How to Cold Email Professors for Research as a High School Student

In addition to pursuing independent research projects, highly motivated high school students can sometimes assist college and university professors with their research. This is a great strategy for students who wish to develop strong research skills while collaborating with experienced professionals.

Reaching out to college professors is different from communicating with your high school teachers, though. College professors have higher expectations of independence from students, and tend to expect a more formal, professional tone in correspondence. Furthermore, as a high school student reaching out to a professor about potential research opportunities, you will likely have to send what’s called a “cold email” — that is, an introductory message addressed to someone you’ve never met before and haven’t been referred to by a mutual connection. Although cold emailing professors may seem challenging, it can absolutely lead to valuable mentorships and research opportunities! Additionally, sending cold emails to college professors improves high school students’ awareness of ongoing research and strengthens their communication skills, preparing them to effectively and persistently seek out mentorship opportunities during their undergraduate programs.

In this article, we’ll break down why it’s valuable to send cold emails to professors for research and provide clear examples for successfully structuring your emails.

Why Cold Email a Professor and Show a Demonstrated Interest in Research?

High school students applying to college can highlight their interest in research to strengthen their applications and improve admissions results. Applicants with past research experience should emphasize their skills and list research outcomes in relevant sections of college applications; they can also take advantage of the supplemental section of a college application to express their interest in specific student-led research opportunities available on campus. This strategy communicates to college admissions officers an appetite for research while also drawing a clear connection between an applicant’s intellectual curiosity and the college’s resources. In other words, it indicates to admissions officers that the applicant will maximize the resources that the college or university provides.

As a high school student, you can begin demonstrating your interest in research by reaching out directly to college professors to ask whether you can assist or help out with their research. If you send a clear and well-crafted message, there is a chance that they will be open to collaborating. Professors are generally passionate about supporting the next generation of students in their field. Of course, they usually prioritize undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in their departments. However, if you can demonstrate that your interests align with their area of study, you may be able to land a research assistantship. Whether or not your efforts are successful, you’ll learn about ongoing research in a field that you are interested in and strengthen soft skills for communication. Additionally, if you’re successful in securing a research position with a professor, you can showcase your research experience on your college applications.

Finally, you don’t have to ask for a research position when cold emailing professors. You can also reach out to professors for research mentorship on your own projects, or for career advice for high school students. Additionally, you might express interest in opportunities to shadow a professor's work, which can be valuable for gaining insight into their research process and for learning more about the professor's research.

How to Cold Email a Professor and Increase Your Response Rate

1. Pick the Right Audience

The first step is to decide on the field of research that you want to get involved in. Research experiences are most valuable and rewarding when you are genuinely curious about and excited to explore the subject. Next, go to departmental websites of nearby colleges or universities, or ones that are located near family members you could stay with during the research assistantship (you’ll usually need to be able to commute to the lab/office). Click on the “People” section and explore faculty members’ publications to find researchers whose interests align with yours.

Additionally, be sure to pick a professor who is likely to read an email from a high schooler who is also a stranger. This means avoiding reaching out to academic celebrities because these professors are already overloaded with numerous emails from prospective students and admirers. To get a professor's attention, it’s crucial to target those who have the time and interest to respond to cold emails from students like you.

2. Show Interest in Their Research

Appeal to a professor’s intellectual interests. The cold email should avoid flattery and small talk. What professors care most about is their research. Before drafting an email, you should become very familiar with the professor’s work and be able to explain which specific aspects of it interest you. When writing, make it very clear that you are deeply intellectually curious about their research area. If you’re making efforts to learn more about the topic, be sure to mention that. Professors love it when you’ve already taken the initiative to learn about a topic — it shows that you have an internal drive to learn, which is a great quality for a potential research assistant.

3. Send Quality Emails to Many Professors

Many professors are busy year-round and they may unintentionally miss your email. It’s important to send several emails to give yourself the best chance to make a connection with at least one professor. 

However, just because you’re sending many emails doesn’t mean you should sacrifice the quality of your emails. Quality control is key. Each email should be personalized and appear as a unique piece of communication. If an email appears generic, or seems like it may have been written by an AI chatbot, it will very likely be dismissed as spam, or, even worse, as thoughtless.

