@ff524, you should help him (or her) if you can. Your situation is way different from Massimo's situation, since he is a tenured professor :) You, on the other hand, will be on the job market very soon and could use some help, if you decide to look around in industry.
Remember: people (for the most part) grow - professionally and personally. This student, whether he lazy, not-so-smart, whatever it was that he now needs to relearn some material for his first task on his new job, would be extremely grateful to you in the future. I agree not charging him any money and not to develop a consultancy capacity with his company -- just do it for plain goodwill. It'll go a long way. I've seen it happen often enough :)
@ff524 I understand there are things you are not at liberty to say. The user who asked the question about the rec letter also asked about drug testing. The drug question was full of spelling errors(I had to fix them to make it a question). The rec letter seems to be written by a native English speaker. Something seems to be wrong.
Ah...good catch, @ff524 :) yea, I was going to flag that sex story question too but realized that I currently don't have that functionality available, since you suspended me for defending the notion that the Black Lives Matter movement should not be made a mockery of, especially on an Academic website :(
@scaaahu someone raised a large number of flags on old messages in this room. Chat flags are visible to high rep users all across the SE network, so a flag storm like that attracts attention from users of other sites (and is annoying and disruptive to them, if the flags seem invalid)
(I deleted those last few chat messages, as they serve no purpose now that the flags have stopped)
My students think it's really weird that I don't respond to their messages immediately during the day, when I'm trying to work, but if they happen to send me something at 2AM they get an instant response :)
Actually, it's probably really good that I'm religious. For about 26 hours a week I am offline and can't work and I basically sleep straight through that time :)
@Wrzlprmft Well, actually it depends a lot on how you are managed and how you manage yourself. When I was a student (a long long time ago), we had the bad habit of taking much more work than that we could chew. Once we get an industry contract for the development of a number of measuring systems for trains and for 6 months I worked on that and on my thesis from about 8 am to 4am, Saturdays and Sundays too.
@MassimoOrtolano I feel like I'm too old for that kind of schedule. When I was an undergrad I could study late into the night, no problem. Now I hit 2AM and even if i can't fall asleep anyways, I'm still much too tired to actually do any work.
@ff524 At the time I really had a lot of energy, nowadays I would be no longer able to do that. Actually, I suffered from insomnia from I was 16 to about 30, then I've started to sleep normally.
I also did things like working up to midnight, then go to the disco, and then go straight from the disco to work the next morning... things I wouldn't suggest to anyone who wants a healthy life...
I can only report that having a child really adjusts your sleeping rhythm once it is enrolled in Kindergarten (after totally wrecking it in the first year).
@MassimoOrtolano I had something similar for two years when i lived somewhere else, and could go for a run outdoors every evening. I slept great. But where I live now, it's not safe for me to do that.
@Wrzlprmft I have no kids of my own, but I had to take care of my sister's for a while when she had some health issues. It was crazy, I got no sleep.
I was tutoring the high school kids in the evening until about midnight, then trying to get a little of my own work done, praying the baby wouldn't wake up and have to be put back sleep, then getting up with the baby at 5AM...
This happened to coincide with the semester when I taught a masters course in a subject i had never actually studied, and I was ridiculously busy with that too. It was not fun.
After a few months of playing Mommy like that, I am not in any rush to have my own :)
This is a follow up of my question on MSE. Which tips and recommendations would you give students who want to investigate series about convergence or divergence?
So far we have collected:
It is good to start with the term test.
For Series of the form $\sum_{k=1}^\infty a_k$ the root test is o...
What is a good answer to the question: Why should one study ordinary differential equations?
I would give the answer: ODEs are used in many models to determine how the state of this model is changing (regarding time or another variable). Thus, ODEs are important for many scientific fields beca...
@User001 No. I stick mostly to the academic security conferences. Just got back from PETS. Wish I was going to Usenix in August, but I'll go to CCS in October.
I think we should burninate the tag assistant-professor: there are too many different meanings around the world for this title for the tag to be meaningful.
@StrongBad Yes, exactly: I wouldn't differentiate between the titles and I'd leave the specification of the context to the questioner. I don't understand well, though, if this means burninate the tags or create tag synonyms.
@StrongBad Without specifying of a country, those tags are ambiguous: for instance, in the US an assistant professor afaik is not tenured, while in other countries (e.g mine) it is. Or we can keep different tags, but insist more on requiring country tags. Or if's too work we can happily ignore the issue ;-)
The lecturer tag is supposed to be for questions about the job of lecturer, a specific academic job title that exists in some parts of the world.
Does it even make sense to have a tag for a specific job title when the meaning of the job title varies from country to country? I suggest that re...
huh. including me, apparently
I think it is useful to have specific tags about job titles that do have a specific meaning in parts of the world that use that title. lecturer is not ambiguous to people in systems where that's a job title, just as assistant-professor is not ambiguous to people in the US. On the other hand, junior-faculty is not a clearly defined job title and is ambiguous (look at the current state of early-career to see what I mean by this...) — ff524 ♦Jan 1 at 2:55
@StrongBad I don't think there's anything wrong with making synonyms of tags that are used correctly, if the tags are not being as helpful as they could me.
I think the issue is that the job titles are not particularly helpful. Tenured, tenure track, and non-tenure track seem like useful information for answering questions
@ff524 and @StrongBad At the end, the main issue is probably that that most of the questioners do not provide sufficient context (i.e. other tags, like the country one) together with the title tag. In the question linked by @ff524 the most upvoted question from @Wrzlprmft suggest the usage of tag warnings: maybe we can have tag warnings on these tags suggesting the usage of the country tag too.
This is a follow up of my question on MSE. Which tips and recommendations would you give students who want to investigate series about convergence or divergence?
So far we have collected:
It is good to start with the term test.
For Series of the form $\sum_{k=1}^\infty a_k$ the root test is o...
The lecturer tag is supposed to be for questions about the job of lecturer, a specific academic job title that exists in some parts of the world.
Does it even make sense to have a tag for a specific job title when the meaning of the job title varies from country to country? I suggest that re...
The Ivory Tower
The Ivory Tower