How to email a professor or potential supervisor (and when not to)

Quick take. First check you need to email a professor at all: for most taught master's, admissions decides, not a professor, so write to the admissions office instead. For a research degree, write to one professor at a time, in under 200 words: who you are, the specific piece of their work that connects to yours, and one question they can answer in a line. Address them as "Dear Dr Surname" or "Dear Professor Surname", never "Dear Sir". If there is no reply after about two weeks, send one short follow-up, then move on.

Most guides to emailing a professor are written for students who already know the unwritten rules of British or North American academic email. If you learned formal English somewhere else, some of those rules are the opposite of what you were taught, and a polite email can read as a mass message. This guide covers who to write to, what to write, and the phrases worth changing.

First: do you need to email a professor at all?

This is the question most guides skip, and getting it wrong wastes weeks.

For a taught master's, a professor usually cannot offer you a place or tell you your chances, and many will not reply. Ask the admissions office instead: they answer questions about entry requirements, English test scores and deadlines every day.

The email that gets a reply

Professors who supervise research receive many unsolicited emails, and the ones that get answered are short, specific and easy to reply to. Aim for under 200 words.

Subject line: make it specific enough to tell them what it is before they open it.

Prospective PhD student: machine learning for crop disease detection (2027 entry)

Greeting: "Dear Dr Okafor" or "Dear Professor Mensah". Use the title they use on their staff page. If you cannot tell, "Dear Dr" is safe for anyone with a doctorate.

The body, in three short paragraphs:

1. Who you are, in two lines. Your current degree or job, and what you want to research.
2. Why them, specifically. One piece of their recent work and how it connects to yours. This is the paragraph that shows you are not sending the same email to fifty people.
3. One clear question. Something they can answer quickly, such as whether they are taking new students for your start date.

Close: "Kind regards" or "Best wishes", your full name, and a link to your CV or one-page research outline as an attachment.

A full example:

Subject: Prospective PhD student: machine learning for crop disease detection (2027 entry)

Dear Dr Okafor,

I am a final-year MSc Computer Science student at the University of Ibadan, and I would like to apply for a PhD in 2027 on detecting cassava diseases from smartphone photos.

Your 2025 paper on training image models with very small labelled datasets is directly relevant to my MSc project, where I have 400 labelled photos and found that standard augmentation made accuracy worse. I would like to build on your approach with field images from Nigerian farms.

Are you planning to take on new PhD students for 2027 entry? I have attached my CV and a one-page research outline.

Kind regards,

Amaka Eze

This example was written for this guide. The names, paper and project are illustrative.

It is about 130 words. It names one paper, explains a real connection, and ends with a question answerable in one line.

Phrases that read differently abroad

Formal English is not the same everywhere. Many phrases that are normal and polite in formal writing in South Asia, West Africa and elsewhere read as old-fashioned, overly humble or even like a template to UK and North American academics. None of these is wrong English. They are just not what this reader expects.

"Dear Sir" deserves a special mention. It assumes the professor is a man, and many are not, so it tells the reader you did not look at who they are. Using their name and title takes ten seconds and avoids that.

Mistakes that get an email deleted

• Mass emails. The same text to many professors, sometimes with the wrong name left in. Professors talk to each other, and they can spot a template.
• No link to their work. "I am very interested in your research" without saying which research.
• Asking for things they cannot give. "Please check my eligibility" or "please arrange a scholarship" for a taught course.
• A wall of text. Your whole CV pasted into the email body. Attach it instead.
• Big attachments, or none. One short PDF CV is enough. Do not send ten certificates.
• Chasing too often. A follow-up every few days feels like pressure.

When and how to follow up

If you hear nothing for about two weeks, send one short follow-up as a reply to your first email, so the original is underneath:

Dear Dr Okafor, I wanted to follow up on my email below about PhD supervision for 2027 entry. I would be grateful for a short reply when you have time, even if you are not taking students this year. Kind regards, Amaka Eze

If there is still no reply, take that as an answer and move on. Silence usually means they are busy or not recruiting, not that your email was bad.

Other emails you will write when applying abroad

The same rules work for every formal email in your application: put the purpose in the first line, give only the details the reader needs, ask one clear question, and close politely.

• Admissions office: your applicant number in the subject line, your question in the first sentence.
• Accommodation or landlord: dates, budget and the exact question, in a short list if there are several.
• Embassy or visa centre: your application or reference number first, and a plain description of what you need, with no emotional appeals.

This is exactly what IELTS General Training Writing Task 1 tests: a formal letter with a clear purpose, every point covered, and the right tone for the reader. If you are taking General Training, the formal letter guide and the letter phrases guide cover the same skills, and the letter checker marks a letter for tone, purpose and every bullet point.