Hello, I have a sorta silly question. For my email, I use AOL, which is pretty old and no one really uses it anymore. My mom tells me every time that I need to change my email because colleges will think that I’m outdated and that I can’t keep up with technology. I think that’s ridiculous, but it is plausible. Colleges judge you on every small thing–so should I change my email to something more recent like gmail? My email isn’t something inappropriate, it’s just that it’s old.
The reason why I haven’t switched emails is that everything is linked to my aol. All my subscriptions, clubs/organizations that I signed up for, etc… switching emails would be too much of a hassle.
I have 3 emails, one for work, one for college stuff and other important items, and one to use as a junk email (so I don’t get spammed on my other emails) And technically I have a 4th too but its just a school gmail account that is used for google drive (can’t access email)
No college will reject you for an odd email address. Most adcoms will never even see it unless they are also responsible for handling admissions letter and even then, that’s after the fact. You will need to have a professional email address in the future though.
You brought up an interesting question. I don’t think admissions will care about your retro AOL address. Most people open a new email account for college admissions to keep all the emails and the attendant spam in one place. We are getting all kinds of odd colleges and loan offers that are getting kind of annoying. Gmail and Yahoo are free.
If any college doesn’t use a script to compile all the emails into relevant categories, and instead uses a human typing at a computer, they’re being hugely inefficient.
I created dedicated e-mail accounts for each of my sons’ admissions processes, just so that we could both have access while maintaining privacy in our regular accounts. As others have pointed out, it’s very helpful to separate the college communications from other e-mails.
The domain name of your email carrier is of no importance. Now if your User ID is the least bit unprofessional, I would suggest changing it. Even better, as others have said, would be to have a dedicated email address just for the admissions process.
While we’re on the subject of inappropriate email addresses, what if my email username is just a bunch of seemingly random letters (they’re initials but the adcoms wouldn’t know that). Is that considered unprofessional?
No, but for ease of communication, particularly if some clerical is entering your info into a database, I’d suggest an email address that won’t result in a higher probability of typos.
Thanks everyone for the feedback! My AOL account is my professional email, so it doesn’t say anything inappropriate. But I really think having a separate email for the admissions process is a good idea, but would it be too late for me to switch? I get a lot of emails from colleges to my AOL account. How do I redirect college stuff to a different email?
Many email servers have their own email forwarding systems where you can get emails from other inboxes. Personally I found the app Altomail to be extremely useful. It allows you to check multiple inboxes at the same time and you don’t even need to download anything to signup. If you do decide to make another email account specifically for college, it will definitely come in handy
You may check if you can set up an alias or forward e-mail address. We use that for online shopping all the time to avoid junk mail as we can cancel those alias any time.
Ha, I was wondering the same thing when I applied for school I prefer AOL - I’ve always found it better than Yahoo for spam filtering. Like everyone else said, you should be fine.
I prefer AOL - I’ve always found it better than Yahoo for spam filtering. Like everyone else said, you should be fine.