Emailing a Professor

Hi everybody, here we have provided you with a draft of what a good email to a professors.

Before You email your potential advisor: Organize your CV or Resume, Make sure to read a few of their research papers and comment on it. Make sure to use correct grammar and make your emails formal!  

Draft of a good email:

Subject Line: Use “Fall/Spring (Semester) Year prospective student” (i.e. Fall 2021 prospective student)

Content use this as a guide to draft your own email:

Dear Prof. ???

I hope this email finds you well. My name is ——— and I am currently a ——- (i.e. senior, graduate student, master’s student) at ———— (i.e. Sharif, Tehran, etc) University (options: with a GPA of ???, working under Prof. ???’s supervision, etc). (Keep your introduction short i.e. 1 or 2 sentences, try to quickly move to their research and their paper, and explain your background research as it pertains to their work).  I recently read your paper ———- , and found ——— (i.e. your method of utilizing a Bayesian framework instead of a frequentist one, your method of statistical analysis as it pertain to risk prediction, etc.) to be fascinating. (Transition to talking about you work) I have done similar work at ——  (i.e. Dr. —- ’s lab over the summer of 2020), where —— (i.e. I used a combination of HMM and RNN modeling to predict patient outcome). (Feel free to give valuable opinions on their work) I was wondering have you considered ——- (i.e. using a continuous Dirichlet model instead of a discrete one?).   

(Talk about how you like to work with them and how this fits in your overall goal in life). My longterm goal is —— (i.e. to become a physician scientist, to become a professor and run my own lab, etc.), and I think that working under your supervision and learning from you would be an amazing opportunity for me to get one step closer to my goal. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read my email, and was wondering if you could please let me know  about the possibility of any available position in your research team.

My CV (you can also include transcript) is attached below for your reference. Thank you so much again for your time and consideration,

With all the best wishes, (other options: Sincerely, Regards etc.)

—— (your full name)