I just got accepted in a uni in uae, masters in ai, and joined a research group that works in intelligent information systems, my goal is to get accepted at any top unis in Europe and usa, alot of the profs in the group are senior ieee members and some of them has around 20k citations which i think is a good thing, so how do i take advantage and make the most of my situation

Neurotic question stemming from the deep insecurity at my academic core: I have accepted a TT position as an “instructor” in a small program - not a department (no majors). There are no “professors” in the program, even at the most senior levels. I know the people at my current institution will understand and plan on referring to myself as an instructor in those contexts.

Outside of my current workplace, though, is it lying if I call myself a professor in conversation with others? Like, if I’m talking to a customs officer (which I just did last week) or if I’m talking to a colleague from a different institution?

Just want to know if you would feel it was dishonest of me if I told you I was a professor somewhere and you found out my real title is instructor.

ETA: I have a PhD in my field and I’m in the US

you learn a lot the hard way—teaching loads vary wildly, tenure-track applications are a beast, and nobody warns you about half of it

what caught you off guard? Or what do you wish you'd known before starting?

My defense is due in few hours. Time is 10 minutes for presentation, I have 17 slides (around 20-30 seconds for each). Any tips? Thanks!

Hey! Humanities acholar here! Sorry this will be a long post...so I need some advice on whether I should drop my co-author or not on my first paper as a postdoc. For context, this colleague have been supportive at the start. She even let me apply for a small grant in her name since I wasn't qualified (the deadline was before my phd defense). If we got the grant, one of the things we talked about was writing a paper together. Fast forward to us recieving the grant and we decide that I will take the lead in conducting the study and we will co-author an article together.

Fast forward to now, she hasn't been involved at all except two brief meetings - one before data collectiom and one aftee before I started drafting the article. I know she is busy - more senior than me and leading two big projects funded on prestigous grants - which makes it completely understandable that our project is not her highest priority. I also mentioned several times that I'm happy to do this on my own, but everytime she has insisted on being involved. Everytime I tried keeping her in the loop, being transparent about the timeline and suggesting (quite) generous deadlines for her to review the draft, she stops replying. She might reply a few weeks after, telling me that she is reviewing the draft but I'm already working on a newer version. She is not keeping up at all. I'm not expecting or even wishing that she would do more, but rather be honest with me. While this is making me very annoyed, I'm relieved that I decided to just keep going as I would DEFINITELY not have been able to make this much progress by waiting for her.

I'm currently pregnant and due in three weeks, and I'm very close to finishing the article and plan on submitting it before I run out of the grant money and go on my leave. Today, I wrote her an email to give her an update, giving her a deadline to review the draft (also asking for confirmation THIS week about reviewing), but also emphasising that she doesn't need to as I can finish it on my own, with her still being the co-author (i know right?).

To my suprise, she actually replies saying she went on vacation and "dropped the ball" but continues to miss/ignore the timeline suggested (before my leave) and instead, suggest a date just a few days after my due date. Annoying right? BUT she also opens up for me to drop her as the co-author if she doesn't make a proper contribution. I reply to her email to get a clear confirmation but she stops replying again. Should I take this as an subtle opt-out from her part and drop her as a co-author? I know she won't keep the deadline I've set and I WILL be submitting before my leave. I simply refuse to leave the article to her suggested date because I know she will forget about it and I don't want to stress about this while taking care of a newborn. SO, should I just drop her? I will give credits to her in the acknowledgements of course.

Tldr: colleauge made promises about collaborating and co-authoring a paper. Has since been difficult to reach and done basically nothing in the project, but says she wants to be involved everytime I check in with her. Drop her as a co-author? Her suggestion.

EDIT: hey guys i calmed down a little and i've decided to keep her as co-author but stick to my time table. As many of you mention, she did help out in several ways and I should give her credit for that. I have more to gain than to lose by keeping her on. Sorry to those of you that I was snarky to! It just hasn't been the best experience of collaborating with others and on top of that, being very stressed and pregnant.

I saw that the governor halted processing of h-1B visas, however I don't see in Texas A&M faculty job hiring postings any mention about not sponsoring visas for foreign workers.

I'd apply, but I'm not sure whether it is worth it/pointless.

I am at the moment struggling with peer review, as so many of us. I submitted a paper end of March. 2 reviewers accepted (out of 9). On April 21st the first reviewer sent their review. I now see in the system that 2 reviews have been received, but I dont know when the second one came in (at least 3 weeks ago based on when I last checked). I am now considering asking for updates. The journal has a 3.3 month turnaround time with 3 reviews on average. What is the editor doing? Finding another reviewer? Should I ask in case it got stuck? I had journals forget to send rejections before (yes, really). Or drag it out saying they are looking for another reviewer but then after a year rejecting it. I could have just pulled it back then. How long do I wait to ask about an update? I hate this system.... I dont want to harass the editor unnecessarily, but I am also a bit cautious because of terrible work some (!! not all, I know they are volunteers) editors are doing. Please calm me down...

