How to get an Internship offer from Universities abroad ?

Professors in universities abroad get hundreds of mails each year from various students studying in different universities interested to under their guidance or joining their research group. Professors generally try to reply to all mails that are not spam, but it becomes very difficult to reply all of them.


This page provides some advice for prospective graduate school applicants considering emailing to any professors abroad for joining their research group.

Who to contact

Your goal in sending email is not to contact as many professors as you can, but to identify a few professors who you might want as your research advisor and then to find which of those seem most promising as advisors and convince them that you would be a worthwhile student.

Its a really bad idea to send many spam emails to long lists of professors. These emails will never help you, and some professors will maintain blacklists of applicants who do this to make sure their application is rejected without consideration.

You should only contact professors with whom you have a genuine interest in working based on knowing something about them and what they do. You can find out about professors' research by looking at their web pages (professors who don't have web pages about their research are either not interested in recruiting students, not doing any research, or so famous they probably have someone to filter their email for them).

Homework to do

Before mailing to any professor, do some searching on what research works are currently active under him or what his research group actually does. Also look at the list of publications on his personal website and try to find out some of the publications having something relating to some topic you have read before or have done some project work relating to the topic.

If doing this doesn't give you any interesting ideas, this is probably not someone with whom you want to do research so you shouldn't waste time contacting her or him. If it does, send a short introductory email.

Format of First Email

• Make sure your from address and subject lines are useful.
• Greeting: its safest to be a bit formal here.
• Briefly introduce yourself in at most two sentences. Don't tell your whole life story. Be direct and clear about applying to grad school.
• Explain specifically what you have read on his website (mainly his published papers) and how you find him.
• Concisely describe your insight or why you are interested in the work.
• End with a clear, simple question (if there is any vacancies/research positins available ).
• Closing — make sure to include you name and email address.

Follow Up Email

Since most professors get lots of email, there is some chance that even if you do everything right, your message will get lost in my inbox and you won't get a reply. If you don't get a reply after about a week, send a follow up email that politely asks if the message was received and includes the previous message. If you still don't get a response, that's a pretty good sign that the potential professor you are contacting either has an overly-agressive spam filter, or is not someone you want as your advisor.