Why won't professors respond to my e-mails?

warbrain
Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:56:28 +0000

I thought I would ask this question here, since the parents on this forum seem really helpful.

I currently go to a top-25 school that uses its undergraduate research program as one of the major selling points of the university. I tried looking around, but there are no listings for math projects (I’m a math major), and everyone I talk to, including the secretaries in the math department and my adviser told me to e-mail professors directly instead of waiting for a project, and even gave a few recommendations of who to e-mail.

The problem is that no one seems to be responding to my e-mails, and I don’t know why. I tried looking around on the internet for reasons why professors normally don’t respond to e-mails, but none of the explanations seem to apply to me. I have a descriptive subject line, I use correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, etc., I start off with “Dear Professor X,” I try to keep everything short and to the point. But still, no one replies, and I don’t know what to do. I also send messages again to check if they received it if they don’t respond after about a week too. I’m starting to get really worried - I’m not sure if I’m disliked among the math department, or how to deal with these professors when I have to take their classes, or how I will get into grad school if I’m not even able to do research. I’m at the point where I’m thinking about changing majors, which would suck since I love math a lot and really want to become a professor. But I don’t want to have to take these classes if I know that I’m not going to be able to do math once I graduate.