about the corresponding author role because of the data transparency issue. In case anything happens, I need to be responsible for the data sources. But also my professor said we might need to redo all our experiments after getting reviewer feedback. I am not sure if this is something I need to ask her again to see if I can get the information I want, or if this isn't something to worry about and I can safely be a corresponding author.

I’m writing the discussion for my thesis and I realised I just messed it all up since I'm basically repeating the entire literature review. Im struggling to interpret the findings, because Im the only person who has researched this quantitatively (all my lit review papers are qual) and I did regression, so I cant even imply causality. Just associations, so I can’t really compare effect sizes or say “this matches X’s results.” I end up either summarising what the qualitative studies found again (which basically repeats my lit review), or speculating so much it starts to read like a qualitative discussion.

For those who’ve written a quant discussion where your study was the first of its kind:

• ⁠How did you use the existing literature without just rehashing it?
• ⁠How much explanation/speculation is appropriate for associations from cross-sectional data?
• ⁠Any examples or structures that helped you?

Greetings everyone,

I will be applying to consumer behavior track of Marketing PhD programs in the states. Basically, I need guidance in my university choice list such as whether I am being too much optimistic or is it realistic. Requesting all of the students in marketing PhD and people from adcom to evaluate my profile:

1. BBA, CGPA-3.39, from a top 1 business school of my country
2. MBA, CGPA-3.67, same uni as above.
3. Working papers: 3. Working to get 2 of them published since they are almost finished writing.

My master’s thesis: basically provided a new view and empirical evidence of a psychological consequence which was traditionally regarded as outcome factor into a driving factor. This theoretical pivot was novel and never done before. Because of this I got 4/4 on both oral and written report.

1. Have prior professional experience (during my BBA) as a freelancer statistical data analyst and consultant. Because of that I do have fairly good command on many statistics tools (such as spss, r, amos / smartpls) and methodologies. Basically I ran experimental, statistical and built predictive analysis for organizations and individual so have strong foundation in mediation, moderation, ANOVA, ANCOVA, MANOVA and other types of advanced statistical analyses and factorial design in generally.

2. GRE: 324 (Q-162, V-162).

3. Other stuffs: many coursera certifications and guided projects for the tools (r and powerbi) and many extra curricular activities regarding organizing and managing humanitarian work.

4. Teaching experience: Taught statistics, english to high school student as a tutor and currently tuturoing 1 student for GRE verbal section.

5. Background: Bangladesh.

6. Motivation: extremely strong since I love the process of unveiling new consumer behavior related phenomenon or looking at something from a different perspective and also love critiquing current status quo of knowledge and proposing something new based on research gap. Have strong desire to get into a department where seniors, faculties, peer help/collaborate and guide each other. Hopefully being in such a environment can help me create fresh & impactful knowledge that I can hopefully publish in the premier journals of marketing (JM, JAM, JCR, JCP, JMC etc). This is especially important for me because nobody from my country ever did it. Also, I have a good end to end understanding of the research process itself such as understanding current state of literature, figuring out gaps / asking new questions, designing methodological design, collecting data and analysis.

7. Plan: Going back to my country with the foreign degree (they pay a nasty amount of money for faculty positions in my country with a foreign degree and demands huge respect).

Requesting anybody please comment down with your opinions.

🔴 Extreme Reach — 3

* The University of Texas at Austin

* Duke University

* Washington University in St. Louis

🟠 High Reach — 5

* The University of Georgia

* The University of Arizona

* University of Maryland, College Park

* University of Florida

* University of Colorado Boulder

🟡 Target / Moderate Reach — 6

* University of Massachusetts Amherst

* University of Connecticut

* University of Cincinnati

* University of Houston

* University of Missouri

I'm a 30 year old, I'm a man if that matters, and this summer my colleague (a 34 year old woman) and I volunteered to teach kids at a k-12 math camp.

One day, my colleague came to camp wearing nothing but a plain tank top and jeans. There weren't any formal, written-down dress codes for the adults and we were all assumed to be professionals. She is conventionally attractive so the boys that day were relentless and they made comments about her (at one point bordering on an r joke) until she started crying. She couldn't stop crying. An older volunteer, who was also a woman, took my colleague to the side and more-or-less passive aggressively told her that she should have been fully clothed (she was probably doing her best to be nice but still). So when I agreed with the older lady, my colleague cussed me out and I'm still pissed about it.

