Professors receive a large number of emails (oh yes, social-media messages too) from students seeking opportunities to work with them. Roughly, 5-10% for doing a research degree (MS/PhD), 20-25% for doing a BTech/MTech project, and nearly 70% for doing a research internship/project. In spite of so many ‘‘pings’’, professors always keep looking for that right student who may work with them and help advance the state-of-the-art.

The purpose of this article is to ensure that if you are seeking an opportunity to work in your dream area or with a strong research group, you do not miss it just because of writing your first email/message with anti-patterns that get sent to the bin within 2 seconds (yes, that less) of being seen. Similarly, if you follow some best practices, believe me a good professor would be happier even more than you on getting a relevant and motivated student to mentor and work with.

The Anti-Patterns

1. “Dear professors”

Unless the professors are from the same area, you must write an individual mail. (Likely 2-second bin)

2. Professor in BCC

I told you, you must write an individual mail. (2-second bin)

3. “Dear Manas sir, I seek an opportunity to work with your esteemed research group on data science and image applications…”

Manas sir does not work in data science and image applications. (Before writing to someone, at least find their research area and see if it matches with your interest and expertise.)

4. “I am highly motivated and talented and have attached a top-class CV; good CGPA, multiple projects, … and a very long email!” (But CV reflects non-matching area)

Bad. You wasted several minutes of the professor's time (possibly several hours of your own time) and yet did not do your homework of finding their research area. (Destination is still bin, but you may additionally get an angry response.)

5. “I am highly impressed by you and your works and very interested in your research area (area pasted in some different font)” (Copy-paste bulk)

Thanks for the praise, but back to points 1 and 2. (2-second bin)

6. “I sincerely request you to give an opportunity to my son/daughter”

Please request your ward to write an email. (Bin or response depends on the prof, but likely not an accept.)

7. “I am very hard working and willing to learn whatever you do.”

It would be better that you build a background in the professor's area before seeking an opportunity; professors can sympathize with you but are essentially short of time to train from scratch (particularly if this is about an internship). Further, you may not be able to do well if you choose an area/professor randomly without having fundamentals. (Destiny unknown yet, but can be built up in future.)

8. “Your area is programming languages; I have an excellent coding experience (won all hackathons) and I love programming.”

Well this research area requires you to be a good programmer, but research in programming languages is not really about learning to program. (Might get a response if the professor is eager to get some ‘‘coding’’ task done, but not ideal for research without other fundamentals.)

The Best Practices

As professors, what we look for is an email from a motivated and sincere student who is interested and suitable to work in our area, and is willing to put in effort. So the good practices boil down to satisfying these three criteria:

1. Sincerity
2. Interest
3. Suitability

Basically, you should do the following:

• Find your interest first. What are the courses from your UG/PG syllabus that excite you? Which ones do you like reading the textbooks of? Which ones would you be fine spending a few months or years (depending on internship/project/degree) of diligent thoughts and effort on?

• Develop suitability. Find out what is being done in that area. You could follow blogs, watch videos (e.g. the SIGPLAN YouTube channel is an excellent place to learn about PL research), and at the very least you should have taken the courses related to the area you are interested in.

• Find out the professors who work in that area by going over the faculty profiles at different institutes and getting an idea of what they have been doing in the recent years. Maybe skim through 1-2 of their papers (whose titles you find interesting).

• Once you decide to write to someone, do some homework getting to know about the opportunities that are available with them. Most often, this just requires you to go over the websites of the relevant professors and finding if they have put any relevant instructions: Are they on leave? Are they willing to take interns or scholars? What is the expected duration? Read about their group and the profiles of their existing research scholars (MS/PhD students). For example, on my website you would find an “Openings” page that describes some of the skill sets and work styles, and a “Students” page that lists my current and past students.

• Once you decide to write an email, keep your up-to-date CV ready. Definitely include your course work information, any relevant projects that you might have done, anything cool that you tried doing (including failed attempts), and your GitHub profile if available.

• Finally, if you believe you are a suitable candidate, write a to-the-point but detailed email that describes your background (interests and skill-sets), your previous efforts in that direction, the duration you are available for, and what do you expect out of the collaboration.

• Read once more, ensure you have put up a suitable subject (don't forget to attach the CV!), and whoosh! Send.

Most of the times, if you have followed the above practices and satisfy the interest-suitability-sincerity criteria, you would definitely get a response within 2-3 days. If not, you can send a gentle reminder once. More than that, and perhaps the professor is unavailable these days (long leave, personal reasons, etc); but highly likely, you would get a call for a meeting and if you continue demonstrating your sincerity then your dream offer too :-)

Best wishes!

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p.s. You may notice that the order in the bullets (sincerity-interest-suitability) is different from the order in the explanation (interest-suitability-sincerity). That's because even though writing an email required the reverse, sincerity is the first step towards all accomplishments. Think about that a bit more and be sincere in everything you do.

p.p.s. If you would like to work with me and have the above three qualities, go over my Front Page, learn about my recent research, skim over the Openings page (if you have a very high interest match in the area, don't worry too much if there is no direct opportunity as something might come up in future), and I will be looking forward to that nicely written email seeking to become a CompLer!