Email writing to potential supervisors can be challenging at times.
When I was writing to potential supervisors, I was working full-time. Since I had been working 10 hours each day, it was pretty late when I started writing to potential supervisors.
My friends told me to wait a year before even beginning to write since it was too late. At this point, most of them have already contacted supervisors and secured a graduate position.
This is where I snapped out of my procrastinating bubble and began to think about what I could do to secure a graduate position. In addition, I had very specific research interests, so getting into a graduate program was very difficult.
Besides finding relevant labs at hundreds of universities, I also had to review the profiles of different professors before contacting them.
Therefore, I needed a system to help me organize my email writing to potential supervisors efficiently and robustly. With a few days of tweaking, I created a simple yet effective graduate application management system.
Two weeks later, I was able to find professors with mutual research interests without too much difficulty.
In total, I sent 130 emails to professors at different universities in both the U.S. and Canada. For those 130 emails, I got 53 replies, with a nearly 40% conversion rate. Of those 53 replies, 22 professors expressed interest in hiring me for their lab and encouraged me to apply formally through the university’s graduate office.
After contacting a professor, I was offered admission to a PhD program where the research they were conducting was exactly what I was interested in.
In this blog post, you will find some helpful information I learned about managing email writing to potential supervisors during my application process. Finally, I discuss how I use Notion to manage my graduate applications.
How to write an email to a potential supervisor is also discussed elsewhere (With a free template).
Why is it so critical to have a management system for organizing your email writing to potential supervisors?
Half the battle is won by starting well.
You will be able to save a tremendous amount of time and effort if you have an email management system in place.
Email writing to potential supervisors cannot be done a year in advance. If you are applying for a graduate position, you must have the final results of your bachelor’s degree (most of the time) or your master’s degree, as well as all your documents ready to show when requested.
The reality is that regardless of your plan if you want to make a good impression and write a well-balanced email, your time window is very limited. Often, this fact is overlooked because it isn’t well documented or predictable.
Therefore, when the time comes, it’s better to start on the right foot.
You can use conventional methods, such as having different word documents for universities and notes for supervisors and academic departments.
However, this approach has some serious flaws.
This approach does not allow you to sort anything. As a result, you are accumulating information that will not be useful in the long run. Due to the lack of prioritization, it’s easy to miss information.
Basic requirements for an email management system
No matter which application and/or approach you to choose, you will find information easier if you have these aspects in your email management system.
A university database
This is the most basic requirement for an email management system. The most frequent mistake I made when looking for possible supervisors was checking the same university more than once without realizing I had already checked it a couple of days earlier.
If you don’t have a database to keep track of the universities you have looked at previously, it might take a while to realize that. These short times add up because you will be visiting many universities.
Therefore, keeping track of all the universities that you checked is essential.
A way to sort the most interesting universities and supervisors
You may find an extremely relevant and interesting research lab conducting the type of research you are interested in.
Because you will be checking so many universities and departments, it’s easy to forget what that lab or university is. If this is the case, you will have to spend the next couple of hours trying to locate that specific university, the lab, and the supervisor.
In addition, you might like a particular university simply because of its location.
This can be resolved by using a sorting system that enables you to mark the most interesting universities and make a note about them. Therefore, a database system is important to pull out important information when needed.
Calendar
The next step is to email your potential supervisors once you have identified all the universities and potential supervisors you want to contact.
I realized I needed a proper tagging system to keep track of potential supervisors’ emails. Tags must include the following:
1. In progress: You are gathering information about that supervisor to write a much more personal email at this stage.
2. Ready to send: You have finished writing the email. Yet, you haven’t sent the email because (1) you want the email to arrive at a certain time in the supervisor’s inbox or (2) You still need to make some decisions.
3. Email sent: The email was sent to the potential supervisor, and you are awaiting a response or a fixed time to send a follow-up email.
4. Cancelled: The supervisor has notified you that they are unable to recruit students, or you have not received a response to your follow-up email.
5. Positive reply: The supervisor has emailed you expressing interest in your application(Woohoo!).
It might be wise to set a deadline for sending emails to supervisors. In addition, you should keep track of the number of days that have passed since you sent your first email to determine the most appropriate time to follow up. This is why an email management system should include a calendar.
If you receive positive emails, you may wish to separate them from all the other emails and analyze them for the most suitable opportunity. You could easily sort emails with a positive reply tag.
In addition, if a supervisor is interested in your application, they might want to meet with you or interview you. All of those events can be scheduled in the calendar.
Application checklist
As soon as you know which universities you are applying to, you should begin tracking the documents you need to submit on time.
These documents include:
1. Recommendation letters
2. Your test results (GRE, IELTS etc.)
3. Official transcripts
The professors or professionals who you are getting your recommendations from are busy people. They may forget to submit the recommendation by the deadline. You do not want that to happen, especially after you put so much effort and time into it.
It’s okay if your recommenders forget about sending the recommendation email, but you have to ensure you don’t!
Therefore, having a checklist when applying for graduate positions is extremely helpful.
The simplest solution is always the right solution
As a rule of thumb, I believe the simplest solution always wins.
You can manage these four tasks on four different platforms. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. However, I thought I would save a lot of time and effort if I could find a platform to manage all these tasks in one place.
Having said that, what do we need here?
It would be better to have an app (if such an app is available) that takes care of everything in one place. “In addition to managing databases, it should be capable of filtering and sorting data.”
Possible issues when working with productivity apps
I am prone to the shiny object syndrome, which leads me to check and use almost every productivity app on the market. I learned a few lessons along the way, despite the fact that the output is not so constructive.
1. All productivity apps are designed to make things easy and simple. However, due to the flexibility of the apps available today, it’s easy to get caught up in “building sophisticated structures” just because they “look pretty.” But it will end up making your life more difficult.
2. In most cases, free apps offer the best features and are more customizable.
Organizing email writing to potential supervisors in Notion
You could choose any app, software or even Microsoft office suite to accomplish this task.
Out of all those apps, Notion caught my attention because I could create something from scratch. In addition, Notion is a database manager, which is exactly what I was looking for.
In addition, Notion gives you the freedom to build any database structure that you desire. If you wish to use Notion to manage the email writing to potential supervisors, be careful not to create a very complex structure that looks nice but is a major problem when the data piles up. The “Dunning-Kruger effect” of Notion is becoming worse and worse with the abundance of templates available.
I have been working as a Notion consultant for four years, and the most frequent request I get from clients is, “We brought a template online, but we don’t know what to do with it now. Can you help us make a simplified version of it?!“
Creating a workspace for this task did not happen in a day. To find the best solution, I put myself through a lot of trial and error. I also wanted to build the simplest yet most effective system so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by all the data.
Here’s a screenshot of my email management database in Notion.
You can obviously create an email management system for yourself. But if you want a more feature-rich template, check out a modified version of my own workspace below. (120+ Universities have already added with more details)
Here’s the walkthrough of a modified version of the notion template I used for contacting graduate supervisors.
You can grab the template by clicking the link below.
Conclusion
The process of applying to graduate school can sometimes be cumbersome. It can be quite stressful to have to do so much in such a short amount of time.
If you have a proper system for organizing your email writing to potential supervisors, you will be able to ease up the tension and make your life easier.
We are excited to know the strategies you used when writing emails to potential supervisors.
Feel free to comment, and we will update the post with any interesting responses!
Images courtesy: Screen mockup, Infinity loop, Liquid shapes, Abstract gradient, Dunning Kruger Effect, Brochure, mosaic cover,keep it simple, teacher’s day , Image by storyset , Image by Freepik
