Why getting an RA position is hard for MS applicants

[CalmLogic]

I thought this was very informative:

Why is it harder for MSCS students and undergrads to get paid RAships?
Everyone has her/his own opinion, but here is mine:

1. Short time commitment. Most MSCS students are here for 1.5 to 2 years, and many are only interested in a one-quarter or two-quarter project. That often isn't enough time to make interesting progress on research, and the management/time cost of bringing a new student up to speed can be high (even if the RAship is for credit and not pay).
2. Heavy courseload. The MS program is course-heavy. If you're taking 3 or 4 hard courses, that leaves little time to concentrate on a research project, and makes you invisible around midterm and finals. Unlike problem sets, research cannot usually be done in short spurts once or twice a week--it requires blocks of uninterrupted time. If your prospective sponsor doesn't believe you will have such a schedule, they may be hesitant to work with you.
3. Lack of funding. Funding is tight all over, and advisors who've already invested 3 or 4 years in a PhD student need to make sure that student has enough funding to finish the program, so such considerations will always be high priority. For MS RAships in particular, the burden is high--it costs roughly the same to fund an MS RAship as a PhD RAship: around $12,000 per quarter, slightly more over the summer, when all is said and done. (I know your paycheck says less than that, but more than half of the money is mandatory overhead of one kind or another.)

What can I do to maximize my chances of being offered a position?

1. Have a demonstrated track record of working on research projects--even course-type projects such as CS244C--and a research supervisor who is willing to write a one or two line email about how well you did. That person need not be a faculty member, it can be a graduate student you were working with, a faculty member from a previous institution, etc.
2. If the problem is one of funding, be willing to consider working for credit initially, with the informal agreement that if all goes well you will be first in line when more funding does become available.
3. Don't just show up and say "Do you have anything for me to do?" Learn about the projects people are working on (often their PhD students' home pages are more informative than the faculty home pages or even the group/lab home pages, so check all of them). If they have recent papers that are accessible to you, check them out. They are excited about what they're working on, and will react more positively if you are too. On the other hand, don't feign excitement just to get the position, because it will quickly become obvious to everyone.
4. Don't spam people with identical emails. If you intro yourself by email, do it in a personal way, offer to drop by in person, and provide enough background about yourself and why you're a good candidate that you will in fact be invited to drop by in person.
5. Talk to the PhD students. They are on the front lines, and besides describing the project, may also have a better sense of what parts of it could use some extra assistance.
6. Realize that people are really busy. If you don't get immediate responses, or the responses or short, don't get offended and don't give up. For my own part, I consider every request individually, but I typically get several such requests per month (more at the beginning of each new quarter). Sometimes it is not even a problem of funding but of supervisory bandwidth.

http://swig.stanford.edu/~fox/advising.html

[mrkunal]

Really informative. I was wondering why we don't get many RA's. Thanks a lot.