How to Cold Email Professors for Research as a High School Student
By Daniel Hazard
PhD in English at Princeton University
By Alex Yang
Graduate student at Southern Methodist University
11 minute read
Although you can always pursue your own research project, a great way to get involved in research and immediately learn from an experienced professional is to do research with a college professor. But how do you even get in touch with professors who are incredibly busy? You send them a cold email - the most direct way to get in touch with any professional on the planet. In this article, we’ll break down why it’s important to send cold emails to professors for research and provide clear examples of how to structure your email.
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Why Cold Email a Professor and Show a Demonstrated Interest in Research?
High schoolers applying to college have many ways of showing demonstrated interest in research. A simple and very effective tactic is to use the supplemental section of a college application as a space to discuss the student-led research opportunities available on campus. This kills two birds with one stone: it communicates to college admissions officers an appetite for research and makes a case for there being a match between an applicant’s needs and a given college’s resources.
However, you can take your demonstrated interest a step further by reaching out directly to a college professor and seeing if you can help out with their research. This may seem like a daunting task, but you’d be surprised by the responses you might receive if you send a well-crafted email. Professors usually enjoy supporting the next generation of students who are passionate about their field. And if you’re successful in securing a research position with a professor, this can be a fantastic learning experience for you and you’ll be able to showcase your research experience on your college applications.
You don’t necessarily have to cold email professors to ask for a research position. You can also reach out to professors for research mentorship and career advice. Additionally, you might express interest in opportunities to shadow a professor's work or join their research group, which can be a valuable way to gain insight into their research process and learn more about the professor's research.
How to Cold Email a Professor and Increase Your Response Rate
1. Pick the Right Audience
Pick a professor who is likely to read an email from a high schooler who is also a stranger. This means avoiding reaching out to academic celebrities because these professors are already overloaded with numerous emails from prospective students and admirers. To get a professor's attention, it’s crucial to target those who have the time and interest to respond to cold emails from students like you.
2. Show Interest in Their Research
Appeal to a professor’s intellectual interests. The cold email should avoid flattery and small talk. What professors care most about is their research and you come bearing the best kind of gifts: anecdotes, bits of information, small insights—souvenirs from your world that add to the researcher’s map of their own. This requires you to become familiar with the professor’s research and be able to explain what aspects of it interest you. You can elaborate on why it’s interesting to you, and if you’re already making efforts to learn more about the topic, be sure to mention that. Professors love to see when you’ve already taken the initiative to learn about a topic - it shows that you have an internal drive to learn, which is a great quality for a potential research assistant.
3. Send Quality Emails to Many Professors
Many professors are busy year-round and they may unintentionally miss your email. That’s why you need to send a good volume of emails to give yourself the best chance to make a connection with at least one professor.
However, just because you’re sending many emails doesn’t mean you should sacrifice the quality of your emails. Quality control is key. Each email should be personalized and appear as a unique piece of communication. If an email appears too generic, it might be dismissed as spam, or, even worse, as thoughtless.
That being said, cold emailing professors is a time-consuming process and once you’ve completed several cold emails and get the hang of the structure, you can use them as templates for the rest while still being sure to add personalized details about the professor’s research and work.
4. Be Specific About Your Ask
Oftentimes we’re so focused on making the email personalized and introducing details about ourselves that we forget to include our ask for the professor. What is the actual request that we want to make to the professor? Are we requesting a meeting with them? Do we want to intern at their research lab? Do we have specific questions about a topic to help with our own research? Whatever your ask is, it should be crystal clear in the email. That way, a professor knows exactly what the email is about and how to respond. If the professor is unsure about what the course of action is, it makes it less likely that they’ll respond. In the cold email examples later in this article, we’ll show how you can be specific about your ask.
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5. Keep The Email Short
In an email, it’s tempting to explain your full background as a student and all that you admire about a professor’s work. However, keep in mind that professors are busy people, and they don’t have a lot of time to read through lengthy emails. Cold emails are most effective when they’re to the point and include just the right amount of personalization and detail. Consider what are the most important points you want to make in the email and only keep whatever is absolutely necessary for the message to get across. A concise email is more likely to hold a professor's attention.
