How to politely respond to generic emails requesting a PhD/job in my lab? Without wasting too much time
What I currently do is save the following text on my computer, and simply paste it in an email response every time I receive this type of email.
I'm sorry to say that this email is too generic for me to consider you as a future PhD student working with me. Unfortunately, it doesn't demonstrate that you know what topics I work on. I'd recommend in the future sending only a few emails. Focus on max 10 or so potential supervisors that really fit your specific research interest. Explain what specifically drew you to them as a supervisor. Explain what you want to work on with them. You should have read one of their papers or at minimum read a description of their research from their webpage. The type of email you wrote will get very few responses because we receive several such emails. I hope this doesn't come off too harsh. I hope you might take this advice and improve next time if you send more emails in the future - because I really do want you to succeed.
Here is an example of what I sent to my prospective PhD advisor 10 years ago. I only emailed 6 professors, because I really wanted to spend a lot of time tailoring my email to their interests and convincing them I wanted to work on the things they worked on.
"My name is ____________ and I am a senior majoring in Applied Mathematics at UC Davis. I am interested in working in your lab during graduate studies because of my broad interests in theoretical ecology.
Your website especially stood out because you state that you encourage independent research and teamwork. Currently, I am collaborating with six other students modelling plant population dynamics in fragmented landscapes. We defined our own research question, and although it was the toughest part of the project it was the most rewarding.
During this project, I first came across your early work on the population dynamics of plants with a dormant life stage - and further reading some of your newer papers in epidemiology, predator prey dynamics and evolution, I really like the diversity of the problems in your lab.
Specifically, I am interested in doing research in spatial ecology and understanding how populations spread. This is because spread is not only a fundamental process in ecology but also because it is at the heart of controlling environmental pests and diseases. I think your work on integral projection models will be especially relevant to the spread models I want to study (integro-difference equations). I am in the beginning phase of drafting an NSF graduate research fellowship application on how to best choose the locations of pest control when a pest species spreads according to such equations, and think you’d be an ideal supervisor for the project.
I was wondering if you will have any openings for new graduate students in your lab this coming year? Any comments or feedback would be greatly appreciated."
Note the parts about teamwork and independent research are specifically on this professors website that talks about qualities he looks for in graduate students. I didn't put this sentence in any of my emails to other professors (in fact all the sentences except for the first one are very different for each prospective professor). For most professors, I wrote shorter emails that focussed on how their work related to mine. For example, sentences like the bolded one in this email.
cheers,
-Dr X
The goal is to provide them with useful advice that they might take and become more successful in the future. Often these students come from disadvantaged backgrounds or from developing countries and I think it is really important to try to help them and not just ignore their emails. Of course, as one becomes more well known, even this strategy might prove to be cumbersome.
Over this past graduate student application season, nearly all of the students I sent this email response to were gushing with gratitude for the advice.
If I am not especially interested in the student's profile, I simply delete the email. If no effort whatsoever was spent by the sender to address an email to me personally, I don't feel like I have a duty to respond to it.
If I am interested by the student's profile and they have just been clueless about how to get in touch with potential supervisors, you can answer generic advice as suggested in @WetlabStudent's answer, or you can write a one-line generic answer like "Thanks for reaching out. What would specifically interest you in working with me?" and give the student a chance to be more specific.
In our department, we forward those emails to the department administrator, who replies with a polite but generic e-mail encouraging prospective students to apply via our normal procedure. However, that’s a bit above and beyond, and I realize many departments don’t offer such a service to their faculty.
In lieu of that, if you are a Gmail user, I recommend the “canned responses” feature, which is even easier than the copy and paste approach IMO.