This assignment began with reading an article titled “How To Email A Professor”. Next, we had to show this article to 5 other college students. We then had to keep track of which suggestions each student was most familiar with prior to reading the article, and which suggestions each student was least familiar with. Finally, we had to post on the discussion board the initials of each of the 5 college students, and which suggestions they were most and least familiar with.
The 9 suggestions from the article were to use your university email account, use your professor’s last name in your salutation, start with a new message, write an informative subject heading, do not address a professor by their first name unless they have explicitly instructed you to do so, write grammatically, spell correctly, and use appropriate capitalization, use paragraph breaks to help organize your message, don’t use e-mail to rant or whine, and write the body of the email message first; fill in the address in the to: line last.
I explained in my discussion board post that I showed the article to 3 friends from UW Madison, and 2 friends from other universities. My 3 friends from UW have the initials of TS, MB, and NC. My two friends from other schools include MP, who goes to the University of Chicago, and PK, who goes to UIC.
TS told me that he was the least familiar with recommendations 1 and 2, about using your university email account and using the professor’s last name in a salutation. He told me he was very familiar with suggestions 3 through 9.
MB told me that he was least familiar with number 8, about ranting or whining over email. He was most familiar with number 6, about writing grammatically and using proper spelling.
NC said that he was least familiar with number 9, about filling the body of an email first before filling in the address. He was most familiar with number 1, about using your university email account.
MP told me he was very familiar with all 9 recommendations! He is a very intellectual guy, so this did not surprise me very much.
PK claimed he was least familiar with number 9, about filling the body of an email first before filling in the address. He said he was very familiar with the other 8 recommendations.
Reflecting on this assignment, it was nice to read an article about how to email professors, since it is a topic that is very prevalent to college students. For me, even though I have heard all 9 of these suggestions before, I still violate some of them sometimes. For example, sometimes I forget to start with a new message sometimes, instead of replying in an old email conversation I had with a professor. So, this was a nice recap, and will likely lead me to mess up less in the future.
Additionally, it was nice to interact with other college students outside of the course. First, sharing the suggestions with them may have led them to learn something they didn’t know, which would be great! Second, it is just nice to see the different perspectives they have. Even though I know the people that I reached out to very well, some of them had very different familiarity than I would have expected. It was interesting to learn what each of my friends was most and least familiar with.
As mentioned in previous posts, this course never fails to include different types of assignments. Including other college students outside of the course brought in some variety, and made the assignment more enjoyable. I do not know what to expect for future assignments that may be different, but it will be interesting to see what ideas that professor Gernsbacher has to continue to mix things up!
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