If you have the plan to become a scientist, the execution of that plan can seem daunting at times. There are so many fields of study out there, how to choose? And vice versa, labs generally receive many applications, so how can you make yours stand out?

We are just one tiny insignificant lab, with a steady influx of applications from all over the world, different scientific backgrounds, and of highly variable quality. Reading these applications has made it clear that not everyone everywhere is in the position to craft a successful application. There can be many reasons for this, but I suspect some can be easily remedied when it’s clear what a lab is looking for in an application. While there may be many answers to this, and the exact details may differ from lab to lab, below are some general tips & tricks that hold true for our lab, and probably generalize reasonably well to other labs as well.

For some, reading the tips & tricks below may seem obvious. If so that’s great, and means you probably received solid guidance from mentors and peers, or you have a keen sense for understanding unwritten norms. For others, you may thing “really?” or “aha, that makes sense”. Either way, the below is a single opinion from a single scientist in a very particular corner of the Neuroscience world. It’s up to you is you choose to ignore or use all of these recommendations as you see fit.

Be specific

When receiving an application, the main question a lab will ask is “Would this person fit into the lab, and how?”. To answer this question, it helps if you can offer specific practical information up front to prevent a long back-and-forth (or worse, not receiving any reply at all). In your first email, be specific about the role you seek in a lab (an internship? a PhD position?), when and how long you would like to join for, how you will be funded, and in what context you are applying (e.g., is this part of your studies? what are the formal requirements? are you planning to work in person or remotely? etc.).

In addition to being specific about practical matters, you also want to be specific about the scientific reason for which you are applying. For example, what topics interest you (and how does this align with the questions the lab is interested in), how would you like to study those questions (and how is the lab equipped to help you do this), etc. There will be a few more tips below to help you craft this scientific motivation, which emphasizes writing a tailored and well-researched first email. But for now just one more thing, which is to keep it short and sweet, maybe two paragraphs or so – the scientists reading your email will be wanting to do their science, and probably dislike overly long emails and administrative duties.

Why this lab?

We are a cognitive computational neuroscience lab, which means we study healthy human subjects using behavioral and neuroimaging measures, with a whole bunch of programming and computation at the back-end. We do this work because it interests us, so when you apply we’d want to know if it interests you as well. Other labs will have a different focus because they have different interests. So when you apply to any kind of lab, you probably want to get your shared interest across first and foremost.

If you come to our lab from a closely related scientific background (say: neuroscience, psychology, or computational science), and have used similar approaches (say: psychophysics, eye tracking, or neuroimaging), you’ll probably be able to readily describe why you want to join our lab in particular. For example, you may want to study human visual attention, and measure MEG data to model pattern responses under different attentional states – these are all things we do, are interested in, and could offer. Alternatively, you may not yet have a very well-defined question in mind but you took some courses in for example cognitive science that really piqued your interest. Now you want hands-on experience to see how the kinds of studies you read about happen, and what is involved. All of of this and more may be true in your case. So all you have to do is write such reasons into your motivation, so the receiving lab can evaluate if you might be a good fit!

You may have a harder time motivating your interest in our lab if come from a rather different scientific background (say: radiology, medicine, zoology, systems biology, etc.) and have experience in totally different scientific approaches (say: cell cultures, assessing psychiatric patients, gene editing, etc.). More difficult maybe, but properly motivating your application is certainly not impossible! Most labs will not want to miss out on talented people that happen to come from different scientific fields, and who have a clear trajectory and vision of why they want to move into a particular direction. Of course, the lab you apply to will need a clear sense of what motivates you to do their type of science, because in lieu of a related scientific background they’ll need to spend some extra time training you to learn their particular techniques. This means such “far afield” applications may require some extra work from your end, as you will need to learn a little about the science you’re trying to get yourself into. More about finding out what a particular lab does is up next.

What does this lab do?

To know if your interests and existing skill set align with the lab you are applying to, you first need to know what that lab actually does. Yes, it takes time to figure this out, and you may not understand everything that’s on their website or in their papers, but here’s the upside: If you invest some time to understand the science of a particular lab you will (1) improve your application by being more specific, but you will also (2) learn something new, and (3) you may even figure out that you’re actually not all that interested in the work a lab does. Doing science isn’t easy, so if you’re not excited by the work of a particular lab, it’s probably better not to apply there.

So how might you go about researching a particular lab? You can see if they have a website and really check it out. Maybe they have recorded talks online, which you can watch. Read one or two papers published by the lab in depth. In this case, don’t let a paywall stop you, most labs will reply to a brief email along the lines of “I am considering applying to your lab, but would like to read a few of your papers first. Unfortunately I have trouble accessing [insert journal article], would you mind sending me a copy?”. Seriously, for a scientist there are few things more flattering than someone wanting to actually read their work.

After you’ve done the above you’ll probably have a better sense of the questions and techniques employed by a particular lab. You might have gotten a sense if these questions interest you or not, and why. You may better understand the techniques used by the lab, or at least you may understand well enough to know if you want to learn and/or apply them yourself. All of this understanding you will able to use for your motivation.

What you may not want to do

Hopefully the above is able to give some handles on how to approach writing a strong application, but sometimes it also helps to have some examples of what (maybe) not to do. The application emails you send to labs may go unanswered, which may be difficult and demotivating. You may find yourself sending more and more emails, hoping to get a reply. And of course, as sending more emails takes more time, it becomes tempting to just send the same general email to many different labs. It’s an obvious and understandable trade-off between quality and quantity, but does it work? Truth is I don’t know, and I have no data on this… What I do know is that such “scattershot emails” often fail to adequately convey if you would be a good fit to a particular lab. If the connection between your interest and the actual work that a lab does is unclear, such emails may get discarded more readily.

A similar outcome may occur even if you do mention very specific interests or experience, but the lab you apply to has little to no expertise in those. In our lab we think it’s super cool if you know how to use genetic tools to study lymphoma, are an expert in autistic rat models, or you are passionate about MR physics. But the truth is that our lab only knows a few very specific cognitive computational neuroimaging tricks and we’re pretty useless otherwise. We simply cannot provide adequate supervision for any of the very many other worthy scientific endeavors out there. In fact, if you’re still here reading this, I’d recommend considering climate science and not neuroscience. The world needs it more.