contacting professors: how much information to include?

[flagler20]

I'm a little confused about how much or how little information to send to prospective advisers. Is the standard approach to keep your e-mail to just a few sentences? Because I've read other advice that talked about sending a resume, and I've come across a few web pages of professors that specifically request prospective students to send information such as a CV for the professor to make a judgment off of.

[Alephantiasis]

You might want to have a look at that: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/advice/prospective.html

[flagler20]

I already read that page. In fact that's why I made the post. It conflicts with other advice I've heard. For example, this is from the web page of Colorado State University's Natural Resource Ecology Lab:

"Please feel free to contact PIs you might be interested in working with. At a minimum, we suggest your initial contact e-mail should contain the following:

• A cover letter (or e-mail) describing your academic and research background, your research interests, and why you think you would be a good fit for a given PIs Lab
  
• A copy of your resume. Including academic activities, publications, outreach, scientific activities, and other interests
  
• A copy of your transcripts or list of courses and your GPA
  
• Copies of any pertinent publications you are an author on
  

PIs receive a lot of emails from perspective graduate students. Please give them a few days to get back to you."

[Alephantiasis]

I suppose it depends on the department. I would keep the initial e-mail short and direct, unless instructed otherwise. The instructions you mentioned don't seem to serve the same purpose: it looks less personal, more official and unilateral than a casual academic conversation. It's a matter of feeling what the places you're interested in expect from you and how they think about prospective grad students.

I tried the first, more personal, approach and it worked out just fine. My potential (at that time) adviser offered me a different perspective on my project and his feedback helped me to revise my statement of purpose. Exchanging with someone also tells you whether you'll like working with him or not. That's why I'd stick with the personal (and yet efficient) tone rather than the bland cover-letter, gpa, gre scores nonsense option, unless I know for sure that's expected.

[flagler20]

That makes sense. I guess if they're interested in you from your brief intro they can request more info also

[ktel]

I already read that page. In fact that's why I made the post. It conflicts with other advice I've heard. For example, this is from the web page of Colorado State University's Natural Resource Ecology Lab:

"Please feel free to contact PIs you might be interested in working with. At a minimum, we suggest your initial contact e-mail should contain the following:

• A cover letter (or e-mail) describing your academic and research background, your research interests, and why you think you would be a good fit for a given PIs Lab
  
• A copy of your resume. Including academic activities, publications, outreach, scientific activities, and other interests
  
• A copy of your transcripts or list of courses and your GPA
  
• Copies of any pertinent publications you are an author on
  

PIs receive a lot of emails from perspective graduate students. Please give them a few days to get back to you."

This is exactly what I sent to all my PIs. I have no publications though, so just a CV, transcript and obviously the e-mail which I kept somewhat brief. Everyone responded and responded positively. This was for engineering.

[InquilineKea]

Isn't that a bit excessive though? A lot of people send their transcripts/resumes to their PI - but transcripts/resumes rarely show fit with the particular professor (unless you've taken a huge number of grad-lvl courses that you've 4.0'ed). More importantly though, everyone is now advised to send their transcripts/resumes to potential advisers, so what happens is that advisers get a *huge* number of short emails with transcripts/CVs attached. It's not the job of the professor to evaluate them - it's the job of the adcoms to do so.

I don't even send them anything other than what I've done (research-wise), and simply ask them research-related questions. Everyone responded and responded positively. If I attached my CV, I don't even think that they'd even look at it.

Edited September 29, 2011 by InquilineKea

[ktel]

It depends on what you put on your resume. I made it quite clear on the first page of my CV what relevant experience I had that would make me a good fit for the grad program I was applying to. He could have read past that page, but if he didn't want to, he got the info he needed.

For the schools I was applying to I wouldn't have even been accepted without a professor accepting me first. The "adcom" just makes sure you meet minimum grade requirements, I'm pretty sure. So the e-mail to the PI was very important.