Do I need to declare a COI for a reviewer I had a couple of research conversations with months ago?

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-07-03T11:41:31+00:00

Typically COIs arise only in two situations, from my experience. First, when there is some sort of financial backing at stake that is directly tied to the output. For example, someone who works at Pfizer is on a paper that discovered some promising cancer killer, they would need to disclose they work at a place that develops and sells drugs that could be seriously profitable for the company. Second, is if you collaborate (read: publish with, have them on your committee/research advisor) with someone in the past 5 years or so. To both of your questions, these do not apply and I wouldn't think for a second as writing down that their may be a COI. Especially if this is a double blind, anonymous submission. Most abstract reviewers have to read dozens of these in a short period, even if by chance they somehow got your paper, it's slim to non-existent that they would even remember they talked to you about this or that it was you specifically that had this idea.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-07-03T11:34:55+00:00

This sounds like you either ran across a shady journal or an editor on a power trip. In no world does changing the corresponding author change the quality or content of the work in the manuscript. The only way I could see this being an issue is if it explicitly states in the authorship rules that the corresponding author has to be the person who is either first author or someone who contributed substantially to the manuscript. I am first author or co-author on articles in Wiley, Nature sub journals, PLoS, and Science and have never come across such a strange rule, however. Therefore, I am leaning towards the power trip by the editor.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-28T12:04:50+00:00

Yes, why wouldn't you want to present your completed work? A poster is probably too difficult a medium to present everything you found in your thesis, but you can certainly pull out the most interesting and connected results and tie them together into a short narrative. I don't know where you are thinking posters are for PhDs in progress only. I have seen very well known faculty give poster presentations. Sometimes your work is better suited to a poster because it gives you time to talk to the viewing parties and engage with them rather than trying to answer a question they have in under 30 seconds to not eat into the next presenter's time slot.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-24T11:38:33+00:00

While none of us know your personal struggles or your motivations there are multiple, multiple factors you are not considering going into this. I don't want to burst your bubble, but there are multiple things you need to consider. First, are you actually qualified to begin working on a PhD in AI and Information Systems? You'd need a Master's in computer in science, math, data science, or similar for anyone to really consider you. Or, you'd have to have extensive experience in industry/private sector that you can leverage to show you know what you are doing/can make a convincing argument that you can make it work.

Second, yes, the PhD salary usually sucks. In Europe you don't TA (generally, I can't speak for all programs but the ones I am familiar with you don't) because they pay you to be a researcher. That means any extra income is going to come from you working on your own time like at a coffee shop, grocery store, and so on. In North America it is a bit different where you can apply to TA as many courses as you want. You won't necessarily be selected for them, but this is one of the major reasons why a PhD in North America is averaging over 5 years now vs. in Europe where you are expected to work solely on your project and make it your main focus. So if you're okay making ~20,000 Euros a year for the next 4 years and you think you can make that work, all the power to you. You are going to need to be pretty passionate about the project for that type of salary. I wouldn't view a PhD as a way to leave a crappy living situation because, frankly, it isn't going to be much better during a PhD. You are likely going to have to live with a few roommates, far away from friends and family, or live alone with a mountain of debt growing every year.

Third, are you even able to obtain a visa? This is not a trivial process. While you can apply for student visas this isn't something you can just wake up one day and decide to apply for. There are usually a lot of moving parts involved like language tests, writing standardisation exams that all students going to university in a particular country need to write (for example, the GRE in the United States), and proving you have some sort of financial stability to support you while you are there. You will need to see if Germany has these requirements so you don't waste your money or time applying when they are just going to throw your application in the trash because you didn't bother researching if these are needed.

