Re:Google Is Eating Our Mail
by mattkrause on Friday April 26, 2019 @04:07PM
(#19761310)
A courier is clearly a little over the top (though maybe not totally absurd: a faculty search costs tens of thousands of dollars).
I would expect both sides to make a bit of effort. Applicants should check their spam folders and follow up, especially if there's a known timeline (American grad school offers need to be extended and accepted by the 15th of April, for example).
Institutions should maybe not rely on only an unreliable, unacknowledged form of communication. Since the applications usually collect phone numbers and addresses, a phone call or letter would be a very reasonable follow up; neither costs more than 50¢ to use. I think all of the PhD programs that accepted me did call and it seems like a good way not only to notify, but to actively recruit.
What's the alternative? Making sure that the recipient gets the message by sending a courier to his home address?
I remember when a buddy of mine, back in the pre-email days, applied for a job at a company. About a week later, he received a letter, asking him to call them. Turns out, he forgot to put his contact info into the application, but they were interested enough to look up his name in the phone book (they also have/had street addresses were I live) and write him a letter, hoping it would reach the right person. "Always put your contact into into an application" isn't a petty rule, and neither is "use an email-provider that doesn't randomly reject messages" in my book.