GUIDELINES FOR CONTACTING ME and my relationship to email
In general, Scott Hughes’ guidelines for contacting a faculty member apply to me as well. Aside from this, below you find some more details about my relationship to email, which you may want to keep in mind if you do not receive any response from me. As Scott writes, I do not enforce these rules to be a jerk (although I never said I am a good person): simply, if I didn’t do so, I would get nothing done.
As a faculty member, my time is extremely limited, and as such I protect it jealously. Work-life balance is also extremely important for me (especially with a small child), and as such I protect the time I spend with my family even more jealously. Although email is the easiest way to contact me, it is also the biggest threat to the earlier two items, and I therefore treat it with extreme caution.
In short, I check my email only once a day Mon-Fri, usually in the afternoon (around 6 am Italy time), and process it in about 30 minutes time: the rest of the time, my inbox is paused using Inbox Pause, and I only receive emails from a handful of carefully selected addresses (most of the addresses in this whitelist end in unitn.it, and are those from which typically quick action may be required). I never check my email on weekends, or when on holiday, and I do not have my email on my phone.
You can easily imagine that when my inbox is unpaused it is flowing with emails, and I triage these by priority, meaning that many get deleted - this is especially true after returning from holidays (during which my email is basically the event horizon of a black hole). As the triaging is done quickly, there is a class of emails which usually get deleted instantly (aside from crackpot emails discussing the author’s latest theory of everything - I’m very happy for you but I could not care less): very long emails from a sender whom I don’t know, which only get to the point (if at all) after several paragraphs, with an uninformative subject line, or sometimes even without subject line. I’m not a jerk but if I don’t know you and you are contacting me, I need to be able to identify quickly what you are asking me, and if I have to spend more than 30 seconds to do so, I will delete your email without thinking twice.
I often receive student queries about internships in my group, short term research projects, visiting positions, and so on: with very rare exceptions, and unless there is a pre-existing research relationship (in any case with no more than a degree of academic separation), the answer is always invariably no, because my priority as a faculty member at Trento is to supervise Trento students. Also, generic enquiries about doing your PhD in my group will not be answered if I get the impression you are just sending these emails to N>>1 professors, simply changing the professor’s name or the institution (and sometimes not even that). As an example, I once got an email expressing interest in working with me at Weizmann Institute, and another one addressed to “Dear Prof. Chris Clarkson” - needless to say, I responded to neither of them, and to neither of the many “Why aren’t you responding” follow-up emails in the latter case. Finally, I only answer my office phone if the call is from an University of Trento number or if I recognize the number.