Note: the following statement is made all in good fun and is not meant to critique the functioning of the Mathematics Department (or any other department at Brandeis) in anything more than a surface-level way. Professors and staff work incredibly hard to do the work that they do, and we are incredibly lucky to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Dear Brandeis University Mathematics Department,
Every morning when I open my Brandeis inbox in gmail, I inevitably find at least one email from you. And as each day goes on, that number often doubles, triples, or even quadruples. Four emails from one department per day is, quite frankly, too many emails. Even one email per day from a department is too many emails.
Let me explain. The source of my woes is the mathmajors-group. You see, esteemed members of the Mathematics faculty, I am not and have never been a math major. I have no idea how I got added to the mathmajors-group, and I am equally as unsure why so many other non-math majors that I’ve talked to have been added just as quickly. Here is the extent of my relationship with the Brandeis Math department: I took Math 10B freshman fall, and Math 15A freshman spring. Again, since I’m just cutting to the chase, I’ll let you know straight out that I am currently a senior. And you all should definitely be able to figure out that 4 – 1 = 3. So, my only tenuous ties to your lovely department have not been relevant for about three years at this point.
And yet, somehow, you saw fit to add me to the mathmajors-group email list and never remove me from it. Why is that? I am genuinely curious. An explanation would be a rare missive that I would love to receive from you. However, I have constructed my own list of the issues I have discovered while navigating your many, many emails. These issues are threefold:
- Most of the emails I receive from you are only relevant for either true math majors or math graduate students. Through a proof by induction (my base case being that a singular email is always intended to reach its desired audience), I must conclude that you are spreading information in a highly illogical manner. It brings me limited joy to hear about the math mentorship program or the Graduate Reading Program, and I don’t see why it’s necessary for me to continue being told about them. In fact, I don’t even see why it’s necessary for actual math majors to hear about opportunities only relevant to graduate populations, and vice versa. Not every email needs to be sent to the full force of your listserv.
- This brings me to point two. The sheer volume of irrelevant emails I receive has conditioned me to automatically ignore any incoming emails from your department. This means that I miss the rare, once in a blue moon email that is actually meant for the target audience of students-who-were-at-one-point-or-continue-to-be-enrolled in math classes. This is unfortunate, as I do love a fun Pi Day celebration or interesting alumni panel. Alas, I have often overlooked those notices until it was too late.
- By points one and two, if students feel like your emails are not intended to reach them, and if they find themselves by and by skipping over their content in its entirety, your mailing list numbers will slowly but surely start to trickle down. Which, I am sure, is an outcome that you would like to avoid.
To improve on the current situation, I humbly ask for a few mutually beneficial modifications to your current system. Firstly, please create a mathenrolled-group, separate from mathmajors and mathgrad, to keep track of individuals who are taking or have taken a class with you, but, at least currently, have not made the relationship official. This is something that is normalized in most other departments, and eliminates a large swath of the problems I previously discussed. Once this has been accomplished, you can then focus on thinking a bit more carefully about who the target audience is for a given email. Does an email need to be sent out to the wider “enrolled” group, or is it only relevant to math majors or graduate students? Finally, I think that you can cut down on your total email output considerably, even outside of these proposed improvements. Maybe consider doing a weekly preview of upcoming events, rather than a day by day update. Communicate within the department about who is sending out what email and when. If you have all of it written out somewhere, you might realize yourselves that this is a supremely ridiculous amount of emails that you’ve been sending out for years on end. A good P.R. schedule is an oft overlooked but critical piece of the puzzle.
And to any non-math faculty who are reading this article, snickering and feeling very smug and self-important for not having been placed under my microscope, I will leave you with this: the math department is not the lone case of email chains gone awry at this university. I just felt that they were an apt example (and one that I could think of a lot of domain-specific puns and references for). In my opinion, most departments at Brandeis would benefit from a slight re-evaluation of their google group priorities. Because if us students are inundated by emails from all of you, what percentage do you think will actually make an impact? Food for thought.
Sincerely,
Sarah Baskin
