How It Works

How ReachOut works

From interest to inbox in minutes. ReachOut handles the research so you can focus on making a genuine connection.

1

Build your profile

Upload your resume or fill your profile in by hand. ReachOut extracts your coursework, projects, skills, research interests, and goals — the raw material behind every match. The more specific your profile, the better your matches: "reinforcement learning for robotics" finds you different professors than "computer science." Your profile is saved to your account, so matches keep improving as you add to it.

2

Discover professors

Search 12,000+ researchers by field, school, or location — built on real publication records from OpenAlex, not stale directory listings. Every recommendation carries a reply-fit score from 30 to 99% that blends two things: how closely a professor's recent work matches your profile, and how likely they are to answer a cold email at all. You spend your time on professors who are both relevant and reachable.

3

Write an email worth answering

Professors ignore generic outreach — the email that gets answered names a specific recent paper and says something real about it. ReachOut surfaces each professor's latest work and guides you through a fill-in-the-blank structure anchored to one of their papers, so the result is specific and personal but still entirely in your own voice. It also hunts down the professor's email address from open sources, labeled verified or best-guess so you know how confident to be.

4

Track & send

Send through your own Gmail account, right from ReachOut — the professor sees a normal email from you, because it is one. The tracker keeps every contact organized through the full funnel: to email, drafted, sent, replied. When a professor hasn't answered in a week, ReachOut flags that it's time for a polite follow-up — the step most students skip and the one that most often turns silence into a reply.

What the reply-fit score means

Every recommended professor shows a match between 30 and 99%. It's built from two ingredients, both computed from the professor's real publication record:

  • Topical fit — how closely their recent papers overlap with your background and interests. Recent matters: a professor who published in your area this year is a far better target than one who left it a decade ago.
  • Reply-likelihood — how active they are right now, and how saturated with attention they already are, normalized by field. A famous professor with tens of thousands of citations gets hundreds of cold emails and answers almost none. An active professor building a lab in your exact niche reads theirs.

The score is a probability signal, not a promise — a 90% match can still stay silent, and a 45% can surprise you. What it does is order your list so your first ten emails go to the people most likely to write back.

Common questions

Is ReachOut free?

Yes. ReachOut is completely free while in open beta — no credit card, no trial timer. Every feature, including match scores, email discovery, drafting help, and the tracker, is included. See pricing for details.

Does ReachOut send emails for me?

No. Every email is written by you and sent from your own Gmail address. ReachOut helps you find the right professor, structure the email, and track the outcome — nothing is ever sent without you hitting send.

Where does the professor data come from?

Professor profiles and publication records come from OpenAlex, the open index of the world's research. Email addresses are discovered from free public sources like Europe PMC, open-access papers, and institutional pages — each labeled as verified or best-guess so you know what you're working with.

Will a professor know I used ReachOut?

No. The email is yours: your words, your voice, sent from your own address. ReachOut adds no branding, tracking pixels, or watermarks to anything you send.

Ready to reach out?

Free while in beta — find the professors whose work matches yours.

Built on open data from OpenAlex & ORCID