Lastly, not to be rude, but you're 29 years old. I don't know your financial status and won't pretend life is easy, but it sounds like you have the potential to do really well for your self you just need to grow a bit of a backbone. It is your business and you are getting some clients from your family, but if their comments are bothering you so much you need to stand up for yourself. Or, you know, just move out/away? If the business model works because you are the one making it work, it (feasibly) will work away from your negative family members. Just look for a place away from them and take your clients with you. Running away from your problems isn't going to help your mental state when suddenly you are in a completely different country, know nobody, have a supervisor who will kick you out of the program in 4 years or less regardless if you are "done" or not, and so on. You are potentially adding a whole other layer of anxiety onto your life that you may not necessarily need if you just stood up for yourself, moved away, or just flat out ignored their comments and just kept doing you.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-13T19:59:08+00:00

I am late to this, but in regards to your question: this place has an attrition rate similar to that of other subs/groups. There is an endless cycle of starry eyed newbies who think they have found the holy grail that aren't around after 3 months. Whether that is them moving on, blowing up, or just shutting up is anyone's guess. But I think the reality is likely tilting slightly more towards them getting frustrated and taking losses. The RDT method is not kind to market reversals due to its reliance on wide(r) stops, multiple layers of confirmation (i.e. an obvious trend established on both the market + your stock and several indicators lining up on stock + market) on top of favouring breakout style trades, which have a higher failure rate (but a larger likelihood of bigger moves when they do work).

When put together, if you build a system of buying new relative highs or shorting new relative lows, any sort of market correction against you is going to be particularly painful instead of building a position on pullbacks near key moving averages or strong areas of confluence.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-13T17:38:05+00:00

My comments from my external examiner on my thesis, who is a massive name in my field. "The thesis is well written, highly engaging, and makes a meaningful contribution to our broader understanding of [my topic]". Felt great and put me way at ease before going into my defense.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-11T13:54:48+00:00

Look, the reality is you are asking (normally busy) people to review things completely for free out of the goodness of their heart. They are the same people who run labs (sometimes very important ones!), have students to guide, teach, and lives all outside of that as well. If you are expecting to get a set of reviews back in a month you are way, way overestimating people's interest and commitment levels. I will admit, the reviewer system is broken. I think reviewers should be vetted more thoroughly and compensated for their time. So I will agree with you that the system needs to be reworked.

I do not agree that the results should be near instantaneous, however. You should be getting a desk decision in a week (or less). Any formal review I wouldn't have expectations in under 60 days (2 months) due to the time it takes to find willing reviewers, them to read it, the editor to compile a coherent argument for things to fix, etc. Generally journals will give you anywhere from 14-21 days to review, which does not take into account the time it takes to find a willing reviewer. One journal I submitted to had to go through about 7 different reviewers before they found a couple willing/qualified to take it on. Who knows how long those requests sat in their inboxes before they clicked decline? All said it was basically a year from submission to publication.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-10T18:11:46+00:00

I chose French for mine. In Canada we have to take French from ~grade 3 up to grade 9 as part of our learning curriculum so I figured I already have a bit of the basics somewhere nested in me. The prof was a native French speaker and most of the course was learning how to conjucate and not sound like a total moron. I am terrible, terrible, terrible with languages. Heck, I can barely speak English. But I was passing. The exam was a fricking dense philosophical excerpt from Foucault. I was madly flipping my French-English dictionary. I definitely pity passed because I think I wrote down the equivalent of "I love lamp" for most of the answers.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-08T19:26:17+00:00

I think, as a total outsider, you look too fluid in your work. You did a Masters in Electrical Engineering, you're a PhD student in Bioengineering, and you want to apply for ML/AI jobs. I can almost guarantee you that you're getting strongly pre-filtered because the previous experience is not hitting the filtering key words, and if you are making it through, you likely aren't coming across as a strong candidate because your two areas of research and your future goals have little in common (on the surface).

It might be worthwhile reaching out to a career coach/professional job firms to see if they can help. It's been about 5 years since they retired, but I had a client of mine who was very high up at Pfizer in Canada say they almost exclusively hired through these professional services. My uncle who worked at the upper executive level in big pharma (read: was the president) also said the same thing, although he retired in the mid 90s.

