A paper sent to the wrong venue does not get rejected quickly — it gets desk-rejected after six weeks, or sent to reviewers who evaluate it against criteria it was never trying to meet. That is a lost semester. Two mechanics in particular are now failure points nobody warns students about: preprint policy (posting to arXiv can disqualify you at some venues and is required at others) and AI-disclosure policy, which most journals adopted between 2023 and 2025 and which differ enough that you cannot assume.
The journals’ own scope and author-guidelines pages — there is no substitute and no aggregator that is reliably current. Sherpa Romeo for preprint and self-archiving policy across publishers.
None.
Three candidate venues for a paper you are actually writing. For each, four things:
Then pick one and justify it against the two you rejected — not in the abstract, but for this paper. “Higher impact factor” is not a justification.
Finally, draft the cover letter. First paragraph names the contribution, in the words from IMRAD structure.
Everything above is audience analysis. A hiring group is an audience with a scope statement, a timeline, and things it requires — they are simply written somewhere other than an author-guidelines page. Once you are in your final two years, run the identical exercise on a place you might work.
Three candidate groups, not three companies. “EPRI” is not a target; “the Energy Systems and Climate Analysis group, which builds US-REGEN” is. Name the group and the specific thing it builds. If you cannot, you have not done the reading, and the reader will know within a sentence.
For each of the three, the same four attributes: what they actually work on, quoted from their own material; their timeline — posting cycles, when funding lands; what they require — degree stage, clearance, location; and what they publish, which tells you whether your record looks like the records of people they hire.
Then pick one, justify it against the two you rejected — for your work, not in the abstract — and draft the message. It is a cover letter with the labels changed: the first paragraph names your contribution in the words from IMRAD structure, and names the specific thing of theirs it connects to.
One check this exercise exists to catch. Confirm the person you are writing to actually works on the thing you are writing about. Meeting somebody from an organisation is not the same as meeting the group you want. When they are not the same, the ask is an introduction, not a job — and that is a different message, usually a shorter one.
One-page memo plus the draft cover letter or outreach message.
This replaces your writing entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WW assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.
You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all five skills in M5 are done, submit the M5 — The Review Cycle assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.