Contacting professors prior to admission

[Soheila]

Last months, I emailed to some professors at the University of Wisconsin, Northwestern and 2 professors at Rice. All of them had the same explanation why they cannot tell me if I can have them as my advisor or they can support my application in the admission committee.

Here are two of those emails I got:

“To enter graduate study at the University of XXXX you must apply to one of the graduate degree programs and be offered admission.  Individual faculty members do not have the authority to admit students into their laboratories.”

 

Or

 

“At XXX students apply through different graduate programs, which do all of the admissions (e.g., BCB and SSPB).  Once entering these programs, students rotate through multiple labs before being matched with a mentor. For this reason, faculty do not admit students directly to their labs until after those rotations. “

 

After these emails I understood that in biomedical sciences, u cannot get any precise reply from a faculty member to know if you are a competitive candidate or not. Do you guys think I am right? I really do not know what to do? should I apply for these programs or not. 

[Lalbadshah]

I contacted profs in about 20 unis, outlining my profile, research experience and interest. Only about 4 of them gave me a genuine response - 2 of them saying the same thing as you received, as for the other 2 - one gave me a % chance of acceptance and the other encouraged me to apply. Majority of the replies(10-13) were copy pasted templates telling me to refer FAQs on the unis website. The rest did not reply at all. I am a cs student and applying for ms programs for the same. Profs receive thousands of these kind of mails, most don't reply to them or even read them, don't get discouraged.

[Soheila]

But the professors who replied me did not copy and paste a template. Their replies were nice and they didn't refer me to FAQ pages. 

[TK2]

Why not apply? All they've said is that they're not in charge of admissions and that it's too early to start worrying about who you'll work with closely eventually. There doesn't seem to be anything discouraging there.

[TakeruK]

On 10/3/2016 at 3:27 AM, Soheila said:

After these emails I understood that in biomedical sciences, u cannot get any precise reply from a faculty member to know if you are a competitive candidate or not. Do you guys think I am right? I really do not know what to do? should I apply for these programs or not. 

In most fields, faculty members are not going to tell you if you are a competitive candidate or not. This is not the reason to email prospective advisors ahead of the applications. Besides, since these people you email may not be the ones making the decision, they are not going to want to say something like "you will/will not get in" because they don't have control over it. And, if you know they don't have control over it, would you believe what they say?

Instead, the point of the email ahead of applications is to find out whether or not a professor is even interested in more students and/or if they are interested in a field of study you want to pursue. For example, if their website says they study "Topic X" in their lab and you want to go to grad school to study "topic X.1", you might email to see if they do actually work on "X.1" instead of just "X.2" and "X.3". But from what I hear from my biology-related friends, most faculty do plan to take on more students every year and labs are quite big, so perhaps emailing ahead of time doesn't yield as much useful info as it does in other fields.