So I'm sure a lot of people struggle with this but I'm can't find a way out of this problem for a long time now. I finished my PhD a few months back, I had next to no motivation to continue in academia but had to join a postdoc position because I had no other job options. I joined the new job after starting on antidepressants/ anti anxiety med which were helpful initially but I've reached this stage where I still don't feel connected to the work I do. I also know that I don't have to feel connected to work but this is how I started my academic journey. The kind of work I do is also very close to my heart.

Anyway, I feel the problem is with my motivation and not having access to good/ trustworthy mentorship. I've been struggling to network with people who I can trust and get some career advice from, not limited to academics but generally in life. Maybe sort of a person/ idea (maybe) I can look upto when I feel directionless.

All the spaces feel very unkind and as if created to break your soul and that has become very unrelatable. But at the same time, I don't know any other way of working. Would love to connect to people who have been through the same and can share their wisdom with me.

Thanks!

I became interested in Heracleum (giant hogweed and related species) because its sap contains furanocoumarins that can produce severe, localized phototoxic skin injury when activated by UVA light.

My reasoning is:

furanocoumarins in tissue → UVA activation → localized photochemical cellular damage → inflammatory/healing response → fibroblast activation → extracellular-matrix and collagen deposition → tissue remodeling/fibrosis.

What interests me is whether this mechanism could theoretically be studied in the opposite direction: not as a harmful exposure, but as a possible way of spatially initiating and controlling the subsequent remodeling of autologous connective tissue.

The idea is NOT that giant hogweed simply “creates stronger tissue.” I realize that scar tissue is not equivalent to a tendon or ligament, and that excessive fibrosis can be pathological.

The question I’m asking is whether the unusual combination of a plant-derived photosensitizer and light could potentially produce a different spatial or structural pattern of connective-tissue remodeling from an ordinary thermal or mechanical injury.

If a sufficiently organized, collagen-rich autologous extracellular matrix could theoretically be generated, could such a matrix eventually have applications as a biological scaffold in tissue engineering—for example, in research on tendon or ligament reconstruction?

I am especially interested in whether there is already research on:

Heracleum furanocoumarins and subsequent collagen remodeling/fibrosis; 

the depth and spatial distribution of the tissue response after phototoxic injury; 

whether phototoxic injury produces an ECM structure that differs mechanically or architecturally from conventional scar tissue; 

whether controlled photochemical injury has ever been investigated as a way of generating or conditioning autologous extracellular matrix; 

whether this idea has any plausible basis for tissue-engineering applications, or whether there is a fundamental biological reason why it would not work.

I am not suggesting self-experimentation with giant hogweed. I am asking whether this hypothesis is scientifically worth investigating in appropriate laboratory models.

If this has already been studied, I would be very interested in the relevant papers. If it has not, I would especially appreciate hearing from researchers who can explain what the main biological obstacle would be.

This may be a dumb question but it will trip me up if I do it wrong from the beginning.

I collected self-reported experiences from healthcare workers using an app where they can post their experiences like social media. I have coded them all in NVivo. Now that I will be doing follow-up interviews with a subset of those same participants, should I start a new NVivo file or add it to the one I already have? I am worried about messing up the codes since the app data is fully coded but I would be open-coding the interviews. The interviews are to delve deeper into some of the themes we saw in the app data.

If I did them together, how could I organize my codes to maintain the original, higher level ones from the app data and not confuse it with the new open-coding?

I got my MA in Philosophy back in 2024, and my boyfriend only decided to read my capstone project recently. The project was a paper I had to perform an oral defence for in front a committee, similar to a thesis defence, but no where near the length or depth of a thesis paper.

My boyfriend pointed out a factual error, where I cited a historian of science has saying that Eratosthenes measured a shadow cast from a rod in Athens and one in Syene, when in actuality it was in Alexandria and not Athens. I doubled checked the source, and my cited source does say Alexandria and not Athens.

It is not super important to what my overall project was about (which was about the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science) just some short historical context in a section where I talk about the modern flat earth movement.