FWIW the boys were banned from the camp. We all treated this incident rather pragmatically, as in "the boys definitely were at fault, but this could have been prevented".

Hey im currently an intern i completed my mbbs in india i want to research in molecular pathology i want to move to japan my overall percentage is 55% can i apply to any university am i eligible i am in a dilemma can any give a clarity

So my understanding is that for larger R1s you essentially need to be a superstar (K99, impeccable productivity, multiple high impact papers, stand out from sometimes 1k+ candidates). On average. Not saying it’s a must but just typically that’s what you see.

Whereas for smaller R1s, yes the applicant pool will likely still be huge but the shortlist is likely less competitive on average. Like a good track record and good research fit can get you through the door.

However, the funding landscape has clearly changed and the bar has definitely raised for all positions. My question is, are small R1s essentially what large R1s used to be?

Everyone is so desperate for positions so I am wondering how things compare to just a few years ago

EDIT: I get that every single TT position is competitive. I am mostly asking how much more competitive small R1s are compared to pre funding cut days. And by small R1 I mean the average small R1. Not an ivy league outlier.

I am a 20 year old third year undergraduate in Humanities and I’m in a (maybe you can agree) really delicate place right now.

I recently became good acquaintances with one of my TAs, and she is TA’ing for my class that i don’t think is her favourite. She just moved to my country for her PhD, which to someone in my position is pretty daunting.

We have connected over a shared topic of research interest(no relevance to class). As an undergrad, we do not do research, but I have taken courses on this topic and loved them. She has gladly given me advice on graduate school, explained her research, and how she got there. I know for sure I want to pursue grad school now, but all of this is entirely irrelevant to the class we are in. Also the topic of the class is not my strong suit at all, so I’m not pulling easy A’s like Einstein.

Is it realistic to think I have a possible mentor/research helper here if I play my cards really carefully? Going to her office hours and talking about grad school or secondary topic cannot be attractive to her. I plan to give her a handwritten card at the end of the term as a thank you.

How can I maintain this connection for future? This has never happened and I don’t want it to slip through my fingers.

Hi! I'm a master's student in psychology looking to access ResearchGate. My university has limited access to academic resources, and I'd really appreciate it if someone could send me an invitation or explain how to get access. Thanks in advance!

A new professor appeared who was kind of famous, at least in his world. He accepted me as his student and I was flattered. He sent me off to learn some fancy statistics which it turned out I was surprisingly good at. The professor (not a statistician himself) had developed his own special method of doing something and he taught this method to students.

I had finished my course work and started working on my dissertation. I didn't really understand his method but thought it might be something that might be helpful for my work. I sat down and very carefully and thoroughly studied the mechanics of his method. This slowly and painfully revealed to me that his elaborate "method" really actually didn't work correctly at all. I wrote this up and showed it to him.

He didn't want to even talk about this problem. He also was leaving town for the summer. He left something on my desk saying that he was giving me an incomplete grade on my work (which made little sense because all I was doing was working on my dissertation and wasn't taking any classes any more).

This escalated to the point that I practically got thrown out of grad school and I had to change to a new advisor, but the first guy (let's call him Jack, not his real name) had to stay on my committee also because of my funding. Jack found a few minor typos (like mispelling "black" as "balck" by mistake) in my dissertation and announced that it was full of errors and completely unreadable and he refused to read it. He "delegated" to my new committee chair saying that he would just let my new major advisor decide so Jack didn't have to read it himself.

So I did managed to get my degree by the skin of my teeth, no thanks to Jack! And even had a pretty reasonable career finally. It was a thoroughly awful experience though. And it weirded me out to see that famous Jack actually didn't know what he was talking about from a statistical point of view (I minored in statistics and had a real statistician on my committee so i did have a grip).

So I usually upload some of the practice work given in class to websites like studocu and others so I can have access to previous mid terms and exams because the professors don't post them until the week of. I mean I usually remove my info from the documents so Im not sure how they would know it's me, but I'm still kinda scared. How would this affect my chances of getting into engerining, BC this isn't really "academic dishonesty"

I'm just starting a career change. I think radiology technology fits my interest. I've been trying to look into schools that might be best for my lifestyle, location, and circumstances. I'm planning to apply to school in 2028 fall but trying to narrow it down as far as where.

