Searching unlisted email addresses of Program Director / Chairman

This is a follow-up post to an earlier post about emailing directly to residency program directors requesting them to reconsider your residency application after a rejection. That article ain't much if you can't get your email directly to the program director and / or chairman, since as we already covered how the emails listed on MyERAS are usually first screened by program coordinators.

Time to play mini-Sherlock Holmes ! ;-) Here are some ways to search and fetch email IDs of people:

1. Guesstimating the Email address construct: Look up the email addresses of any other faculty/contact on the residency program website, or lookup the email address construct of the program coordinator. Usually, for convenience, an IT department applies the same email construction rules for all employees in the organization.
So, if 'John Cummin's' email id was listed as 'JohnC@harvard.edu', it is highly likely that 'Michael Ray's' email id will be 'MichaelR@harvard.edu'. Instead if it was J_Cummins@harvard.edu, Michael Ray's would mostly be M_Ray@harvard.edu.

[Note that the reference email address needs to have the same domain name as the program website - for example Lisa_stevens@utmb.edu. If not, then look up another person listed on the site that has.]

2. Scientific Article Search: A classic example is Pubmed. Use the Author search function on pubmed.org to get links to article written by the person in question. The actual article itself usually carries the correspondence email addresses on the author / authors. You maybe lucky to have full-length article listed on pubmed itself or you could get access from a U.S. university library. Of course, the person needs to have articles published in the first place - but since usually one must be a well published person to become a program director at a good program, most of them should have published articles out there.

3. Online People Databases Search: Pipl.com is a people-data search engine which performs fairly well with email addresses. Sometimes you may be surprised what you can find when you try out your own name on this one. Another one to try is Zoominfo.com (use the people search tab). There might be others out there.

4. Web 2.0 !: You might even find the person on Web 2.0 sites like Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo, etc.

5. If nothing works and you do not find any direct email addresses, one thing to try is send an email to the publicly listed email address on ERAS and let the first line on the email be a request to forward the email to the program director / program chairman - OR, send in a postal letter addressed to the program director and use the Department address to mail it to.



Any more innovative ideas ? Let me know !