Did you email supervisors in the areas you were publishing in?
No. But even if I did, my one publication that I somehow managed to do on my own was trash. So I wouldn’t put much weight on that.
How often did you email them?
I probably tried to email a new person every couple of weeks. The first person that seriously responded is the person I am working with now!
Why’d it take so long for them to accept free high-skilled labour?
I think taking on part time students is really time consuming. A lot of institutions flat out don’t do it. And providing them with resources (like compute time on a HPC in my case) is expensive and bureaucratic. I also included my day job in my CV, so they could’ve just flat-out not have believed that I’d commit, and be wasting their time.
I would just spend more time emailing potential supervisors, with a higher frequency. There doesn’t really seem to be a minimum threshold level that I needed to hit, other than finishing my master’s