Please stop sending me emails.
I’m sure many of you are familiar with this issue. Every day, you receive at least 20 or 30 emails from Fairfield University, usually about programs you have no relation to. Life@Fairfield is the greatest offender in this regard. Students at Fairfield University receive dozens of emails from the site in a single day, often of no relation to their academic or extracurricular lives. I, for example, am not in the nursing program, so why am I receiving constant emails about a nursing opportunity in Florence?
While this is arguably a silly issue to complain about, it is indicative of a larger mismanagement of student affairs here at Fairfield University. Some of the emails the university sends to the student body are of genuine importance and ought to be given some attention. It is far too easy to lose those messages among the dozens of superfluous ones that inundate all of us. Good management would aim to streamline this issue, so as to make sure students actually see the important emails among all the chaff.
Instead, Fairfield has not made it easy for the student body to solve this problem on its own. Life@Fairfield, for example, gives all sorts of notification options, but there is no way to remove the unnecessary emails while retaining those of personal importance. It simply isn’t dynamic enough to allow that. You can either get every message or be left blind to events on campus. Neither is a good option.
“Quite frankly, I feel like it’s very unnecessary, especially because it’s from organizations I’m not a part of, and from majors that I’m not taking. Like, I’m a politics major, and I’m getting five business emails,” says Aidan Maione, a sophomore.
Beyond Life@Fairfield, the university and its schools also send emails to people who don’t need to receive them. These often involve events and opportunities that simply are not relevant to the student in question, and only end up clogging their inbox.
To many students, this is genuinely disruptive.
“Looking through here, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t really care about,” says Matthew Bulger, a sophomore student. “I don’t want all these emails. I just want to email my professors about stuff. Sorry to Fairfield Soccer, but I don’t need to be emailed about them having a game.”
I propose an easy solution. Make it simpler to sharply limit which emails you receive. This should not be complicated, and it would save all of us a whole lot of time. Even better, Fairfield University itself could choose to limit which emails its students receive based on their schools, or, better yet, based on their majors. Imagine a world in which you only received the emails that were relevant to you. Class updates, events you’ve signed up for and university announcements. Picture how great it would be. That is a world that is, in fact, obtainable. All it would take is a little reorganization.
So, please, stop sending me emails.
