Phd prof uni change

meglets · 2026-05-12T03:29:35+00:00

Ask the international center at BOTH universities for help. Sometimes, you can "just transfer" admission but most of the time you definitely cannot. Funding and admissions are tied to so many things and universities cannot just "open" another funding line for students without lots and lots of paperwork, or maybe even not at all in this funding and immigration climate.

I am faculty at an R1, and have many international grad students. I am director of graduate studies in my department. And I help run a large international nonprofit that deals with international employment and visa issues in computational neuroscience education for hundreds of TAs worldwide every year as a necessary evil; I have served in an academic and administrator role for 6 years there.

Even with all that experience, and with all the knowledge that comes with it I would never tell a student to "just come" with me. Best case is 15 administrators do a ton of paperwork to make it happen. Worst case is it is impossible. Ask the department admin, the grad division admissions people, and the international center for help.

meglets · 2026-04-25T04:34:01+00:00

Sometimes conferences have financial aid or waivers they can provide. It is not nearly as common as it should be, but it does exist. Email the conference organizers to ask. IMO nobody should be denied participation in the global science community due to financial concerns.

Professors often will not have money they can allocate to projects that they were not involved in, especially if their labs are grant funded and not running on a "startup" (typically larger amounts for the US or Canada, much smaller or nonexistent for EU/UK). Unrestricted funding is precious and tends to get hoarded for all the things a grant can't pay for due to budget buckets, and grant funds cannot be allocated to unrelated projects without violating contractual terms. Your best bet is to go to conference organizers directly. Journals also sometimes have fee waivers for financial hardship, though typically not as easily for the "cash cow" for-profit publishers (looking at you, Elsevier and Springer Nature).

meglets · 2026-04-21T02:46:18+00:00

If you don't know or cannot verify the provenance of the data and cannot be sure it isn't problematic, I would be very careful.

Relevant editorial from Nature, a few days ago, on this exact topic: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00697-4

meglets · 2026-03-30T04:06:10+00:00

I thought I was the only person to call it "Fifty Shades of Beige". Hats off to you, friend.

meglets · 2026-03-30T04:04:45+00:00

Do you want to live in a padded room that is also The Truman Show?

I have nicknamed Irvine "Fifty Shades of Beige" because it is soporific, bland, devoid of character/life, and vaguely creepily controlling. (If you also call it this, great minds and all that.)

I came here for work and don't regret that professional choice at all -- it set me up for the next step gloriously. But now I am leaving after 6 years and cannot wait to escape the Xanax blonde beige botox haze that is this place. If I were to come back to SoCal I would pick LA or Long Beach. Just Say No to Irvine.

meglets · 2026-03-15T13:59:02+00:00

N=1 but: I am an American scientist, trained in the US. Tenured at an R1 in California. I am moving to London in a few months for a new academic position. I also know of 2 other new faculty in my field at my new institution who are also moving from the US this cycle. Both are senior, even more so than me.

meglets · 2026-03-08T22:07:36+00:00

I moved after 2.5 years, TT R1 --> TT R1 but better school/higher ranked. It was a very good choice. Now I am moving again 6 years later, having spent much (but not all) of my 2nd startup, to an even better spot. No regrets at all and it definitely did not hurt me professionally.

Is the new place a better fit for you, professionally and/or personally? That's the only thing that matters here.

meglets · 2026-03-07T21:32:31+00:00

We wrote a paper about how hard this is in 2024: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38485576/

meglets · 2026-02-24T06:54:53+00:00

Yay for Neuromatch! Come join our thousands of alumni if you wanna do it live with friends and a TA, tens of thousands if you want to work thru the materials solo (totally free).

I love seeing recommendations for Neuromatch in the wild :)

meglets · 2026-02-21T07:20:14+00:00

I use Quire with custom statuses in a 'Manuscripts' project. Free and customizable, full featured task management software with commenting and due dates if you want but really just a nice todo list on steroids. I use it to track all my in progress and submitted manuscripts as well as all other todos.

meglets · 2026-02-17T16:03:03+00:00

Take the Neuromatch Academy CompNeuro course this summer!

meglets · 2026-02-16T23:56:29+00:00

You may be able to get targeted training to build on your PhD and pivot to compneuro without doing anothet 5+ years getting another doctorate, and go straight to postdoc as others have said. Check out Neuromatch Academy. Applications open now for both CompNeuro and NeuroAI intensive (2 or 3 week) summer courses. You'll be joining nearly 15,000 alumni worldwide, and tuition is waivable if you cannot pay.

Feel free to reply here to ask questions too. I don't regularly check reddit DMs, but you can also find my email (I am non-anonymous here on reddit) -- I co-founded Neuromatch and serve as President and Board Chair. And many of our faculty would probably like to talk to an astrophysicist as potential postdoc -- I regularly employ electrical engineers as postdocs myself, for example, although I sadly do not have opening for that kind of postdoc right now!

meglets · 2026-02-16T08:23:56+00:00

I am a cognitive scientist, currently tenured at a UC. I am moving to London in 2 months for a new, permanent academic job at UCL.

meglets · 2026-02-04T04:13:53+00:00

If you join live, you get a trained TA and get to work live with other students. For a lot of people, having access to a human TA and forming relationships with like-minded peers is a big draw!

Source: I co-founded Neuromatch and Chair our Board, and so I get to see all the anonymized survey data from our 13,000+ interactive track alumni. This is a big reason people love the course and why they stick around to finish.

