Applying to work with Alan Blackwell

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If you are interested in working with me as a collaborator, visiting researcher, intern, or graduate student, then please contact me by email - I would like to hear from you!

  • Please note that the Cambridge internships scheme for undergraduates (UROP), is only open to students already registered for a degree in Cambridge. That scheme is described here: http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/teaching/urops/.

If you have never contacted me before, it is essential that you say in your initial email what specific aspect of my research you are interested in (see the note below).

If you do not have any specific interest in my own areas of research, but would simply like to spend time in Cambridge, or in the Computer Lab, then you should explore the University and Department schemes for research fellowships, job vacancies, and internships.

How to explain your specific research interests when approaching an academic

  • First, read their web page. If you are looking for something specific (an internship, a job, how to apply for a degree programme), there may already be links from their web page giving the information you need. If you want to email them anyway, make sure to say "I read the link on your web page about X", so that they understand you aren't being lazy.
  • Second, you should tell them what specific aspect of their research you are interested in. By "specific", I mean something where this person is one of the world experts. If you know of an undergraduate course on this topic, or there is a textbook with the same title, this is not specific enough (unless they wrote the textbook). Look at their list of publications, and refer to something specific that they have written.
  • Third, make sure that you have chosen a topic that they are interested in right now. If you refer to something that they did 20 or 30 years ago, it's possible that they are bored by it now. If you refer to something that they have published this year, it makes you look up to date (and it's possible that not many other people have even read it yet, so they will be pleased of the attention).
  • Fourth, try to be complimentary. Most academics are in it for glory, not for the money. It's a bad idea to imply that you know more about the topic than they do - but try to explain why you like their work. You need to say which specific aspect you find interesting, not just general flattery - this is an important opportunity to demonstrate your understanding (see below).
  • Finally, tell them why you are qualified to contribute to their research. If you don't at least have an undergraduate major in a directly related field, you are probably not qualified. This isn't the end of your dreams - if you really want to work in this specific area, read some books, or take an online course. Ideally, this should be at Master's level. If you can't understand the Master's level material, then read less advanced material until you are ready.

Helpful advice for those early in their research career

If you are reading this page for the first time after already having sent me an email message, it is possible that your previous email may have struck me as rude (perhaps because you sent your email without showing any interest in my research). If you think this may have happened to you, then please feel free to offer an explanation or apology, and we can start afresh. Note that the majority of people who are directed to this page never do take any further action - perhaps they don't even read my reply, which is a shame, since I will have taken the trouble to read theirs, however much spam they were sending.

Ideas for a new standard reply

I'm always tweaking the way that I respond to unsolicited email. The latest ideas, that I have just started to test, are as follows. As always, I welcome feedback on whether it would, or would not, be a good idea to respond to unsolicited email in this way.

Thank you so much for your message. I have been waiting to receive an enquiry like this, for reasons explained below.

I am commencing an experiment in relation to the theories of attention investment described in my recent book, and in several publications that you may already be aware of. More information relating to the experiment, and further background that you may find useful, is available from my website alongside the advice that you may have read in preparing your message.

The novel aspect of this experiment is to see whether I can effectively calibrate the attention invested in responding to unsolicited enquiries. An initial heuristic will be to roughly equate the attention I invest to that invested by the sender when writing. This may be overly generous, if I were to receive hundreds of unsolicited emails every year, and if a typical sender of unsolicited email to university professors only does this a few times in their life, with the result that the balance is heavily asymmetrical. I’m curious to know whether I have got this calculation right, and would be interested in your own interpretation.

To proceed with the attention investment experiment, my estimate of the attention invested by you in writing your own email is as follows --
Option A
Your email makes no reference to me or my work, and I could not see any relevance in choosing me as a recipient. On that basis, it appears that you have either chosen my email address at random or by using a spam generator, and have spent no time thinking about who will receive your message. I am sending this reply on the same basis.
Option B
Your email appears to be a standardised message, in which you have simply inserted my name at the start of a standardised text that you are sending to many people. I am sending this reply on the same basis, and have inserted your name at the start in recognition of your own polite effort.
Option C
Your message says that you have read my website and/or publications. Unfortunately, the rest of the text shows no insight or understanding of what you have read, suggesting that you did not read very carefully or for very long. I have therefore responded by paying the same degree of attention to your own email.
If you did read my website carefully, or spent a long time reading my publications, the fault is either mine for not writing carefully enough, or yours. If the fault is mine, I will be very grateful for your help and advice in improving my work. On the other hand, if my own writing was sufficiently clear, and you have spent a long time reading it without achieving any insight, this suggests that either your English reading skill or academic ability is not sufficient to work with me. You may find it helpful to take further instruction in English, or in undergraduate and graduate classes related to my research, and then contact me again at some point in the future once you are in a better position to understand that background.
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