Phone call with professor : Newbie questions

[hope4fall2012]

I have been mailing professors of late and one professor offers to have a phone call to discuss his research group and the university. I would like to say this is good, but I'm very very bad when it comes to speaking with people. I dont want to screw up my app before even beginning it.

I had a few questions about this :

1) What does one address a professor as in the US? An assistant professor? Here,in India we address them as Sir/Ma'am and when I was working in an American company (in India),everyone was on a first name basis. So I'm really confused.

2) Also, how long is the phone call going to be? What is usually discussed? I know I need to be up to date with the professors research, but do I need to be in a position to state my research goal. If yes, how specific do I have to be?

3) How is it normally done? Does the professor call you, or do you call them? Over the phone?? or skype??

I'm sorry if these are noob questions, but Ive never done this before and I dont want to end up embarrassing myself.

[waddle]

1) What does one address a professor as in the US? An assistant professor? Here,in India we address them as Sir/Ma'am and when I was working in an American company (in India),everyone was on a first name basis. So I'm really confused.

To be safe, "Dr. Awesome" or "Prof. Spamalot", unless they tell you otherwise. I'm not sure what the distinction between Assistant, Associate, Full Professors in India is, but in the U.S., they're all full-time faculty (but assistant professors and some associate professors--depending on the school's tenure system--are just not (yet) tenured) and thus should be given the respect accorded to professors.

P.S. Never say "I want to work with Assistant Professor LeCool", that sounds pretty bad. Just "Dr." or "Prof." will suffice.

2) Also, how long is the phone call going to be? What is usually discussed? I know I need to be up to date with the professors research, but do I need to be in a position to state my research goal. If yes, how specific do I have to be?

Depends, probably between 20 minutes to an hour. It's always different; they might ask you to tell a little bit about yourself, then they'll talk about what they do (or they'll just do this if they like to talk ... some people love talking on and on and on, all you really have to do is listen in that case), you can ask some questions and they'll talk a little more in depth, perhaps talk about the program and school, you get the picture. You don't really need to be able to propose a Ph.D. thesis topic, but just sound like you know in a general sense where you want to go with your research (e.g., "I want to model the impact of sulfur dioxide emissions on the climate" or something like that ... I'm not an atmospheric scientist so I can't really speak to what's considered a "general" area of research in that field) and with your degree. Basically don't say, "well, I want to go to grad school 'cause you know, that's cool and I don't really know what I want to do next, so you know, yeah." and you'll be OK.

3) How is it normally done? Does the professor call you, or do you call them? Over the phone?? or skype??

Ask them what's convenient for them, offer to provide them your phone number (or Skype name, since you're overseas, presumably). They'll probably call you, but just make sure with them beforehand.

Edited December 6, 2011 by waddle

[ktel]

1) Call them Dr. or Professor

2) My phone calls and meetings with profs varied. Sometimes it was a mutual conversation, sometimes it was just them telling me about their research and asking a question or two at the end. Some were short some were long. I will say I liked the mutual conversation professors the best. They seemed like they cared about me, not just themselves

3) I was doing calls within Canada and we either used Skype or they called me. Long distance is usually covered by the university.

[hope4fall2012]

Thank you guys!!

That was very helpful..

[InquilineKea]

Yes - Dr. is usually safest.

It does appear, though, that people in the geosciences are a lot less formal than people in most other fields. Some even prefer being called by their first names. But I suppose that there is an additional psychological barrier when one is foreign.