Mad Libs Gone Mad

Letters sent to me as a prospective advisor of prospective graduate students who are prospective applicants to the graduate program in my department continue to arrive, with more appearing in my inbox every week. As usual, and as I have described before, these letters are quite mixed in their level of sophistication.

Here is an unscientific conclusion from my reading of these letters:

I have not seen any correlation between size, type, prestige, and/or location of the undergrad school and whether the letter is impressive or naive.

Excellent, focused, professional letters can come from anywhere. Clueless, naive and (inadvertently) obnoxious letters can come from anywhere.

The only somewhat predictable characteristic is that students from certain countries tend to send form letters, probably to many different professors, probably in the hopes that at least some will reply. I have wondered about this strategy and whether it is effective. The large number of possible recipients might increase the yield of replies, but the obvious form-letter nature of the letters (especially the "Dear Sir" ones sent to female faculty) discourages replies.

The strangest e-mail that I have received in recent months from a prospective applicant was sort of like a form letter, but it was also sort of like a Mad Libs template into which the student had inserted relevant information for each recipient, but not in a particularly smooth or knowledgeable way. The letter went something like this:

Dear Professor of Science,

My name is Student, and I will be graduating from University in spring 2012. I am looking into graduate programs for the fall, and am interested in your research program. Will you be taking on any new MS/PhD students next year? [<-- all that is fine so far]

In particular, I am fascinated by your work on "Title of old, obscure paper that is an outlier in my usual research topics" and how you applied [incorrect name for a technique] to [something I never did] in "Title of second paper that doesn't have anything to do with anything else listed so far." I would like to work on topics like this under your direction as advisor at [name of my university].

Attached is my CV.

Sincerely,

Student

OK, so he tried. He looked up some of my papers, picked a couple that may have looked interesting to him, maybe took some notes of some words in the abstracts or titles, and put this information in the letter.

B for Effort.

I think this can be a very good approach if you know what you are doing and if the things you are writing about are at least a little familiar to you, so you are not just stringing together Science Words and paper titles in a possibly-strange way. If this student had showed the email to a professor, chances are the professor would have seen some of the problems right away, without even knowing anything about me or my work.

We have debated cluelessness here in this blog before. When I have described clueless students, particularly undergraduates who are just starting to navigate the complexity of the graduate school universe, many readers can relate to the feeling that there are unwritten rules and things you are supposed to do and not do (but you have to figure these out by trial-and-failure first).

And so it is, and maybe that's how internet resources (including blogs) can help a bit. But beware..

For example, I have written posts in which I supplied templates for various types of academic letters, with blanks for personalized bits of information. These templates are mostly just to give a sense for the types of information, appropriate length, and scope of various types of letters. I hope they are overall helpful, but if you stick random words in the blanks, you end up with something that is likely more incoherent than what you'd come up with by writing the letter entirely on your own.