Tension Free Zone

AI Prompts for Internships, Cold Emails and Networking

Write a supervisor email that gets a reply, tailor a cover letter to one posting, and ask for feedback after a rejection in a way that is answerable. Every prompt is written to sound like a person rather than a template.

Frequently asked questions

Will a supervisor be able to tell that a model helped?

Every prompt asks for a message written in your words about your actual interest, and the short versions are deliberately plain. A professor who reads a hundred such emails a week is not fooled by polish; they are moved by a specific reason you wrote to them.

How long should a cold email to a professor be?

Short enough to be read on a phone: who you are, what you have read of theirs, what you are asking for, and one line on why you are worth a reply. The prompt asks for that and cuts everything that is not one of the four.

Is it worth following up after no reply?

Once, after about a week, and briefly. The follow up prompt adds the new information that justifies writing again rather than repeating the first email, which is the difference between persistence and noise.