Undergraduate Research Cold Emails

Passion is the main thing you need to have.

I have been asked a lot for my thoughts on applying for research positions as an undergraduate. As someone who did so successfully a little while ago, I thought I would compile my thoughts on the matter so I could pretentiously paste the link to this to summarize them.

This is primarily applicable to those in STEM, my experience in particular being in experimental physics. I do not have the visibility beyond STEM to say if this applies to other fields. I will be phrasing everything from here on out without caveat to non-STEM, so just take care not to misunderstand the scope of my claims.

This advice is also primarily tailored for applying to faculty members within your own institution for school-year research, which usually means that you attend a research university. For the summer, each institution has their own rules, applications, and the like, but this may be helpful to get the ball rolling. As for applying to other institutions, such as if your institution doesn’t do research, this is a far harder prospect in both the school year and summer. One must use their own discretion to determine whether emailing external faculty is a good idea or not. Professors get many emails internal to their university, let alone from outsiders. I will say that for summer roles, the overwhelmingly likely response is to point you towards the school or department’s REU/SURF/SURP/UROP or whatever they call it. For non-summer roles, proximity is critical, especially if your institutions have strong ties (Ex. Pasadena City College and Caltech), in which case it is definitely not frowned upon to reach out. However, the following advice may be important to tuning your discretion if there is still doubt.

-1. Research Interest (the hard part)

You must know what you want to study before being able to competently write an email about it. Even if it is just as simple as “it sounds cool”, what is “it”? It is worth identifying specifically at least two things: your field and your subfield. For example, within physics (field), there is condensed matter, atomic/molecular/optical, particle, and many more. If possible, identify a sub-subfield. If I am interested in condensed matter physics (subfield), some examples could be superconductivity or 2D materials research.

A research university is a complicated beast, and although most undergraduate roles do not have strict requirements, most will expect you to be from at the very most a neighboring field so that you have a chance of competently contributing to your project. If this seemingly disqualifies you from a role you find very interesting, disregard it and apply anyway; its main utility is a coarse screening for opportunities which may be tangentially interesting to you but are ultimately out of your scope.

(The following can be skipped without loss of practical understanding)

I say this because passion is the main thing you need to have. Many other things can be learned on the job, and in all frankness, for most technical skills (as in non-theory), the classes associated with them at most universities are insufficient to prepare you for the real thing. You will learn a substantial amount of additional information by doing it for real.

As a matter of fact, a secondary requirement is to be intellectually curious about your research work. I cannot stress to you enough how much of a non-starter research without curiosity is. I understand as well as you do that graduate schools care deeply about research engagement, but half measures are obvious to everyone, your faculty member and graduate schools included. They are the ones writing and reading your letters of recommendation, respectively, so do think carefully about what you want the letter to say. I will say now that research is not right for everyone, and that is okay. There is a world of work outside of it, especially in engineer-y style roles. I have heard good things about project teams for getting involved in more development-oriented work.

0. Identify Faculty

Just about every institution has multiple lists of faculty, one of the overall faculty of the university and usually one for each department. Go to the department that covers your research interest; if it has a “research” page, open that. Sometimes they will separate by subfield, and other times they will not. Within these pages, they usually have little blurbs that say what they do, so go through each, and if their blurb sounds cool, open their page in a new tab. It can be helpful to use your sub-subfield to narrow down to just the groups that cover your interests, but if you don’t have that nailed down, it isn’t critical. If it does not, do the same thing to the “people” page for all of the faculty. Do not do emeritus, that is a fancy academic word for retirement.

For each of the pages you opened, they will sometimes have a lengthier summary, but it is often better to instead go to their group site, which is usually linked to on their faculty page, to see what they have actually been getting up to. If it is not, look them up. On the usual group website, you will have a research page that describes a somewhat dated image of their work, and a publication page that is the juicy one. These are almost always extremely well updated, and although it takes a trained eye to discern what topics they are and are not active in, it can be super helpful. Use these things to discern which groups interest you or not, and close the ones that do not interest you.

Next, for each of them, check to see if they have a “Join Us” or “Contact” page. On occasion, these will remark on what openings they have, whether they are taking undergrads or not, and what their requirements are. If you fit within these criteria, keep the tab open.

1. Contact Faculty (the easy part)

It is worth noting early that you may have better luck emailing at the start of the term, as professors get extremely busy near the end. They will not go through their backlog; they will assume that if it is important, someone will email them again. Anyways, now that you have a list of faculty with whom you want to work, pick the two you want to work with the most. Refrain from blasting all of them at once; this is a faux pas. All faculty seem to know each other, and they talk. Find their email on the website, but do not put it into your draft yet (that is the last step). Now, prepare to email.

Your email should have:

1. Professor xyz,
   Not hey, hi, or whatever, unless you really want to.
   

2. Who are you
   You are a something’th year, whatever major.
   

3. Why are you emailing them specifically
   Do you find their work interesting? What about it is interesting? Be specific, the more specific the better, but be careful to not overextend yourself and start saying words you do not know. Ask me how I found that one out.
   
   Use the other half of this section to describe how your experiences pertain to their work. If you have no other experiences, just expressing your interest the first time is sufficient. At this time, also address any questions they want you to answer based on their contact page. If they did not ask any, then no additional justification beyond the prior is needed.
   

4. Call to action
   You want to meet them to talk about opportunities. Make the friction as low as physically possible; you want them to be able to say yes, check their calendar real quick, book a time, and email you that back. Do not make them think; they do enough of that. If possible, provide your own availability in a concise format, such as Fridays after 2 PM or weekdays before 10 AM. If you are not available to meet in person, please make this evident, as the fewer emails, the better. Hopefully, they tell you where to meet, but unfortunately, this is one of those 80%/20% kind of situations. In dire circumstances, I have literally walked the halls of departments to find the labs of professors in advance, since they just said to meet them at their lab without a location for it on their website.
   

5. Attach whatever they want
   Remember where you checked the requirements? Some will ask for a resume, an unofficial transcript, and so on. It is unorthodox of me, but if they do not ask for these things, I tend not to attach them. I do not like the way it looks, but that is just my personal preference/neurosis.
   

6. Finish the email, send the email
   Can I just say that subject lines are the worst? For this kind of email, keep it brief and informative. I tend to just say something to the effect of “Undergraduate Research (Appointment)”. I always try to get in there that I am asking for an appointment, since that is clearer than just a general inquiry. A through line worth identifying right now is being clear; the call to action, the subject line, make it very clear what you want. You are interested in working in their group, and would like to meet to talk about it. Then thank them, put the email address in, and send it.
   

You did it! Yay! It should be straightforward from here; if they reach out to schedule, then do so, meet with them, do their proceedings to join, and if all goes well, you have a shiny new research group.

If they do not respond (which is the more likely outcome), send a follow-up one week later, remarking that you are still interested, and updating/reaffirming your availability. If that goes unanswered, if you want it really bad, email a week after that. If that goes unanswered, cross them off and email another one of the faculty you identified. The idea is to have two feelers out at all times until you get something.

So that’s how that’s done. Best of luck! Now here comes the pretentious self-plug, open wide!