POI email etiquette

[eastcoastprimate]

Now that I've narrowed down my list of potential POIs, I've been wondering a bit about follow-up etiquette.

 

How long should one wait after sending a first initial email before either resending it or writing a new follow-up email? A week? 2 weeks? A month? Never?

 

I'm sure each professor is different in terms of their threshold for annoyance, but I was just curious what the general consensus is with this. 

[iphi]

Oh boy, it's tough... I'd say maybe 3 weeks with "Followup" in the subject line. If you still hear nothing then don't write back.

[bsharpe269]

I personally wouldnt send a follow up, though I know that others on here might disagree. Many PIs even say that they get a bit annoyed by a single email since they perfer that interested students contact them after being admitted. I know that this feeling isnt universal and many PIs feel very different. Either way, I would stick with one email. If they dont respond then I would take that as a sign that you should wait until interview weekend to speak in more detail.

[eastcoastprimate]

Thanks! To clarify, I'm in a field where contacting a POI to find out if they are taking students/interested in you as a potential student is the norm. It's so hard to tell - I know most professors get so many emails that I'm sure these "prospective student" emails get lost in cyberspace. 

[TakeruK]

I'd follow up after a month or so. However, if you sent your first email like 2 weeks before the application deadline, I wouldn't follow up at all, since I wouldn't want to be sending these kinds of emails after the application deadline has passed and they are making decisions. Like you, I sent my emails to ask if they are interested in a student for topic X so that I can decide whether or not to apply to the school, and obviously this is pointless when the application deadline has passed! In general, I sent the first set of emails around October and a followup in November. 

 

My response rate was roughly (I sent emails to approx. 24 professors):

 

1/3 of professors did not respond at all

1/3 of professors gave very short emails that range from neutral (standard info about applications/saying that US schools don't usually hire grad students directly into a lab/no commitment on whether the prof would want to work on topic X) to potentially slightly annoyed (i.e. statements like "Please apply and talk to me when you have a decision")

1/3 of professors gave actually useful information and wanted to discuss potential work further with me, or also equally useful, telling me that they are no longer working on X and/or they have no funding for X (so that I would need to do extra TAing and apply for grants if I wanted to do this work).

 

On average, I emailed 3 profs from each school, and coincidentally, for most the schools I received one reply of each type! I don't think the negative responses hurt my application success rates and I definitely think that while the negative responses don't make you feel good, the positive responses are well worth it. I actually don't worry too much about the negative responses because I really wanted to work on a certain subfield in my PhD and I didn't want to be in a program that made no promises on what kind of work I could do. That is, I wanted to jump right into work in a certain field instead of spending the first 2 years trying a bunch of stuff and then starting dissertation research. So the negative responses helped me figure out which profs/programs I might not get along with as well.