Now that you have made up your mind to pursue a technical program, the next step is to find a prospective guide to work under. If you are a master’s student or even a direct PhD applicant who hasn’t decided yet, you can focus on the university first and use your first year of the program to explore different labs and speak with guides in person. However, if you already have clarity about your niche or are looking for a funded master’s degree, then this decision becomes quite crucial to make beforehand.

As a rule of thumb, prefer the guide and their lab over the university for a technical degree, unless you have a strong inclination toward the college’s reputation or location. For example, in my domain, Purdue, UIUC, and Georgia Tech have more relevant labs than, say, Stanford or UCLA. Thus, I prioritized the first three over the rest. One way to determine this is by reaching out to professors or alumni in your domain. Make a list of prospective guides who are working in your domain at each target university, then rank them based on your personal criteria. This could include the h-index of the principal investigator (PI), diversity of topics undertaken by the lab, scale of industry/university collaboration, career outcomes of alumni, overall university reputation or maybe just QS ranking.

You might be wondering where to find all this information. For starters, visit each target university’s department website and look for professors in your area of interest. You will find the lab group websites of these professors on their university pages, usually with a subsection that lists recent publications. Try to read at least three to four recent papers and focus on the methodology and future work sections. This will help you understand the facilities the lab has access to, the funding sources for their ongoing projects, and the potential topics you might work on. This will also be useful later when writing well curated cold emails or drafting the last paragraph of your Statement of Purpose (SOP) regarding the labs you are interested in working with. Just remember that it is completely fine if you do not understand the entire paper. The goal is to get a general sense of the work your prospective advisor is interested in and to gauge your alignment with it.

It might be the case that you don’t find a separate lab web page on the university website, or that it has not been updated from Jurassic period. In such a case, look for the professor’s Google Scholar page. There, you can also find additional metrics such as citations, h index, and i10 index. These are like Pokémon stats but for researchers. While there are many other metrics that can be used for comparison, for your purposes, these three are good enough indicators of a lab’s productivity.

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Citation: Number of times a research paper is reference by other papers.

h-index: h number of papers with citation of at least h times (aka Hirsch index)

i10 index: number of papers with at least 10 citations

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These metrics are not a gospel, though, but they still give a good way to weed out predatory labs. Say the total citation number on a profile is large but the h index is relatively small. This indicates that they are producing a lot of content, but it is not of much importance to the scientific community. You will be forced to generate papers of low to no impact, like a paper mill. Similarly, a relatively large i10 index number compared to the h index can be due to high self-citations or “courtesy” citing within a group of lab teams. You might be forced to add co-authors with no real contribution or redirect your analysis to accommodate some irrelevant work, just to massage some ego. One way to refine your search is to go through the References section of their paper and observe the overall self-citation numbers. Moreover, there is no hard threshold for these metrics anyway, as some domains, such as AI being a hot topic, will naturally attract more citations than a very niche domain like pure mathematics. Meanwhile, radically groundbreaking ideas rarely receive much attention for quite a long time, which may imply a less impressive researcher profile even though they might be intellectually in the leagues of Ramanujan or Euler. Hence, limit your comparison to researchers within a particular subject or domain only.

Parallelly, it is best to read about current and past lab students’ project descriptions and career trajectories. Take note of the average graduation length of alumni, as it reflects whether your prospective guide got attachment issues or not. If there is a common theme of students overstaying by more than one year or continuing as postdocs, then it might be a bad sign for your early completion goals. Also, if you wish to join industry after your graduation, then prefer a lab with a higher number of industry alumni over university postdocs. Meanwhile, do talk to current or past lab students to understand the actual work culture in the lab. Take note of obvious red flags in these discussions. Remember that being a good researcher does not necessarily correlate with being a good guide. You have a life outside of work, and your work life balance is solely your responsibility in grad school. Personally, I would always prefer a supportive guide with slightly less fancy research outcomes over a toxic prodigy with publications in Science or Nature, as I do not wish to recreate the Whiplash movie in real life.

Similarly, choosing between an early-stage researcher and a well-established lab is an equally tough decision. Newly joined professors bring more current research topics and tend to be more proactive as guides, but at the same time, they lack mentoring experience and access to funds or top-notch research facilities. On the other hand, in a large lab, you will most likely have access to the best facilities and do not need to worry about funding, but your guide may not have enough time to devote to you, and this lack of attention might create issues during your thesis review and dissertation process. Hence, strike a balance between the two by either joining a mid-career stage professor or taking up a collaborative project between a younger faculty member and a senior researcher.

This search activity should ideally be done between July and September of your application year. Be proactive here, since this curated information brings clarity on the number of universities that you wish to apply to, and in turn dictates the amount of money you will spend on sending English test scores, and the number of prospective emails that you will write. Start your email outreach around September to October, since by this time faculty gain clarity over funding status and plans for upcoming projects. This gives you a first mover advantage, as some universities require you to have a professor willing to work with you before extending any offer. Though this does not guarantee that these projects will see the light of day by the time your application is reviewed, since recent federal funding cuts have shelved many projects midway. I have received “unfortunately” emails for the very same reason.

On a side note, some practice binning their university applications into a holy trinity of Ambitious, Target, and Safe categories. Ambitious are the most reputed institutes, like Ivy League schools, with a cutthroat selection rate. Targets are usually emerging ones with slightly lower rankings than Ambitious, but still with great prospects, as some like to call them, New Ivies. There you can most probably get in as well, though it is not guaranteed. Safes are like Hilbert’s hotel that can take in anyone under the sun. Based on your profile, make this mental model so that you have reasonable expectations during your application process. Preferably, focus more on Targets, but do not take your Safes for granted, since the contemporary state of geopolitics has changed the equation.

Once you have made up your mind, use email trackers on Gmail like Streak or Mail tracker for cold emailing. These are Chrome extensions that let you see when and where an email was opened. These are handy tools to calm your anxiety (or maybe fuel it further) and get closure on whether you are being ignored or not (If you love them then you let them go). These usually do not work with scheduled emails, so try to time your email for the local early morning, around 7 to 8 am, on a weekday for the recipient. Once you send an email and it is not opened yet, wait for at least two to three days before sending a reminder email. Try not to exceed two reminder emails. If both reminder emails are ignored, then it is better to move on. Sometimes you will see multiple opens on the tracker but no reply. This shows that the professor is somewhat interested in your profile but is either busy or still considering it. In such a case, it is better to wait for three to four days before sending reminders.

I am attaching a sample email format for a PhD position query below. You can use a similar format for TA or RA positions. Do note that it is just for your reference, and feel free to tweak it as per your needs. Prefer attaching any document as a Google Drive link instead of a PDF, as it might be marked as spam otherwise. Do make sure that you allow sharing permissions so that it can be accessed. A better approach is to create a Google site or a GitHub page, as it might be more visually appealing and comprehensive.

Once you are done sending cold emails, move ahead to the subsequent chapters to prepare for your next steps. May the force be with you!