<p>Hi everybody,
Last week I had an e-mail from a Prof who I mentioned in my SOP, about having a conversation in the week. I replied his email saying that I will be devastated if I miss his call and added that I am busy working so tell me when to call (because of 8 hour time difference between my country and US).It has been a week and I still haven't got any reply or call. Should I e-mail him to remember me? Will it be inappropriate? And if I should e-mail him, what should I write? Please help me, I really want to get in this school =S</p>
<p>It’s a little difficult to tell what’s going on here. What it sounds like is that you wrote an SOP and named Professor X as a potential adviser, and Professor X e-mailed you to set up a phone conversation. You e-mailed Prof X to tell him that you work full-time and that there’s an 8-hour time difference between your country and the U.S., so you’d like to work out a time to call (or something like that). Then you got silence. Since today is Sunday I’m assuming “last week” means last Monday some time.</p>
<p>If that’s correct, realize that in academic time a week is really not much time at all. It sucks, but academia is a slow-moving behemoth and professors are often buried under mountains of useless spam from the university, from their professional orgs, from news outlets, from working groups…</p>
<p>You probably didn’t miss his call. Professors wouldn’t try to call you out of the blue for something like this; it’s my experience that they’re going to try to set up a time to talk to you first, precisely because of time differences and people’s work schedules and things.</p>
<p>I’d wait until Wednesday. If you haven’t heard from him by then, send him a nudge with something like this:</p>
<p>"Dear Professor X,</p>
<p>I hope your week has gone well. Last week, we spoke over email about the possibility of having a conversation over the phone about working together, with me potentially as a PhD student in your lab. I’m e-mailing to see if you would still be interested and to set up a time to have that conversation. I’m generally available X-X times EST/PST/whatever."</p>
<p>There’s no need to mention the time difference at this point. Just mention what times you will be available in HIS time zone to talk. (Make sure that you are flexible: it’s best to give him some times that are during the regular 9-5 workweek in the United States, but at the very least, something that’s before around 7-8 pm his time and after 7-8 am his time. If that means that YOU have to wake up at 5 am to get on the call, that’s what you should do.)</p>
<p>You completely understood what I tried to tell. </p>
<p>He said that “Can we have a conversation this week?” In my reply, I didn’t write about the time difference, I wrote this: “Please tell me when will we talk”. </p>
<p>Thank you so much for your reply. It cleared my mind. Now I will wait till Wednesday and if I don’t hear from him, I will send a reminder mail. Whenever he calls, the time is not important for me. I just need to know when he will call, because mobile phone signals are not strong where I live. So before the time he calls, I will set a place for myself and wait his calling for not missing it because of the weak signal.</p>
<p>Thanks again.</p>
<p>Awesome, good luck with the conversation!</p>