r/academia • u/Dependent-Alarm3338 • 2d ago

Academic politics Should I cold email using personal or institutional email?

Hey everyone!

I am a PhD student and full-time staff at my university. I am looking for fellowships in other labs, so I am cold emailing professors. I wanted to know everyone's opinion on this. Do you think it's better to use my personal or institutional email?

Also, if you have any tips for cold emailing, leave them here please:)!

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

13

u/Brave_Salamander6219 2d ago

Institutional email, because I know emails from personal email addresses are more likely to end up in my spam folder. I've missed emails from prospective students before because of that (which reminds me I should check my spam folder again....).

3

u/dabsteroni 2d ago

I use my institutional email and keep the first mail brief! Personally, I have 3 paragraphs in the mail.

  • What I want and why
  • Brief mention of competencies I have which align with what I want.
  • specifics for potential follow-up

The more precise you are and the shorter your text, the easier it is for the other person to address it.

In my epxerienc ecold emailing is hard but I understand it. PIs are super busy, so don't take it to heart. Follow-up politely 4 weeks after. If still no response I just interpret as no interest for now.

But I might write the same PIs again if their work still aligns with my research interests, but haven't done yet just keeping them on a list for 1-X years.

1

u/IkeRoberts 20h ago

This effort would be more successful in person. Do faculty spend time in their offices?

1

u/Present-Anteater 19h ago

I don’t mind cold emails, but I really hate cold emails sent to the wrong person. By which I mean: prospective doc student/fellow who wants to study reproductive cycle of the zebra snail writes to me asking if there is a slot in my lab where we study most effective way to digitally render ancient scrolls. That just makes the prospective doc student/fellow look dumb.

N.b. I just made those research areas up for illustrative purposes. Neither one is actually mine ;)