I am going to attend my PhD interview online. The PI asked me to present my previous work and a research proposal in 10 min. I made a 8 slide presentation. Is it very big for 10 min?  And the other thing he told me is, at the end he is going to give me some time so that I can ask questions. What kind of question should I ask in this case? Related to subject? What other areas (other than subject) should I consider to ask questions?
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I've a Skype interview for PhD application (it will make me miss  today.) I've been asked, in advance, to prepare a short presentation and then there would be some discussion with the panel (I guess.) I expect that they will ask if I have some questions so, I'm wondering what are the best (type of) questions one might consider?
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I am putting together my application for a postdoctoral position in theoretical condensed matter physics. The position is not a fellowship and is a regular postdoc position. If you have gone through the process of applying for such positions a number of times, or, even better, if you have reviewed such research statement letters, what are the main points that are sought/you seek in such letters? Specifically, should I put more emphasize on my PhD research to demonstrate my "depth of knowledge" on projects I have worked on (past research), or dwell more on things that I want/am capable to do (future research)?
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Over the past couple of days there have been a few questions about overlapping proposals and questions that could belong on multiple sites:        What is the best practice before / after asking a question if you think your question might be better on another site?  or  If I think my question might belong on multiple sites as per the above posts?
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I am currently designing an interview plan in order to make a persona for our products(an ERP software, already online). So here is the outline of the questions that i want to asked:  know your user (name, age, experience, working environment, etc) know how they work know their likes about the system   know their dislikes about the system   could you give me some ideas?
85251
I've attended a lot of seminars and lectures by now, and it's typical for the chair of the seminar to offer audience members a chance to ask questions of the speaker about their work after the presentation.  Most of the time, the questions seek clarification of some aspect of the presentation or focus on a more comprehensive understanding of the research involved.  However, occasionally, I've noticed that questions are purposefully designed to embarrass the speaker.  Things along the lines of "That method won't work at all for what you're trying to do.  Your results are completely invalid" or "So-and-so's group already did that work years ago.  Did you not read their paper?"  Perhaps more disturbingly (I just got back from a really large conference if you can't tell), is that women seem to be more harshly criticized than men, and over trivial issues.  For instance, in a few sessions I went to, female graduate students were given really hard times over their presentations while the male grad students were not.  All presentations were about the same quality.  I guess I'm a little shocked; I'd heard of sexism in academia but hadn't actually seen it (or noticed it) until this conference.  Oddly enough, I've observed that it's typically prestigious professors or researchers that are asking these ostentatious questions.  I suppose they figure they have enough "fame" or whatever that their job isn't in jeopardy, and there's no easy way to really prove they're being rude or sexist.  I don't know what's going on here, but it seems to me that these questions, even if they do have technical merit, should be held until after the seminar, where they can be discussed privately with the researcher.  My question here, specifically, is what can be done to minimize these (uncomfortable for everyone) instances?  My thoughts are that a session chair should remind the audience to refrain from questions that are accusatory in nature.  As a presenter, I'm not sure what can be done in advance to preempt and avoid these questions.  Any ideas?
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Do people take time out to go home, meet with family etc. during their PhD?   If yes then for how long and how frequently is it usually?   How does one deal with this with one's advisor?  What are the pros and cons?     Given that one basically has just about 2-3 years in practice to do all their PhD work, I don't understand how anything else fits in the schedule except work. The entire idea of a PhD looks quite scary to me that one is expected to produce cutting-edge stuff in that short a time starting from just standard graduate courses!    PS: the question is general, but if it is field-dependent, I am interested in particular in physics PhDs (theoretical high-energy physics specifically)
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Is there a limit on how many questions I can ask per day? Per hour? Per other time unit?  Related Questions:
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Are students allowed to complete a large portion of their research independently, then enroll in a PhD program, apply for a defense panel within the first semester, and quickly finish the thesis? Has this been done before?  Update: Question trimmed. I'm looking for an answer whether students can be admitted with much prior work on the thesis already complete, to finish in a short time (perhaps one year fix and improve the work), and whether there are real examples of people who did this. I not asking whether I myself am personally capable of completing this prior work to sufficient quality.
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Is SE Q&amp;A format relevant for "identification of seldom physical objects observed in real world"?  Questions like "I do not know function of this object (picture) - which purpose does it have?"  In many cases I suppose these question could have civil engineering or handcraft i.e. cultural/historical background. In second case "SE history" might be okay. For first case, I do not know.
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I don't know how many of you have experienced the  principle when posting questions on SO, but I know I have on a few occasions. And then I just discard my question. So here's the question:  Should we go ahead and post the question?  Of course if it's something stupid like forgetting a semicolon, etc., I would say no... but there are several occasions, like if a data structure doesn't make sense, that at least someone would eventually benefit from the question/answers.  And if you should ask the question, how would you recommend choosing an answer for it?
