Students: Write shorter emails
The fall semester is underway at almost all universities now, so this is as good a time as any to give some advice to students. Write shorter emails.I gave that away in the post title, so why am I still writing? Because I want to try to explain why I give this advice. Friends, your profs get a emails. A lot of emails. A great heaping buttload of emails. We get them from chairs, we get them from deans, we get emails from chair who are forwarding the dean’s emails, we get them from funding agencies that we have never applied to a grant from, we get them from almost every administrative office on campus, we get them from journals, and we get them from students. I don’t think it’s easy to understand how much of a professor’s life revolves around emails. It is the default mode of communication for universities. I think for many students, their typical mode of communication is through their phone, either by text or social media. Email? That’s for old people. But a lot of professo...