For the purpose of academic communication or job seeking purposes, I use PhD after my name and avoid putting Dr before it. Outside of academia or jobs that require PhD, I do not use any title. But I think you technically have to wait for your official letter or ceremony to be awarded your PhD then use the title.

MBA's are bogus degrees, the online ones are worse, they are practically sham degrees. Read a book called "Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton" before applying to any MBA. Even the HBS-MBA is not for everyone.

The best way to approach a bully is to bully back. Go to his office and yell at him for being such a disrespectful bully. Make sure you raise your voice loud enough so other people in the floor would hear you shouting at him. Do not worry, the more arrogant the bully is (which is your case, he is extremely arrogent) the more coward they are. When you are yelling at him, make sure you mention reporting him to the HR or even police if he disrespects you again. For god-sake, you have a PhD, standup for yourself.

Hi metabanalysis, thanks for the information on Athena Swan and Project Juno and I hope these projects correct the problem. All I was trying to say was to show that based on the past data for the winners demographics, there is a considerable bias in selection of Nobel prize winners and certain demographical. cultural or religious characteristics are more likely to win than the others. If this is true, it means that the Nobel-worth discoveries may not be as important as they get media attention and there are several important discoveries that do not get the credit and reputation they deserve.

Interesting article for those of us seeking career in academia.

Congrats Satchi! or should I say Dr. Satchi!
All the best!
Kim

@Ian
You described it in an interesting way and I never thought of it this way but I agree with what you said.

Hi all,
This is becoming a major question for me and I like to hear your thoughts on this issue. I am trying to improve my publication record using data from my PhD thesis. I should mentioned that during my PhD thesis, my supervisor provided the minimum or better to say NO support or intellectual guidance and went on sabbatical for a big portion of my PhD time. Now as I am proceeding with publishing the results, I have had her name as co-author for few of the publications and she has added these publications in her Uni webpage and her CV. But I feel having her name on papers is unethical as she never had any input during the tests or analysis nor added a single word into my thesis and the papers from the thesis. I do not want my relationship goes sour with her but I do not want her name to be attached to my work and papers. Do you think it is enough just to acknowledge her in the "Acknowledgements" section of my future papers instead of having her as co-author of my own papers?

If the work is entirely done by you with minimum input from him, then do not give it to him unless it is written by then your university contract. But since it is your PhD work, I doubt that there is any rule saying that your work belongs to the university. I have the same problem with the publications of my PhD thesis and I am sick of putting the name of supervisor on my publication when he did not add a single word into these papers nor when writing my PhD thesis (he did not read 2/3 of it!). I think this is completely unethical of the universities and profs to get publish without being directly involved in writings papers, codes etc etc.

I had similar experience during transition from MSc to PhD, my MSc advisor was retiring so he could not take me and I was introduced to a join supervisory (interdisciplinary PhD) of two profs, one young prof in my field and one older one in another field. It did not work well. There was no communication between the two and I had no research subject for 8 months. After 8 months the younger prof left for another position in a different country and the older prof became uninterested in technicality of the issue (he was not a sciences prof) so I had to find a different prof. If I were you, I would go to the prof I enjoyed doing MSc with and do not worry about the apparent conflicting issue, find the right thing for yourself.

We also can assume that this asymmetry is completely accidental knowing the probability for having such huge skewness is extremely low (imagine that 30% of lottery winners every week come from a small village that compromise 0.2% of population of a small country or imagine 30% of all Nobel prize winners in the world come from Guatemala, what is the probability?)

Or we can assume that there is a real reason behind the asymmetric skewness. The cause for skewness in a distribution can be either (1) inherent/intrinsic or (2) bias.

(1) In case if inherent/intrinsic skewness, this means that the winner groups should have a greater scientific success to allow them to win more often. This could be inheriting an extremely higher IQ (genetic cause) among them that allow them to win extremely more often (x 150 times more than average population), or better selected educational environment or any other unknown factor for now. Or maybe this is just better “networking-cause” that allows certain groups wins much more often. The opposite argument can be applied against group that are underrepresented (i.e. for women). Women PhD holders can be less creative or original thinker (or possibly lower IQ???), or they can have occupied less Nobel-producing jobs which could have allowed them to have better chance to achieve an original work.

