BYR Achieve · 镜像论坛

Today's session is very interesting. I enjoy acting as a professor. It helps me think in another position which can improve our understanding of contact with professors. The deepest impression is that, even though I had only 5 or 6 e-mail to do, I still find it hard to remember who is who and who said what in the last letter. So, in the real situation, professors cannot remember you. This can be viewed as a good thing and a depressing phenomenon. For the good part, you just don't have to worry about saying something wrong in the last letter. The professor just don't remember you! So, just be brave in contacting with professors. For the negative part, it might take quite a while to leave a vague mark on the professor's mind. Actually, this is an interesting topic, which I will discuss further in below. Another impression is that some questions cannot be answered. Despite annoying questions about information readily available on the web page, some general questions can not be answered in a way that the students will be content with. For example, what is the current situation in the field? Or can you give me some advice on this field? These general questions are either too vague to answer clearly or too big for a quick reply. No professor will take out a whole 2 hours just to reply your big question. If the professor is nice, he might give a few summary sentences or point out papers to read. If you just ignored the papers or books he suggested, thinking it is too time consuming, you will never have better questions for the next round of contact. At the same time, asking such general questions all the time shows that you have not really thought about the issues and you are lazy, only wanting quick answers. A much better way to ask questions will be to ask specific questions. Or you can talk about your comments on a specific topic and ask how the professor thinks about your view. It is highly recommended to use closed-questions such as "Is it A or B?" rather than open-questions, e.g. "What is blabla?" Because these closed-questions are much easier to answer and the result is more chance for reply. For questions that are too open, the professor may just skip around and provides some vague ideas. Another point is that try to ASK questions. What I want to emphasize here is that just pouring out your ideas, thoughts and statements does not help much on the reply. Because the professor might just ignore the statement of minor importance and go directly to the question mark, which may be the only question you actually asked, and might be very general. All the information you provided about you, for example, high GPA, excellent student, does not make contributions since the professor forgets about you totally after reading the e-mail. It is better to write down your relevant comments on a specific academic topic and ask whether the professor thinks a specific point is correct. Writing highly relevant ideas and facts in the e-mail contributes to high-quality contact. Cutting away unnecessary information and questions keeps your mail more readable among the busy schedule and much easier to reply. But, how to ask quality questions? Actually, professors don't anticipate undergraduate students to be super-men. Of course, the very first questions you ask are very shallow. However, after the professor provides you some more material to go on, you should just go on. Read them, think about them, and state out your comments and questions. Through the progress, you will learn and be more familiar with the topics. And, maybe, once in a while, some sparkling questions jump out from no where. The important thing is that you should go on reading and thinking and researching. As you really build up a firm background for yourself, you will be impressive enough to the professors. Now, this comes back the topic if the professor can remember you. Even though you may be getting along very well with the professor or even vice versa, you can not anticipate a guarantee of offer from the professor. Because who does not anticipate for better things? Students want better universities while professors expect better students to pop up some time later. So, no gurantee on offer. Then what is the purpose of contacting professors? It is actually a way of doing research supervised by an advisor. For graduate students, most of the work is done independently. When students have questions, they discuss with professors. It is exactly the same thing happening here. You read papers and learn and have questions, e-mail professors for discussions and you improve. We are actually in the process of graduate education. That is the value of contacting professors. You gain your research experience and information from the US. Bypassing the process of self-improvements, satisfactory results will never come along.

模拟了下和教授联系的过程 一些感受

模拟了下和教授联系的过程一些感受