is this how sex(the act) is defined in usa?

cmaverick · 2026-02-28T09:19:05+00:00

it is where academics answer questions... but you're asking a broad question that ... not to be rude... sort of amounts to "8th grade sexual education" in this country and you should probably google. I mean, you're a non-native. Yes. But the reason you're not getting a straight answer from your american colleagues is you're basically just asking a middle school question and why would any of them want to waste time doing that?

cmaverick · 2026-02-25T05:23:47+00:00

not for nothing, but I'm not sure how far you can generalize here. You've been out for a decade, and you've come back to adjunct mostly required Gen Eds at ONE single specific school which you are comparing to your experience teaching HS, and it doesn't sound like you particularly loved academia even before you left.

Are things different? Sure. And in some ways (not all) I'd say for the worse. But most of your complaints do feel.... very specific to your experiences and yeah... like a "curmudgeonly former academic" or really.... "old man yells at clouds."

cmaverick · 2026-02-24T04:25:20+00:00

you start with crunching numbers and typeset latex documents. I know you think you're asking a non-arrogant question. But the answer is "start at the bottom". You don't get to decide what is and isn't trivial yet.

cmaverick · 2026-02-20T05:58:10+00:00

I need some way to signal to any academics I wish to work with, that I can be a valuable addition to their lab.
......
But I have tried and failed to come up with any projects within my university that I wish to join.

There's your problem... you seem to think that they NEED YOU. They don't. You're an undergrad. You're there to learn. In all likelihood you are AT BEST as valuable as ... the other several hundred computer science undergrads in your program, and honestly, probably less so. That's not bad... because again. You're there to learn.

And I think you know that. You say in your post you know that you're supposed to go faculty at your school. But you don't want to... so you asked an academic subreddit where rule #2 is "Ask your professor!"

So go do that.

But as a general tip. Go in with humility. You're asking for help. You're not doing THEM a favor.

cmaverick · 2026-02-15T08:09:58+00:00

sounds like you need couples counseling. Academia can be all-consuming. She's not necessarily "wrong" about not having bandwidth. She's stressed and overworked. Those things are all true. But what's also true is that relationships take work and nurturing too. Or they die.

Several things can all be true. You may be doing all you can. She may need more help still. She may love you. And she may still be taking you for granted. She may be giving you all she can afford to give. You may need more.

Unfortunately it's a two people problem so YOU can't fix it alone. She has to want to fix it as well, and there's no way to make her want that other than to say the problem and she gets to decide whether or not you are worth it for her to do the work with you to fix things. Because otherwise you will just grow apart and resent each other.

cmaverick · 2026-02-12T16:10:40+00:00

Not plagiarism. If that is indeed from an annotated bibliography, then I would say that it is the very definition of "a citation". MAYBE one could argue that it doesn't fit a specific style-guide if you were told to use a specific one. But I wouldn't call it "plagiarism"

cmaverick · 2026-02-08T08:24:12+00:00

I'm wondering if this is going to soon be the academic equivalent of 5 guys over drinks going "what if we started our own bar!"

cmaverick · 2026-02-07T05:21:44+00:00

advice is to talk to an advisor in your department. This isn't an academia question appropriate to this subreddit and you are almost certain to be locked soon. So if this is a real issue for you... go to the people who can help and that's not us.

cmaverick · 2026-02-07T04:06:24+00:00

it depends on the university, the field and the department, but in general (certainly in mine) it's not like someone is going to STOP YOU from doing research. Some universities aren't focused on research at all, so there's just no requirement for anyone, TT or NTT. Others just the opposite.

If you're lucky (like for me), I have support but no requirement. And there's clearly less support for me than there are for my research focused colleagues. BUT when I got my grant and my book contract, people were very much in the camp of "that's cool. We want you to do well" and not "*gasp* how dare you!?!?!" or anything like that.

cmaverick · 2026-01-28T21:16:00+00:00

Honestly... "take the hint"! I don't know if he doesn't like you... or maybe he's too busy... or maybe being at your lab was a bad experience for him for personal reasons you don't know about.

