Senior economists asked me to reconnect after finishing course no reply in 2 weeks

A few months ago, I cold-emailed a very senior and well-known economist who runs a research lab. They responded very kindly and essentially told me to finish my econometrics course, reconnect afterward, and that they hoped they could find some way for me to become involved with the lab.

I completed the course in August and emailed them again as they had asked.

Around the same period, I also tried reading one of their papers with a coauthor and sent them a separate email explaining how I was trying to understand the empirical strategy using what I had learned in econometrics. It was genuinely one of the first papers where I felt I could start understanding some of the empirical work rather than only the conclusions.

I did not receive a response to my post-course email, so after roughly two weeks I sent one polite follow-up. I haven't heard back yet.

For additional context, this economist has interacted with me on LinkedIn before, including reacting to some of my posts/comments, so the original response did not feel like a completely generic reply.

I understand that very senior academics are incredibly busy, and I also understand that saying they would hopefully find a way to involve me was not a promise of an RA position.

I'm mainly wondering how people who have worked with faculty or research labs would interpret this.

Would you assume:

they are simply busy and the email is sitting in their inbox;

they may need to check with people in the lab/projects before giving me an answer;

there currently isn't an opportunity and they haven't gotten around to saying so;

or that I should interpret the lack of response as a soft no?

I'm not planning to email again anytime soon. I'm mainly trying to understand what is normal in academia because, as an undergraduate, I don't have much experience with situations like this.