<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I am accepted by Rice University. Should I send an e-mail to the professor who is mentioned in my acceptance letter as my advisor?</p>
<p>Yes. That is common courtesy to inform those who are directly involved in your application, such as said professor, plus any other people who wrote you LORs.</p>
<p>@awcntdb - I think @ayxowpat was referring to the person who will be the advisor at Rice.</p>
<p>@nanotechnology - Thanks. I did misread that. Hum… Now, I do not know. When I went to grad school, there was no email. We just showed up and scheduled a meeting with the advisor. </p>
<p>The advisor might even email first. My older son’s undergrad advisor emailed him with specific info re chosen majors and even scheduled a phone conversation over the summer, before my son even got there.</p>
<p>I am usually the academic (not research) advisor for new graduate students at Illinois Tech in physics and I have no problem getting an email from an incoming student. You might not get a lot of details about the things you have to do before starting right away since that usually comes later.</p>
<p>So, I am not sending an e-mail, right?</p>
<p>This one seems like a personal choice, not one of protocol. This really is your call.</p>
<p>You could send a simple email of introduction. It should be an email where the advisor is not obligated to respond, but still allows the option. Something along the lines of below could work (adjust to fit your voice etc.):</p>
<p>"Dear Professor [LAST NAME]:</p>
<p>I was accepted as a [DEGREE NAME] candidate at Rice. My acceptance letter states you are assigned as my advise, and I would like to take this email to informally introduce myself.</p>
<p>If there is any information about me you would like forwarded or something you think wise for me to prepare for in advance, please let me know.</p>
<p>I look forward to meeting you in the Fall.</p>
<p>Sincerely,"</p>
<p>I thought my response was clear. I am not offended by email contact and I expect most other advisors will feel the same. An email like the one written by @awcntdb is fine.</p>
<p>It won’t hurt, and might help.</p>
<p>I definitely e-mailed my advisor before I came and got a lot of useful advice. He recommended a book for me to read over the summer and also sent me the protocol of the study I’d be working on when I started. That study turned into the data I used for my dissertation. Receiving it ahead of time helped me think about it over the summer and casually look into some information on it; it also helped me plan better, so I wrote my seminar papers in my first two years on that topic so that I could glean from it during my dissertation writing phase.</p>
<p>Thank you all, I will send an e-mail and it will be like @awcntdb wrote. </p>