Cutoff Point for Contacting Professors

[maxmarx]

I've been on the fence about contacting professors, I got conflicting opinions on the matter from a couple of my undergraduate professors. Lately I've been leaning more towards doing so. The problem is most of the deadlines are approaching and I don't want to seem like a slacker if I contact them right before or right after the deadline. Is this a rational fear or should I just going ahead and contact them deadline or not?

[goukaku suru you ni]

hmm... i think it depends. if you recently learned about this professor whose interest really matches yours, then it's probably okay to send an email. I contacted some professors in a certain uni a week ago and surprisingly they replied to my inquiry. Some of the professors I emailed half a year ago, did not even reply to me, so maybe what really matters is the professor's interest in what you intend to do.

[eucalyptus]

I just emailed profs at JHU two days ago and Harvard yesterday and they have both written back to me favourably. They don't appear to be offended by the late notice and both indicated that they're interested in my research. My experience suggests it's better to contact late than not at all!!

[FentonForche]

I'm not sure how qualified my opinion is, but I have come to believe professors micro-analyze this stuff far less than the applicants do. Send them an email if you want, just don't act like a sycophant. It may or may not get you anywhere based on how active that prof wants to be in admissions decisions.

Where I went, the admissions committee was a pretty closed circle of 4 or 5 professors + 1 current grad student. This was a poli sci program that was in the US News Top 25 at the time, but not top 10. I was somewhat friendly with the one grad student who was on the committee, and she kind of clued me in a little about how they operated.

GPA and GREs that were low would get your app pushed to the side early in the process. If you scored insanely high they might make sure your app got special attention, but no one thing was a golden ticket. Once you made it past that stage, they'd start to look more at the totality of your application, and from there things got murky. If you had a faculty member advocating for your admission, that helped, but not everyone who was admitted had that going for them. I was an example of the latter. Once admission letters went out, they assigned one faculty member to every admit and had the profs get in touch with them. The prof might be the person that was advocating for you, or it might just be the faculty member they think "fit" the best with you. The guy who they deemed "fit" best with me seemed to have no clue about who I was or what I was interested in, and obviously had nothing to do with the admission process.

One thing that stuck with me was how some pretty arbitrary stuff that you can't always control can get your application tossed. Case in point, one otherwise decent candidate had a rec letter from an Ivy prof that read something like "not strong enough for a top level program but would probably be fine in a school like yours." Needless to say, the app never made it out of the first round, and from no fault of the student's. He just made the mistake of getting a rec letter from a tactless jerk.