Anyone familiar with how applicants are tracked within admissions offices?
I ask because I’m wondering if emails from my daughter to an admissions officer would be attached to her file if her application/file has a different email address associated with it.
e.g. - if when signing up for a tour/college info/email list and when submitting her common application, she used firstnamegradyear@xxx.com, but then sends emails from firstname@xxx.com, would the dots be connected within the admissions office?
Maybe it’s inconsequential, but the thought occurred to me so I was curious. And that perhaps it could be a factor with schools that consider Demonstrated Interest.
I don’t know the answer to your question specifically, but I’d think not. I’m not sure how the admissions office would “connect” those dots. Simply put, another student could have the same name as yours, and their email address would be a different one.
We had our kids set up a special email address that was ONLY used for college related things…ALL college related things. That way, everything was in one place.
And our kids were advised not to use their high school email address for this purpose…at all.
It’s not; It gets asked thousands of times per year.
She should use one email address for anything college related. She can let the universities know which of the 2 addresses she has been using is her “official” one and not assume they’ll figure it out on their own.
I suppose our ‘gotcha’ is that the email address used to sign up with colleges, college board, the common app, etc. isn’t actually an email account, it’s just an address that forwards incoming messages to the email accounts of kid, mom, and dad.
I received/saw the same advice about using an email address specifically for college-related communications, and that was my solution. Up until now it’s been working great but now thinking that perhaps something slightly different may have been better.
In addition to using a single email address for all communication to and from a college, you might want to encourage your daughter to open links in the emails sent to her. Colleges can track whether links have been followed, whether links from that page were then followed, how much time is spent on their website, etc. I wouldn’t make a big deal of this, but on the other hand for colleges that care about demonstrated interest it might count against an applicant if they never bothered reading any of the links sent to the applicant explaining why the college is so wonderful.
for those that are interested, here is an article from The Atlantic talking about the practice of tracking web activity
Some have turned to a Louisville, Kentucky,-based company, Capture Higher Ed, that tracks how prospective students use university websites. Using a unique email link sent to prospective students or personal information they provide on a college’s web site, Capture’s software can tell universities what web pages were visited, how often, and what prospective students did before and after. With that data, admissions can better understand the digital breadcrumbs students follow during the college search process, particularly what they do before they decide to apply or enroll.