Contacting English Professors/POI?

[onerepublic96]

Does anyone have any experience with or tips for contacting professors of interest when applying to English PhD programmes? I know there is no expectation to do so, but many of my universities have not (or at least it seems so) updated their department or faculty pages in a while (years, for some), which makes discussing the department's work and potentially specific faculty difficult when writing about fit in the SOP. I had the idea of contacting a few of my POIs at some of these schools just to make sure they're still doing what I think they're doing, and if there's anything new I should be aware of prior to applying, but I'm not sure how to best do that? 

[lalalalalalala12]

This is something I was told pretty emphatically not to do when I was applying, and since I got here I've been told it's not useful and is often more irritating than anything. Does the school really not have accurate faculty listings? Are you worried some are gone or retired or there are existing faculty which aren't listed? If so, I would see if there is a department secretary or something you can contact for an up to date list of names. Most of your statement of purpose should be about you, anyway, you don't need too much information about the POIs. You want to demonstrate fit, but on the other hand they do know who works there and what their specialties are. 

[onerepublic96]

1 hour ago, isoldeabandoned said:

Does the school really not have accurate faculty listings?

Some of the profiles at the programmes I'm interested in just list a few selected publications (in some cases, the most recent of which are from 2008-2010), and nothing else. I can get the gist of what this or that professor is interested in, but... it's hard to determine methodology and specific concerns or approaches from just a few publications, not to mention that I find it hard to believe that these professors haven't done anything else in 9-11 years or are still working on the same things. 

I personally am also leaning against contacting them, because I don't think it makes any significant difference in chances of acceptance, but I'm also worried that without up-to-date information, I'll inadvertently tailor some of my SOPs to research that is no longer happening there. 

[WildeThing]

18 minutes ago, onerepublic96 said:

Some of the profiles at the programmes I'm interested in just list a few selected publications (in some cases, the most recent of which are from 2008-2010), and nothing else. I can get the gist of what this or that professor is interested in, but... it's hard to determine methodology and specific concerns or approaches from just a few publications, not to mention that I find it hard to believe that these professors haven't done anything else in 9-11 years or are still working on the same things. 

I personally am also leaning against contacting them, because I don't think it makes any significant difference in chances of acceptance, but I'm also worried that without up-to-date information, I'll inadvertently tailor some of my SOPs to research that is no longer happening there. 

Search for them in your university library databases and search engines, you can limit those searches to recent years, too.

[indoorfireworks]

I was leaning against it for the most part, but I made two exceptions. The first was because of a very out of date department web site. The second was on the advice of one of my letter writers; I emailed a POI who was of retirement age to see if he was still active. I'm glad I did, because he just retired at the end of last semester. In each case, I just made a quick statement about what I liked about their work, what I plan to do in a PhD and asked A. what graduate level classes they are teaching or plan to teach and B. if they expected to be available for dissertation committees in the next couple of years.

Both were extremely gracious and I'm ultimately glad I contacted them, even though the first POI said he didn't know how he felt about my proposed methodology. That was kind of a bummer to hear, but it wasn't outright negative and I'm not taking it as discouragement toward applying. And regardless, I feel really good about knowing I'm only applying to places where there will grad-active be profs I want to study with. I can imagine being very frustrated spending the time and money researching a school, reading a prof's work, applying, and then finding out the POI isn't there or isn't working with grads much. 

TL;DR - it's a case-by-case thing, and I would really only do it if there was a reasonable chance they might not be doing work you're interested in (if they're there at all). But I would definitely do that research on  your own first. I imagine it would look bad if you asked "hey, what are you working on" if articles are readily available online.  

As far as finding up-to-date pubs, I definitely recommend Academia.edu and ResearchGate even if you do have access to a university database. I found a lot of work from POIs as free pdfs on public sites that my U's library didn't have.   

[onerepublic96]

4 hours ago, WildeThing said:

Search for them in your university library databases and search engines, you can limit those searches to recent years, too.

 

2 hours ago, indoorfireworks said:

I was leaning against it for the most part, but I made two exceptions. The first was because of a very out of date department web site. The second was on the advice of one of my letter writers; I emailed a POI who was of retirement age to see if he was still active. I'm glad I did, because he just retired at the end of last semester. In each case, I just made a quick statement about what I liked about their work, what I plan to do in a PhD and asked A. what graduate level classes they are teaching or plan to teach and B. if they expected to be available for dissertation committees in the next couple of years.

Both were extremely gracious and I'm ultimately glad I contacted them, even though the first POI said he didn't know how he felt about my proposed methodology. That was kind of a bummer to hear, but it wasn't outright negative and I'm not taking it as discouragement toward applying. And regardless, I feel really good about knowing I'm only applying to places where there will grad-active be profs I want to study with. I can imagine being very frustrated spending the time and money researching a school, reading a prof's work, applying, and then finding out the POI isn't there or isn't working with grads much. 

TL;DR - it's a case-by-case thing, and I would really only do it if there was a reasonable chance they might not be doing work you're interested in (if they're there at all). But I would definitely do that research on  your own first. I imagine it would look bad if you asked "hey, what are you working on" if articles are readily available online.  

As far as finding up-to-date pubs, I definitely recommend Academia.edu and ResearchGate even if you do have access to a university database. I found a lot of work from POIs as free pdfs on public sites that my U's library didn't have.   

Thank you! I'll go down the hunting for publications route first, as you've suggested. 

Sidenote, @indoorfireworks, on first reading your post I misread 'if he was still active' as 'if he was still alive' and that's just... something... ?

[Indecisive Poet]

11 hours ago, onerepublic96 said:

 

Thank you! I'll go down the hunting for publications route first, as you've suggested. 

Sidenote, @indoorfireworks, on first reading your post I misread 'if he was still active' as 'if he was still alive' and that's just... something... ?

I would recommend this route too, and it may also be helpful to search for your POI in a database and limit your results to dissertations – the dissertations they have supervised should come up. I learned through this method that the only Romanticist at a program of interest hasn't published since 2013 and hasn't supervised a dissertation since 2014, so I knocked that program off of my list.

[indoorfireworks]

19 hours ago, onerepublic96 said:

 

Sidenote, @indoorfireworks, on first reading your post I misread 'if he was still active' as 'if he was still alive' and that's just... something... ?

haha yes, that's also an important factor

Edited October 21, 2019 by indoorfireworks

[dilby]

I spent weeks working myself up to contact a POI at Chicago but just couldn't shake the feeling that it would be a totally inorganic, artificial, bullshit outreach with the obvious subtext being "please let me in to your program" so I didn't end up reaching out to anyone. It doesn't sound like many of the people in my cohort did either, except for one person who had a fairly direct personal connection via a mentor. So I would not say that this kind of contact is required.