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Being in college is all about getting on track for your professional life – or cultivating your brain with a useless English degree, or getting drunk – the point being, you don’t have a real job. Accordingly, you shouldn’t have a snazzy automated email signature at the end of all your emails. Make it stop!
A basic listing of your name, email address and perhaps a cell phone number are totally fine, but I find it both perplexing and incredibly obnoxious when it goes any further than this.
In four years of college, I’ve noticed a proliferation of said email signatures, ranging from a tame listing of one’s university and class to lengthy listings of minors, thesis topics, home addresses and so on.
A most common offender, and one that’s come to bother me includes listing “Candidate for B.A. in XXX Major.” Wow, you majored in history/political science/chemistry/economics! This is useful for us to know, why? Not only is the word candidate completely and utterly absurd, but you’re an undergrad for god’s sake. If you’re getting a PhD in Victorian Era Literature and you need to communicate with an obscure British historian for insight into the topic, well then, okay, include your academic status. But until then, most of the people you communicate with don’t need or want to know that you’re minoring in Consumer Psychology.
But even worse than pronouncing your fancy college and major is including your position in a campus organization. Again, when you’re emailing the nationals of your sorority, it’s fine to include in your email signature that you happen to be the Vice President of Kappa. Otherwise, please oh please just leave it out.
Here’s an idea: in the rare scenario wherein your title/major/position is actually relevant to the text of your email, add it in. When you’re just coordinating dinner with friends or a study group – or gasp, even applying to a job (!) – no one gives two shits that you are the secretary of the College Republicans.
While I wish these were the worst of the email signatures I receive on an average basis from my peers, I find the above to unfortunately be merely the norm.
Once, I got an email from some girl who, at the bottom of the email, S P A C E D O U T H E R N A M E L I K E T H I S. I don’t even need to explain why this is terrible.
Then there’s another one I get far too frequently. After the contact info and superfluous listing of miscellany, the following line appears: “Please consider the environment before printing this email.” What?! Who prints emails? And, hi, it’s 2010, almost 2011 – I think that whole save the trees, save the rainforest thing ended in the previous millennium.
Finally, on occasion, people include pictures in their signatures! Sometimes even festive colors. Also, see things that stopped being okay post-1999: clip art; colored text in emails.
Get thee to your inbox and remember, dear college peers (and real-world people too), your email signature is not your AIM profile.
