At some point I decided the fastest way to get better at research was to ask people who actually do it for a living, so I started cold emailing professors. Not a handful — I kept a spreadsheet, and by the time I stopped counting it was somewhere past 150.
My first template was bad, and I mean that plainly. It was long, it opened with something like “I am a high school student passionate about AI and its applications,” and it asked for a lot without offering much back — could we set up a call, could you look at my project, do you have any advice for someone like me. I sent maybe thirty of those. I got back three replies, and two of them were polite declines.
The version that actually worked was shorter and more specific. I dropped the “passionate about AI” line entirely — professors get that phrase from every student email they’ve ever received and it tells them nothing. Instead I said exactly what I was working on in one sentence, referenced something specific from their actual research (a paper, a lab project, sometimes just a line from their faculty page), and asked one narrow question instead of a vague “can we talk.” Something closer to: here’s what I’m doing, here’s where I’m stuck, does this match anything you’ve seen in your work. Response rate went up a lot once I did that. Not dramatically — cold email to busy academics is still cold email — but enough that I started getting real replies instead of silence.
The most interesting thing that came out of the whole effort wasn’t from an email at all. It came from a conversation with a rabbi I knew, completely unrelated to any of this, who mentioned he had a connection to someone doing relevant research. That one relationship turned into a much more substantive conversation than any single cold email did — the kind where someone actually walks you through how they think about a problem, rather than just pointing you to a paper. It’s a good reminder that the people already around you are sometimes a better path in than a stranger’s inbox.
If I’m honest about what a high schooler can realistically get out of 150 cold emails, it’s not mentorship and it’s not a research position. Mostly it’s small pieces of advice, a pointer to a paper you hadn’t found, occasionally a genuinely useful correction to something you got wrong. That’s still worth a lot. But I’d be lying if I said it was some hack that gets you a lab. What it gets you is practice writing to strangers concisely, a slightly thicker skin about being ignored, and once in a while, a door that opens somewhere you weren’t even knocking.