How to Shortlist Advisors
Perspective
There are two ways you can short list professors:
- the rank and prestige of the university
- overlapping interests.
Second way is preferred because when your interests naturally align with that of the prof, it:
- Makes your application (SoP/CV/LoR) more relevant to the program
- Increases your chances of admit
- Decreases chances of dropping out due to misalignment in interests.
Go safe
Given that this time I no longer want to go for top-tier ones, second approach is ideal.
How-To Find
How do I find professors who match my interests?
- I identify my broader interests such as data-driven decision making, AI in engineering.
- I search these topics into Google Scholar
- I see a series of papers
- I organize them according to their recency
- I open the paper to find details about the author.
- In the beginning of the paper I see a list of professors and their institutional affiliations.
- I combine the name of the author with the school they teach in to find their website and email
- Repeat till I have found 15-20 professors.
This is the most methodical, easiest and genuine way of finding labs that you naturally incline towards!
Note
I think it makes sense to add the following step too: Check if the PI has a website.
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.1
For every research position I have won, it was because of this approach that I followed.
Authenticity
This helps you express genuine interest in the lab because, you emailed them after reading their work. It gives me the scope to form research directions that relate to their most recent work.
Ref:
- https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1443969538631012355.html (original: https://x.com/yourgradcoach/status/1443969538631012355)