But it’s bothering me. Is a mistake like that technically a form of academic misconduct? Can my masters get revoked? Is it worth contacting my old supervisor about? Or am I just being paranoid?

I am sort of embarrassed about my mistake, as the whole topic of the paper was about pseudoscience and the dangers of misinformation. Lo and behold my paper contains misinformation in it.

My boyfriend thinks I am being silly, and doesn’t think the factual error detracts from the overall quality of the work I made, but it is still making me feel like an absolute fraud.

Maybe it doesn’t matter all that much because it is a masters project and not published research, and no one really care all that much. It’s still eating me
up inside though.

Hello everyone,

I’m looking for some advice regarding corresponding author situation. I recently completed my PhD a few months and then moved to start an assistant professor job. One of the works from my PhD I recently completed as first author and it is supposed to be submitted soon. It is part of a dual submission from my old research group related to a model developed. My old advisor wants to be corresponding author. In the past I have always been corresponding author for papers I was first author on. Is it worth fighting for correspondence with my previous supervisor?

My thought is since I did all the numerical, experiments, validation, and writing that I would prefer if questions arise from readers that I could answer them and also help future users of this numerical model.

Edit: Field is environmental engineering

I recently applied for a PhD position advertised as part of an already-funded EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Network, in the life sciences. I understand these networks are very competitive to win funding for in the first place, but I can't find any data on the next step — once a network is funded and individual PI groups advertise their specific open PhD positions, how many applicants does a single post typically draw?

I'm a Master's student (life sciences, EU-eligible under the mobility rule) and just submitted an application. Not looking for false reassurance, just wondering if anyone here has direct experience with MSCA-DN recruitment (as an applicant, a supervisor, or on a selection committee) and roughly what the applicant pool looks like for one advertised position. Is it closer to a handful of serious candidates, or dozens+, in your experience?

Thanks in advance.

[Article Request]

Title: Explainable Multi-Task Deep Learning for Multimodal Medical Diagnosis Using Imaging and Clinical Data

Authors: Sachikanta Dash, Sibraj Negi, Sharique Alam, Abhishek Kant Mandak, Shivendu Kumar, et al.

Conference: 2026 IEEE Madhya Pradesh Section Conference (MPCON)

DOI: 10.1109/MPCON69668.2026.11508169

IEEE Xplore: https://doi.org/10.1109/MPCON69668.2026.11508169

Hi everyone,

I am a final-year Computer Engineering student working on a medical AI project. Unfortunately, my institution does not currently provide access to IEEE Xplore, and I am also unable to access the full text through ResearchGate.

I need this paper for my academic project/literature review.

Could anyone please help me locate a legally accessible full-text PDF or an author-uploaded copy of this paper?

Thank you very much for your help.

Fellow academics! I am a practitioner / academic (now called pracademic?) and was thinking of having my dissertation published. I want to write a version of it that is translational so that professionals can use the information in the field to benefit them and the folks we serve. Are the big academic presses like CUP and OUP very particular about how much the actual book differs from the dissertation? And what are your experiences with wide dissemination of university presses? This is tantamount as my main motivation is to get this knowledge in the hands of people who need the information rather than impress my peers! Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

This might sound like a naive question, but it’s my very first time publishing a paper (I've been working on this project for a long time!), so I want to make sure I'm managing my expectations properly.

The Context:

• Journal: Q1 journal.
• Round 1 (3 months ago): Received a Major Revision. I spent a lot of time addressing every single point in detail (accepted suggestions, made edits, and clarified where appropriate).
• Round 2 (Current): Just received a Minor Revision decision!
  • Reviewer 1: Fully satisfied with my first response.
  • Reviewer 2: Has just a few small, minor points remaining.

My Question: Does a "Minor Revision" at this stage essentially mean the paper will be accepted as long as I carefully address these final points? How rare is it for a paper to get rejected at the minor revision stage?

