Art of Application – 5: Write to the Proessors

Come to a deeper approach now. Intimating with Professors might boost your admission chances or funding scenario. It will more beneficiary for PhD guys, but MS people also could have extracted some benefits also. What you need to do is search the Internet inside out. You must have stickied with the desired university pages hours after hours. You should have a sound idea over your favorite field of study and search accordingly. I will recommend those who are even sophomores start this process to learn literally. Trust me, they are the people with some real brains and every time you will speak to them, you will learn something. So try to intimate with them as early as possible. Beforehand, you must  read the following points and try to follow them. Do not hesitate to mould them according to your present situation. Remember, intimating with a professor is nothing but an art and you should lend some creativity to do so. If you are among the hoi-polloi why should one super professor bother to talk with you?

1. Do not use BCC to mail all: Well, though this is the shortest way to mail numerous people with a single click,  I will not recommend you to do so. Because, one can easily track that this mail has been sent keeping him in the BCC. What the professor will conclude from this is the sender is such a person who always loves to achieve goals via short cart. A very bad impact at the very first which is not intended at all.
2. Do not use steriotype subject line: You must not use commonplace subject lines like “MS in CS aspirant for Fall 2009” or “Need Funding for coming semester”. You should be highly creative to select your Subject Line to make the mail through the filter criteria and get noticed by the professor.
3. Carefully review the mail body: Most of the time we prepared a standard format of the letter and mailed them to different professor. But be careful for each individual while mentioning University name, department name and like such and such things. Always check whether you address “sir” to any female professor. These cases really could have stampeded your chances.
4. Do not show over respect: It is fine to address them with their first name or last name appended with Prof. tag. There is not needed to address them as “respected sir”, nor it is preffered to call as “dear”. You should have show proper respect to their researches and published papers but please do not worship them using exhilarated train of words.
5. Try to mail them on weekdays: Try to avoid mailing in the weekends. Normally professors ignore the mails except highly crucial ones. If possible do not mail them on Mondays as it can be mixed up with unread junk mails.

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