Just to go through a few of the ones I encountered:

"Submitting the same research to multiple conferences" - this was a practice in my lab, which I was asked to do, which bothered the heck out of me. Apparently I was just being oversensitive. Still, I did ask my advisors about it, and their answer ("it's what everyone does") didn't do much to allay my worries.

The take-home for me was that (1) it's good to be ask questions, even if I turn out to be wrong; that's how you learn, and (2) if you're an advisor, explain things clearly, particularly if it's worrying your graduate student. You're his source of knowledge as to how the field works.

"Advisor asking me to work on research not covered by my grant" - This happened at the very beginning of my graduate work, and my co-advisor was notorious for doing this. (During my first year a student left the lab because of something similar, except he wasn't going to get a paper out of his work.) I handled this by talking to my primary advisor about the "problem".

This resulted in my co-advisor being somewhat "banned" from requesting my assistance on any of his work, which was a double-edged sword... I was free to do my own research, but (I realized later) since my primary advisor was completely uninvolved in the lab, I didn't get any publications at all during my first few years, and when I wrote something it took forever for him to review it.

I probably handled that one wrong, but I really don't know how else I should have handled it. Ah well.

"Advisor isn't advising" - As stated. I solved this one the only way I could think of... plow through my research as fast as I could and graduate very quickly. Not a good choice in retrospect; my publication list is woefully short. I probably should have switched labs. Ah well (again).

@CharlesMorisset feel free to comment on any of these, I'd be curious to hear feedback

@eykanal Concerning the first one, I'd say that your take-home is good, and it's part of the "what is it that you're not being told before starting a PhD, and that you might not like" question. And to some extent, the second one is also related: yes, overlapping submissions and time-sharing are real things, at least in many universities, and you might have to deal with it. In both case, I guess you did very well by talking with your advisor.

And in the second point, you also raised a very important point: yes, you can say no to your advisor, but it comes with a cost, which is that it might be much harder to publish, which might hurt your career a lot. Of course, I guess it's not always like that, and you can disagree with your advisor, but it can be dangerous.

Without spying too much, a quick look at your profile seems to indicate that you left academia: are these bad experiences you've been through related? In retrospect, do you think that if you had been much more "compliant" with your co-advisor requests, you would have had many more publications, and would be leaving an happy academic life now?

(it goes without saying that I'm in no way looking down at that your current career path, it just that it seems you had a quite complicated thesis, so I'd be curious how you analyse your experience yourself).

@CharlesMorisset :) No problem about the checking me out... I considered that before I posted, but as I've made a lot of information public, you're perfectly OK for asking.

Many of my experiences were related... I had a somewhat tumultuous PhD experience, and it turned me off from an academia career.

In truth, I expected to be leading an academic career... my current employment definitely was unexpected, but I took it largely because of all the problems I had going through grad school, and the fact that afterwards I was left with a relatively weak Academic CV

When will this site leave private beta and go public beta?

@eykanal Hello. Do you know when this site goes public?

@JG = Just saw your post, was looking it up. It seems that the "private->public" transition is based mostly on the StackExchange moderators and whether they think the site is ready enough to open up.

See this question for some more discussion: meta.theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/16/…

There are a bunch more posts like it if you search around, but they all say the same thing... there's no hard & fast rules, it's kinda fluid based on how the mods feel the site is doing

hey @charles

Hi @eykanal! Thanks for your answer :)

no prob

I can definitely tell you, I didn't expect to be working in a bank three months ago

I'm trying to think of a good question summarizing this kind of situation, so that you could answer it and share your experience :)

3 months ago? So it's really recent!

very

six months ago I found out my postdoc grant was not being refunded & began looking around, just under three months ago I got in contact with someone from the bank, started working here two months ago

it's been a busy winter thus far :)

do you enjoy your current job? I have friends working in banks (not as quants though, more like programmers), and they actually like the thrill and the pressure.

I'm definitely enjoying it

VERY different from academia

I can imagine :)

I'm surprised at how difficult it is to get good data (modeling-wise) in the real world

well, don't you get the data from your bank?

yes

it's just that the datasets are surprisingly small, and often there are missing fields based on whether that particular parameter was known or not

in neuroscience I had the opposite problem; each subject was ~4.5 GB of timeseries data

plus a whole bunch of behavioral data

well, in my field (computer security), I have basically zero real data :)

what would be "real data"? hacking attempts?

in my case, I work more on policy definition, so I'd be interested in having real security policy, and real policy problems (like all the exceptions they have to grant)

but that's why I was surprised when you said that it was harder to have good data in real world, for me, it's quite the opposite

yeah, my data is mostly defaulted commercial loans, and (gladly) there aren't so many of those

are you working in academia or industry?

academia, doing my third postdoc

I was bit luckier than you during my PhD experience

most people are, from what I can tell

@eykanal what field are you in?

I don't know, I have heard several stories similar to yours, but it seems that they usually don't stick around to share and explain what went wrong

@eykanal Is there an expected date?

@JG - My academic work was in neuroscience/signal processing, my current work is in banking

also, regarding the private->public thing, I don't know

I don't even know who makes that decision

@CharlesMorisset - you know, I had a good time despite all the problems, and I still am friends with a lot of the people I worked with

I actually just went back and gave a talk about my work last week

your current work or your postdoc work?

@eykanal What type of banking job do you have?

@eykanal Are you at a central bank or an investment bank (e.g. Deutsche Banke)

@charles - both, actually... you can see the talk on slideshare

it was a methods talk, and I was working with the same imaging technique in both my grad and postdoc positions

@eykanal How do you combine your science and bank work?

@JG - I think you're asking more questions than I can answer here :)

you can send me an email, my email address is in my profile

@eykanal I just had a look at your slides, I have to admit that I didn't understand much :) But I like the style of them, in particular the red pointers to the text, they bring a lot. What do you use, Keynote?

Yeah, I'm a huge keynote fan

@charles Over the years I developed a very particular methodology for how I do presentations involving math

actually, that would be a great question... could you post something asking about how to effectively make presentations about math?

I've indeed always used Latex, because I need the maths, and I wasn't satisfied by the other solutions in the past, but I must say I'm quite impressed by the quality. I'll ask the question right away!

@CharlesMorisset - I've found the following two programs to be indispensable for writing talks - LateXiT for the Mac, and a similar but less functional KLaTeXFormula for a number of OSs

those, plus explicit descriptions as to what each variable means, plus some fancypants wipe animations, makes for a very understandable math talk

@eykanal Thanks for the tip, I've tried Keynote, but never combined it with LateXiT, so I couldn't easily include all my math stuff. But basically, you copy and paste each formula from LateXiT to Keynote? There is no easier way?

If by "easier way", you mean "can I typeset latex directly into keynote", the answer unfortunately is usually "no". That being said...

you know, I'll just type all this in the answer to your question :)

@JG - looks like the site just went to public beta, so ask away!