I read a lot of Matt Might’s blog articles, and I really like them and still recommend that students who are in undergraduate or graduate school read his blog. He gives a lot of systematic suggestions on how to deal with specific tasks for undergraduate/graduate students.

This year, I am starting to supervise students, and I would like to open a new category to repeat something that we all learned in our past university studies, but new students might not have grasped at their stage.

Today, I am starting with how to write an email, as I received a lot of supervision inquiries from undergraduate and postgraduate students this year. I guess mainly because I updated my university personal page.

Every email should have a subject line, greeting, context, closing, and signature.

1.Subject line: can be short, but it needs to be clear so the receiver won’t mix it with advertisement email.

2.Greeting: It is totally fine if you don’t know how to address a person properly, but at least start with Hi,.

For PhD position inquiry emails, please address the supervisor by name, but don’t just write Hi Professor,. We all know you send multiple faculty member emails, but we also don’t want to reply to you if you are too lazy to add our name when you send these emails.

3.Context: Please introduce yourself if this is an inquiry email for a project or PhD position opportunity, and please also write it in paragraphs, not just a long one-line sentence. If you don’t provide any of your information, we won’t be able to evaluate whether you are suitable for the project or position, we will just assume you are not suitable.

With the use of AI, more and more international students will draft their emails using AI tools. It is ok, but please don’t write it too long, as our research shows that current reasoning AI models can potentially provide longer conversations than old non-reasoning AI models. In which, if you ask AI to help you draft an email, it could be longer than a usual email. Think about the words and information in each sentence and write it yourself (include only essential details), and use AI to help correct grammar errors and inaccurate words is the way I recommend.

For a PhD position inquiry email, please don’t just copy the supervisor’s personal page research topic when you express the interesting, I more want to see why your background aligns with my research.

It is also better to make one main ask, not five different problems at once. If you need to ask multiple questions, you could number them, so I won’t miss any questions.

4.Closing and Signature: Always thanks for their time and look forward to their reply. I do receive emails without the student’s signature (name). It is fine if their email address shows their name, and it is not fine to me if it doesn’t, I don’t know who I need to reply to.