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Tips on communicating with potential advisors

Here are some general guidelines and additional resources that you can use to maximize your chances of receiving a response from potential graduate mentors.

Do your best to be specific – specific about your interests, skills, how you think you will fit with the laboratory, your goals, and how your time in the lab will help you reach your career goals. Emails of interest are often so general that they demonstrate that your have not attempted to understand what we aim to achieve, that you have copy/pasted my name into a boilerplate email, or that you have not thought about what you want to do with your graduate degree.

Here are some common items and phrases that will likely not elicit a response from a future advisor, or they have little bearing on my initial evaluation of candidates. After them, I list suggestions for how to change them to make an email of interest stronger:

  • Too general. “After researching on your laboratories and research projects i am impressed by your impactful work you are doing to this field.” OR “I’m eager to be a part of your research team since your works are appealing to me and I have similar research experience in your field of research.” – We cannot discern anything about your interests from such general statements. You are much more likely to get a response if you include a genuine (and specific) expression of interest that goes beyond this general statement.
  • Misalignment. “Through my research, I gained valuable knowledge about [scientific discipline that has no relation to the HIP laboratory]. This has prepared me to contribute meaningfully to your laboratory’s research.” – If you are interested in working in a mentor’s lab but do not have the specific skills requested in a project, you need to explain why you are interested in gaining this new skillset, how you are prepared to do so, and how your existing skillset might complement the lab’s current capabilities. If you see a recruiting ad for a project that involves microfluidics, you must articulate why this project will help you gain the right skills for your career goals, and how your other skills will help you get there.
  • Overt flattery and/or statements easily derived from LLMs. “I read your paper titled [X], which was truly fascinating. It states point A, point B, and point C.” – You must go beyond simply restating what you saw in a paper or what ChatGPT might explain if you ask it what the paper is about. A professor will be far more responsive to a statement of genuine interest that shows us why you are interested in a topic. Did you read something about it? Does it connect to your own life in some way? Did you do a class project that sparked an interest?
  • Metrics that have little correlation to research ability. “I ranked #3 out of 50,000 on the college entrance exam. My university is ranked 2nd out of all universities in my country.” Such metrics do not translate to the US system and do not strongly correlate with your ability to do good research. It’s probably good to include GRE/TOEFL/GPA if you have them, but I don’t pay a ton of attention to them. We will learn about your analytical abilities and your English proficiency through conversations and follow-up emails. I do spend some time looking at your grades in classes that are relevant to my field, such as: physics, fluid dynamics, heat and mass transport, math classes, microbiology, chemistry.

Here are some other webpages that give good advice to prospective students: