I am a fairly good Spanish speaker, so I'm ahead of someone with no language experience, but I don't speak more than a few basic words in French, and I don't think I could put together a sentence from any of those words.

Unfortunately, in math, there are a lot of older and/or obscure papers written in German, French, and Russian. I have seen numerous requests on my Facebook feed for someone to translate a paper (or, more likely, asking if anyone has a grad student or undergrad that could translate the paper).

The nice thing, though, is that if you can get the gist of what the paper is saying (in my case, the exam...), you might be able to infer what the French says because you understand what the paper should be proving, morally.

Tu parles francais ou tu ne vas pas ecole

You speak french <or?> you did not go to school?

You speak French or you don't go to school.

Of course I only took 4 years in HS 6 years ago so your translation may be better, heh. Should be Tu lis anyways (you read)

Its more common in humanities and social sciences. My friends in history and literature departments are required to have some level of proficiency in a second language. I'm in political science and we have a "research tool" requirement that can be fulfilled either with a language or some taking more than the minimum required statistics and/or formal theory classes. You take whatever is most germane to your research. I'd guess that only about 1/3 of the students in my department use a language as their research tool.

FYP

Interesting. I guess the requirements will vary between fields and schools, so I'll do some research in specific areas that interest me.

In general though, sounds like you don't have to study much foreign language if you don't choose to. That's a relief.

there is no need to do language exam at Czech Technical Uni (czech republic) at Ph.D. but you have to be good at english as the most of the papers english written. and they can examine your language skills during the entrance exam.

I'm a high school student in a college town (R1 University) and am very interested in academia. Fields of interest primarily include business and computer science; I feel business especially needs more Ph.Ds and will have good employability prospects. However, I'm interested by almost all subjects in school.

I'd love to be able to get experience in a lab or just be around / help a professor, for fun and to learn. I have plenty of free time in the summer and during the school year, and am actually enrolled in an internship class at my HS which will give me the opportunity to leave school grounds and work at an external site.

What kind of experience do you think a high schooler could get? I feel comfortable reaching out to local professors, but would love to hear thoughts concerning in what ways I could be of use / what sort of opportunities I should look for.

Thanks

Your best bet is to use your academic advisor at your high school and Google first. If that fails send an email or call the offices of the department you're interested and ask them what opportunities are available for high school students and what professors you can contact. Let us know ITT if that fails. I know a professor I worked with at Pitt had students from high school doing research on TB and there are programs at IU but I can't really give you more details without knowing the school.

The basic experience you'd get is mainly grunt research with most likely a focus on educating you how to do research as a career. Professors have an obligation to perform community outreach and sometimes they choose the high school area.

I wouldn't be fearful of contacting professors directly, but it's best to see what already exists so you're not wasting their time or yours. They love excited students such as yourself though!

Thanks, I'll do some research and get in contact with my HS advisor. Good to note that laying the groundwork like that will both help me find the right professor / lab and prevent wasted time and effort by getting a feel for what's out there.

Currently I feel poignantly the gap between learning a concept that has already been thought up and coming up with a concept of your own.

From my experience in school emphasis has only been placed on the former. Classes, especially in the harder sciences, require little independent thought. A concept, its proof, and the resulting formulas are presented and you are only required to understand them.

Granted, gaining a deep understanding of the concepts is not always easy. Often it requires deliberate practice and substantial mental effort. From my experience, many students never take the time to understand the concept and prefer just to mechanically solve the problems using the formulas. My strength as a student has always been my desire to understand the principle behind the facts, which is a trait I expect to be a common thread in academia.

Still, though understanding a concept is not effortless, it still seems leagues away from creating new knowledge. After learning more about the role professors have in research, I feel like merely learning what has already been discovered falls short of true academic work.

I'm still a fairly young student, so I have plenty of learning in front of me. I think it will be important to strike a balance between learning (understanding others' thoughts) and thinking independently (coming up with my own thoughts).