That being said, cold emailing professors is a time-consuming process and once you’ve completed several cold emails and get the hang of the structure, you can use them as templates for the rest while still being sure to add personalized details about the professor’s research and work.

4. Be Specific About Your Ask

Oftentimes we’re so focused on making the email personalized and introducing details about ourselves that we forget to include our ask for the professor. What is the actual request that we want to make to the professor? Are we requesting a meeting with them? Do we want to intern at their research lab? Do we have specific questions about a topic to help with our own research? Whatever your ask is, it should be crystal clear in the email. That way, a professor knows exactly what the email is about and how to respond. If the professor is unsure about what the course of action is, it makes it less likely that they’ll respond. In the cold email examples later in this article, we’ll show how you can be specific about your ask. 

5. Keep The Email Short

In an email, it’s tempting to explain your full background as a student and all that you admire about a professor’s work. However, keep in mind that professors are busy people, and they don’t have a lot of time to read through lengthy emails. Cold emails are most effective when they’re to the point and include just the right amount of personalization and detail. Consider what are the most important points you want to make in the email and only keep what is absolutely necessary to get the message across. A concise email is more likely to hold a professor's attention.

Extra Tips

To maximize your chances of getting a response when cold emailing a professor, send it (or schedule it to send) around 7:30–7:45 AM on a weekday. This will ensure that your message appears at the top of their inbox when they check it in the morning.

Also, you may have more success cold emailing professors at certain times of the year, depending on their teaching responsibilities, grant deadlines, etc. For instance, early December to early February is typically a good window to reach out about summer research assistantships. This gives the professor time to plan for your presence before finalizing their summer staffing and submitting grant budgets.

Finally, before sending your email, proofread it for grammar, style, and tone. Ensure your introductory message is free from grammatical errors, its style is stylistically coherent, and its tone is neutral and professional. For example, in an introductory email to a professor, avoid using more than one exclamation point. If the professor responds with a different tone, you can then adjust yours slightly.

Example Cold Email for Students

Below is a sample cold email that you can use as a template. We’ll break this email down piece by piece to show how it reflects the five qualities mentioned above.

Email Subject Line: Reaching Out - Your Perspective On The Colorado River Drought

Dear Professor [name],

My name is [first name last name] and I’m a student at [X high school].

I was looking through your university’s department pages when I came across your research on improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. It caught my attention because it seems like the local governments in the area have been coordinating their efforts, following the recommendations made by your research. 

I wanted to reach out to you because I live in the Colorado River basin, and as you know, the main threat facing the Colorado River today is not so much pollution, but water supply. Because of drought and population growth, the Colorado River is running dry and this is an issue I care deeply about. I wanted to ask for your perspective on what you think cooperation between government officials and scientists will have to look like to resolve these problems in the Colorado River. 

If you have the time to have a 15-minute chat or even answer questions over email, I’d love to discuss and learn from you.

Sincerely,

[your name]

Let’s break down this email piece by piece.

The subject line of the email is meant to quickly summarize the question you’re asking, which in this case, is the professor’s perspective on the solution for drying the Colorado River. Then, the email goes into the student's introduction, which you can usually keep very simple. 

The second paragraph of the email is designed to show that you’ve done your research on the professor and that this is a personalized email. You’re showing that you understand their research topic and its importance. 

The third paragraph makes the ask of the email, which is to ask for their perspective on the Colorado River basin. This is a good question because it has a specific topic; furthermore, stating that it’s “an issue I care deeply about,” it shows the professor that you are also invested in the topic. 

The final paragraph makes the formal request for the professor’s time. Notice that when asking for a potential call, the email only asks for 15 minutes of the professor’s time. You want to be respectful of their time and not ask for too much. To make the request even more approachable to the professor, the email also includes an alternative method for completing the student’s request — answering questions over email. This strategy helps you get much better response rates, because sometimes a call may be too difficult to schedule, but answering questions asynchronously over email is much easier for a busy professor to do. You not only want to make your ask specific, but you also want to make it as frictionless as possible in the beginning. Asking for a one-hour meeting from the first cold email is doing too much early on!

