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hi i'm casey i'm a professor in an information science department and i've done a series of videos with advice for applying to phd programs this video covers a question that i get a lot which is should you and how should you reach out to potential advisors prior to submitting an application now this is definitely one of those topics where you want to find out about the norms in your discipline in my field information science and i think computer science generally tends to be quite similar my understanding is that for most people reaching out to potential advisors ahead of time is fine helpful but not necessarily required in some other fields it might be strange or unexpected or something that people don't really do and in some other fields it might almost feel like a requirement and one reason why this might be so different in different fields is because as i've explained in other videos before in some disciplines advisor fit is much more important than in others if you are in a discipline like many in the humanities where you're not working very closely with an advisor it might be that students are accepted into the department generally and that advisor fit doesn't really matter and in that case you should still talk about specific faculty in your statement of purpose because that is a good reason why you're applying to that program it shows that you've done your research etc but you probably don't need to do sort of fact-finding on the capacity etc of individual faculty members before you submit your application but if you are in one of those disciplines where advisor fit can actually be very important for admission this is something that i've talked about in some of my other videos so i can't totally the answer the should you for you but i recommend asking some faculty in your field what they think about it your letter writers for example might be good people to ask about this so from my perspective reaching out to potential advisors isn't something that you have to do but it's really more of a fact-finding mission for you it can be really helpful for you to get some useful information and let me tell you about what some of that information might be if you haven't seen my video about common reasons why phd applications are rejected you might want to check that out but the last one is bad timing bad luck sometimes there's a one perfect potential advisor for you in a department and that person cannot take on new advisees for whatever reason funding capacity who knows if that's really the case they often are quite upfront about that and might even suggest other people that you should consider talking to or writing about in your application materials for example i currently have five phd advisees and until quite recently i had six that's a lot the previous year i was pretty much at capacity i could not really take on new phd advisees now there are other people in my department who are awesome and have some related research areas to me so when prospective students were reaching out to me during that time i told them the truth that it was not impossible but unlikely that i was going to take on new advisees and then based on what research interests they expressed to me i suggested that they look into the research of some other people in my department who were working on related topics now i want to be clear if you get one of these responses from a professor who says i'm unlikely to take on new phd advisees that is not a oh fine i guess i definitely shouldn't apply to that program you should consider whether there are other people that you could potentially work with as well and also keep in mind that who knows what's gonna happen maybe they have some more funding in the pipeline and their capacity is going to change but it's good for you to know that you should look into other options as well and it also means that for example if you are really banking on that particular program really good to not put all your eggs in one basket make sure that you're applying to other programs as well just in case always a good idea anyway because there is a certain degree of timing associated with phd applications in the same way that it is with job applications the other thing that you could find out from reaching out to a prospective advisor ahead of time is what their current research direction is for example if you look at someone's recent publications think about when that research was actually done so now something has been published which means it went through peer review maybe there were rounds of revision and then of course there was a time it took them to write it they might have done that research two years ago are they still doing that kind of research you can of course find out a fair amount sometimes by going to a faculty member's website or by looking at current grant funding in fact current grant funding is something i really recommend looking into because it tells you what that person is going to be doing for the next few years so you really never know people's trajectories can change a lot and you want to make sure that you have an idea of what they're doing now and that suggests both whether they're a potential good fit for you and the kinds of things you might want to mention in a statement of purpose okay so those are some reasons why you might want to reach out to prospective advisors ahead of time a common question i get is when should you do this so typically phd applications are due late fall early winter for example in my department they're due december 1st that's pretty common i usually don't see applications due before november but you should check and make sure that you have a sense for this for the programs that you're applying to it wouldn't necessarily hurt to reach out earlier but i personally don't think there's any need to reach out earlier than say the fall semester one of the reasons is because some professors aren't working as much over the summer or at least they're not doing as much service kind of work they might be heads down and writing a book or doing research and not responding to emails quite as readily as they might during the academic year some might even be on vacation imagine that also if capacity is an issue and funding etc sometimes funding decisions come in over the summer and so they might have a better sense of whether they're taking on new phd students in you know august or september so i would say typical to reach out would be you know one to three months before the deadline i would say i tend to start hearing from prospective students in august and we'll hear from them any time to you know a couple of weeks before the deadline which is fine and of course this probably goes without saying but this should be done via email don't call them so now i'm gonna give you a kind of template that you could think about for writing this email now don't use this exactly i don't know how many people are going to watch this video what if everyone sent the exact same email that would be kind of weird and again you're going to want to adjust it for the norms of your field but this will give you a sense of the kinds of things you might want to say i'm also going to put this text down in the description below i actually have this written down i'm going to read it off on my phone in the text below i'm going to have blanks where you would fill in information but i'm going to draft this as if someone was writing an email to me an imaginary someone who has a research interest in common with me dear dr fiesler i am considering applying to your department's phd program one reason being that i am very interested in the work that you are doing on research ethics for public data for example i particularly enjoyed your paper about research ethics for twitter and i could see myself possibly doing that kind of work obviously you're filling in blanks here my own research interests relate to data privacy particularly when it comes to social media and in fact i have some research experience with privacy settings on facebook i'm