这是一位学者发表在Twitter上的一些关于如何联系学术人物申请学习或是工作的一些建议。未经作者同意，转发于此：
Advice for students wishing to contact academics
One of the great things about being a tenured academic is that people not only start to know who you are but would like to work with you. This is very flattering, but of course, research funding is not abundant and time is always in short supply. I have been asked at an increasing frequency for any vacancies / internships / studentships / jobs and I imagine most often I would be very lucky to be able to take the folk on who write to me. At the same time, I have had, and heard from colleagues who have had, some major, cringing bloopers. This made me wonder what advice is offered to those who wish to pursue further study at different institutions than the one they might currently be at and, deciding that very little is probably formally offered, I thought some guidance might be helpful. So, when writing to an academic that you think you might like to work with, consider the following.
1. Remember to introduce yourself properly 合适地介绍自己
We may have no idea who you are. Where do you work right now? Who has managed your work / supervised your research? There's a great chance we might know them What interests you? What do you want to do? What other skills do you have? Have you done any work experience / internships / had other careers / responsibilities? We need to see your CV in 100 words, effectively. Why are you the sort of person we would like to work with? You should be considering selling yourself as well as you would in a job interview. Is there something you can tell us that might pique our interest?
2. Make it clear you have done your research on the recipient 对对方要有了解
Nothing is so likely to irritate the recipient (of any letter really) as the feeling like the person writing the letter is cold calling, I once received a letter where the writer couldn't even be bothered to send out the same (badly written) letter to different academics individually and pasted us all into the 'To' field （群发O(∩_∩)O~）. You can imagine how special I felt! We are really busy people and we are always fighting to keep our heads above water, to win that next pot of funding to keep being the awesome people you read about. We're not all the ego-maniacal tyrants academia used to be characterized by, but we would like to feel like you think we are worth the huge amounts of time we would invest in you if you join our lab. I suggest you contact the recipient by name, and ensure you demonstrate you have actually read their research (if you haven't, you shouldn't be writing to them yet, go get on Google Scholar 如果没有读过他们的文章，就不要写信). Writing something like: “I read your recent article in XX journal where you showed that YY and this made me think about this field for future research opportunities" demonstrates that you really think their research is interesting.
3. Understand what you are asking for 知道自己想要什么
It can be hard for undergraduate students in particular to understand how much they are asking for when they ask for research positions or for presentations and data. A conscientious supervisor will commit to spend significant time, energy and emotional investment in taking you on. This might range from an hour a week to much more depending on your training, progress and individual needs. We're generally all decent people and want you to succeed, so we're going to allocate a big bunch of time that's already limited for you and you should realize that when you ask us to take you on. Consequently, think how you would fit with the rest of our research group (most academics detail their whole research group on their webpages)?
We also get requests from students for research data and presentations. These usually happen because the students have no idea what they are asking for. Once you have spent years researching a subject and a week of your life writing a research seminar on it, securing your footing as a world expert on that topic, you'll realize why we read emails from you asking for the Power Point with a sigh. Our academic reputation and prowess is hard won. The same for data. I have heard colleagues have received emails asking for whole sets of unpublished satellite tracking data, representing hundreds of thousands of pounds of funding and years of grant writing, report writing and getting food poisoning in the field (or whatever) and having to ensure fairly tough conditions to get precious few MB of data. It's like we have spent years growing a tree from seed and you come along and ask if you can just have the apples. If you still don't understand why such a request is outrageous, then ask your friendly local academic. You're unlikely to get a response to such emails because they are silly.
4. Manners, manners, manners 一定要有礼貌
Overall, be polite. This is no time to be informal or jocular. You just should start your email saying something like: "I know you are probably extremely busy and get many requests like this and I am grateful in advance for any time you have to read my email as honestly that's all true. We are, actually, too busy to read your email and yours is the fourth this week and no, we don't actually need any more people to manage, so it's worth demonstrating that you have the emotional intelligence to realize this. We don't owe you anything and if your email comes across rudely, we are likely to delete it immediately. Please don't use language that reads like we are your friend in a pub (emoticons and 'txt’ speak is never acceptable). Please don't also patronize us (or accidentally patronize us, it's your responsibility to check your email to ensure this can't possibly be the case) or make out like you think you know what we need. Apart from the fact that there's never any excuse for it, bad manners burn bridges and busy people have little time for reading more deeply into a CV of someone who appears rude. It is also extremely important that you realize how much information travels. If a colleague says: "That student used to work for me and I would not want to work with them again you are probably out. And academia is a VERY small world - we probably know people who know your people and of course on the other hand, if you are a great person to work with, you just doubled your chances.
So finally I thought I would detail what an academic really wants in a person contacting them about opportunities. I think I can speak widely for at least the field of biological sciences. First we want to work with nice people. If you're going to upset us or other people in our research group, it’s not going to make life better for anyone, so first and foremost, you need to be nice. Second, you should have a decent dose of independence, intuition and 'get up and go’首先人要好，其次要独立、直觉和有魄力. We need you to do not only what we ask, but also to preempt obvious things and try out solutions before we have to ask you to. We want you to tell us “actually there's a better solution for problem X than the one you've just asked me to enact, and here's the evidence". In order to really own your research, you need to take some responsibility for success, and not to expect us to tell you every step of the way要主动. We will supervise you to the best of our ability, but we work alongside you when we conduct novel research -maybe no-one knows what the correct answer is to the problem! Third, you should be interesting第三要有趣! While many students manage a linear career from college to BSc to MSc and PhD, your life experience counts for a huge amount and some left-field specialist skills or hobbies can come in very handy! Some of my proudest achievements have been when I have set my science aside and thought creatively about a problem. Finally, you should be enthusiastic最后要有激情，这比智力重要. Yes, I think the last quality is enthusiasm, and not intellect, because a real passion for a subject trumps grade-scoring ability when the going gets tough (which it does, from time to time, and in some parts of a PhD, all the time). Plus, and I'm not going to get into this here, but intellect can be measured in a number of different ways and our current system may not adequately measure the breadth of ways we learn.
So I hope this helps you to write better letters to get into labs where you'd like to work and helps irritate a few less academics in the process. Good luck and happy letter writing!
