First email to prospective advisor

[shatun92]

Good day,

I will be applying to Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and I would like to get a feedback on my email to prospective advisors:

Dear Dr [Last Name],

 

My name is [First name Last name] and I will be applying for Master of Science in Electrical Engineering with concentration in Power Engineering. I graduated with Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from [University 1] and currently, I am post-baccalaereuate student at [University 2], where I take graduate level classes in power systems.

 

I have read your paper [Last name et al] in [journal name] and I am curious about your plans to follow up on this line of research. As I am very interested in joining your group to do research in , I wonder if you accept graduate students for the Fall 2017? If so, I would greatly appreciate the chance to have a short phone or Skype conversation with you to discover the possibilities of me joining your group at [school name].

 

Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon.

 

Sincerely,

[First name Last Name]

 

[TakeruK]

This is good. If you did research at University 1 or University 2, write a 1 sentence summary of your work in the first paragraph as well. You may also want to consider attaching a short CV.

[shatun92]

8 hours ago, TakeruK said:

This is good. If you did research at University 1 or University 2, write a 1 sentence summary of your work in the first paragraph as well. You may also want to consider attaching a short CV.

I am doing research at University 2 and have done another at another university. At University 1, I have done a Capstone (Senior Design) project that involved building a physical device but it took me almost 6 months of research of figuring out how to do it. I will add summary of research in introduction.

I keep getting different comments about CV. Some people say that it's too pushy to attach CV in the first email, while others recommend doing so. I am still debating about doing it.

But I appreciate your comment and input. Thank you.

[TakeruK]

10 hours ago, shatun92 said:

I am doing research at University 2 and have done another at another university. At University 1, I have done a Capstone (Senior Design) project that involved building a physical device but it took me almost 6 months of research of figuring out how to do it. I will add summary of research in introduction.

I keep getting different comments about CV. Some people say that it's too pushy to attach CV in the first email, while others recommend doing so. I am still debating about doing it.

But I appreciate your comment and input. Thank you.

I agree that it's not clear whether or not including the CV in the first email is a good idea (which was why I said you could consider it). I would have thought it was too pushy (and have said this in the past) because some profs have told me this. However, I recently talked to a lot of other professors that tell me that they want the CV right away so that they get the info they need. It's hard for them to determine how excited they are by your profile without seeing a CV etc.