Sending me email
He who sows courtesy reaps friendship... (St. Basil)
Unfortunately, my email has grown to a point where I can no longer
respond to all messages. You can help me keep up by refraining from sending
me certain types of email. Other types I am glad to receive, but
may not get a response, or may get only a boilerplate response. In
particular:
- If you are a prospective graduate student interested in applying
to Cornell, please do not send me your application materials. You must
apply directly to your graduate field of interest, e.g., computational
biology, computer
science,
or genetics
and development.
- Please do
not send me email asking to do a summer internship in my lab.
I do not take summer interns.
- I welcome hearing from highly motivated graduate
students (current or prospective) who are
interested in the possibility of working with me. However, most
such students get the same
response: once you are admitted to a graduate program and arrive at
Cornell, please take one of my classes or see me about a lab rotation.
If things go well with the class or the rotation project, I will
be happy to discuss the possibility of joining my lab.
- There is an unfortunate trend among students weaned on email,
instant messages, and social networking to confuse their professors
with their buddies when communicating with them electronically (see
this article
in the NY Times). My approach to dealing with this problem is simply
to ignore requests that are inappropriate, demanding, or rude. I
almost never lose track of an email, so if you have not received a
response from me after several days, please rethink your
approach.
- If you are applying for an open staff position in my lab (e.g.,
postdoc or programmer), then I will gladly read your message and put
your application materials on file, but I will most likely not respond
to your message immediately (I typically receive 40-60 applications per
position). You will hear from me if and when I decide to interview
you for the position.
- If you are writing with a technical question or bug report about
my PHAST software package, I will do my best to address it, but it may
take me a week or two to respond. I am more likely to respond quickly
if you do some work on your end to isolate the particular problem
you're experiencing (e.g., compilation fails at specific step X), and
if you send me clear and concise description of it. If you experience
a bug during execution (e.g., a segmentation fault), I will need your
input files and your command-line call in order to reproduce the
problem. If your input file is large, please try to find a smaller
input that produces the same bug. Please do not send me technical
questions that are not directly related to PHAST, e.g., having to do
with the installation of cygwin or CLAPACK.
Thank you for your consideration.
Adam Siepel
May, 2008
Back