Unfortunately, I think I will have to focus more on the former while I'm still a student to gain enough background knowledge within a field to pursue the latter more fully. It makes me feel a bit uneasy focusing on others' thoughts all day, but it seems necessary for the moment.

What are your guys' thoughts on this balance? How was your experience transitioning from student (learner) to researcher (independent thinker)?

The transition from student to researcher isn't generally expected until grad school. That doesn't mean you won't be expected to show the ability to ask interesting questions and come up with ways of answering them though. There are a bunch of links and discussion earlier itt that addresses this a bit. At your stage though I'd focus more on absorbing as much as you can and asking questions when you can. At some point (it may take a while) you'll ask a question for which there may not yet be a good answer.

Thanks for your input. It'll be exciting and somewhat intimidating when I ask a question like that.

While I know I will gain a lot by learning over the following years and I love to learn, it seems weird to me that I can succeed in school without coming up with thoughts of my own.

Reading this (awesome) paper called A Mathematician's Lament by a mathematician describing the current state of mathematical education is what spurred my thoughts on the matter: http://www.maa.org/devlin/lockhartslament.pdf

Basically thesis is that students aren't doing any math but are just being told steps to follow and doing them over "exercises." In this system students good at following directions, not necessarily thinking about / proving mathematical principles and solving problems, succeed.

What struck me is the definition of a mathematician. Does learning and understanding mathematical concepts, even if you aren't coming up with new ones of your own, make you a good mathematician? This question can be further generalized to learning and understanding in all fields as opposed to creating and thinking independently.

You think so, but mainly this happens as a byproduct of learning. You observe things, and your natural curiosity leads you to ask a lot of questions, not all of which have readily available answers. So you start thinking harder, and most of the time, you'll come to a pretty uninteresting answer -- uninteresting because when you think about it, the answer will seem obvious in hindsight.

Then there will be the other questions, those which you answer, but it doesn't seem trivial in hindsight. And then there will be those you can't answer.

And you'll have conversations with colleagues, and you'll develop some sort of taste -- i.e., what types of problems people care about and what people don't. You work on and publish what people care about, because that's how the game is played if you want a job.

Learning all of this is the transition from student to mathematician.

Well, I think you develop a lot of intuition by solving problems. And I think, at least for myself, watching others' methods, techniques, and routines -- learning and understanding their toolboxes -- has made me a better mathematician. In this sense I think "intuition" can actually be learned.

I think we can philosophize about this all day, but I am certain that there are folks who have extremely successful careers in mathematics that do nothing more than learn fields that others have developed and do hard calculations or extend others' theorems to new settings (even in relatively uninteresting ways) or whatever. These kind of things won't win you a Fields Medal, but they certainly can get you tenure at a mid-level school. Whether this is acceptable to you all depends on your objective function.

Yea, seems like learning and asking questions and coming up with answers are all part of the process. Great theories aren't made in a vacuum, i.e. no one sits down and starts by saying, "I'm going to come up with a groundbreaking theory today."

And I feel at the end of the day one's objective function has got to be pursuing meaningful work and staying true to oneself. If you're drawn to applying and expanding concepts to new fields and it is making a positive impact, great. If you're drawn to creating a new concept or idea and that is having a positive impact, great.

Also, I agree that you can build intuition. I also think we're all naturally born to think independently. The "transition" is more a product of the need to develop a knowledge base before expanding the horizon than it is the mental capacity to think for oneself.

Time for a mini-revival of this thread. I know most of those posting here are engineering/math geeks, but....wondering if there are any psych types? Specifically, anyone know anything about a specific grad school, the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, whcih has campuses/affiliates in Chicago, DC, and LA. Facts, rumors, opinions all welcome. I know next to nothing about this school, and am trying to field some questions.

Mini-revival attempt round two.