I'm looking in the Schenectady, NY area. So far I see 2 schools close Fulton Montgomery and Maria College. I've been reading the reviews for both schools and it looks like Maria College isn't great. I'm looking for more feedback on which schools you're going to and enjoying! It can be anything across the country, just trying to get some feelers out there.

hi everyone, I'm an international student. started my grad school journey in fall term. i'm having a really hard time adjusting, i used to believe I'll never struggle with speaking in english as i've always been decent at it back home but translating my thoughts and actively participating in class has been a struggle. I also have social anxiety and i have a bunch of facilitations and oral test coming up i'm genuinely terrified because i get completely blank when i'm put on spot. I can do presentations because I read off the pointers i make and maybe I'll do the same for facilitation read it from a paper while looking up every once a while

But for the oral tests, I can't I genuinely can't. and trust it's not because I dont know the answer, if they ask me to write it down right there, I'll do it so easily. But I hate when everyone's attention is on me and I start shaking and stuttering and go blank.

Should I tell my professors about this? i've reached out to a counselor but it's barely been any help, so i stopped. and going through this as a grad student at my big age i feel embarrassed. I have this constant thought of my professors regretting that they accepted me into the program.

Background: Comp Sci PhD from an R1 university (non-US), my research area is cross-disciplinary (Comp Sci, Finance, and Statistics).

My goal is to get an academic role in a top university in a business school in China.

Right now, I have 3 offers:

• Postdoc at MIT in Comp Sci, under a very well-known researcher (close to Turing Award level), but his main research area is related to biostats with applications in the biomedical field (easier for Nature). They publish very few papers, but all are very high quality. Most of their PhDs and Postdocs have 0 publications. But when they do publish, it's usually Nature-level. They did have a few big 3 finance journals from the early 90s with over 4000 citations. And have not touched any finance since then.
• Postdoc at a top US business school (not HYPSM) that pumped out a lot of top Finance journals in recent years.
• Junior lecturer (the equivalent of an Assistant Prof) at a top 3 Australian uni, in the business school.

My biggest worry with the Australian uni is that top finance journals love big uni names, if none of your co-authors have published in those venues before, and your current affiliation is not from a top US uni or Oxbridge you risk getting rejected (or much harder to get accepted).

I was thinking of doing a postdoc in one of those target unis in the US, submit alot of papers while I am there. Then look for an academic role in China. But many people around me are calling me crazy for not accepting the Australian offer. They said even if you are a postdoc from HYPSM, that offer from Australia would still be competitive to obtain. Given the current AI paper spamming slop, it might be even harder to get a role after postdoc.

I was wondering if anyone can give me any advice.

Does anyone else have this experience, and how do you manage/overcome this? I’m working on a history research project. Even though I have an outline, source base, and narrow (6 year) time period, I can’t seem to get past the tendency to get stuck on “fully understanding” a historical trend that’s one small piece or that isn’t even the direct subject of the paper. Then I get sucked into just reading and writing about that, with little to show for it. I think it’s a combo of obsessive tendencies, perfectionism, and maybe subconsciously avoiding the actual thing, so fixating on something tangentially related instead. It feels like quicksand. When I try to move on I get so overwhelmed and then my mental system crashes.

Any guidance, practical strategies, etc would be super helpful. Do I just need to catch myself when this happens and force myself to move on? I really want to go to grad school but I’m worried I don’t have the discipline that it takes. I have ADHD and struggle with having clear mental compartments or being able to direct my thinking in a conscious way

Asking about do conferences in your field make profit, because the discussion in this thread raised many thoughts in me https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1x6qbmb/​

My experience is from biomedical engineering field in Finland/Europe and all the conferences I have been attending over the last 10 years are organized by some scientific society. So they are not for-profit organizers. Actually I know our Nordic society right now has even a problem that we need to spend the surplus budget our annual conference earned, when organizers were too good at getting sponsors. So they are giving extra travel grants next year. By law the non-profit association is not allowed to accumulate significant wealth.

I have also been in organizing committee of several small national conferences and we always try to put the registration costs as low as possible. So need exact calculation on how many sponsors we need to keep registration price at less than 500euros for example.

So when in that linked thread so many people say that it is completely fine to sneak in conferences and attend the dinners without paying, I find it hard to agree on. However, somehow, if the conference was making profit, and/or was run by a company, not by a scientific society, it would be easier for me to understand why so many people seem to advocate for sneaking in and attending for free.

So are the conferences in your field making profit? Which country and which field?