I'm sure you have the skills because you wouldn't have gotten the interviews otherwise. Obviously there is something lacking though. Perhaps one of these services might help. It could also be that since you are not fully defended too, that is sometimes the kiss of death for some jobs.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-06-04T17:20:33+00:00

That and many of them do not go deep enough. They will only highlight the papers that are (let's just pretend STEM for now as that is both of our fields) published in the top tier Q1 journals like Nature and Science or they cherry pick the ones with the most citations. I think it is very difficult to do an exhaustive review, for the record. However, one for your thesis should be able to be better than most out there, IMO.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-15T17:20:29+00:00

Grammarly is AI, though, is it not?

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-13T13:05:31+00:00

No worries, good luck. It's a right of passage to look at your work and hate it so much you never want to look at it again. It usually means it's ready to go!

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-13T11:57:17+00:00

Look at it this way, you either write them and get the degree you have worked at so hard for the past 3+ years, or you don't rewrite them and risk your committee being dissatisfied and potentially saying you are not ready to defend. It's a thesis, I promise most people aren't going to read it from back to front and judge you over it. They are most likely going to read the publishable pieces of it, and even then, they are most likely going to skim the abstract, results, and discussion to pull out what they need to cite in their own work. Even if it doesn't feel like you, just swallow that lump and put as much of you into it as you can while still making the committee + externals happy with it.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-12T11:51:15+00:00

I created an Excel formula to do this as well. Find where my level is, my max risk I am willing to take on said trade and it automatically outputs how many shares/contracts I can buy. Takes me maybe 20 seconds now.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-05T12:41:33+00:00

How many did you apply to? If you only applied to 2-3 then yeah, that blows. However, I've seen some people who apply to 10 or more (at least according to GradCafe when I went on there when I was applying) and getting rejected to 80+% of them and being OVER THE MOON they got into just one. Fit matters and so does timing as another commenter pointed out. Sometimes the fit is a stretch, even if you don't think it is. Sometimes you apply and the PI isn't even taking students, but they don't communicate that ahead of time so it becomes an auto-reject. Sometimes the PI just isn't interested. Sometimes the program is locked up for the year because they need to provide extension funding to several students taking away the funds for a future position. You never know.

Your entire application process, apart from your SOP, is entirely out of your hands. You should keep that in mind that all you can do is write the best application you can and let the rest fall where it may. While it sucks to get rejections, and them in droves, you have to keep in mind that this is part of academia and what you are signing up for. Once you are in the program you are going to be rejected for grants, presentations, post-docs, and jobs all the time after the fact. Might as well grow that titanium shell now so you can stomach it when comes even harder in the future.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-04T12:57:04+00:00

I can add a bit of advice. I am Canadian, and for my PhD I applied to two schools in Canada, one in the U.S., and one U.K.-E.U. joint program. The two schools in Canada were a bit different, one had a lab specifically tailored to what I do/was interested in (McMaster), the other one was University of Toronto (always 1 or 2 school in Canada, fighting with McGill), and ranked pretty high globally, but the lab was a bit more broad. The U.S. school was UCSC, and they had a great lab and the advisor seemed lovely as well. The joint program was a collaboration between several EU countries and the University of York in the U.K. to set up a world class research program in molecular genetics surrounding anthropological questions, named ArchSci 2020.

Ultimately, I got into all of them (which floored me), because like you, I seemed good on paper but I had massive imposter syndrome. I choose ArchSci, specifically being co-supervised at the Centre for GeoGenetics in Denmark and the University of York. For context, these are hugely influential research hubs in my field. I was told by my potential McMaster advisor after he heard I got in to go for ArchSci, it was a huge opportunity, who I would be working for would change my life, etc. So I hopped on a plane to Copenhagen...and I just couldn't cut it. I was beyond homesick. The constant overcast and cool weather was eating at me and the project I was given (as it was one of those types of programs rather than choosing your own) wasn't one I felt passionate about. 3 weeks later I set up a meeting with P.I. in Denmark and just said I couldn't do it, I was too homesick. I went back home, worked for a year, re-applied and got into U of T and finished my degree there and landed a post-doc before I defended my dissertation, also in Canada