I'm a high school student in a college town, and am taking an internship class. My goal is to intern at an informatics research lab. While I could always use tips on finding these opportunities, I do currently have a few leads. I'm more interested in asking how you guys would tailor a high-school resume / cover letter / general sales pitch to a research lab.

Obviously I don't have any experience with any of the professors in class. I also am not going to be a major intellectual asset in terms of coming up with novel ideas concerning the informatics research. I will, however, be intellectually curious, have a strong motivation and work ethic, and have a desire to learn and contribute in whatever ways I can.

Those traits too generic to sell in a cover letter / interview? Thoughts on how to frame myself / in what way to approach someone running a lab?

Think this is the best place for me to ask this:

I won this NSERC award (5.6k paid out as part-time job every 2 weeks) to do research this summer at school.

In the conditions to accept it stated that I have to continue my studies at my current school after this program.

Thing is I will be transferring to another school this fall. Are they actually gonna get serious about this? What do you guys think will happen?

Any pointers on studying for quals? I don't think I've ever studied for more than 10 hours for a single test before, and I'm dealing with severe burn out problems trying to study even 2-3 hours a day for this test. It's in 2.5 weeks and I'm through maybe half the material (having been studying 2-3 hours/day the past 10 days or so), and still need to try some practice problems.

What field?

civil engineering (structures), its 100% written exam, 5 questions 5 subjects 8 hours closed everything

Any general tips on writing a first paper for publication?

I'm in a data visualization lab and have created a few graphs related to business. I think the biggest challenge in front of me is finding how my work fits into and expands other current work in the field (to which I am relatively new).

Hey guys. So I'm nearing the end of my PhD, hopefully will graduate in 1-2 more semesters. Anyway, my advisor sort of got me in with this company (awesome company, would be very excited to work there), and they want to bring me on site for 2 days of interviews because a bunch of groups want to interview me.

Anyway, I guess I'm just looking for some tips and things to be on the lookout for. I don't want to divulge too many specific details, but I'll say my experience is in signal processing, and I'm specifically researching synthetic aperture radar. I'm not sure how much technical questioning they'll do, since my research is relatively specific (I haven't done much "conventional" signal processing in a little while). Also, I will need to give a 1 hour seminar. My advisor recommended to have almost no equations, be mostly graphical and whatnot. Where do you guys see this type of presentation in the spectrum of "technicalness"? In general, what types of qualities and knowledge base do you think they'll be looking at most?

I've had lots of interviews for summer internships in the past, but I expect this will be quite different. Anything you guys could give me a heads up on would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

1) Chocolate covered espresso beans. You're in for a long day or two, and will need to stay sharp without running to the bathroom every 30 minutes.

2) Have you not given any seminars on your research? This is unusual ime, especially when you've been in the program for 3+ years.

If the answer to 2) is "yes," (i.e. you HAVE given seminars), I would imagine your field's meetings would include people who understand your subdiscipline specifically, and also people who don't really have a sense of what you're doing. (This is very common in my old field, ecology, where ecologists and evolution-ists don't have a lot of cross-talk, nor do e.g. terrestrial/aquatic, ecosystem/population etc.). If you don't already have one, work up a talk that your parents could understand, with a lot of emphasis on the underlying conceptual framework. I would expect your audience to be able to follow equations in general, but maybe not for your specific research.

Do a practice talk in front of a few labmates. They should be able to provide feedback. Maybe include some folks from related but dissimilar departments to act as "semi-experts?"

3) On night 1, do not drink too much.

4) Depending on where your interview is, map out your location as much as possible. (This is less important if you're going to be in one building all day, or have some specific point of contact.) When I interviewed at a large campus, I was kind of left to fend for myself, and had to work hard to time getting to my next meeting whenever I had free time.

5) GET AN AGENDA ahead of time. Know who you're meeting with. Know something about them if possible so you can ask good questions. Be proactive in having them escort you to your next meeting if they don't know they're supposed to, and if there is not a single escort/point of contact.


Sorry for the rambling. HTH.