I got an email from a student the other day in relation to a committee I chair, and I swear, the student's signature thing had nine lines of activities plus a phone number and preferred pronouns.
Do your students provide a full list of activities?
Each activity gets a line:
This major.
That minor.
This club
That other activity,
And so on.
I see this a lot around here, and I'm wondering if it's also something at other schools?
I'm guessing (only guessing) that students are being told that it looks professional to mention their activities?
Some of mine do it, but others don't. I think those who do are mostly pretty involved in campus activities of some sort (RA, student government, discipline- or ethnicity-focused society, maybe plain old sorority/fraternity, etc.). Others (especially those in majors that tend to lead pretty directly to employment -- e.g. engineers of various sorts) just have their major, which makes more sense to me.
ReplyDeleteI'd say the majority don't use such signature lines, but those who do often have very long ones. Either someone is telling them to do it, or they're picking up the habit from each other.
I have a faculty member who has a list of stuff like this in their email signature. Plus an inspirational quote. It's a variety of professional roles, but I have to say, it's... not as impressive as I guess they think it is.
ReplyDeleteI think they're imitating us. Email sigs used to be 2-3 lines, over and out, but now they're a whole PR press corps in one 10-line + image thing.
ReplyDeleteThat could be. I do see plenty of faculty and staff folks around here who have long signatures, too.
DeleteI would be thrilled if I could just get them to sign their name on an email, and maybe even tell me which class they asking about! (at a CA CC)
ReplyDeleteYep, there are always those students, too!
Delete