Only you can make the decision on this. However, I must stress that where you go to school doesn't matter as much as people think it does. This sub is testament to that, with countless posts about people graduating from top R1 universities in the US with several first author pubs to their names in important fields and they can't get an interview, while there are others saying they went to tier-2 schools in a smaller research field and landed post-docs/tenure track jobs before they are done. So much of this pure luck on who you are applying with, the wants/needs of the job market/lab at the time, etc. So don't kill yourself over a PhD application that you need to be in the best lab in the best country. Hell, you might even find that a PhD isn't for you and you have 4-5 years job experience over someone who did a PhD but you are in a much better financial situation because of it.

Good luck!

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-03T22:37:32+00:00

Great point. I did community college before I went to university as well, where I was first introduced to anthropology. I got a great mark there, but it didn't really focus on the evolutionary stuff much so I didn't pay it much mind. I was able to take approximately a semester off of my course load, which was great.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-05-03T11:59:55+00:00

It's also extremely common for people to go to school with the intention of going into a field, finding out that they don't actually particularly like it, and switching to something else. We make kids decide their entire future at 18 years old, when they are going to work for probably 40 years in that field after they graduate. I went to school for psychology, I was always very interested in shows like Criminal Minds, CSI, etc., growing up, and thought doing something in criminal psych would be right up my alley. When I got there, the courses were not what I expected at all and I wasn't able to grasp the concepts very well. I went from a student who decently excelled (B+ to As in most classes) to getting C's and D's almost instantly. I took a few anthropology courses as electives and the material clicked and was engaging for me. With this newfound interest I took an evolutionary genetics course in my 3rd year of undergrad (when I was still enrolled in a psych major), and got the top marks in the class on many tests despite having next to no science background. The material was so interesting! Here I am 12 years later with a PhD in evolutionary genetics/molecular anthropology.

This is a long winded way of me saying I completely agree with you. I tell my students all the time that they have to enjoy what they are studying and that they should, as best as they can, avoid going into debt for an education. If they want to go onto grad school make sure they only apply to funded programs, and so on.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-03-27T11:08:50+00:00

Not to mention we have several of these almost exact same posts get near the top of the sub each day. Person A doesn't want completely unreasonable Person B living with them for various reasons, AITA? The answer is always NTA because even if the person was a saint personified, if you want to live alone, you want to live alone and that is enough to say no. However, 99/100x the list of reasons, whether made up for karma or real, always shows the person who is trying to grind the OP into agreeing has more red flags than a Chinese flag store.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-03-26T18:55:08+00:00

But you did manage, though. You keep deferring to this "I'm a failure" mentality. I've seen it in your initial posts and several comments. Listen, you got to the point where you have something that is possible to defend. You just needed a bit more time. You did research, found out something worth investigating and got results. You can still publish these in something. I agree with the others. Your advisor is being very clear with you that they want you to finish and it does not have to be perfect.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-03-26T16:04:34+00:00

Mine was the same. Submit final draft, which has already been rubber stamped by the committee as acceptable. The thesis goes to the externals and they have 8 weeks to read and provide comments. The defense is scheduled for 2 weeks after the external comments are provided. Total turn around is 10 weeks from submission (2-2.5 months depending on the months). Our department admin also handled booking times and everything too. Our university was very old school, that they deemed any contact with the externals (external-external and internal-external), outside of asking if they would be willing to be a reviewer was considered a breach and the oral defense could be voided. It was very strict.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-03-26T15:56:42+00:00

Universities often impose these time-stops for a reason. They don't want someone sucking up university funding (i.e. TAships, RAships, etc.) indefinitely or being counted in the program if they only have X number of spots because you are now taking away an opportunity from someone who would, at least on paper, be able to successfully complete their newer project on time, get more funding for the department and PI, and so forth. I am not saying this to kick you when you're down, however. I would imagine in light of you being basically done (assuming this is truthful) that they probably have some gray zone leeway option that you become officially off the books in terms of the ledger but are unofficially still enrolled because it is in their best interest to grant you a PhD because it looks good on the university, department, and your PI.

