During the first quarter of my second year at TU Delft, I applied for three (all available) teaching assistant positions. They were for courses in which I had received grades of 10, 10, and 9.5, so I thought I had a reasonable chance. Yet, I was rejected from all three.
At around the same time, I had emailed PRIME, a team at TU Delft working on mathematics education. I knew their work from the mathematics courses in my bachelor’s and had really liked the way the material was taught. I did not know that students worked on the team, let alone that there might be a job for me there. I simply wanted to ask whether there was some way I could contribute. Unfortunately, I did not get a response.
I just wanted to follow up…
After a month, I decided to send a reminder email. I did not want to be annoying, and the lack of a reply seemed like an answer in itself. Still sending one more seemed worth the small risk.
This time they replied. My first email had been overlooked, and they invited me to come in for a conversation in person.
I didn’t know what to expect from the meeting. There was no specific position to discuss and no formal role I was applying for. Since they were giving me their time, I wanted to make the most of it, so I prepared a short presentation with ideas for how mathematics could be taught in computer science courses.
One of those ideas was to use more mathematical animations. I loved the videos by 3Blue1Brown and I thought that animations made with Manim—the library behind those videos—could do something similar for university mathematics.
On the same page
As it turned out the PRIME team was already working on several of the things I was proposing, including the use of Manim. Rather than having to convince them that the ideas were useful, we found that we were thinking along very similar lines. They told me I could be a good fit for the team.
A few months later, I was working at PRIME and was responsible for creating Manim animations for mathematics courses. An awkward email turned into my first job at the university. I stayed with the team for the remaining two years of my bachelor’s, working with mathematics professors on visual explanations and tools for online textbooks. You can see some of that work in Mission LAIKA, a project that uses animation to connect linear algebra with kinematics and aerodynamics.
Conclusion
Looking back, the surprising part of this story is how ordinary it is. Nothing changed because of an elaborate application strategy. I sent an email, it was missed, and a month later I sent a follow-up.
The three rejections were disappointing, especially given my results but they pushed me to look beyond the opportunities that were already advertised. PRIME did not have a role waiting for me when I first reached out; The conversation came first, and the job grew from the overlap between what they were building and what I wanted to work on.
I do not think every unanswered email needs another follow-up, or that every email request leads somewhere but reaching out is a small action, and occasionally the reply can change much more than you expect.