How to Contact a Prospective Advisor. Like most professors, I get several hundred emails a year from prospective students interested in coming to UVa for graduate school and joining my research group. I try to reply to all messages that are not obviously spam, but find most messages I receive make me less likely to want to accept the students sending them. This page provides some advice for prospective grad school applicants considering emailing me, but most of it probably applies to any other professor you want to contact also. Who To Contact Its a really bad idea to send spam emails to long lists of professors. These emails will never help you, and some professors will maintain blacklists of applicants who do this to make sure their application is rejected without consideration.
You should only contact professors with whom you have a genuine interest in working based on knowing something about them and what they do. Do Your Homework First Email A typical message should go something like this: What Not To Do Follow Up Conclusion. How to Be a Good Graduate Student. See: Graduate School Articles. Newest: Random: Illustrated: Functional Programming: Graduate School: Productivity: iPhone, iPad, iPod: HOWTOs: Undergraduate Computer Science: Parsing: Continuations: Compilation: Mathematics: Programming Languages: Writing: Giving Presentations: Lambda Calculus: C: C++: Scheme: Racket: JavaScript: Swift: Understanding and implementing lazinessPython: Perl: Java: Scala: LaTeX: Hacking the OS X Address Book with C, Racket and LaTeXML: Advanced programming languagesSQL: Haskell: Scripting: Lambda: Apple: Unix: Web servers: Static Analysis: Security: Hacks: Travel: Greasemonkey Hacks: Academia: Teaching: Science: Health: Gadgets: Gaming: Classroom Fortress: Nine Kinds of StudentsHome Improvement: Rants: American Airlines sucks Chronological Order: