strange research requests

[easwaran]

How many of you get e-mails like this one? I never have, but perhaps this is just because I don't work in a field where people are expected to do post-docs. It seems really sad to me - it sounds like this person has learned a lot about some very specific things, and yet is at the same time woefully clueless about absolutely everything else. I

Comments

[vaelynphi]

Funny: before I got my doctorate, I got all sorts of letters like this, not only by e-mail, but in a few cases by actual mail. Since I graduated, not a single whisper.

I guess undergraduates run the hippest labs or something.

[easwaran]

That goes along with one of the comments there.

[trailingvortex]

Some people are tremendously happy in their obsessions. Others pretend to be super specialised to compete in a very competitive market for such positions.

The Sir thing is quite funny.

[jholomorphic]

indian english speakers (i assume the letter is from one of our friends on the subcontinent, by the style) often seem to get confused about the gender of sir and madam. (and use it in inappropriate contexts when substituting it for "ji")

[madcaptenor]

Do "sir" and "madam" correspond to the same word in their native languages?

[trailingvortex]

-ji is an honorific suffix thingamy like -san in Nipponese.

[marklevoyageur]

Who knows? Polymers might be philosophical.

[krasnoludek]

Wow, comment #12 is gold.

"my future research goal is firmly oriented towards a broad area of research interests."

"Most of us, beginning from the Amoeba to Human belong to a same kind of socioeconomic family."

[easwaran]

Yes, we are no richer nor poorer than our one-celled cousins.

[trailingvortex]

The biosphere and all its organisms is maybe kind of a 'socioeconomic family'. So he's sort of not all wrong.

[oxeador]

I have gotten three different requests from undergraduates (in India) to do a summer internship at my lab. I am a postdoc in pure math.

[easwaran]

I think some people use the word "lab" to mean "research group". At least, I've heard some more science-oriented philosophers use the word "lab" to talk about them and their collection of students, and I think I've heard about it in purely theoretical sciences too. But it is at least a somewhat misleading term if you're not going to have lots of equipment to play with.

[trailingvortex]

"And this great device is the Factorisor. I would't put your hand in there unless you want it broken down into into its indivisible constituents."

[madcaptenor]

I made this mistake once or twice when I was transitioning from chemistry to math and e-mailing professors (at my own institution) to ask if they could advise me on a summer research project.