How do I tactfully let a professor know I want to work with someone else?

Graduate School
1

Hey all,

My school has an accelerated master’s program that I am applying to. At the behest of my undergrad advisor, I reached out to both coastal and geotechnical engineering faculty since I am interested in both of those fields and where they overlap. I was already planning to give the green light to the geotech professor I spoke with when a coastal professor emailed me back to arrange a meeting. The coastal professor was the one who set up the program and so I thought I would speak with him to see what he had to say. I talked to him today and he was very relaxed, said he would advise me, and I basically agreed (I was nervous and I was kind of on autopilot interview mode where I didn’t want to seem uninterested). He said that as I developed my research interests, I could change professors if there was someone else whose research was a better fit (someone else on the coastal staff, that is).

The more I am thinking about it, the more I want to just go with the geotech program because I think I can encompass coastal research into my program. I think coastal engineering is fascinating, but I don’t think there are as many job opportunities within it. Geotechnical is more broad, and can encompass coastal.

How do I tactfully let this one professor know that I want to go down a different road? I don’t want to seem flaky or like I led him on. I met with him because I wanted to explore my options. I definitely don’t want to burn any bridges though.

Also, if anyone has any insight into the coastal v. geotech debate, I’d love to hear it.

Thanks.

2

So first of all, just because you do research in coastal doesn’t mean that your whole MS is limited to coastal and thus your job opportunities are too.

But if you want to do geotechnical research and not coastal, just be straightforward: “Dear Prof Links. Thanks so much for meeting with me and discussing your research. After further thought and discussion, I’ve decided to pursue my thesis research with Prof. Green in the geotechnical research lab. I appreciate your time and look forward to taking classes with you in the future.”

Or some permutation of that. Do not worry about this: professors have plenty of students to work with and they don’t take it personally (usually) when students decide to work with someone else.