If you are like me, you spend hours every semester reading and replying to what seems like an endless onslaught of emails from professors, employers, fellow students, the Loch Ness monster… You open your eyes to a glaring screen that will either have you crying in joy at the sight of ‘class is canceled’ or weeping in misery when you realize you forgot to submit that 1500-word politics assignment at midnight. Now, your professor is barraging you with questions of where it is and how you will remain a failure for your entire life, and no this did not happen to me, and I reject any insinuations you are making otherwise!
Emails have a reputation in college for being overused, over-ignored, and having an expectation of a formality that half-convinces you that you need to be wearing a suit and tie to even hit the ‘reply’ button. They pile up in the inbox as a list of emboldened reminders of how disorganized you are. You make promises to go through them, to clear out the junk, to reply to that email from an overpaid Wire employee requesting an interview for their article about how that random club you joined in your first semester builds community. In reality, every other month, you press down on the ‘mark as read’ button and pray you did not miss any ‘actually important’ emails.
The question that scholars for centuries have been trying to puzzle through is why the college email is so despised by students and so beloved by professors. Why, in the year of the seeming dawn of AI sentience and rich people taking day trips to space, are we still required to join email threads of professors wanting to discuss making a schedule for who brings in snacks each week? Why are we required to format these one-sentence replies like we are drafting a letter to the President?
Writing emails at college has the same degree of formality as every traditional assignment or exam we are required to take and yet no one knows why. If I want to add a fun little crying emoji at the end of my emails, why is that such a bad thing? Whitman needs a mass database that records each professor’s expectations for email etiquette as I don’t have time to figure out if a professor will match my ‘I’m sorry for sleeping through class, please don’t fail me’ vibes on an email ‘sent from my iPhone.’
The formality isn’t even the worst of it. As a wise YikYakker replied to my post begging for opinions, “email has you accessible at all hours, so there really isn’t a ‘work’ and ‘home’ separation.” College distinguishes itself from high school by keeping a majority of students in the vicinity of campus. The Whitman Bubble creates a sense of the isolation of campus wherein even taking a nap between classes in your own bed still feels like being at school. Email has made students available to professors at every hour of the day. For people who allow for email notifications on their phones, there is the constant pressure of replying even when you are supposed to be having ‘me time.’ For people who do not have these notifications, there is a risk of missing an important email and being labeled as ‘disorganized’ and ‘unmotivated.’
It is no wonder that countless inboxes end up in a neglected heap by the end of the semester. The overwhelming pressure to reply to every email that pops up is bound to break even the most committed students. We enter as first-years with glowing halos, signing up for every listserv at the activities fair, and then spend the next four years building up the courage to remove ourselves from the list. “Unsubscribing from listservs can be so awkward if there’s no ‘unsubscribe’ button and you actually have to email the listserv and ask to be taken off; I’m anxious lol,” said another pained YikYakker.
In 2023, students are entering college fluent in countless media websites. We have been raised alongside the rise of social media and have embraced every new method of communication that has been sent our way. We use more informal social media for our personal lives to connect with the people around us without the need for phone number directories or address books. We use sites like Discord and Twitter to connect with larger communities and stay up-to-date with whatever is happening around the world. Even workplaces are switching to more efficient platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. For a reason though that I cannot fathom, colleges remain in the archaic realm of email.
This does not mean that we should just hide from the problem, though. If schools are going to continue using email as a prime method of communication, students and professors alike need to figure out a way to make the platform more manageable. We need to gain some semblance of email fluency that eases the stalemate between knowing there is an issue and not doing anything about it.
This WhitTech project will explore the essentials of college email and find a way to help students and professors alike to more effectively use their Whitman email.
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