WEL-come to the Wildlife Ecophysiology Lab!
October 22, 2025: I have one opening for a JRF position (minimum of 1 year). I would ideally like to recruit someone who has some experience or at least interest in identifying birds and doing bird surveys. But if there's someone who has that experience and is also interested in helping out in a moth project and a few other projects on birds/bats/habitat surveys, that would be ideal.
Introduction. 4 Feb, 2025. I will try to keep adding to this page over time. But this is just a quick set of notes, because of the number of people writing to me for summer positions. Please also check out the Early Career Advice page for tips on applying for positions in Indian academia. I spend time writing these guides because I believe that part of making science equitable is making processes as transparent as possible - so please use them! I welcome feedback or additions to them - they should be as useful to students as they possibly can be.
Hello! I know it is intimidating to apply for a new position. Here are some tips that will hopefully help. If you are here on this page, you already probably know that writing to people helps with getting positions.
The biggest piece of advice I can offer is - do not send a template email to everyone you are applying to. Why? Because:
1. You are maybe writing 10-100 applications to get a position, depending on how widely you are applying. Yes, this is a lot of work. But consider the person receiving your application. Faculty are potentially receiving hundreds of applications every few months, and might have no positions available in their lab, or a maximum of 1-2 positions available at any given time. They are sorting through these hundreds of applicants, while doing all the other things for their job (which include teaching courses, mentoring students on research projects, writing grant applications, submitting grant reports, managing funds, ordering supplies for the lab, planning fieldwork and applying for permits, hiring other faculty, constructing buildings, attending conferences, giving talks, etc.). Their email inboxes are usually also flooded with literally hundreds of emails a day. So, they are busy doing a diversity of things, and their goal is probably not to ignore you. I do not say this to intimidate you, but to give you some context on why so many of the emails you write never get a response, or get very delayed responses. How can you stand out in this deluge of emails? Think about the impression your email is making on the recipient!
2. You need to do some background research. Look up the person, see what they work on. Check out their lab page, some of their papers. If they have had students in the past see where some of them are now to get a sense of what they tend to work on. Then think about whether their kind of research is really what you want to be involved with, and why - why would it be interesting to you, and why should you be interesting to them? How can you contribute something to their lab; what skills or approaches do you bring with you? Even if you do not have much prior relevant experience, think about what skills you have in general: maybe you have made some interesting natural history observations your are curious about, or you are good at writing up reports on scientific papers, or you are good at working with a team. Then try to communicate these things to the potential adviser. Please remember that this is a topic you should be interested in - it really helps the adviser if you have thought about why. I understand you might be early on in your career and are looking for your first research opportunity, but you can still do some background work and be curious and think of questions you have about their research - this is a really good way to engage their interest.
3. Things not to do: Many of the emails we get have some combination of these things in common: They have no subject line, are addressed to someone of the wrong gender ("Respected Sir" to a female faculty) or a misspelled name ("Arusha Shanker" for me), do not mention where the student is studying, what position they are applying for, what time period they can work for, why they are interested in my lab specifically, have no background on the person (e.g. attached CV) included, or are vague or completely off-target for the lab in their interests (e.g., when applying to my bird physiology lab, they say "I am interested in biotechnology and cancer"). Please use an email address that matches your name! I've gotten many emails from addresses that do not match the student's name - that's very confusing. I got one email from someone from an email address with a university name - like [email protected]. And then please sign off every email with your name. Especially if your email address doesn't match your name for some reason, but even otherwise. Also, it does not help me if you just list 20 interests - if you say "I am interested in behavioural ecology, evolution, nutrient cycling, pollination, cell biology, molecular biology and many others" this does not tell me anything about who you are and your research interests. I understand you might be excited about a lot of things, and have not narrowed down your interests yet, but think about it from my perspective - this list does not tell me anything about you as a person and why those things interest you and what my lab and I can do about advancing those interests. Next, please check the spelling in your email and attachments - these are indicators of your attention to detail, and we evaluate based on details like that implicitly. There are so many softwares, including Word, Google Docs, and even chatGPT, that you can use to do a spell check. Make sure all the fonts you use are matching, and not a mish-mash patchwork of different fonts throughout your email. Attach a PDF (safest for best formatting) or a Word doc; do not attach both and don't attach a scan or picture of your printed CV. Name the CV file something useful - not something like "10b39e2d-6d20-417b-8838-14ea8e7427d3 (1).docx".