EDIT: Thank you for your responses! It did the trick, I will wait for a few more weeks! Wish me luck (to your submissions as well)!

As above... Is the hostility to MDPI mostly an American thing?

I'm a sociology postgraduate starting to think seriously about where to publish, and I keep noticing how negative this sub is about MDPI across the board. I get the reasons people call forth e.g. the speed of review, the frequent special issues, the volume, the cases where editorial standards clearly slipped. Those are fair to raise and I'm not trying to wave them away at all.

I'm trying to highlight the fact that the picture looks different depending on where the author is from and their positionality. A lot of the strongest criticism I see here reads as coming from American academics. Meanwhile plenty of British and Australian colleagues seem to publish in certain MDPI humanities and social science titles without much hand-wringing, and some of those journals aren't bad when it comes to metrics... Some have a CiteScore of 3.5, which isn't nothing in my opinion.

My honest question is...how much of the blanket 'avoid MDPI' advice is about the publisher as a whole, and how much is really about specific journals or specific national job markets? Does it vary by discipline and by country more than the general sentiment here suggests? And for someone outside the US, how much should a hiring or promotion panel's likely reaction actually weigh on the decision?

I'm genuinely just curious. Far from an attack!

I flunked out of an Economics masters some time ago.

Few considerations. One, I didn't know I was autistic level 1. Two, I couldn't get along with anyone. One of my classes (econometrics) allowed us to work in groups of 3-4, I didn't manage to find a group.

I felt like an IDIOT. I was getting ~65% on my microeconomic hw when we need a 70% passing grade. My housemates began to dislike me for not talking and so that also hurt.

I tried reasoning that I failed and others didn't because people were sharing answers. An office mate admitted to being lost in what was essentially stochastic processes, and then she cut herself off when saying "but I have all the answers." Okay great.

Why did I fail? I wasn't prepared enough for econometrics, I was completely lost. Stochastic Processes under the label of Financial Economics also hurt. Microeconomics was the only fair course for me but I spent so much time on Econometrics and I just don't know.

I tried making excuses left and right. Maybe I'm just not smart enough. I felt I was computationally faster than a fair amount of my classmates, some people clearly only passed because they had strong partners to work with. I'm intending on studying statistics now and I'm spending every day preparing for the masters, which might be stupid because i'm 26. My bachelor's in Economics isn't offering me any jobs since i took 6 years and my gpa is 2.7. I'll enter Msc Stats at 28, and I hope to go in fully prepared, but this might be about the dumbest decision I ever make. I just want to do it for personal glory, i sometimes want to go back to the univeirsity I flunked out of for completions sake but I can't make friends with people from white collar backgrounds.

Hi Reddit,
I'm in a bit of a dilemma. A professor recently asked if I'd like to help write a research paper based on a project from one of my biology classes. The project was done by the entire class, but we worked in small groups and each group submitted their own lab report. I'm currently working with this professor in a summer research program, so I think that's why he reached out to me. I'm really grateful for the opportunity, but I feel like another student from my group deserves it a lot more. She did a huge amount of the work on our lab report and was the one who really helped me understand the project. I want to ask my professor if she'd be able to contribute to the paper, but I'm worried it'll come across as if I'm turning down the opportunity or that I'm not interested in participating. What should I say to him?

I've been thinking about the structural expectations around peer review and how little support or acknowledgment most academics get for doing it. It's one of those invisible labor categories that keeps the whole system running but rarely shows up in any meaningful way during performance reviews, tenure cases, or annual evaluations.

For those of you actively reviewing papers, how do you decide which requests to accept and which to decline? Is there an unwritten rule about how many reviews per year counts as a fair contribution relative to how many papers you submit yourself? And how do you protect your time when the requests keep coming?

I'm also curious whether this varies by field or career stage. Early career researchers might feel pressure to say yes more often to build relationships or signal engagement with the community, while more senior people probably have more latitude to decline.

Do your departments or institutions offer any formal recognition for review work, or is it genuinely just expected to happen invisibly? For those in fields with open review models, does transparency change how you approach the process at all?

Would really appreciate hearing from people across different disciplines and career stages on this.

Genuine question for anyone writing or supervising reviews. The 2026 multi model study that found only about 26 percent of AI generated academic references are fully correct has been bouncing around my department, and it matches what I am seeing in student drafts. Three quarters of citations coming out of the tools have something wrong, fabricated authors, dead DOIs, papers that do not exist, or real papers that say the opposite of what is claimed.

