Freshmen of the incoming Boston College class of 2013 have not received their acceptance letters yet, and any attempts to describe them as a group at this point would be uncertain, at best. But one thing is sure, according to the Information Technology Services (ITS) Division: Each member of the class will arrive on campus with an established online presence. As a result, e-mail services for the class of 2013 will include a pilot program that will do away with the inbox currently given to all students.
Students are using e-mail at younger ages then they used to, said Mary Corcoran, associate vice president for user and support services. Students have also become more comfortable with e-mail as a means of communication, and by the time they arrive at a college, many have already settled into an e-mail service and address that they are comfortable with. "Many students have multiple e-mail accounts presently, anyway," Corcoran said.
The new program, which Corcoran said is being instituted on a pilot basis, will assign a bc.edu address to each student, but without an e-mail inbox. Instead, all e-mail messages will be forwarded directly to another e-mail account provided by the student. This is a feature of the current e-mail system already utilized by much of the student body, and the accounts of all other students will be unaffected by the change.
"Colleges and universities are studying what to do about e-mail, especially student e-mail," Corcoran said. "Last spring at the beginning of this process of review we learned that many students are working with multiple accounts right now."
Corcoran said that BC has a good deal of experience working with forwarding accounts, such as those that will be assigned to the incoming freshman class. She said there are 42,000 such accounts currently maintained for alumni use.
One of the most important concerns for students, Corcoran said, is that they are able to use their BC e-mail address when communicating with prospective internship opportunities or employers. "It's very, very important to maintain the Boston College identity," Corcoran said. She said that students should not be concerned about their ability to send out e-mails from their bc.edu address, as they will still be able to do so under the new system.
"We want students to be able to have the best service," Corcoran said. She said that the capabilities of inboxes under the current BC service are limited and that other online services such as Yahoo and Google can offer students more comprehensive capabilities and that students may be more familiar and more comfortable with these services anyway.
Corcoran said that any problems with the new system could be easily rectified and that if freshman experience widespread problems the issues could be easily rectified.
"We feel very comfortable that this will work. It's an experiment, but if there was a problem we could very easily create inboxes for the incoming freshmen," she said. "This is a pilot. If we need to we can correct the course here."
Students have begun to use e-mail in different ways, Corcoran said, since BC first began giving out student e-mail accounts. Not only do they arrive at school accustomed to the technology and with some acquired preferences, but other technologies such as instant messaging and text messaging have taken over what was once seen as e-mail's domain.
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