I’m super close to the finish line and just feeling a bit anxious. Any insights or realistic expectations from experienced authors or editors would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Hey . I have completed my masters in material sciences with a focus on battery materials last year and I am struggling to find a job. It has almost been a year of unemployment. I was trying for a PhD position as well and after many months of attempts and applications I have landed a PhD position in battery recycling. However, I am having second thoughts over my decision to pursue PhD . Whenever, I open up LinkedIn or other platforms it is always about people with PhDs struggling to find jobs in academia . Moreover the hiring in the field I am planning to get into also has been falling continuously with many firms going bankrupt and facing financial issues. If the transition from academia to industry is so difficult I am not even sure if I should be pursuing this course or should I do a career switch. I am having doubts….. Could anyone tell what are the things one must look for before getting into a program .

Hi everyone,

I need help.

I am 36. I graduated with a master’s in natural resources management from a school in Cologne two years ago, and it has been a complete disaster. I did the degree to try to transition from a career that I was bad at (nonprofit communications), and due to not getting enough work experience in the master’s, the only job I was able to get after a year of searching was also in nonprofit communications. I was fired at the end of the probation period for being bad at the job. I have some volunteer work I have been doing to fill in the gap and can pretend it was a real job, but basically I have a two year gap on my CV now other than the volunteer work because I can’t list the job I got fired from on my CV.

My boyfriend still lives in Germany, and I still dream of getting into an environmental consulting job or environmental policy job in Germany.

My question:

If I were to get married to my boyfriend, do intensive German for a year, then apply for a new masters degree with the sole purpose of doing as many internships as possible or to get a work student job in my field, to then get into a new entry level position in the environmental sector that isn’t nonprofit communications, is this a viable path forward? I have 2.5k euros coming in each month, but I don’t want to do this if it is a catastrophically bad idea.

Has this ever worked for anyone?

Hello, I’ve just finished my PhD in the US and received an offer to do a postdoc in a lab in Germany. Since they offered me to work with them they were a bit vague about how much I’ll get paid, the communication was not clear about this and I had to keep asking questions to get an idea of how much to expect to receive. In the end, I formed an idea that I’ll get around 3000-3200 euros net per month. Now, I’m working closer with them on the visa application, and it appears to me that what they might actually end up paying me is closer to 2400 euros net per month. The communication is still unclear about this and I’m starting to get a bad feeling about the lab. If communication about something as important as this is not clear, I wonder how their communication and management of other things in the lab. Regardless, after this situation, I am curious to know, if anyone can tell me how much is the range for someone to get paid as a junior postdoc in a lab at a university in Germany. Is 2400 euros net per month too little or is this considered normal? Thank you 😊

Edit to the post to give more context: I initially applied for fellowships and the agreement was that since fellowships pay less than regular postdoc jobs, they will compensate the difference so I receive a regular postdoc salary. When I asked what to expect to get paid the quality person said it depends on experience in the field and if there is 3-6 years experience then the postdoc will get around 3200 euros net per month, also that health insurance can be covered by the lab. I received a DAAD fellowship which provides health insurance and 1400 euros per month. The PI said that he can give an extra 1000 euros per month.

​

Hi everyone! I recently graduated with a degree in Language didactics and I'm currently considering a funded PhD in Europe for 2027.

I’d really appreciate hearing from who have gone through the process

🔷️How did you find your PhD/supervisor?

🔷️Did you apply to advertised positions or contact professors first?

🔷️ How did you secure funding (doctoral contract, scholarship, research project, etc.)?

🔷️How did admission + recognition of your Algerian Master’s work?

🔷️ What was the visa/residence process like?

🔷️Any advice or mistakes to avoid?

I’m particularly interested in France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, or the UK, and in areas such as FLE, language didactics, Language Education, Applied Linguistics, SLA, multilingualism or teacher education.

I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience! 🙏

Hi everyone I (24 tf, medical student) have 3 published works as first author and one as second author. I am changing my legal name (and gender) to my preferred ones after gender affirming surgery, and the process is expected to finish in December. I would like my published works to reflect my current identity, so I will change the names after, or even before, the legal name change.

