Cold Emails from Prospective Students

Hi there,

I’ve sent you this link because you’ve cold-emailed me with interest as a prospective PhD student. I’d like to provide a short, generic reply instead of no reply because in the handful times I’ve spoken to applicants, this reply is more helpful and more considerate than no reply at all.

Unless I’ve said otherwise in the email, it doesn’t seem as if your application has stood out to me. Note that this doesn’t mean you can’t improve your application or that your application won’t stand out to another professor, but it simply means it hasn’t stood out to me and the criteria I use.

I get about 200 of these cold emails over the course of a year (and this was just in my first year as a very new professor). Furthermore, I plan to admit and advise zero, one, or two new PhD students per year, and of the four I have advised so far, none of them had sent me a cold email before applying. Nevertheless, I do feel I owe prospective students transparency from these emails. The PhD application process is difficult, and lack of responses (I would assume) makes things more confusing.

When I read these emails, I am scanning very quickly for interest and skill. I have found that successful PhDs can be done by people with strong interest and average skill and by people with average interest and exceptional skill, so evidence for either draws my attention. Some examples in order from most specific to most general are:

• Previous work with VR/AR/XR as indicated by a research conference submission or demo project.
• Publications in machine learning conference or venue that I have heard of, or past experience with human body motion data.
• An exceptionally strong academic record, being above 3.7-3.9 on a 4.0 scale, with consideration for the strength of the university.

This is not an exhaustive list, certainly, but it is important to note these are evidenced by things you have done rather than things you say. It is very easy to say nice things like “I am very interested in your work” (especially in the era of large language models), and so talk is cheap. You could be saying these nice things to many different researchers, and so I’m not inclined to believe my work is something you are particularly interested in (and motivated by). On the other end of the spectrum, it is very good indicator of interest to have done work (as large as a paper submission or as small as a personal project or literature review) that is most relevant to me and ten other professors, perhaps.

From the 200 emails I get, perhaps three or four stand out, and I encourage those students to apply. This encouragement is not a guarantee of acceptance (of course) and I still filter through roughly a dozen good PhD applicants during application season. I ought to also mention that of my four current PhD students, none had initially reached out with an email - they had simply applied, or had transfered from another Illinois Tech lab.

Finally, I’d like to ask whether you liked or disliked this “behind-the-scenes” look, and what might be helpful to add to you or other students in your same position. Are you sending the email to answer a different question - perhaps whether to apply, given application fees get expensive quickly? Even though this is a generic reply, I’d still like to make sure it’s useful.

Thank you,

Mark