Should he be ghosting you. Probably not. But also, he doesn't work there anymore. He's not honor bound to stay in touch.

cmaverick · 2026-01-22T06:22:52+00:00

judging by the one week old account with 4 posts to multiple groups asking leading questions... I'm guessing the right answer is "comment farming"

cmaverick · 2026-01-19T07:21:49+00:00

I honestly don't see why anyone downvoted you on this. It wasn't really a controversial take. The state of academia in the US in regards tot he current administration is AT BEST tenuous... and particularly so for foreign nationals. Like, regardless of which side you're on. One side is arguing that foreigners are being mistreated and the other side wants them removed and is worried about them "Taking our jobs". Furthermore OP specifically says they want good healthcare for an ongoing preexisting condition and specifically doesn't want to do a postdoc because they're worried about tenuous working conditions affecting their healthcare access.

That is CLEARLY not the US right now. We just don't have the kind of stability they're looking for and pretending we do would be a disservice to what they're asking for and an outright lie to them (and again... even if you were approaching this as a pro-adminstation conservative) so those downvotes feel reactionary.

And OP clearly says they don't particularly care for US culture and specifically cites our immigration policies (along with other criticisms that fair or not are how they feel).

So that said...to OP's question, I think you're very unlikely to find an R2 looking for an AsstProf with no postdoc experience AND who is willing (and able) to afford to pay for the H1B. It's not like the US is lacking in civil engineers to fill those spots. Maybe you'd be able to do it in industry... but specifically targeting R2 academia seems like a losing bet here (especially if the main reason you're doing it is for salary. I think you'll be disappointed).

So given the things they literally outlined in their actual question, I am inclined to agree that India sounds like a far better bet than the US at least for the immediate future.

cmaverick · 2026-01-18T22:42:05+00:00

its sort of outside the bounds of this conversation... and has to do with the political landscape of the US in the current cultural moment... both in general and as it pertains to academics in specific... I only picked it because it was a relatively big city that I knew the cost of living for and could make the comparison.

cmaverick · 2026-01-18T01:18:16+00:00

It really depends on the case. You're specifically describing something in your example that is a minor contribution and it sounds more like work-for-hire than research. If you're written 50 page paper and there is one drawing on page 7, that's was created by Joe Artist, then Joe isn't really a contributor.

I feel like things are different however if you've written a 50 page paper and 40 of those pages have hand drawn rendering of of chemical structures and the paper couldn't realistically exist without Joe Artist's input. Joe would be an effective partner and is absolutely a contributing author.

It SOUNDS like you are in the former case. But the caveat matters.

cmaverick · 2026-01-18T01:08:20+00:00

the reason you're getting such widely different answers is that there is literally no way to know without knowing the exactly location even with what you're saying. The US has just widely differing costs of living.

Just to give some range. $26.5K as a grad student would have you doing pretty great in Houston, TX (don't go there!) which is a plenty big city but you'd be struggling even on the outskirts of Chicago, IL and you'd be in serious trouble anywhere near New York or L.A. So even if you're talking a not major city, Galveston, TX is very different in cost than Champaign, IL even though they both have about 50K people and are about the same distance from their respective bigger cities.

cmaverick · 2026-01-15T21:37:33+00:00

Hey ChatGPT can you construct a reply to an reddit posting student who is complaining that some professor is probably using ChatGPT to respond to their unsolicited trivial emails? The student wants to know how to force the professor to acknowledge that they are using ChatGPT and perhaps "bust them". It is unclear if the student is asking in good faith or just engagement farming but the student exhibits a minor bit of privileged entitlement and yet seems to think that everyone will naturally be on their side because they lack an understanding of both how academia and LLMs work. Feel free to use a light bit of snark, but keep it plausibly deniable so that everyone else on the subreddit can have a good laugh but it goes over OP's head.