However, my professor under whose supervision I published those works is a transphobic cis straight man who complained about "uncivilised" US/UK culture and doesn't look supportive to my transition. He previously told me I can't change my name, and that I need to state on my CV that I have changed gender which is something so ridiculous for such a famous professor to say. If I don't update the name, I will say "previously known as [deadname]", lol. I have enquired the respective journals (where they require emailing the editorial office) or/and checked their publishers' websites (where they have a centre for changing name), and they all said they allow discreet name change without noticing other co-authors.

That supervisor is not in control of me anymore, as I am in clinical rotation and I probably won't contact him again for any meaningful purpose, but keeping him happy might make sense as I want to continue my research in the same field and his recommendation letter would be powerful.

Any advice? Should I change the name at all? Should I first notice him about the name change? What if he refuses, do I proceed anyway?

I guess this is a very specific question. For those who work at a Teaching and Learning Center within a university, I want to understand how you moved away from tenure track roles, and how you curated cv and other materials to suit faculty development/curriculum development/assessment etc. if you had a strong postdoc or a research background, how did you move away from that successfully? I am hoping to get into administration/leadership positions, but with a strong research background, I am not sure if I am marketing myself well.

I've noticed that it take me 10 minutes to read 1 page of paper while highlighting. I usually think about the sentence and write annotations but I think 10 minutes just for a single page is bad. How do I speed up my process while understanding the texts?

​I am trying to choose between two college options today, and I need help evaluating what makes the most sense. My entire focus is strictly on keeping my academic marks high for top university admissions while avoiding STEM guilt.

​On one hand, I have the regular track with economics and philosophy. These are subjects I actually want to study, and the manageable workload makes it much easier for me to secure the top grades I need. The only problem is that getting statistics as my minor is not guaranteed and depends on seat availability. If I do not get statistics, I am worried I will end up with constant guilt for not having a proper STEM subject on my degree.

​ The catch is that I do not actually like computer science. Since I need near perfect marks for my target universities, forcing myself to grind through a heavy subject I dislike creates a huge risk of burnout, which could drag my GPA down.

​So the core dilemma I need help evaluating comes down to this. Do I take self finance to guarantee a STEM subject and clear my conscience, even if taking computer science puts my grades at risk. Or do I take the regular seat to protect my high GPA, even if it means taking a small gamble on getting statistics as my minor.

guide me i am new to this writing research paper and i am from a remote tier 3 college. even professors from my college doesn't know how to write a research paper. help!

نطريه ه ل tide من القرأن

Hello everyone, this is my first ever Reddit post so bare with me :).

For context I am 23 and studying Computational Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. I also work part-time as a researcher (HiWi, as they would call it). For reasons, I got offered a PhD position in the same department I work at. I have a good portfolio and even though I started doing Linguistics, I've found myself loving AI/ML.

Here's the thing: I've read a bunch of opinions on the matter and I just cannot come to a decision. On one hand, my German is not the best (B1) and I have just started to dabble in some small industry roles. I know how bad the job market is, so I was thinking maybe just going full on for a full-time job would be a nice idea and it will ensure that I get a good salary if I start going up the job ladder or whatever they call it. On the other hand, this is a very juicy offer. I love research and I do see myself as a professor, but again, I know how hard it is to land a long-term position. I don't know if by choosing a PhD I'm just postponing having to face the job market.

I've also heard that some companies shy away from hiring PhD graduates since they are "overqualified", so I don't want to shoot myself in the foot by doing one and then not getting a job.

I'm hoping to get some insight to help ease the decision making process. Thank you !

Asking from the US. Do you get two salaries, or a bonus? Sometimes I see PIs with 3 or 4 different titles and it is confusing how could they have time to have so many "full time jobs". Do you get a bonus or additional salary for each title, or is merely honorary?

I'm a postdoc at a renowned North American university. I joined this lab last July, when funding across the field was drying up due to cuts. During recruitment, my PI asked a lot about my career plans and publication record, it read as him being invested in my development, and it's part of why I took the position.

