Professor asked for availability, didn't contact

[Starscream]

Hi all,

So I emailed a professor at the ECE department at a top US university on Thursday morning, describing to her that I had done work relevant to her research, had sent a paper to a journal to be published and that I wanted to inquire if she would be hiring graduate students for her lab for fall 2013. She replied within an hour, telling me that they would like to talk to me (her response was CC'ed to one of her PhD students, whose work is most closely related to mine) and that I should give her my availabilities for Friday, Monday and Tuesday. I responded on Friday morning by thanking her, and telling her my available timings according to her time zone. I asked her for her preferred method of communication, and that mine is Skype (am from another country across the Atlantic).

Since then I haven't heard from her. What can be the reason? Is she too busy, could she have forgotten or lost interest? I told her two possible times, depending on her time zone (I googled and found two different local times for her state which differed by 1 hour, so I explained it in the reply).

Can anyone help ease my anxiety?

[ghanada]

whoa you need to relax! Have you had much contact with professors before? This type of behavior is TYPICAL, especially at top universities. You should be thankful you got that first reply so quickly. But seriously, these things happen all the time and even moreso in the summer. You also need to realize these professors get emails like yours all the time, so among attending to current projects, grants, current grad students, etc., you being a random potential candidate asking for help puts you on the bottom of the ladder. She probably either forgot about wanting to schedule a meeting with you or got too busy to find time herself.

I would just wait til like Friday or even Monday to send a friendly e-mail seeing if she still wants to try and talk in the future. But realize it is July, apps aren't due for like half a year, so no need to start freaking out over nothing.

[mandarin.orange]

Oh, I asked about this once. Right down to the potential PI returning my initial email in less than an hour:

Profs hava a lot on their plate and many, many people competing for their time, so don't take it personally!

[Starscream]

whoa you need to relax! Have you had much contact with professors before? This type of behavior is TYPICAL, especially at top universities. You should be thankful you got that first reply so quickly. But seriously, these things happen all the time and even moreso in the summer. You also need to realize these professors get emails like yours all the time, so among attending to current projects, grants, current grad students, etc., you being a random potential candidate asking for help puts you on the bottom of the ladder. She probably either forgot about wanting to schedule a meeting with you or got too busy to find time herself.

I would just wait til like Friday or even Monday to send a friendly e-mail seeing if she still wants to try and talk in the future. But realize it is July, apps aren't due for like half a year, so no need to start freaking out over nothing.

Its August now

So basically, there is a chance that she might not want to talk to me after all, if she doesn't respond to my follow up?

On a slightly different note, I will be applying for MS leading to PhD. What are the chances of an international student with decent GPA (> 3.5 out of 4), great GRE scores, LORs, one journal publication and two years of industry experience (in a field that is very closely related to the appraoched professor's research interests), being accepted for a GRA after holding meeting(s) over phone with some professor at a good college? Is this is a good approach for securing a GRA? are there any others I should consider? Please share your opinions.

[ghanada]

Of course there is always a chance she might not want to talk to you, but I wouldn't necessarily ASSUME that. Although I think that highlights a point I was trying to make: don't put all your eggs in 1 basket. It is good to find people of interest and try to make contacts, but at the same time don't get your hopes up. Try contacting many more people and apply to lots of places. I probably sent out like 20+ emails to potential advisors and got responses from like half. A few of them were even pretty enthusiastic. But at the same time, a lot of them told me that they were interested in me, but didn't have any way of "helping" me get in. It really depends on each school and their admission process. The schools that are more rotation based (as opposed to match-based) tend to not let their professors have as much say until later steps along the process. There is just so much variability so applying to a big range of schools is helpful.

As per your chances, that is also hard to say as well. Particularly with top tier schools you NEVER KNOW. Your resume sounds good, but since you are international it will be even tougher for you. I would think you should have little problems getting into most schools in the 20-30 range. I also think you have a decent shot at getting into a handful of schools in the 10-20 range. But once you start talking about the top 10, it will be a toss up. It could really go either way. A lot comes down to who else your competition is and whether the people you want to work with have open spots and money. These things change so much every year so you could be a bad fit this year, but a perfect fit next year, just have no way of really knowing.

You should read the profiles of the people on the EE PhD thread. Not sure what your exact GPA is, but for top schools I think 3.7 to 3.9 is about average and 780-800 Q GRE is pretty much standard. For reference, I had a really low undergrad GPA (<3.0), high MSEE GPA (3.8), 5 first author pubs, 5+ secondary author pubs, and 5 years of research experience when I applied. I am going to University of Michigan for the BME PhD, but I also had the choice to do EE as well.

[Starscream]

I must be really bad at navigating my way around a website. Please tell me where can I read the profiles of the people on the EE PhD thread?

[ghanada]

2012:

2011:

There is one for every engineering discipline every year. Go through the pages, many people POST their profiles inside these threads. Also, in the 'Results' section many people list their GPA/GRE. You will see a red diamond in their result post if they listed their scores.

[victor.s.andrei]

This type of behavior is TYPICAL, especially at top universities. You should be thankful you got that first reply so quickly. But seriously, these things happen all the time and even moreso in the summer. You also need to realize these professors get emails like yours all the time, so among attending to current projects, grants, current grad students, etc., you being a random potential candidate asking for help puts you on the bottom of the ladder.

Agree with this, especially since that's exactly what the folks at my undergrad (in the 20-30 range for CS/EE grad rankings) school told us when I was last there.