So you are a new graduate student, and looking for opportunities and ideally funding. What do you do?
What you should generally not do is send a copy-and-pasted e-mail to all the faculty. That looks bad (given social expectations and protocols in academia) and provides little information to the recipients as to why you would make a good contributor to their research program.
Instead, you should first review faculty members’ web pages and research activities. The list of research interests on their faculty profile page is often not sufficient for this: my faculty profile says I do ‘recommender systems’ and ‘human-computer interaction’, but that isn’t enough to know what it is that I do. I’ve tried to update my research page to make it easier to find answers to this question, but that information isn’t in the standardized profile1. Look at the professor’s web site to see what they’re working on. (Professors, please update your web sites so that this information is visible!)
Second, consider taking classes from the faculty members whose work particularly interests you. I prefer to hire students who have taken one of my graduate classes for two reasons:
The class provides background knowledge that’s helpful for conducting research. I also try to integrate research and research methods into my graduate classes, so they provide useful general background for CS research as well.
The class provides me with a good sample of the kind of work students are able to do related to my research work. When a student just comes to my office, I do not know their current skills and capabilities.
The research assistantship should be a mutually beneficial relationship. The student gains valuable hands-on training in research, in addition to funding; the professor gets more research done than they would be able to do on their own (and trains the student, which is a goal in itself). Interactions over the course of a semester course provide a much better means of assessing whether such a relationship will work out than a resumé and short meeting.
Third, send a personalized e-mail. This e-mail should do a few things:
Indicate your interest.
Communicate that you know what it is that the faculty member does and is looking for. This should demonstrate that you have read something about what they do; copying and pasting their research interest keywords doesn’t really demonstrate that. Some may say that you need to communicate your interest in their work; I put less emphasis on this. A student who has good technical and critical thinking skills, and is interested in research, but doesn’t have strong preferences about the specific subfield of computer science that they study will likely be a stronger contributor to my research team than a student who is really excited about recommender systems but cannot critically reason about them or research work.
If you have experience that is relevant to the work, mention that. For example, if you have work experience in programming languages used by the group (for my group, that would be Java or R, with some Python), or have done some work or taken a class on the subject, you should mention that. For me at least, test scores and grades are mostly irrelevant; I don’t care much about the test scores, and probably have no reference to measure the grades. The exception to this is if you have taken a course at Texas State relevant to my research work (e.g. machine learning or databases).
Personalizing your e-mail in this way, and communicating the experience and skills you have that are directly relevant to the professor’s work, helps your e-mail stand out and makes it easier for the faculty member to judge whether you are likely to be a good contributor. It also demonstrates that you take time to think about what you do, which is a valuable but not universal skill.
I have one further piece of advice, as some insight into my thought process and what I am looking for. I love training students, but the research funding I have available is not only to to provide educational opportunities; it is also to conduct research in furtherance of my overall research program. So the question I try to answer is this: is it reasonably likely, given all the uncertainties inherent in research work, that funding a year of research by this student will result in a publishable research paper?2 This does not mean that I will consider you, or our relationship, to be a failure if we don’t get a paper. Research, and work in general, is far too uncertain for that to be a realistic expectation. But I want to make as good a bets as I can.
We do not expect you, or your e-mail, to be perfect, or you to already know everything. If you did, you would not need to be a student and could go make a lot more money in industry. I’m trying to assess, to the best of my ability, whether offering you a position is likely to pay off in learning for you, knowledge for the world, and research output for both of us.
Good luck!
Maybe it should be. I’ll think about writing a short prose blurb about what it is that I really do, and see if it can go in the profile.↩︎
For Ph.D students, the bar should usually be higher — aiming for 2–3 papers per year in their last years — but 1 paper seems like a more reasonable target for a masters’ student.↩︎