Chapter 2, Musings of an internship applicant, sending your mail

Chapter 2, Musings of an internship applicant, sending your mail

After you have fine tuned your mental setup and confident to go ahead for an internship, you need to prepare several vital things for your application, viz., your resume and a cover letter, (plus a SOP/LOM, statement-of-purpose / letter-of-motivation) in some cases. This is the first step for your application – yet the most important and decisive factor for your success. I can tell you from my own experience, that your cover letter, that is the e-mail you send to the professor or whatever is much more important than your resume. At every stage you need to be alert and foresee the fate of your email. For the person, who reads your CV, must have to,

OPEN your mail. (Why should he bother to open it? He can simply delete it. Is the subject interesting?)

READ your mail. (Why should he feel like reading it? Is the style of writing very convincing?)

READ your CV, finally and hopefully.

Thus to reach step 3, you have to pass steps 1 and 2 successfully. I could share some general suggestions which I found on the net or from my seniors about writing these cover letters. Also give the subject of the email carefully, so that it is interesting to her (professor), concerning her exact research interests, say, “Efficient noise removal: Project Opportunities in Image Processing”.

Suggestions for the mail: Begin by a general salutation and state your intention at the outset. Rather than writing “Dear Sir”, write the name of the professor. Frame each line such that she bothers to read the next line and so on. You can also state 1-2 of her group’s publication which you have studied. (Write this near the place where you mentioned your area of interest). Don’t worry about (actually) reading publication right now, you can read it in case someone replies you positively [: P].The closer your mail matches with their research -- the better, thus a thorough study of their lab’s work profile is necessary. You can change your research interests accordingly according to the professor's interests. The email should be 9-10 line to a maximum of 14-15 lines, so that it fits in a screen, i.e., it should be such that at one glance she should be able to make out everything. Highlight with boldface or underline where you feel necessary, but do not use too many boldfaced or underlined characters, this will make the mail clumsy and dirty. Instead of describing your projects in detail in the email better give a direct link to your webpage or blog where you keep the details of the work you have done. Similarly is the case with publications, if any. Do not commit any grammatical mistakes in the email. Don’t mention any thing about money or funding in first mail, ask them for it only once they reply positively. And most important, do not use an extremely fancy email-id (for example, dragonballz_doomed@abc.com) to mail people, (if you think it’s fancy enough open a new account). Never use a Bcc or Cc while mailing professors. Use a single mail to communicate a single professor. It is better to send 10 “personalized” mails in a day (as mentioned below) than sending 200 mails. Apply to maximum 2 professors of same department in same college simultaneously. You can mail other professors of same department after a couple of days.

The 8’0 Clock Rule: What would you usually do if every morning you find your mailbox flooded with 100s of emails? (You tick most of them and send them to trash! Except a few ones that were really interesting). You don’t even bother to see the emails which are well below the inbox, but unread – generally you take a glance at the emails which top the inbox list. Remember, you are not the only one who is sending the email to that professor, may be hundreds across the globe. Thus ensuring that at least he is aware that you sent him an email is important. As they open their inboxes around 8-8:30 in the morning, thus make sure that your email reaches just then (I, mean this time should be the local time for that country, for Germany it is Indian local time – 4.5 hrs, which should be equal to 8:00AM), else they would be downtrodden by the huge traffic of mails [: (]. Do not email on Saturdays or Sundays, for the same reason.

Publications: Here, I could tell you that publication at reputed places (conferences) counts a great deal, and together it proves that your research works at your host institute are really authentic. Being undergraduate students, nobody should expect a paper at a top-rated conference or journal from you (so not any path breaking research), but medium rated conferences can serve you the purpose. I am a student of computer science, so can suggest students of related streams to publish at conferences, where proceedings are published by Springer LNCS (Lecture notes in Computer Science) or uploaded in the IEEE Explore – they guarantee at least a descent quality of your work. Do not publish in National Conferences or Open Access journals; they add very little credit to your work. For papers which are still not published but accepted, you can use them too.

Next, I will discuss about the strategies to search people whom to apply, that is how to search universities, or professors, which labs are they attached to and so on.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." -- Steve Jobs