<p>Have you even e-mailed a professor yet? If you haven’t, don’t worry about this until it happens. Here’s what you should do:</p>
<p>1) Wait. It’s the middle of May and most professors are embroiled in grading, administering finals, posting grades and figuring out grade disputes. You can go ahead and send an e-mail now, but do note that there’s a pretty big chance that the professor won’t get back to you in a timely fashion. Personally I’d wait at least until the last week of May, after Memorial Day.</p>
<p>2) Send a short, sweet email. Briefly describe your interest in their area and your own qualifications (“I’m current an MS student in marine ecology at UConn, and I’m interested in doing a PhD in marine ecology. My research interests are in X, Y, and Z, which I think overlap nicely with your interests in A and B.”) Make the email more about your interest in them than you. For example, you may want to mention a recent publication of theirs you liked (that you read!). Attach your CV. (It’s not presumptuous. They’re going to want to see it before proceeding further, and if they don’t want to read it they won’t.)</p>
<p>3) Wait two weeks. The summer is a slow time for professors and sometimes they are preparing to travel, trying to get summer work off the ground, preparing grants for submission in August or just recuperating from the academic year. I mean, even normally I’d say wait two weeks, but I’d be even more patient in June, July, and August.</p>
<p>I would say in 70-80% of cases the professor will email you back. If they don’t:</p>
<p>4) If they haven’t emailed you back in 2 weeks, then send another email as a follow up. My advice is to open with a very brief, non-accusatory sentence or two indicating that you mailed them a couple of weeks ago. Then follow up with basically the exact thing you said in Email 1 in different words. This is just in case they DID miss the first email, and/or so they don’t have to go hunting for Email 1 in their inbox (or worse, if they accidentally deleted it) and re-attach your CV.</p>
<p>5) Wait another week or two.</p>
<p>Most professors will have responded by now. In the case that you don’t hear back, either this is a very scatterbrained professor, or perhaps he’s traveling and forgot to put on the vacation email, or maybe he really doesn’t want to talk to you. I think over the summer, there’s two ways to go. if they’re a really top priority person you can email them one more time - this time don’t reiterate email one, just mention that you emailed them a couple weeks ago and want to know if they got it. After that, if they don’t respond, let it go.</p>
<p>OR. Since it’s the summer, another option is to let it go for now and try again closer to September, when more professors will be thinking about which PhD students they want to bring into the lab. Personally if I emailed twice and heard nothing in June, this is what I would do.</p>