(2) In case of Nobel prize being bias towards certain groups, that something that goes against the will of Alfred Nobel and this makes the Prize worthless.

There is also an existential possibility that Nobel Prize has become irrelevant to the science progress and has become a celebrity award given each year to the first 3 persons (usually Caucasian men and one of them Jewish) whose work match certain defined criteria and group-thinking agenda of a group of self-selected elites members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and totally irrelevant to the real world scientific work. And in this case why it should be advertised and treated as the apex of human intellect among the scientific communities?

What I was trying to say is that if we take the list of Nobel Prize laureates as a sample of the scientific community (read it as the population) and then we look at the demographic characteristics that make up the composition of the winners sample, it appears that certain groups are extremely overrepresented and some are extremely underrepresented (Assuming a normal distribution for the demographics of the winners). For instance, in my fields of research (physics and chemistry) although for the last 30-40 years, the female population makes up close to the half of PhD holders, less than two percent of Nobel laureates are female. Same extreme underrepresentation applies to ethnics groups (i.e. Asian, African, South Asian and Latinos and Southern European countries, even the ethnic individuals born and raised in the Nobel-Prize- producing countries). Interestingly enough over fifty percent of PhD degrees awarded from the US and UK universities after the WWII have gone to these groups. On the other hand, some groups receive this prize more often than the others. For instance, although Jewish people comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population, they have received over 30% of all Nobel prized awarded – a mere factor of 150 times more than their population- (note that this year 6 out of 7 sciences awards have gone to Jewish scientists). I do not know whether this is an overrepresentation of not, but clearly there is an extremely significant asymmetry in demographic of Nobel Prize laureates. (to be continued...)

@ Dr Strangelove True, even among my relatives and friends only few females passed the high school threshold so I should be happy:) they are females what do you expect? eh? ... but it is fascinating that it seems that you should belong to certain trademarks to win the prize (i.e. Chicago school of economics or have Jewish blood for sciences).

Thanks Satchi and metabanalysis for the positive reply! I admire your positiveness and encourage.

I've just found out that the BBC also has a "winning formula" for successes for winning this prize which can be found in the attached link.

I get their joke but the funny part is that the BBC did miss ethnicity and cultural/heritage background in their formula which has statistically more impact on your chance of winning the Nobel prize than anything else. But even according to them having a bready face has more impact on impressing the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to increase your chance of winning the Nobel prize (and also the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) than you being female or your ethnicity! I guess BBC once again wanted to be politically correct than anything else! :)

Better go get my lottery ticket than spending my life (will be 40 soon) in below-povery line threshold postdoc jobs hoping one day I come across something new and I'd be recognized (I even will be happy just to get a assistance professorship position in a 300+ ranked university in my mid 40s!)

As a visible minority (non-european) female post-doc with a B.Sc., two M.Sc. and one Ph.D. and 2 post-docs in physical and chemistry sciences, I have been told many times that I am a bright scientist and always have been encouraged by school officials, my supervisory profs and my family to pursue deeper in science and one day I might come across something good enough to be awarded a Nobel prize, the ultimate trophy in human intellect. I'd always secretly dreamt that this can happen to me and one day the Swedish academy of science will honour me such a trophy.

But now close to end of my 30's and after publishing several peered reviewed papers, I have come to this realization that I do not have the right ingredients, intellect, genes and brain power to win this prize and that all of these years I was living in a dream.

Statistically speaking, the chance of me winning twice a multi hundred million dollars/pounds lottery is much much greater than winning a nobel prize in my field of research. There is no secret calculations: out of rough 10 billion living people who lived in 20th and early 21st century only 5 female won the physics and chemistry prizes, almost less than 5 were from non-european origin. This gives me chance of 1 in few tens of billions chance of winning, also considering the fact that a great portion (close to 30%) of winers in sciences are from american Ashkenazi jewish background (this year 2013; 6 out of 7 or 85% are Jewish), the chance of me winning the prize is probably 1 in few hundred billions whereas chance of me winning a high-end multi hundred million dollar lottery is few in tens of millions! Is nobel prize is truly a good representative of human intellect or like anything else in our modern time is become (or have been) a political tool and biased towards certain established mainstreams?