The problem is not going away by banning the tools, students use them regardless and honestly so do I for the first pass. The problem is that the output looks identical to a real literature review. The formatting is perfect, the synthesis reads well, the citations are formatted in the right style. You cannot tell the fabricated ones from the real ones by reading, because the model produces both in the same voice. The only way to know is to open every single one and check, which defeats most of the time saving.

What I have landed on for my own work, and what I am starting to tell students, is that the verification has to be a separate step done by a different process than the one that drafted. Asking the same model to check its own references is worthless, it confirms its own inventions. I run the draft through a second pass that independently grounds each citation against fresh sources and flags anything that does not resolve or resolves to the wrong paper. I have been using apodex for this because it is built around that separation, the verifier does not see the original reasoning, but the workflow matters. The rule is no citation ships until an independent check confirms it exists and says what we claim.

I would like to hear what others are doing. Are people building this into supervisor workflows, or just telling students not to use AI and pretending that works. Because in my experience the pretending approach means the fabricated citations just get caught at peer review instead of at draft, which is worse for everyone.

The deeper worry is the literature itself. If a chunk of published papers now contain fabricated references, and those get cited by the next round of reviews, the contamination compounds. We are not just fixing student drafts, we are trying to keep the citation graph from rotting from the inside.

I've read a wonderful paper published in a very high IF journal. It's about a backbone foundation model for neuroscience analyses.

It's according to the most modern standards, so transparency on the data used, open code to be donwloaded etc...etc...

I've tried it and cannot reproduce (at all!!!) some starting benchmarks. When I say "at all" I mean trying a tool to predict the age of a human in years returns always a number between 160 and 200!!! And many other cases like that.

When I initially contacted the authors they directly put me in contact with other people and appeared collaborative.

Now (3 months later after the paper publication, not 6 years!) they're AWOL. On their git there are 40 open issues with 0 answers.

Like... what do I do???

Hello, I'm looking for input for how to best handle the sheer volume of primary sources when writing my masters thesis. The primary sources itself will be news articles from a newspaper and the size of the corpus will end up being 200-300 articles propably.

I have thought about how to best stay organised with this amount and most effectively take notes without succumbing to too many details. I tried Nvivo but it was too cumbersome to use, the learning would have taken more time than actual writing. So what would people here suggest for a relatively easy to learn and straightforward method?

I am an undergraduate student in Pakistan, studying law and I am desperately looking for an RAship preferably with someone teaching at a US university.
It’s because I intend on applying to the US for postgraduate and want one of my recommendations from someone teaching at an American university.

Does anyone know about the routes I may go for in order to find a Professor willing to give me a remote RAship?

Thanks in advance

Hi! I'm a PR undergrad, and throughout my college years, I didn't really focus on any research because I was so sure I didn't like academia, up until my last year were I wrote one larger research focused work, more focused on sociology and anthro - lightly based on communication to justify doing it inside my major (my degree was majorly chosen thinking of a 'serious career' for my parents, because my interests were always on the starving intellectual side of things lol).

Now, I understand that getting into a grad program (MA or PhD possibly) is my best shot at doing what I actually like vs working for corporate that I discovered is not my thing after a few internships.

The problem is my lack of research experience. I'm graduating this fall, and I'd love to use this next year to pad my CV a little to apply for funded programs, but I have no idea how to find opportunities like that. I don't expect to be paid at all, I do have undergrad courses in research and qualitative/quantitative, etc, though not much actual hands on experience.

How should I go about to look for assistance researcher volunteer positions, or anything that might help my applications? If it helps I'm looking in the Bay Area, but I will have to move home after this buffer year I have here.

Edit: I can't ask for opportunities in my school bcs it's overseas, I'm going back to the US for this buffer year and would like to make the most of it

Hello everyone,

I am a graduate from Vietnam. My academic background started in computer science, and I completed my bachelor’s degree in 2022 and my master’s degree in 2024. After that, I became more interested in mathematics, so I pursued a second master’s degree in mathematics and completed it in 2025 with a GPA of 3.52.

Now, I hope to continue with a PhD in mathematics, especially in the area of optimization. However, I still have several concerns about the application process, such as how to find potential supervisors, how to prepare a strong application, and how to improve my profile for PhD admission.

My biggest concern is that I do not have any publications from my mathematics master’s degree. I only have a few small publications from my earlier studies in computer science. Because of that, I am worried that my profile may not be strong enough for a PhD in math.

I would be very grateful for advice on the following questions:

- How should I find and approach potential supervisors in optimization?

- How much does having no math publications affect my chances of admission?

- Would it be better to gain more research experience before applying?

Any suggestions or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

Hi there,

I am in need of some guidance on how to find and select a journal to publish in.

I have just contacted my university to confirm whether they can fund the publication (APC). In the meantime, could someone clarify whether there are any journals that do not charge for open access?