4. Please do not write in groups for you and your classmates. You might think it's efficient for you and two or three of your friends to write to me together and all ask for an internship. There are many reasons why this is not useful for you and your classmates. 1. usually labs do not have so many open spots at a time to take multiple people together. 2. if I am selecting people for internships I am looking for students who can be independent and whom I can judge individually. An email like this tells me you are close friends who are maybe dependent on each other, and gives me the sense that you expect that all 4 of you will be accepted, otherwise none of you will go. 3. Sending a group email makes the receiver automatically compare your CVs and try to find differences and commonalities between them, this is not helpful to you. 4. I have no way of knowing which one of you did how much work in writing to me, and what interests each of you has - if you join my lab you will not be doing group projects, you would do individual projects that you could maybe help each other with. How can I gauge what your individual interests and strengths are if you write to me as one entity? Please find your own places to apply and don't copy the same template from each other to write to people - show your individuality!
5. Try to show not tell. For example, do not tell me "I have an excellent GPA, "I am very skilled at...", "I am a highly motivated student". instead, show it: my GPA is ##, and "I have ## months experience doing...". Describe what you've learned from your experiences, which will showcase how you have thought about it, rather than just telling me that you're great at it - how do I know that? I've gotten many emails saying "I believe my skills and experience make me a great fit for this role". You might, but how can I know that and calibrate it against the hundreds of other applicants? I might know people with 15 years' experience and a PhD in some skillset - are you as skilled as them? Do you mean you have read about it in textbooks, or you have experience from practicals, or from doing am internship in that? It is difficult to calibrate if you just say you are good or excellent at something - tell me some examples of what you know or how you know it, and let me calibrate that. And honestly, I have used methods in my PhD for years and I would still hesitate to say I am excellently skilled at them, because there's always more to learn and new contexts to learn about them in. I can evaluate your experience much easier if I have examples of what you learned from a past experience and what questions you you got from that experience. It also does not help to just say "my research interests align perfectly with yours". How do I know what you mean, or which interests you are talking about and why? Ask me some questions about my science, tell me what ideas you had when reading about it - these are much clearly signs that your interests align with mine. In academia, what we really want to know is how you think. So show us how you think!
6. Flattery does not help. You don't need to say "in your esteemed institute" or "doing cutting edge work". You do not need to tell me about the groundbreaking work I'm doing - it's really not that ground breaking :D. But my job is to ask cool questions and find ways to answer them. So let me know why the work interests you and what you want to learn from it.
7. CV formats: If you've never been taught how to structure a CV, this isn't obvious, but in academia (universities, research institutes), we do not use the 1 page corporate resume format with two columns. A majority of students emailing me use this format. I don't really mind personally, but just a tip for academia for the future, try to look up an academic CV format and use that (single column, not too many colours especially in the background, can be a couple pages long).
So what you should do is read up on the lab, imagine yourself there, and try to convince the potential adviser in a concise 2-3 short paragraph email why you can bring something to their lab, and what you are really excited to learn from being there. To take it even one step further, you could try talking to their students and finding out the lab's latest projects, or if you happen to visit the city they work in, try to visit their lab in person, or meet them at a conference. In person interactions (unfortunately or otherwise) can really make a difference, and both you and the potential adviser assess how well you would work together.
Students, JRFs, other interns, potential PhD and postdocs: I have one opening for a JRF position (minimum of 1 year). I would ideally like to recruit someone who has some experience or at least interest in identifying birds and doing bird surveys. But if there's someone who has that experience and is also interested in helping out in a moth project and a few other projects on birds/bats/habitat surveys, that would be ideal. I do not have any active openings for shorter-term positions. I invite PhD and postdocs applicants to write to me with that position in the title. For everyone for these positions, you can feel free to fill this form and I will get back to you if a future opportunity becomes available.
Students for Summer 2025: I received over 660 applicants for 1 TIFRH VSRP (Visiting Students Research Programme) 2025 position! Applications are closed for the summer. This summer, we were only taking on students who are interested in field biology/bird acoustics to carry out pilot studies that aim to: a) understand the density and abundance of diurnal birds (sunbirds, swifts/swallows, babblers, bee-eaters, pigeons/doves, bulbuls); b) quantitate the abundance and calling activity patterns of nocturnal birds (nightjars, Indian thick-knee, lapwings and peafowls) on the TIFR Hyderabad campus across different microhabitats. Our diurnal bird project uses a combination of point counts and microhabitat quantification (in scrub jungles with thorny vegetation and hot summers) to understand where different species are likely to be found. To study nocturnal species, we use long term passive acoustic monitoring by recording bird calls at select sites on campus at night during different months round the year. This leads to the collection of large acoustic datasets that need to be analysed to make inferences. We are currently in the process of building classifiers that accurately describe spectral features of bird calls and evaluating their performance (BirdNet Analyzer). If this is work that excites you, please fill out the form above. For this summer, we are not taking students interested cell/molecular biology, computational biology, or mathematical modelling.
