Emailing Potential (Fellowship) Advisors
Olivia Wilkins
I remember the experience so clearly: seven (really, seven!?) years ago, I was sitting in the underground Starbucks at Castle City Mall in Norwich, England, desperately web searching something like “how to email professors about being an advisor.” I was a junior undergraduate spending a semester abroad in the UK during my spring semester, and I was considering what I wanted to do in a bit more than a year when I graduated from Dickinson College.
One option was to pursue a Fulbright research fellowship, something I ended up doing. I spent a year in Germany doing laboratory astrophysics (and absolutely loved it!), but when I started my application, I thought I would be applying to do radio astronomy in Sweden. In this post, I share some advice about what type of information you should look for when emailing a potential advisor as well as provide some template examples. This post is written specifically with the Fulbright research program in mind, but much of this could be tailored to other fellowships or applying to graduate school.
Setting your goals
Regardless of who you are emailing and why you are emailing them, your goals for composing something professional and enticing probably fall within the following (broad) categories:
Networking - Making a new connection or strengthening a previous one
Confirming possibility - Is it possible for this person to serve as an advisor?
Assessing desirability - Do you really want this person to serve as an advisor?
Networking. I previously wrote a blog post about networking generally, but I have a few additional notes on how to talk about networking specifically when applying for something like a Fulbright fellowship:
“Exchange” fellowships (i.e. fellowships in which foreign nationals spend time in a given country) often seek to strengthen international relationships, so you want to identify whether the potential advisor shares that value.
For a short-term (<1 year) appointment, you might be seen as a distraction that will get training without contributing much to the research done by the potential advisor. You need to identify why a connection between you and that advisor is beneficial to both parties.
Confirming possibility. You need to make sure the potential advisor is actually in a position to advise you. Are they accepting new students or group members? Will they be advising you, or will your advisor be a postdoc or other scientist? Asking questions like these directly are important because if the answer is “No, I am not accepting new people into my group,” you want to know that up front before you waste time on an application that leads nowhere.
Assessing desirability. Even if you can work for someone, should you? I mentioned earlier in the post that I started applying to the Fulbright program thinking I wanted to go to Sweden. I sent an email to a professor in a field I was interested in, and they replied that they would be willing to host me as a Fulbright research fellow. So possibility: confirmed. I waited a week for that first reply back, which is reasonable since researchers are busy folks. But as the wait-time between each email exchange got longer and loner, I got the sense the prospective host had neither the time nor the enthusiasm to host me. When I hadn’t heard back about a yes/no question after three weeks with multiple gentle reminders that I was waiting for a response, I decided that this was someone I did not want to work for, and perhaps they didn’t want me to work for them either. I didn’t enjoy my semester abroad, and I wanted to feel supported if I decided to go abroad again. So I asked someone in Germany instead, and they responded within 12 hours with a mini-essay about how they loved having foreign nationals in their lab. I immediately felt like I was desirable, and the promptness and enthusiasm made their research group desirable to me as well.
What to say
I imagine that this piece — what you should actually write in your email — is what you’re most interested in, and that is certainly what I was looking for when applying to fellowships. I’ll give you a template in a moment, but first, a few guidelines:
Be concise. You don’t want to make the recipient go fishing for information about you, but you don’t want to give them your entire life’s story either. Introduce yourself, express your research interests and qualifications, and ask your questions in a few sentences each, then move on.
Be formal. Address the recipient by title, such as “Dr. Ahmad” or “Professor Kan,” unless you’ve been advised otherwise. If you’ve emailed or talked to the recipient in the past, and they signed off with their first name or explicitly told you to call you by their first name, do that. Avoid emoticons, emojis, excessive exclamation points, shorthand, and other things that are generally thought of as informal.
Be direct. Writing an email to a professor, especially when asking them to take you on as a mentee, is extremely intimidating. Asking direct questions like, “Would you be willing to advise me?,” feels like an especially high-stakes situation. But you have to do it. You deserve to know these types of things up front, and doing so also respects the recipient’s time by getting deal-breaker questions out of the way early.
Be specific. Demonstrate that this isn’t a mass email and that you’ve taken the time to read about the recipient’s work and that you’ve thought about how you might fit in. Refer to their website, specific papers, or conversations you’ve had with people in the group. This shows that you are interested and that you have done at least the bare minimum amount of work to familiarize yourself with the recipient’s work.
Remember the subject line! How many times have you hit send, only to have your heart sink as you realize in the split second before the email window closes that you forgot the subject line? I get around this by never putting the recipient’s email address in the “To” line until both the subject and the body are written.
Okay, so here’s a generic email like what I used seeking a Fulbright advisor. (Again, this can be tailored to other opportunities too.)
Subject: Inquiry from an aspiring astrochemist interested in a Fulbright fellowship
Body:
Dear Dr. [Last Name],
My name is Olivia Harper Wilkins, and I am graduating in May 2015 with a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Dickinson College. During my time at Dickinson, I became interested in astrochemistry after participating in summer research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
After Dickinson, I am hoping to conduct laboratory astrophysics as a Fulbright research fellow. I am writing to ask whether you would be willing and interested to host me during the 2015-2016 academic year.
My experiences in astrochemistry thus far have focused on observing complex organic molecules in protostars. After using the Cologne Database for Molecular Spectroscopy databases to identify molecules in my telescope spectra, I became interested in working on the other side of astronomical databases. My experience in laboratory coursework and research at Dickinson and radio astronomy through summer research give me a well-rounded perspective on the work done by the Cologne Laboratory Astrophysics Group.
I saw on your website that you have done work on [type of molecule], something I find interesting because of its implications for prebiotic chemistry but also because it was something I looked at when doing chemical ecology research.
Please let me know whether you would be willing to host me or if you have any questions about the Fulbright program. If this sounds agreeable to you, I will follow-up about the next steps.
Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Olivia
The basic outline of this email is:
Salutation
Introduction — name, current position/institution, research experience
Reason for email — immediate future plans/timeline, “I am writing to ask…”
Connection between research experience and recipient’s work
The ask and next steps — “Please let me know….”, “I will follow-up….”
Note of appreciation
Sign-off
Except for the salutation and sign-off, the exact order of what you say doesn’t need to follow this format precisely. I recommend stating why you are writing early on because if the recipient can’t be your advisor, you don’t want to waste their time by making them read the rest of the email that would then be irrelevant.
Additional resources
I shared what has worked well in my own experience, and it is good to see what has worked for other people too. If you know someone, especially in your field, who has applied to fellowships, you can ask them if they’d be willing to share some of their emails as an example. I do this all the time! Even though I’ve found things that work for me, I like to refine my approach, especially as I branch out to new opportunities or gain additional experience.
For another grad student perspective on emailing professors, check out the post “Emailing Professors 101” by Krystal Vasquez, the amazing person behind the Caffeinated Confidence blog.
For a professor perspective, check out Dr. Karen Kelsky’s post, “How Do You Write an Email or Letter to a Professor?” via The Professor Is In.
If you have any additional resources or tips for writing an email asking someone to be your advisor, especially for a fellowship program like the Fulbright, drop it in the comments!
Consider buying me a coffee to keep me caffeinated for the next one!