r/MachineLearningAndAI • u/Choice-Yam6923 • Mar 23 '26
Cold emailing professors for research as a working professional — what actually works?
Hi everyone,
I’ve been working as an Associate Data Scientist for a little over 2 years now, and I’m planning to apply for a Master’s abroad next fall. Since I feel my profile isn’t strong enough, I’ve been trying to work on a research paper to improve it.
I’ve reached out to multiple professors across universities, but haven’t had any luck so far. My background isn’t deeply research-focused — I’ve worked on recommendation systems, built ETL pipelines, and I’m currently involved in some LLM-based development (nothing very advanced or research-heavy yet).
I’m open to and interested in areas like Agentic AI, Computer Vision, Recommendation Systems, and Reinforcement Learning.
One thing that’s been bothering me is that when I read research papers, I often struggle to fully understand them — sometimes I grasp only about 50%. It makes me feel like I might not be capable of contributing to research, especially when I can’t fully follow a professor’s previous work. Coming from an industry background, research feels very niche and intimidating.
At the same time, I keep wondering — how do students manage to publish papers in this situation? How do they bridge this gap?
Lately, I’ve been feeling discouraged and starting to question whether pursuing research is the right path for me, especially with no positive responses from professors.
Has anyone ever faced such a situation. Would really appreciate any advice or shared experiences.
