Then I cold emailed supervisors for around two years until a research group at a university was willing to spare me some time to teach me about a field and have me help out.
Did you email supervisors in the areas you were publishing in? How often did you email them? Why’d it take so long for them to accept free high-skilled labour?
Did you email supervisors in the areas you were publishing in?
No. But even if I did, my one publication that I somehow managed to do on my own was trash. So I wouldn’t put much weight on that.
How often did you email them?
I probably tried to email a new person every couple of weeks. The first person that seriously responded is the person I am working with now!
Why’d it take so long for them to accept free high-skilled labour?
I think taking on part time students is really time consuming. A lot of institutions flat out don’t do it. And providing them with resources (like compute time on a HPC in my case) is expensive and bureaucratic. I also included my day job in my CV, so they could’ve just flat-out not have believed that I’d commit, and be wasting their time.
I would just spend more time emailing potential supervisors, with a higher frequency. There doesn’t really seem to be a minimum threshold level that I needed to hit, other than finishing my master’s
Did you email supervisors in the areas you were publishing in? How often did you email them? Why’d it take so long for them to accept free high-skilled labour?
Did you email supervisors in the areas you were publishing in?
No. But even if I did, my one publication that I somehow managed to do on my own was trash. So I wouldn’t put much weight on that.
How often did you email them?
I probably tried to email a new person every couple of weeks. The first person that seriously responded is the person I am working with now!
Why’d it take so long for them to accept free high-skilled labour?
I think taking on part time students is really time consuming. A lot of institutions flat out don’t do it. And providing them with resources (like compute time on a HPC in my case) is expensive and bureaucratic. I also included my day job in my CV, so they could’ve just flat-out not have believed that I’d commit, and be wasting their time.
That makes sense. If you had to re-do the whole process from scratch, what would you do differently this time?
I would just spend more time emailing potential supervisors, with a higher frequency. There doesn’t really seem to be a minimum threshold level that I needed to hit, other than finishing my master’s