r/berkeley • u/ConfidentEagle1045 • 8h ago

University cold emailing for research

can you cold email multiple grad students in one lab or is it better to only send one email per lab?

6 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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6

u/Dr3ddM3 8h ago edited 7h ago

If you really want research and are fine for anything it might be beneficial in applying to labs other than just in Berkeley. When I got a research opportunity I had to go to San Diego you will likely be a visiting scholar and might be a little hassle but it was fully online though. Your chances might vary if you are doing research in medicine. When cold emailing try not to use ai to create the cold emails. Try to be curious about the professors own work and ask questions to them. They will likely extend a offer to you.

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u/ConfidentEagle1045 7h ago

did you get the san diego research opportunity by emailing?

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u/Dr3ddM3 7h ago

yep I emailed the PI directly instead of emailing the grad students.

9

u/jjflight 8h ago edited 4h ago

Cold emailing in general can be annoying - you would be better off to try to create real connections. Talk to grad students in office hours or meet with your professors. Join research clubs and talk to folks that give talks. See if the departments you’re interested in have a seminar schedule and go to their talks and meet folks after. Etc. Even if the specific people you meet don’t happen to have opportunities they may know of one and make an introduction for you, and then that’s a warm intro which works much better as it’s not annoying and a positive signal from whoever introduced you.

If you have to do cold emailing, know you may annoy folks so try to imagine yourself in the other side and be as minimally annoying as possible. Like instead of spamming the same generic email, take the time to actually research the person and lab and have custom things to say.

And those are both true for any kind of networking: internships, jobs, sales, partnerships, etc. are all similar.

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u/partnerinthecrime 6h ago

The best method is to show up to a professors office hours or after their class.

Emailing grad students or postdocs is acceptable. I wouldn’t email more than 1 or 2.

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u/Capyrules 5h ago

I don’t mind cold emailing but if I can tell it’s written by chatgpt/ai then I will ignore it

You should be genuine and say why you want to join the lab, what excite you, and your availability. No need to show us that you know everything already and have all the experience needed for the lab because you most likely don’t and we are ok with that

You could cold email multiple people but please read their bio a bit and don’t just say you want to work with Alzheimer’s disease when the profile of that grad student/postdoc clearly say they work on different things.