Business Email Templates for PhD, Postdoc & Jobs

During my PhD journey, I had a few opportunities to look at the resumes and emails of the non-native English speaking students. I can confirm that despite the resumes being mostly just one page long, there have been so many grammatical and spelling mistakes. In fact, I am myself not a native English speaker, and if I can find English issues in a resume, the native speakers would definitely find, and possibly weed out a candidate with faulty resume. After all, usually there are more job applications than the actual number of jobs.  So let’s discuss more on writing business email templates. This post is basically an extension of my previous article about PhD and Postdoc & job search.

Well, an email can be a deciding factor in your job application’s outcome. You must write professional emails –there can’t be an exception. If you write semantically or grammatically incorrect emails, forget about a job offer, you may not even get an interview call. Writing a professional email is an important skill that will add value to your PhD, Postdoc, and job applications.

How to create generalised business email templates

How to create generalised business email templates

As I mentioned in my previous post about PhD and Postdoc & job search, you can’t send a same email to all the professors (or HR managers) that you are interested in. At the same time, it would be very complicated and time consuming to write a new email for each and every professor. What’s the way out?

What I did basically was to create a generalised business email template. This strategy proved to be a Swiss Army Knife in my job hunt. In fact, if you are exploring jobs in different areas, it makes sense to work out a few generalised business email templates. I will share with you all the necessary details.

Your business email templates needs to have at least three broad sections-

First section

You can start with usual email greeting, and continue with explaining about your core expertise (thesis title, industrial experience, etc.).

“Hello Prof. XYZ,

My name is ABC, a fresh PhD graduate from the School of Electronic & Computer Engineering, Ohio State University, USA. I have defended my PhD thesis with the title “Simulation, modeling and Machine learning” at OSU. I have developed a strong motivation towards​​ a career in research while pursuing doctorate at OSU. My research interests include Machine Learning; Bioinformatics; Cancer Signaling Pathways; Ordinary Differential Equations, etc.”

Second section

In this section you will explain your motivation, for example, why do you want to join lab of a particular professor (or a business organisation)? Do mention how you came across the profile of a particular professor. If you have work experience in the related field, it’s worthwhile to emphasise that in your email text. Be concise and coherent-

“While going through your lab’s website and publication list, I realised that research at your lab with a focus on Simulation, Modeling, Machine Learning, etc. are directly related to my core expertise in computational modeling. I am really motivated by the fact that the projects at your institute directly address industry needs.”

Here you are also outrightly conveying that you have gone through the research papers of the professor, and you are not just blindly sending him an email. Moreover, do genuinely go through a few recent papers and the home page of the professor’s lab, and find the keywords (e.g., Simulation, Modeling, Machine Learning, etc.) about his research. At this stage of sending your very first email to a professor (or HR), you don’t necessarily have to read all of his publications. Sometime even just the title of a few papers would tell you the relevant research areas.

 

Third section

This is basically a concluding remarks section for your business email template. Well, how about the following in the email template?

“I believe I can work on a variety of relevant problems in computational science and come up with a non-traditional solution.  After my PhD, I intend to undertake a research position placement. I’d like to continue working in this area, and I wondered whether you might have any research opportunity available in your lab. Are you currently hiring additional researchers?

Details regarding my research at OSU and academic background can be found in the attached curriculum vitae. I would be glad to provide further ​​information as you would require.

Thank you for your valuable time, I look forward to hear from you.

 

Sincerely yours,

NAME”

Update your business email templates

Once you have written email templates, go and find a professor in your desired research area of interest. Check out his publications, and find the keywords. In order to send the email, you mostly don’t have to change the aforementioned first and last sections. All you need to do is to update the second section.

Following this template you can easily write an email that looks very specialized to a professor. You just need to add/modify a few words/sentences in your generalised business email templates.

The Cover letter

A cover letter is basically a separate attachment in your email (apart from your CV) describing your interest in a particular job position. You don’t have to send a cover letter until you are applying for a published research position available on job posting sites. In case you’re applying mostly for the jobs selected from the job posting sites, you’d better prepare a generalised cover letter template as well. There are so many free job posting sites (e.g. for a job that you find in Nature jobs). In other words, if you apply for a published research position, do include a cover letter.  Do note that you don’t necessarily have to attach your photo in the CV or cover letter.

What if a Prof says NO

Take it easy, man! It’s normal. You should still be humble, and reply to them very much like a gentleman. My next post will be about discussing the similar situations.

That’s it for now!

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Comments and suggestions are always welcome!

Good luck with job search. 🙂

Last updated: Saturday, September 16, 2017