wondering if you will be considering taking on new phd advices or if you have suggestions for other faculty that i should reach out to i'd be interested to hear more about the more recent work in your lab and i'd be happy to answer any questions or to talk if more information would be helpful the end short and sweet let me point out some specific things that this imaginary phd applicant did here one it's clear that they did their homework they're not sending the exact same email to every professor that they contact i have to tell you i get a lot of form emails and it's clearly people who have no idea what kind of research i do i'm actually courtesy faculty in the computer science department which means that i'm listed on a website with all the computer science faculty i can only assume that some people are sending the same email to every computer science professor at my university because i get emails from students saying that their research area is operating systems or theory don't do that i know that it seems like this is a lot of work but you should be tailoring your applications to specific programs anyway if you want to have a strong application you need to do research about what faculty are doing now i'll note that the i read your paper about x that is optional totally fine if you don't do that if you happen to have read something or if you saw something that seemed really interesting you skimmed it totally mention it but i would say that that part is really optional but just mentioning the general research area shows that you've done your homework the other thing that this applicant has done is said how their research interests connect to that thing that they mentioned the faculty member is doing as you can see from my example it doesn't have to be exactly the same i mean first of all research ethics for public data is only one thing that i do i have a lot of different research areas it would have also been fine for the applicant to just say i'm really interested in technology ethics or online communities but of course if you can be more specific you can be more specific and so they then said some work that they had done that was kind of in the ballpark if you don't have that leave it out in fact let me give you a shorter version of this email dear dr fiesler i'm considering applying to your department's phd program one reason being that i'm really interested in technology ethics and i see that you do work in that area i'd be interested to hear about the recent work in your lab i'm curious whether you're taking on new phd advisees or if you have suggestions for other faculty i should reach out to i'd also like to hear about other work that's happening in your lab something else that you might have noticed that i ended the email with was this line i'd be happy to answer questions or talk more if information would be helpful there's lots of different ways that you could do this i have worded it this way because i don't think that it's bad necessarily to directly ask for say a meeting however however you may want to leave the option open without directly demanding a meeting the reason is in part because if the response from that professor is going to be it's unlikely that i'm taking on new advisees but you should talk to these other people it would not be a great use of either of your time to have a meeting and if the professor wants to talk more to you they might be the one to suggest a meeting or you can tell from their response whether that seems like something that you should then ask for they also might offer in their reply to answer questions in which case you can ask questions in an email or you can say i do have some questions would you rather me send them to you in an email or would it be easier for you to talk on the phone or to video conference so to reiterate the important things are one make it clear why you are reaching out to this person in particular two make a connection with them and three to ask about the kinds of things that you actually need to know and to reiterate it doesn't have to be exactly like this the norms might be slightly different in your field etc you also might have a personal connection to this potential advisor in which case you should totally mention that for example i've been an undergraduate research assistant of this particular professor and they suggested that i reach out to you okay so what happens after you send this email you might get a reply it might be what you want to hear it might be not what you want to hear but hopefully either way the information is useful to you or you might not get a reply now this is very important do not take it personally if you do not get a response to your email i feel terrible about this but i lose emails all the time and i try pretty darn hard but i gotta tell you it's just a bit of a fire hose sometimes and it happens they slip through the cracks and this kind of thing is the kind of thing that can slip through the cracks if you do not receive a response you should follow up once do not follow up more than once and wait at least a week a week is a good amount of time you can also wait two weeks just respond to your original email and say something along the lines of hi there i'm just checking in as i know how easy it is for emails like this to slip through the cracks if you're not able to respond that's totally fine i look forward to applying to your phd program regardless just be polite obviously don't admonish them for not replying or ask them why they haven't replied but sometimes a reminder like that can be a good idea i at least appreciate them and also if you don't hear back from a professor do not assume that that means you shouldn't apply to that program or you shouldn't mention them in your statement of purpose you can't assume that a non-response means that they actively hate you or something like that it's possible that when you reach out to someone they might actually be really excited to talk to you and if that's the case wonderful a lot of the kinds of conversation that you might have in a pre-application discussion with a faculty member might actually be quite similar to the kind of conversation you would have after you've applied so you might want to check out my video about phd interviews it's not really an interview it's more of a fact-finding mission for both of you but that might still be helpful and the other thing is that i want you to keep an open mind about other faculty that they suggest you talk to often that can be a signal of a research area of a faculty member in the department that you're not aware of because it's new it might be a signal for people who have funding or people who are actively recruiting new students so research them and consider reaching out to them if they mention someone specific you also might get a reply back that is pretty clear that these kinds of emails are not common in that department a reply like that would be something like thank you for reaching out i look forward to seeing your application do not take that as a bad thing it just means that they're looking forward to seeing your application so write your statement of purpose you know mentioning that faculty member just as you would have if you hadn't reached out to them it's also possible that you will not get any kind of satisfying answer to the question about whether someone is taking on new phd advisees either because that's not how that department works or they just don't know i mean really you might not get satisfying answers to any of this and that's totally fine it's very likely that if you send a bunch of these emails some of them will be useful and some of them will be completely useless and i think that's really all there is to say on this topic again you do not have to do this but it can be useful for you and if you're at this point in the process and you haven't seen my other videos about phd admissions check them out i'm also happy to answer any questions if i can at least so put those in the comments down below and i wish you the very best of luck i'm casey thanks for watching