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I wrote an email to Prof. X to ask about a PhD student vacancy and talk about a topic in one of his papers. He refused to accept me because of his retirement and replied with a warming email. In that, he cc-ed two others that he thought might be interested in me, Prof. Y and Prof. Z. Prof. Y refused because his area is somewhat distinct to mine; Prof. Z hasn't answered yet. I haven't responded to anyone yet. I also want to ask Prof. X's opinion about Prof. T's work, who is actually the one that I want to follow.  How should I respond to this? My feeling is that if Prof. X cc-ed others, this means that he wants to create a group discussion. As a group, everyone should have the right to hear each other voices. Should I reply to the group with a generic "thank you" email?  But if I do that, then I have to send another private emails to Prof. X and Prof. Z. I just worry that this will make me looks sneaky because I don't have the courage to discuss this in public.   What should I do?
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I am in the field of computer science. It is often the case when I am reading a paper I start to wonder, "Wow stunning results, however, I would like to prove that." or "How exactly did he get these amazing results? He/she just wrote a rough overview of the real methodology used in this paper.". As you can see, a lot of times the small things have a huge impact on the overall performance of the underlying methodology. Often they are not part of the paper or not revealed at all.  My idea would be to contact the paper writer, to ask for his research programs to recreate them and understand them. Can/should I do that?   I personally think that there are probably not a lot of researchers, who would let somebody else "look at their cards". What's your experience with that?
15446
I am preparing slides for a short (10min) talk at the group meeting. The talk is about a fairly serious piece of (pure) mathematics, and it so happens that there is a very relevant one-panel webcomic. A thought appeared to me, and got some support from my fellow PhD students, that it would be cool to include this comic, perhaps at the final thank-you-for-your-attention slide.  I am probably not going to do it, so I'm asking mostly out of curiousity: Would this be a bad idea to go ahead and include a comic on the final slide?   Note: The comic is genuinely funny (based on a sample of 6 non-randomly selected students). It is not - as far as I can tell - offensive in any way. It could come across as somewhat silly.
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I'm thinking about pursue my studies and doing a PhD in information technology.  My problem is that I would like to create something new (== write code), and focus my thesis on how this new technology works (each component and global interactions), what it can do, and how it can evolves / be improved. I'm not against doing research, reading books and work on theory - but I want to be more practical than theoretical.  I'm starting to think that a PhD is not a valid option if my goal is to develop something new instead of conducting pure research. Am I wrong ?  About my cursus: I will receive my master degree soon (~= 3 months). I come from a highly technical background, with 5 years of programming and project management.    Edit &amp; more information My university doesn't offers PhD courses, thus my supervisor don't care about   my choices. Another consequence is that I have no other choices than to go to another university.
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Why are we allowed to ask only one question per 40 minutes? Shouldn't this time be reduced?  Also, when I was posting my second question on Computer Science.SE then this time limit was 40 minutes but when I head towards posting this question, here at meta, then it was showing 20 minutes limit. What is the logic behind this difference?
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I think this should be added to the faq and/or on the /ask page:  Advice to stick around for about 15 minutes after posting. Often this is the time when the fate of a question (or answer) is decided (at least on SO). Close votes are cast, obviously missing information is asked for and improvements are suggested. It's quite an annoyance to look at a 1 minute old question, spend 2 minutes reading it and finding out that a trivial detail is missing for me to be able to provide an answer, commenting about it and then receiving an answer in 2 days when I completely forgot what was the question about.  I think that newbies simply don't expect SO to react so quickly to their questions and don't refresh the page after a couple of minutes. It might be a good idea to suggest doing so.
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Last year, rather late during the MSc application cycle (after one round of funding was allocated - tardiness due to an abrupt change in my life situation), I emailed two professors from two schools that I most wanted to go to. I had perused their webpages and decided these professors had the specific research interests closest to my own.  My reason for contacting them before finishing my applications for their respective schools was that the applications included a large section for specific research questions that I wanted to investigate. So, I emailed these professors asking a bit about their work, because their webpages of course featured surface-level stuff.  One professor was very receptive and invited me to Skype with her so she could better explain herself and I could ask her questions. With her support, I was able to write an application that met her standards quite quickly.  The other professor told me - paraphrasing, of course - that he was too far into the process of choosing a new student for his research group to spend time helping me finish the application.  Let me be clear that the latter professor didn't say any harsh words and I have nothing bad to say about him. That said, the purpose of my question is to decide whether it's better for me as a prospective MSc student to email professors ahead of time like this. Was the latter's rejection likely due to my tardiness rather my emailing him? The more receptive professor made the point that she always wanted to have prospective MSc students write their own research proposals and get her approval before submitting the application. Is this common? If so, then I guess reaching out beforehand is a good thing to do, but earlier in the application cycle?  Thank you.