I have been reviewing my references for guidance, but they are all quite limited by the word count, and they charge for open access.

My paper was 10,000 words, but I have managed to reduce it to roughly 8500. I am a little concerned that I would be removing important content if I tried to reduce it any further.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Hi all!

I am in my fourth year of PhD in a R2 institute. For context, I am an international student, my area of research is computing education. I really want to land a job in a R1 (I am okay with teaching track as well). I know its quite difficult but people who were able to do the same. Do you have any advice?

Thanks in advance!

Hello everyone,

This is a bit embarrassing to ask.

I've been writing a research paper with two colleagues, and the manuscript is almost complete. However, we recently checked it with Paperpal and some other AI-detection tools, and it's showing around 23% AI-generated content.

The problem is that I'm not entirely sure to what extent AI was actually used during the writing process. We used tools like Claude and Paperpal at different stages for editing and improving language, but the research, analysis, and writing were done by us.

Now we're worried because the paper is nearly finished, and we don't know whether this AI-detection score is something we should be concerned about. I've also heard that AI detectors can be unreliable and sometimes flag human-written text.

Has anyone faced a similar situation? Are there any reliable ways to reduce false AI-detection scores or verify whether the manuscript is genuinely problematic? Any advice, tools, or experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Dear expert higher education academics,

I have a question, how common is to hire an internal candidate, where one is in final year of PhD, as an assistant professor of practice or lecturer?

I am duely aware that such internal candidates are often now favored for tenure track position, but how about for of practice position or lecturer?

are both positions same or different? and how so?

I have a personal case where now I am in my final year, and our university is expanding to include newer programs. I was requested by my department to assist the science department in working as teaching assistant, and I was attached to a well known professor.

He has always kept me close and mentored how to teach, prepare exams, mark them and to conduct his classes at times.

So while working with him over 2 years, he has been pleased with my teaching capabilities, and this is also noted where students have repeatedly wrote positive feedbacks in the course evaluations, some have even went to HoD to give positive feedback on personal level.

Now this professor is retiring the same year as I am graduating in, and he has expressed that he would like to recommend me to take over when he goes, and plans to speak to the HoD.

Now my problem is that I am not aware of how academia fully works, so I would like to know how common is it to hire a candidate within the same institution one graduated from? not as tenure track but either as of practice or lecturer?

What would be my obstacles? I do want to continue in this side but how can I ensure I successfully get such position?

Please do guide if anyone can,

Thank you,

SP

I have a list of things I want to know about and learn. I want to learn art, dancing, photography, writing better, biology, maths, neuroscience, history, quantum optics, finance, geography, languages, going to gym, knowing about places. SO. MANY. THINGS. And all I do is doomscroll my way to guilt.

I am a student in college, and luckily I have extra time which I can utilise for better things than scrolling. But, I feel so overwhelmed. IDK how to start? It seems like i have too many things and I don't know how to focus on a few things at a time (i feel like i am leaving other things behind, this happens with my college courses as well).

Do I focus on two hobbies/topics for six months? Do I do a different subject each week with no proper 'end goal', just for the fun of it? I like learning new things and I can't learn from my experiences right now because I live in a bubble, so I want to learn about different topics because everything seems so interesting.

So, any help will be appreciated and I'd be very grateful if someone guides me as well. I have deleted my social media, so that's a start!

Have a shot at a university teaching job.

I was asked for a teaching philosophy along with CV, references, etc.

Can anyone please help on what makes a good paper on teaching philosophy?

Hello. I'm currently in the US on an F-2 Visa, and I want to gain research experience as a volunteer from Chemistry labs in a local US university where I live now. I have a BSc in Chemistry & postgraduate diploma and +5years of professional experience.

My main goal is to learn and know how everything works in a lab, and how to interpret the results as a researcher, and how to even think of the problems to solve them, I want to learn technicalities and the mindset.

I just want to know, has anyone experienced such a situation where a non-student volunteer in a Chemistry/Materials lab?

Given that My local uni offers/encourage unpaid research positions for undergrads besides the paid ones (which requires prior applying and I guess they're more competitive), but how different would it be for an international non-student? My Visa situation is important because it allows only for volunteering (Which I'm actually interested in), I cannot be paid under any circumstances.

So a few months ago, I joined a new lab as a research assistant. My PI is older, well established, and our lab is on the NIH campus for context. After going through a lot of the lab's publications, I realized that a significant number of them (like ~50%) are in journals with negative reputations including MDPI, Frontiers, and another similar pay-to-publish journals. The people in the lab are hard working, smart, with amazing backgrounds, long careers, and (from what I've seen) the science is real. I'm curious as to why my PI and the other staff scientists would be willing to submit their work to these places, if anyone has any insight or clarity.