Example Cold Email for Students
Below is a sample cold email that you can use as a template. We’ll break this email down piece by piece to show how it reflects the five qualities mentioned above.
Email Subject Line: Reaching Out - Your Perspective On The Colorado River Drought
Dear Professor [name],
My name is [first name last name] and I’m a student at [X high school].
I was looking through your university’s department pages when I came across your research on improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. It caught my attention because it seems like the local governments in the area have been coordinating their efforts, following the recommendations made by your research.
I wanted to reach out to you because I live in the Colorado River basin, and as you know, the main threat facing the Colorado River today is not so much pollution, but water supply. Because of drought and population growth, the Colorado River is running dry and this is an issue I care deeply about. I wanted to ask for your perspective on what you think cooperation between government officials and scientists will have to look like to resolve these problems in the Colorado River.
If you have the time to have a 15-minute chat or even answer questions over email, I’d love to discuss and learn from you.
Sincerely,
[your signature]
Let’s break down this email piece by piece.
The subject line of the email is meant to quickly summarize the question you’re asking, which in this case, is the professor’s perspective on the solution for drying the Colorado River. Then, the email goes into the student's introduction, which you can usually keep very simple.
The second paragraph of the email is designed to show that you’ve done your research on the professor and that this is a personalized email. You’re showing that you’ve understood their research topic and its importance.
The third paragraph makes the ask of the email, which is to ask for their perspective on the Colorado River basin. This is a good question because it has a specific topic, and by saying that it’s “an issue you care deeply about,” it shows the professor that you also have an invested interest in the topic.
The final paragraph makes the formal request for the professor’s time. Notice that when asking for a potential call, the email only asks for 15 minutes of the professor’s time. You want to be respectful of their time and not ask for too much. To make the request even more approachable to the professor, the email also includes an alternative method for completing the student’s request - answering questions over email. This strategy helps you get much better response rates, because sometimes a call may be too difficult to schedule, but answering questions asynchronously over email is much easier for a busy professor to do. You not only want to make your ask specific, but you also want to make it as frictionless as possible in the beginning. Asking for a one-hour meeting from the first cold email is doing too much early on!
Now, let’s adjust the subject line of the email a little so that the student asks to help out the professor with research work!
Email Subject Line: Reaching Out - Interest in Helping w/ Water Quality Research
Dear Professor [name],
My name is [first name last name] and I’m a student at [X high school].
I was looking through your university’s department pages when I came across your research on improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. It caught my attention because it seems like the local governments in the area have been coordinating their efforts, following the recommendations made by your research.
I wanted to reach out to you because I’d love to help out with your research on improving water quality and supply. I’m personally excited about this topic because I live in the Colorado River basin, and as you know, the main threat facing the Colorado River today is not so much pollution, but water supply. Because of drought and population growth, the Colorado River is running dry and this is an issue I care deeply about and have been researching on my own.
If you have the time to have a 15-minute chat or even answer questions over email, I’d love to discuss a potential research opportunity with you. No worries at all if you’re currently not looking for any research assistants.
Sincerely,
[your signature]
You’ll notice that the first thing to change is the email subject line, since we’re making a different ask in this email. The paragraph showing that we’re knowledgeable about and interested in the professor’s research is still there, but in the third paragraph, we make our ask about a potential research position with the professor. The sentences on the Colorado River serve to show why we’re interested in the research, and in the last sentence, we even include the fact that we’ve already been researching the topic on our own. This shows the professor that we’re able to take initiative.
The final paragraph has the same first sentence. But after that, there’s also an opportunity for the professor to say no. This is called giving someone “an out.” You do this because no one likes to feel like someone is demanding time or an internship for them. However, if an email gives someone “an out,” then they feel less pressured, and actually, ironically, they’ll be more incentivized to respond to your email because you’ve respected their space.
Concluding Thoughts
Sending thoughtfully composed cold emails not only has a higher likelihood of receiving a reply, but down the line, it could also lead to you working more closely with a professor and even doing your own research under their mentorship.
Even if professors are slow to reply, learning how to send cold emails is an essential skill for your future career. Moreover, as you’re exploring the research that professors are conducting, you could even discover new topics or ideas that you would want to research on your own!
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