Discussion
Mass emailing professors is not how you apply to our PhD program, but if you do, do NOT start with:
“Dear Professor,
I recently read your paper “NAME OF PROFESSOR PAPER” and was captivated. It inspired me to pursue a graduate studies in AREA1, AREA2 or AREA3. I would be honored to work under your supervision at UNIVERSITY.”
Unfortunately, I am no longer working in AREA1, and UNIVERSITY has other faculty you should consider applying to if you want to work on AREA2 or AREA3.
@mattblaze
The ones you really have to worry about are hoping to work at Area 51...
@mattblaze scripting can be hard 😉 That one is rough ;)
@mattblaze hear, hear!
People seem to forget that epidemiologists exist in plant pathology and I get all sorts of breeding and molecular methods, wet lab types asking to do a PhD with me ignoring the fact that I run a dry lab.
Though I will say that with the advent of AI, I get far fewer that are completely out of my area of expertise but still within the field.
@mattblaze apparently it works for recruiters on linkedin... with a bit of tuning, it will work for PhD ?
@mattblaze wow, is that verbatim? I'm sure my wife has complained about receiving mails in that that format, but at least they had made the effort of filling in the placeholders (usually with incorrect values)
@jaark yep, verbatim. Template gone badly wrong.
@mattblaze I literally generated my first internship applications like this, with a MySQL DB and a bash script doing replacement in a template LaTeX file.
But I did double and triple-check that the letters were accurate before mailing them out...
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