Introduction. 4 Feb, 2025. I will try to keep adding to this page over time. But this is just a quick set of notes, because of the number of people writing to me for summer positions. Please also check out the Early Career Advice page for tips on applying for positions in Indian academia. I spend time writing these guides because I believe that part of making science equitable is making processes as transparent as possible - so please use them! I welcome feedback or additions to them - they should be as useful to students as they possibly can be.
Hello! I know it is intimidating to apply for a new position. Here are some tips that will hopefully help. If you are here on this page, you already probably know that writing to people helps with getting positions.
The biggest piece of advice I can offer is - do not send a template email to everyone you are applying to. Why? Because:
1. You are maybe writing 10-100 applications to get a position, depending on how widely you are applying. Yes, this is a lot of work. But consider the person receiving your application. Faculty are potentially receiving hundreds of applications every few months, and might have no positions available in their lab, or a maximum of 1-2 positions available at any given time. They are sorting through these hundreds of applicants, while doing all the other things for their job (which include teaching courses, mentoring students on research projects, writing grant applications, submitting grant reports, managing funds, ordering supplies for the lab, planning fieldwork and applying for permits, hiring other faculty, constructing buildings, attending conferences, giving talks, etc.). Their email inboxes are usually also flooded with literally hundreds of emails a day. So, they are busy doing a diversity of things, and their goal is probably not to ignore you. I do not say this to intimidate you, but to give you some context on why so many of the emails you write never get a response, or get very delayed responses. How can you stand out in this deluge of emails? Think about the impression your email is making on the recipient!
2. You need to do some background research. Look up the person, see what they work on. Check out their lab page, some of their papers. If they have had students in the past see where some of them are now to get a sense of what they tend to work on. Then think about whether their kind of research is really what you want to be involved with, and why - why would it be interesting to you, and why should you be interesting to them? How can you contribute something to their lab; what skills or approaches do you bring with you? Even if you do not have much prior relevant experience, think about what skills you have in general: maybe you have made some interesting natural history observations your are curious about, or you are good at writing up reports on scientific papers, or you are good at working with a team. Then try to communicate these things to the potential adviser. Please remember that this is a topic you should be interested in - it really helps the adviser if you have thought about why. I understand you might be early on in your career and are looking for your first research opportunity, but you can still do some background work and be curious and think of questions you have about their research - this is a really good way to engage their interest.
3. Things not to do: Many of the emails we get have some combination of these things in common: They have no subject line, are addressed to someone of the wrong gender ("Respected Sir" to a female faculty) or a misspelled name ("Arusha Shanker" for me), do not mention where the student is studying, what position they are applying for, what time period they can work for, why they are interested in my lab specifically, have no background on the person (e.g. attached CV) included, or are vague or completely off-target for the lab in their interests (e.g., when applying to my bird physiology lab, they say "I am interested in biotechnology and cancer"). Please use an email address that matches your name! I've gotten many emails from addresses that do not match the student's name - that's very confusing. I got one email from someone from an email address with a university name - like [email protected]. And then please sign off every email with your name. Especially if your email address doesn't match your name for some reason, but even otherwise. Also, it does not help me if you just list 20 interests - if you say "I am interested in behavioural ecology, evolution, nutrient cycling, pollination, cell biology, molecular biology and many others" this does not tell me anything about who you are and your research interests. I understand you might be excited about a lot of things, and have not narrowed down your interests yet, but think about it from my perspective - this list does not tell me anything about you as a person and why those things interest you and what my lab and I can do about advancing those interests. Next, please check the spelling in your email and attachments - these are indicators of your attention to detail, and we evaluate based on details like that implicitly. There are so many softwares, including Word, Google Docs, and even chatGPT, that you can use to do a spell check. Make sure all the fonts you use are matching, and not a mish-mash patchwork of different fonts throughout your email. Attach a PDF (safest for best formatting) or a Word doc; do not attach both and don't attach a scan or picture of your printed CV. Name the CV file something useful - not something like "10b39e2d-6d20-417b-8838-14ea8e7427d3 (1).docx".