Now, let’s adjust the subject line of the email a little so that the student asks to help out the professor with research work!

Email Subject Line: Reaching Out - Interest in Helping w/ Water Quality Research

Dear Professor [name],

My name is [first name last name] and I’m a student at [X high school].

I was looking through your university’s department pages when I came across your research on improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. It caught my attention because it seems like the local governments in the area have been coordinating their efforts, following the recommendations made by your research. 

I wanted to reach out to you because I’d love to help out with your research on improving water quality and supply. I’m personally excited about this topic because I live in the Colorado River basin, and as you know, the main threat facing the Colorado River today is not so much pollution, but water supply. Because of drought and population growth, the Colorado River is running dry and this is an issue I care deeply about and have been researching on my own. 

If you have the time to have a 15-minute chat or even answer questions over email, I’d love to discuss a potential research opportunity with you. No worries at all if you’re currently not looking for any research assistants.

Sincerely,

[your signature]

You’ll notice that the first thing to change is the email subject line, since we’re making a different ask in this email. The paragraph showing that we’re knowledgeable about and interested in the professor’s research is still there, but in the third paragraph, we make our ask about a potential research position with the professor. The sentences on the Colorado River serve to show why we’re interested in the research, and in the last sentence, we even include the fact that we’ve already been researching the topic on our own. This shows the professor that we’re able to take initiative.

The final paragraph has the same first sentence. But after that, there’s also an opportunity for the professor to say no. This is called giving someone “an out.” You do this because no one likes to feel like someone is demanding time or an internship for them. However, if an email gives someone “an out,” then they feel less pressured, and actually, ironically, they’ll be more incentivized to respond to your email.

Skills Honed By Communicating With Professors

As mentioned above, regardless of whether your cold emailing leads to a research assistantship, communicating with college professors strengthens high school students’ soft skills. Writing a great introductory email — especially to someone you’d like to work with — is a highly valuable employability skill for students, and one that is rarely taught. Students who can express themselves clearly and effectively in structured email correspondence can immediately set themselves apart from those with less practice and experience, giving them a significant advantage when applying for research positions, college internships, summer programs, and more.

Communicating with professors isn’t all about your writing skills; engaging in these exchanges also strengthens students’ practical and analytical reading abilities, which are essential soft skills that college admissions offices look for in applicants. Communicating with college professors strengthens your ability to read and critically interpret information in academic contexts — both in the emails themselves and in any published research papers that you have familiarized yourself with in preparation for the email exchange and the potential research assistantship.

Finally, cold emailing professors strengthens students’ persistence and time management skills. Some professors won’t reply after an initial email, or may forget to respond even after exchanging a few messages. In that case, it is the student’s responsibility to follow up after a week or two to get their attention and keep making progress. Staying on top of messages with professors clearly demonstrates the student’s focus, persistence, and time management skills, as well as their organizational skills.

Concluding Thoughts

Sending thoughtfully composed cold emails not only has a higher likelihood of receiving a reply, but down the line, it could also lead to you working more closely with a professor and even doing your own research under their mentorship.

Even if professors are slow to reply, learning how to send cold emails is an essential soft skill for your future career. Moreover, as you’re exploring the research that professors are conducting, you could even discover new topics or ideas that you would want to research on your own!

If you’re interested in exploring research opportunities for high school students to prepare for college, you can apply to Polygence and be matched with an expert mentor in your field of interest! You’ll be able to dive deep into your topic and create an end product that you can showcase to the world.

In addition to independent research mentorships, Polygence Pods is a program that connects students with a handful of like-minded peers and an expert mentor. Over six weeks, each Pod explores a cutting-edge topic while introducing participants to foundational research methods.

For industry-oriented students, Polygence’s Work Lab matches highly motivated high schoolers with innovative startup companies to gain real, challenging, hands-on experience. Students will communicate and collaborate closely with their professional mentor as they complete valuable projects with real-world impacts.

Ready to grow your research network? Reach out and introduce yourself to Polygence!

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