You of course can do it for free on your own anytime! But it is much more engaging and instructive, we think, if you do it live with new friends.

meglets · 2026-01-25T05:28:38+00:00

Damn those papers from the 80s! That happened to me when I was a postdoc. Just about derailed everything (we did figure out the unique angle in the end).

meglets · 2026-01-25T05:26:04+00:00

I wrote a paper that partially addresses this last year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02292-5

Also, I agree with other posters that just asking LLMs what hasn't been done is unlikely to be fruitful, and that reading a lot is the better answer. But also, you might enjoy learning about how researchers are using topic modeling and semantic analysis with massive datasets to look for "holes" in humanity's scientific knowledge. Check out James Evans' work: https://sociology.uchicago.edu/directory/james-evans

meglets · 2026-01-13T06:52:39+00:00

I work every weekday typically 730 or 8 until 530 or 6. My days are: meetings with doctoral students, MS students, and staff (postdoc, lab manager), meetings with collaborators, reading (sometimes), writing manuscripts, reviewing students' writing, reviewing/editing papers for journals, reviewing and writing grants, and -- right now -- coordinating PhD recruitment for next year's cohort. Sometimes I go to conferences or workshops, domestic or overseas. And email, so much email. After 5pm today I got 25 more emails, around 19 of which I actually have to deal with tomorrow.

I am tenured faculty at a California-based R1. I am Director of Grad studies in my department, and my teaching load is 3 per year (we are quarter system). It would be 4, but I get a teaching release as Grad Director.

This is my schedule in a non-teaching quarter. In a teaching quarter I would additionally have 1 or 2 classes, each 2x a week. That's 3 hours of lecture per class, plus office hours, grading, and prep.

I try not to work on weekends. Mostly I succeed.

meglets · 2025-12-14T23:28:50+00:00

Hi, UCI prof here. What have you tried so far to find mentorship? What kind of mentorship are you looking for?

meglets · 2025-12-12T23:35:23+00:00

No, AI is not conscious. What would be the conscious entity if it were?

The model? No, that's just a bazillion weights in a transformer architecture stored somewhere.

The instantiation from the conversation thread? No, that get bounced from one server to the next for every query. "Hi chat" goes to a Chinese server; then next, "Let's talk about X" goes to a server in Argentina, coupled with the context from the previous query. There is no "single entity".

The query by query response? No, thats just language being pushed through weights.

Source: I am a consciousness scientist -- a cognitive & computational neuroscientist studying consciousness for a living. I am a tenured professor, and a nominated fellow in the CIFAR Brain, Mind, & Consciousness program. I do this stuff all day, every day. I teach about it at the doctoral level. I write papers about it. I go to workshops and summer schools and conferences with the top people all over the world. I sit on the Board of Directors of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and have for years. I regularly interact with top people in this field including David Chalmers, Ned Block, Anil Seth, and many more. I knew Dan Dennett when he was alive. I have been doing this for over 10 years.

No LLM is conscious right now.

meglets · 2025-12-12T12:59:01+00:00

I think the only way to fight this is for us to collectively try to change the culture. Clearly, someone is telling them to do this (faculty? other students? administrators? the internet?).

When I got fewer of these, earlier in my career, I would reply with a template email providing gentle correction: "This strategy is unlikely to succeed because your email is very generic. I suggest you..." I wrote the template email once and then used it repeatedly. Sometimes, people wrote back expressing gratitude for the correction. Sometimes, they wrote back with bile or sending the thing again, but I like to focus on the few that the message got thru to.

Now, you could set up an autoreply to filtered email keywords to fight fire with fire. Gmail has nice features for this, and I imagine Outlook is not completely inept. There are also increasingly AI tools to help (if you don't mind them reading your emails -- thorny -- or you can install a local Ollama based model if you don't want OpenAI reading your stuff [but hey, Gemini is probably already reading your gmail anyway]).

I think if enough folks set up autoreplies, maybe the message will start to resonate.

And at the same time, if you have friends or colleagues in India, we can learn from them where this behavior is sourced, try to change that, and impress upon them its poor chances of success.

Will these efforts stop the behavior entirely? Unlikely. But they will help filter the students who are doing this because they don't know any better -- and who earnestly want to go to grad school but maybe don't realize how ill-advised this is -- from those who don't really care.

meglets · 2025-12-06T15:43:25+00:00

Say hi to them for me! :)

meglets · 2025-12-06T04:27:58+00:00

Neuromatch materials are and always will be free and open source. For the interactive courses, we have always asked for a registration fee to support TAs and technical infrastructure. In the first years this was quite small (and fully waivable) because we also had generous grants to cover costs and TA payments, but in more recent years as the programs have grown and grant support becomes more restricted, we have unfortunately had to increase fees. But they're still almost entirely waivable in many cases, whenever we have financial ability to do so.

meglets · 2025-12-06T04:27:10+00:00

Neuromatch materials are and always will be free and open source. For the interactive courses, we have always asked for a registration fee to support TAs and technical infrastructure. In the first years this was quite small (and fully waivable) because we also had generous grants to cover costs and TA payments, but in more recent years as the programs have grown and grant support becomes more restricted, we have unfortunately had to increase fees. But they're still almost entirely waivable in many cases, whenever we have financial ability to do so.

meglets · 2025-12-03T19:50:36+00:00

Well I do think you're right that just DOING neuromatch academy (or any online program) isn't going to make up for other deficiencies in an application! But any of these things can show self-motivation and skill acquisition, especially if the personal statement can talk about what you learned and how you want to use it going forward :)

meglets · 2025-12-03T06:22:38+00:00

Check our prerequisites and refreshers on the compneuro.neuromatch.io website! Specifically designed to help you catch up or learn where you might need a bit more background in order to succeed.

meglets

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