4. Please do not write in groups for you and your classmates. You might think it's efficient for you and two or three of your friends to write to me together and all ask for an internship. There are many reasons why this is not useful for you and your classmates. 1. usually labs do not have so many open spots at a time to take multiple people together. 2. if I am selecting people for internships I am looking for students who can be independent and whom I can judge individually. An email like this tells me you are close friends who are maybe dependent on each other, and gives me the sense that you expect that all 4 of you will be accepted, otherwise none of you will go. 3. Sending a group email makes the receiver automatically compare your CVs and try to find differences and commonalities between them, this is not helpful to you. 4. I have no way of knowing which one of you did how much work in writing to me, and what interests each of you has - if you join my lab you will not be doing group projects, you would do individual projects that you could maybe help each other with. How can I gauge what your individual interests and strengths are if you write to me as one entity? Please find your own places to apply and don't copy the same template from each other to write to people - show your individuality!
5. Try to show not tell. For example, do not tell me "I have an excellent GPA, "I am very skilled at...", "I am a highly motivated student". instead, show it: my GPA is ##, and "I have ## months experience doing...". Describe what you've learned from your experiences, which will showcase how you have thought about it, rather than just telling me that you're great at it - how do I know that? I've gotten many emails saying "I believe my skills and experience make me a great fit for this role". You might, but how can I know that and calibrate it against the hundreds of other applicants? I might know people with 15 years' experience and a PhD in some skillset - are you as skilled as them? Do you mean you have read about it in textbooks, or you have experience from practicals, or from doing am internship in that? It is difficult to calibrate if you just say you are good or excellent at something - tell me some examples of what you know or how you know it, and let me calibrate that. And honestly, I have used methods in my PhD for years and I would still hesitate to say I am excellently skilled at them, because there's always more to learn and new contexts to learn about them in. I can evaluate your experience much easier if I have examples of what you learned from a past experience and what questions you you got from that experience. It also does not help to just say "my research interests align perfectly with yours". How do I know what you mean, or which interests you are talking about and why? Ask me some questions about my science, tell me what ideas you had when reading about it - these are much clearly signs that your interests align with mine. In academia, what we really want to know is how you think. So show us how you think!
6. Flattery does not help. You don't need to say "in your esteemed institute" or "doing cutting edge work". You do not need to tell me about the groundbreaking work I'm doing - it's really not that ground breaking :D. But my job is to ask cool questions and find ways to answer them. So let me know why the work interests you and what you want to learn from it.
7. CV formats: If you've never been taught how to structure a CV, this isn't obvious, but in academia (universities, research institutes), we do not use the 1 page corporate resume format with two columns. A majority of students emailing me use this format. I don't really mind personally, but just a tip for academia for the future, try to look up an academic CV format and use that (single column, not too many colours especially in the background, can be a couple pages long).
So what you should do is read up on the lab, imagine yourself there, and try to convince the potential adviser in a concise 2-3 short paragraph email why you can bring something to their lab, and what you are really excited to learn from being there. To take it even one step further, you could try talking to their students and finding out the lab's latest projects, or if you happen to visit the city they work in, try to visit their lab in person, or meet them at a conference. In person interactions (unfortunately or otherwise) can really make a difference, and both you and the potential adviser assess how well you would work together.
Students, JRFs, other interns, potential PhD and postdocs: I have one opening for a JRF position (minimum of 1 year). I would ideally like to recruit someone who has some experience or at least interest in identifying birds and doing bird surveys. But if there's someone who has that experience and is also interested in helping out in a moth project and a few other projects on birds/bats/habitat surveys, that would be ideal. I do not have any active openings for shorter-term positions. I invite PhD and postdocs applicants to write to me with that position in the title. For everyone for these positions, you can feel free to fill this form and I will get back to you if a future opportunity becomes available.
Students for Summer 2025: I received over 660 applicants for 1 TIFRH VSRP (Visiting Students Research Programme) 2025 position! Applications are closed for the summer. This summer, we were only taking on students who are interested in field biology/bird acoustics to carry out pilot studies that aim to: a) understand the density and abundance of diurnal birds (sunbirds, swifts/swallows, babblers, bee-eaters, pigeons/doves, bulbuls); b) quantitate the abundance and calling activity patterns of nocturnal birds (nightjars, Indian thick-knee, lapwings and peafowls) on the TIFR Hyderabad campus across different microhabitats. Our diurnal bird project uses a combination of point counts and microhabitat quantification (in scrub jungles with thorny vegetation and hot summers) to understand where different species are likely to be found. To study nocturnal species, we use long term passive acoustic monitoring by recording bird calls at select sites on campus at night during different months round the year. This leads to the collection of large acoustic datasets that need to be analysed to make inferences. We are currently in the process of building classifiers that accurately describe spectral features of bird calls and evaluating their performance (BirdNet Analyzer). If this is work that excites you, please fill out the form above. For this summer, we are not taking students interested cell/molecular biology, computational biology, or mathematical modelling.