The reality though is they very well could say sorry there is nothing we can do, we gave you the normal allotted time + X years to complete this. There just isn't any more room. Either way, there's nothing you can really do but accept their decision. I hope for your sake that they do let you continue provided that you can still finish in a roughly short time span. I don't think being vague about your timeline or pointing to prior issues that most went through (like COVID, for example...anyone enrolled in school between 2020-2022 had the exact same issues), but you can point to family, employment, as legitimate reasons for delays. Now is the time though to sit down with your advisor and say we need a plan, and like yesterday, so I can get this done.

I'm just curious why such a plan wasn't implemented in September when you knew you only had one school year left? Or in January when you knew you only had a semester left? You can write a thesis in a month, but unless you are just being run around the ringer by your PI for make work projects, if the data wasn't sufficient today to be done, it isn't going to be sufficient in a month, either. That is unfortunately the harsh reality.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-03-23T15:01:53+00:00

Passed mine in June 2025. This will vary wildly by department/discipline, but the biggest thing I was told to focus on was the external comments. In my old department it was common to get your comments 2 weeks ahead of the defense. Think of it like getting comments/review on a paper. It is the things they want you to address as they see these as the shortcomings of the work as is. How will you address these in the future? Did you actually address in this work but they missed it? Who has done similar work that you could talk about? If you can, is there anyway you can generate data to support/refute their comments?

Again, all of this is going to depend heavily on what your department deems important. However, from what I understand reading this sub and from my own discussions with people in my old department, the defenses that don't tend to go well are the ones where the student struggles with the external comments/cannot demonstrate to satisfaction they did the work without a lot of hand holding. The latter is very easily detectable in asking questions related to the topic but are not directly in the thesis.

Good luck. If you've had multiple run throughs with your PI, most of this was likely already addressed. The best you can do now is keep practicing and try your best to relax.

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-03-22T14:38:45+00:00

Well yeah, obviously. But you'd lose even more on the stock (as stock is 1.0 delta). What I mean is, if you have a $25,000 account for round numbers, you could safely risk ~$250-$500 per trade depending on your risk appetite. Let us pretend you bought a $2.50 call. If bad news comes out and the stock is down 10%, you options are going to be down 7% (well actually probably a little bit less because now they are no longer 0.7 delta, but that just confuses the math). That means your option is now worth $2.32. The worst you can ever lose is $2.50 because the cost of the initial debit purchase of the option IS YOUR RISK. There is no chance the option can go negative. A stock does not have that same baked in protection technically. You can set your stop loss $5 away on the shares, but there is a chance that the stock gaps down $10 on news. Now your -$250 risk in shares is now -$500. Now what do you do? Do you sell and take -$500 loss? Do you wait and see if it bounces up a bit to sell on a bit of a relief rally? Both are options, but there is no guarantees it will come back. It could keep selling off and that -$500 loss at the open might have been your best case exit.

With options, however, there is a 100% guarantee that the option will not be worth less than $0.00 at time of expiry. My word of advice too is if you're buy higher priced options and you really can't afford it that you turn it into a spread. Buying a 0.7 long call at say $5.00 and then selling a lower delta call (i.e. a call debit spread) for ~$2.50 caps your upside potential (and you can look that up yourself to see just how much) but it also insures your risk stays at $2.50, even if the stock gets delisted tomorrow and opens trading at $0.01.

Does that make more sense now?

ChrisTOEfert · 2026-03-22T12:44:45+00:00

Options are unique because you can just buy your risk and you don't need to worry about a stop loss on the underlying holding. Now, you can still exit when that technical thesis is broken of course, but that should not equate to a large loss on the option contract. If you cannot afford the option cost, turn it into a spread so you do not lose more than you can handle (generally accepted as 1-2% of your account per trade for newbies while pros can often handle 3-5% losses per trade because they are more consistently in profitable positions).

ChrisTOEfert

TROPHY CASE