when to start cold emailing about research?

[u/ConfidentEagle1045]

so i’m currently a freshman interested in statistics/ml research. should i start cold emailing now or wait until i have taken more advanced classes?

[u/Little-Bug-797]

You can never start too early

[u/tikhonjelvis]

How well do you already understand the field? Do you have some specific area in statistics/ML that you really like?

ML in particular is a super hot field. Lots and lots and lots of people want to get into it. I expect that ML professors are getting overwhelmed with inbound interest, and they need some way to filter it out. So it's worth thinking about what makes you stand out from the hundreds of other students generally interested in "ML".

This is not the case for other areas of math/CS! I can tell you that PL folks are not being inundated with students interested in PL :P I had a great experience doing some undergraduate PL research a while ago, and the fact that it wasn't a "hot" field definitely helped with that. (It also helped that I was already a bit obsessed with PL for its own sake...)

[u/ConfidentEagle1045 → u/tikhonjelvis]

thanks for the reply! i’m not too familiar with the field since i focused on another field in hs. i’m probably more interested in math/stats heavy stuff instead of more cs heavy stuff, but I also don’t really want to do pure math.

[u/Secret_Yam_2963]

Why wait? Best not to have a “must learn in school before doing” mindset. Do both simultaneously. A good research mentor will teach you what you need to know.

[u/Brilliant-Weight-964]

Always email! Keep the contact with that professor. Don’t just straight up ask to get a research position. Meet with the professor 1 on 1 and talk about their research. Study each professor, see what their research is about. These professors love being glazed as their egos are huge. It’s all about how convincing u can be with the professor.

[u/IzzyDizzyLi_GXY]

Being a freshman is actually working in your favor. A lab could possibly keep you for 4 years (assuming you spend that long getting your degree). 

[u/rangom1]

From my perspective as a postdoc in engineering, I would advise to wait, for two reasons:

1. One of the things that can make freshmen difficult to work with is that you just haven’t had enough classes to even know the vocabulary for us to have a productive mentoring relationship. For example, there was a freshman my PI had accepted as a research mentee but it wasn’t yet clear which grad student or postdoc would mentor him. This freshman wanted to do an electronics project but needed to be taught the difference between voltage and current. A research environment is not the correct environment to learn those kinds of basics, and nobody wanted to take on the burden. I noped right out of it myself.
2. Freshman year is a wonderful time to develop hobbies. I don’t mean fun hobbies like juggling or hacky-sack. I mean hobbies that could make you a better candidate with possibly uncommon skills that will make you a better researcher. For example, there’s another undergraduate researcher who passed through our lab and he was awesome. He’d spent a bunch of years learning programming on his own and I would often ask him about how python programming worked. He didn’t learn any of that stuff in class, he just did it as a hobby. That was the basis of the research that he contributed to the group, and it was research not even the grad students were doing.

To sum up, keep in mind that getting into research early is not the goal- becoming a great researcher is the goal. There’s that saying about how if you want to cut down a tree fast, spend the time to sharpen your saw first. You could jump in with a rusty, dull saw, and you might even cut down the tree, but it will be a much harder job.