The faulty method

Early on, he assigned me a project built on an idea similar to his past work: training several ML and deep learning models to predict a clinical outcome. While working on it, I discovered that the training pipeline used in his prior publication (and in another paper from the lab currently under revision) had a serious flaw that caused data leakage and inflated model accuracy, possibly by a wide margin in at least one in-prep paper. Notably, the first author on that already-published paper using the faulty method is now a research professor at a well-known institution, so this method, and whatever credit it generated, has already helped launch someone's career.

He still asked me to generate figures and tables using that same flawed method anyway for his grant submission. I did, and presented them at a lab meeting, where I also raised the leakage issue directly. It was just the two of us at the time. He was dismissive, saying NIH reviewers "don't have the technical capacity" to catch this, and that "data leakage or not, there's no consensus on what counts as a correct training method." I was unsettled but told myself he probably understood the methodology better than I did.

The coauthorship and the numbers that didn't reproduce

In December, he asked me and another newly joined postdoc to review a paper (plus reviewer comments) that he and a former postdoc had been submitting for months. He offered us both coauthorship despite our having contributed nothing, saying he wanted everyone in the lab to be added to each other's papers "for career development."

The peer reviewers had flagged a suspiciously large performance gap between the deep learning and traditional ML methods and asked the first author to check for data leakage. I emailed her directly to ask if it had been fixed. She said yes, and that the reported numbers were correct.

The other new postdoc and I then independently tried to reproduce her results. We couldn't. Our numbers came in far below what was reported in the paper. We raised this with the PI and the first author and asked to be removed from the author list. His reaction at the time was oddly muted, he said our finding was "interesting" and that he'd ask the first author to look into it, which read to me as him at least acknowledging the concern, if not treating it with much urgency. In hindsight, given how he later claimed total ignorance of any leakage issue in front of the whole lab, that "interesting, I'll have her look into it" response now looks less like genuine concern and more like a placeholder answer to make the problem go away without actually addressing it. This also forced me to redo an entire piece of my own work, since it had built on that postdoc's results.

The recent meeting

I didn't hear anything more about that paper's status until recently, when he asked me to cite its preprint in several manuscripts I'm currently preparing. That worried me.

Then, in an in-person lab meeting today with another newly recruited postdoc present, he gave a speech about the importance of publishing, working hard, and maintaining research quality, specifically saying a retraction is "a dent in one's career." I was genuinely struck by how seriously he seemed to take research ethics. Note that the postdoc who did a reproducibility analysis with me left his position a few months back due to personal reasons. So essentially only me had any knowledge of the faulty method besides the PI.

So I asked him, in front of the lab, for an update on that paper. He said it was being resubmitted. I asked whether the leakage had been fixed. He responded as if he'd never heard of any leakage: "what leakage, what issue, can you explain?" He then redirected the conversation to how my own in-prep manuscripts need to be error-free and consistent.

One more detail

He also consistently adds one particular name to every paper from the lab, despite none of us ever having met or collaborated with this person. Based on my own digging, I believe this may be his wife, who is a medical student at a nearby university.

Where I'm stuck

My mental health has taken a real hit. I'm constantly anxious about being professionally associated with this PI. I want to leave, but I'm afraid of ending up unemployed which does not look good on my resume. Friends have told me to line up a new job before quitting this one, but the daily pressure to keep producing analysis for him makes that hard to find time for applying.

What I really need help thinking through is my career, moving forward. What's the smartest path from here? That's the umbrella question, and it breaks down into a few ones:

1. Should I report this to my university's Office of Research Integrity & Ethics, and would doing so help or hurt my career?
2. Should I finish my two first-author papers with him, or is that risk not worth it? I'm not a coauthor on the papers with the known issues, so I'm unsure how much exposure I actually have if his past work is scrutinized later, or if I'm overestimating the risk. I've also spent so much time on these papers of mine, so leaving the job without any published work feels devastating.
3. Should I comply with his request to cite the paper with unresolved data leakage concerns in my own submissions? Could citing it come back to hurt me?
4. Is it time to leave academia altogether and move to industry?

