One of my current projects is leadership of an experimental social club at my medical school. To make a long story short (and to reference one of my favorite book/movie series), my club is one of eight Harry Potter-esque groups composed of students from each year of medical education (ie, the equivalents of Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, etc). Each of the clubs, referred to as a “society,” is creatively named after one of the great medical prodigies that graduated or contributed to the institution. The program is meant to foster kinship, particularly between the first/second year students and the third/fourth year students, which, due to the nature of medical education, rarely interact. Collectively, the leaders of all the societies have even created a year-long Olympiad of competitive events in an attempt increase the solidarity among those in each society, analogous to the “House Cup” competition in the Harry Potter series.
The problem is that while the students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry communicate via the use of owls, magical howling letters, and fireplaces, we medical students are left with corresponding solely by e-mail, which can, unfortunately, be ignored much more easily than any of the former. While this is particularly irksome when lunch for 40 people has been provided for a mere turnout of 10, I can’t say I don’t understand why so many correspondences go unread. In fact, just this morning I woke to a total of 11 emails from numerous school-related departments, clubs, and course liaisons. Their contents included a reminder about returning course evaluations, curriculum committee update, campus activity calendar for the week, corrections to the syllabus, and an addendum to the original campus activity calendar e-mail, among others. This doesn’t include the other extracurricular e-mails I subscribe to – Google Alerts, Daily Deals Sites, Twitter, etc- or the number of other emails that I received throughout the rest of the day.
With that said, it is clear why so many e-mails get sent directly to spam, or ignored. Let me give another example. A few months ago all students received an e-mail regarding an upcoming update to our campus e-mail accounts. It explained that we would need to update and “sync” the updated account with our old one in order to receive any incoming mail. One of my close friends, used to deleting so many unwanted emails, disregarded the message and, after showing up to a lecture that had been canceled (via email), realized he had not received any campus correspondences for an entire week. He now refers to that week as one of the best of his entire second year of medical school.
I personally have developed a number of strategies to increase the response to any e-mails I send to society members. For example, if I want to remind students of our monthly meeting, I use a fairly direct email subject: “DR. MD2B’S SOCIETY LUNCH TOMORROW, NOON, ROOM 309,” with full awareness hat nothing within the body of the email will ever be seen. On the other hand, if I have more specific details to share with members, I create a particularly ambiguous but catchy subject, such as “FREE SUSHI LUNCH FOR MED STUDENTS!” I then deftly place the location and time of the free sushi lunch after all the other information included in the e-mail. Despite my efforts, I have still received requests from my society members to please just not send them any more emails (along with requests from irritated graduates asking me to remove them from my listserve).
Where do I turn next? To social media, of course! While some e-mail correspondence in some cases inevitable – even preferred- I’d love to see an increase in the number of alternative methods used to communicate with students. For example, instead of sending out weekly emails (and sometimes multiple corrections and updates) about campus activities, an online calendar can be created and subscribed to by those students who wish to receive updates. This applies to individual clubs as well. Further, RSS feeds can be used to provide updates about topics subscribers are interested in – curriculum committees, student government, etc. Twitter hashtags and Facebook events also offer unique ways of communicating with those students who wish to become involved, rather than sending mass e-mails which will be ignored by a majority of recipients or become spam to those who have already graduated from the institution.
So, for this I turn to you, Ye Ol’ blogosphere! What do you think?
I definitely would not like my school to contact me via social media. We had one course where there was email, google calendar, twitter, and the school website calendar. It was endlessly confusing and lead to errors both on the end of updating ALL the schedules if a change was made, and for students trying to check it. Unless you can unilaterally change the way in which all communication is transmitted, having multiple methods makes it unhelpful. Additionally, if someone doesnt want to get your emails, they’re not going to check your twitter statement.
I agree! It can be super confusing to manage, especially for those who are unfamiliar, albeit well-intentioned. There are ways of managing a number of sites at once, but it still might not be for everyone in every scenario. All that for one class seems a little overkill, but on a campus-wide basis I would much prefer to receive updates for the things I’m interested in rather than everything going on at any point in time. I personally think that as our generation, who has grown up with social media, starts to take over administrative and teaching positions, all of those details will be worked out, and there will be development of better systems for organizing this type of information!
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