Sorry if you saw this in the College Admissions thread, I put it in the wrong place so reposting here! :D
I'm planning to email professors nearby (I'm in the DC area so probably profs at UVA or VTech) about working with them over the summer in an unpaid internship. I'm interested in the CS field, but having only taken APCS, I'm absolutely lost when I look at their research projects. And I don't really know how to email them.
So here are my questions:
1. As mere high school students, are we supposed to be able to understand what the heck is going on in the research? Because let's be real, how many high school students would really be able to understand and help out "Automatic Techniques for Evaluating and Hardening Machine Learning Classifiers in the Presence of Adversaries"? I have no idea what that even means, let alone how I could possibly be of use... so i'm kind of questioning how high school students do research and what exactly professors expect high school interns/lab assistants to be doing.
2. I read a lot of threads on how to email professors, but I'm stuck on coming up with project ideas I could propose or just how I can talk about my interests when I'm just interested in really broad things like software engineering, mobile app development, computer programming, etc.
3. I'm afraid if I over-state how much I know in my email, they'll expect me to know more than I actually do and then like kick me out later because I can't keep up. But I've heard that if you don't advocate for your own capabilities, no one will.
4. Can you guys give me opinions on the email I've crafted so far through PM?
Thank you soo much!
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