E-Mail Addresses and College Applications

When I worked as a freshman admission counselor there was always one place I would start reading when I had to review an application. Not the persons name, the high school the student attended, their G.P.A., or even their standardize test scores. The first place I would always start was the student’s contact e-mail address. This information would have a large influence on how critical I would be when reviewing the remainder of the application.

This may surprise some of you. I know there is a cloud of mystery that surrounds the college admission process, and people are always trying to guess what will be deemed important by admission counselors. In short, everything is important, including something as simple as an e-mail address.

I could not help to always ask myself how a student could submit a flawless application and include the e-mail address of SexyJen@... Or Dumbjock@... (which are actually really tame names compared to the ones I actually read). An admission counselor has the responsibility of shaping the institution by the type of students they choose to admit, so your application has to make them believe in you. For myself, when I read a crazy e-mail it really made me think if everything else the student included on the application was scripted and the e-mail address was revealing the true personality of the student I was trying to know and make a decision on.

These types of e-mails did not show up on only a few applications, every admission counselor in the office could share with you a ridiculous number of applications they too were reviewing that included inappropriate e-mail addresses. Some of the names were so outrageous we had to talk about them with each other. We had regular conversations in staff meetings about what new and interesting names were included in the previous week’s applications. The office also considered running a list of all the e-mail names included on applications for the previous recruiting season so we could vote on the best of the worst for that year.

For those of you who are curious about how your applications are reviewed, I can honestly say in my experience, that every bit of the information asked on an application is important in some way, shape or form. Otherwise the school wouldn’t take up the space on the application to ask the question. (Believe me, there are a lot of things we want to include, but really don’t have the space to do it.)

So if you are interested in some generic advice about filling out a college admission application, or any application for that matter, include an e-mail address that is appropriate. That means boring, general, plain, whatever you want to call it. Believe me, your admission counselor really doesn’t want to know you intimately, so skip the cutesy or clever e-mail names. Your application is often the only way you can make an impression with your admission counselor so make sure you are presenting yourself in the best light.

Plain is sometime good.

Cordially,
Chrystal