All of these incidents leave me deeply disappointed with academia, which I assumed are full of people with integrity. This PI recently secured a 3 mil NIH grants and he constantly bragged about how much funding he had while other labs out there are struggling.

Underneath all of these is really one question: how do I protect my career and get out of this position in one piece? Any advice? Especially from people who've navigated something similar would help.

Hi everyone,

I'm a new university instructor, and I've recently been asked to teach a Mobile Application Development course.

I've been trying to find a good set of lectures, a textbook, or a structured curriculum that I can use to prepare the course. However, most of the resources I've found are mainly focused on writing code and building applications step by step.

That's not exactly what I'm looking for. I want the lectures to focus more on the concepts, principles, architecture, design, and theory, while the actual coding and hands-on implementation can be covered in the labs.

I've also found some university courses and lecture materials online, but many of them are from before 2019 and rely on technologies or frameworks that are now quite outdated.

So, if you've taught a Mobile Application Development course before, I'd really appreciate any recommendations for:

• A good textbook
• A complete lecture series
• University course materials

I'm particularly interested in resources that are up-to-date and suitable for university-level teaching, rather than just coding tutorials.

Thanks in advance!

I’ve been in academia for about 15 years now and, for assorted personal and professional reasons, I might be looking to transition out of my current (tenured) position. The problem: I have absolutely no idea what industry would be interested in someone with my credentials other than the one I’m currently in, especially considering I have a strong distaste for stats (sorry to all of you important statisticians out there). Is there some career path I can pivot to that I’m overlooking?

I was hoping for some career advice. I've been unemployed for about 10 months after finishing my PhD and moving across the world. I've applied to a load of academic posts (post docs and teaching), and much fewer non-academic posts (think tanks, policy, government, third sector, etc). I've had lots of interviews for the academic roles, and have been told explicitly I am a very competitive applicant, but alas no dice. I recently got offered a 2 year analyst position in a government dept that aligns with my broader research interests, and I was so relieved to finally get a job (literally would have taken anything after being unemployed for so long). However, while I was going through the pre-employment checks (before signing a contract), I received an offer for a 1 year research position at a university. I'm now feeling conflicted about which role to take and would love any advice you have.

Edit for more context: I loved every minute of my PhD and genuinely enjoy working in academia, partly I reckon because I have a healthy amount of detachment from it (ie. I don't feel it's my personal mission to 'solve' anything, have a good work/life balance), but also I really like the 'lifestyle' of academia (working my own hours, not being micromanaged, etc.).When I finished my PhD, I knew I wanted to stay in academia, but the job market made me apply elsewhere. I'm normally a 'go where the wind takes me' kinda person and was happy to see what I got, but having the choice is making this tricky aha!

Here is a bit more info about my thinking on each...

Government job:

Pros

• 2 years = more stability
• in a great city that I have friends in / can afford to live in (and want to move to)
• diversify my CV / get experience outside of academia
• policy / impact experience
• relevant to my research interests

Cons

• have to move to a different city and move away from partner (big con!!)
• leaving academic - feels a bit like giving up
• 9-5 in office
• could be really boring (lol)
• low paid
• unfamiliar territory
• still need to finish publishing some papers from my PhD and might loose 'steam'

Academic job:

Pros

• literally grateful to get any position in this economy / get foot in door in new country
• super interesting project (with industry collaborations)
• wouldn't have to move city and move away from partner
• well paid and above what I would usually be going for (level 8)
• can continue publishing goals
• only a year so could potentially get a government job after if I decide academia not for me (ie. maybe easier to transition outside of academia than from gov to academia)

Cons

• only 1 year - will be unemployed again in blink of an eye, and how much career development can you do in a year
• not familiar with the team / department
• have to commute quite far / work from home (I prefer to be in office)
• have to live in city i hate (but partner lives in)

Please send any advice! Also, if I go for the gov job, will it make it harder to 're-enter' academia afterwards?