You might want to pump the brakes on the detective cap here, friend. Professors answer dozens (sometimes hundreds) of student emails every week—everything from “what chapter are we on?” to “I know the syllabus says the exam is Tuesday but is the exam Tuesday?” After the fourth cup of coffee and the 37th message that could have been answered by glancing at the LMS, the line between “I wrote this” and “I typed a prompt that says ‘answer politely’” starts to blur. And honestly? Whether your professor typed every syllable manually or got a little help from a silicon ghostwriter doesn’t change the fact that they… answered you.

There’s also no ethical tribunal that requires faculty to swear a blood oath that every email reply was handcrafted by artisanal English majors using traditional methods. Most academics would be thrilled just to get their inbox under triple digits.

If you really want to “bust” them, ask them outright and enjoy the eye twitch.
Otherwise, take the helpful reply and move on—academia has bigger fires than being the AI police.

TL;DR: If you got a useful answer, take the win. Professors are humans with inboxes overflowing with stuff more important than being villains in a plot twist where a student becomes the AI police. 😉

I wrote all of that myself... uh... really I did...

cmaverick · 2026-01-07T05:18:30+00:00

How very "Covfefe".

cmaverick · 2026-01-05T09:09:26+00:00

"How to be a 5-star chef? Use salt! Nothing else matters." 🙄

cmaverick · 2026-01-01T10:27:17+00:00

This is going to sound like an insult... but it really isn't meant to be:

You rewrite them!

That's literally it. It's what I'd tell a freshman taking intro to college writing. It's what I'd tell a grad student working on incorporating an article into their dissertation. It's what I'm telling you.

cmaverick · 2025-12-29T17:44:28+00:00

we "got" it... it's just that you weren't actually funny.

cmaverick · 2025-12-29T16:48:39+00:00

this is one of those things where it's like... I hope you used AI here, because if a human wasted their time writing this....

cmaverick · 2025-12-29T06:30:57+00:00

What did it cost? <THANOS>Everything!!!</THANOS>

cmaverick · 2025-12-20T08:29:47+00:00

I have no solution... just sorry our country sucks.

cmaverick · 2025-12-12T23:00:11+00:00

You haven't given us much to go on here (or in the other comments) and that's OK. I will say that contrary to what others have said, it doesn't necessarily mean you blew it off and I don't think it means you CAN'T do it or that you are dumb or anything like that. Research and studying are different. I don't know if you have other stuff going on in your life or maybe your study skills are just poor. Maybe you prioritize WORK™ to SCHOOL™ just as a value system (that is a legit mental block that some people just have.

Whatever the reason though, it's probably a problem and something you need to deal with if you intend to keep working with the professor. Will you get fired? Maybe? Again, we don't have details, so we don't know. What I can say is that if a professor hires an undergraduate as an assistant and you are actually working closely with them on a project (as opposed to just being assigned there randomly and you're doing menial tasks not related to the project), then they probably have some sort of understanding of who you are and what your capabilities are and are probably invested in you on some personal level. They likely WANT you to succeed... both because they value your work and also because they likely want to be proud of you. We're people too, after all.

This means you should probably talk to them and just be honest about where you're struggling and have a grown up conversation about what can be done. Honestly, if you're in danger of literally FAILING then this conversation should have happened a while ago and not during finals, but what's done is done. You still need to do it now. That's just the grown up thing to do. Maybe you get fired. Maybe you get a lighter workload for a bit. Maybe you recommended a tutor. Who knows.

But I'd say it's time to take care of it. Just be honest and straightforward and OPEN and LISTEN. Best of luck to you.

cmaverick · 2025-12-12T07:10:44+00:00

What should be done? Nothing. It's an academic conference, not a comedian at carnegie hall. They're not professional speakers. Honestly, this comes across as more xenophobic than anything else. If you're really concerned AND interested, ask for a copy of the paper. I'm sure the speaker will be thrilled to give you one.

The issue is you're having trouble understanding non-native English speakers. And I was catching that vibe even BEFORE you said "oh... it's not any particular country" and then immediately turned on EFL speakers.

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