After reading the two links, one that is more comical and the other that is more serious, I was honestly able to better understand how to write e-mails to a professor. One of the things that stuck out to me the most was the clear distinction with the more serious article and the implied distinction with the more comical article between a professional and personal e-mail.

A lot of times when e-mails are sent to professors, the line between sending a serious and professional e-mail and sending an e-mail as if to a friend is blurred. One of the biggest reasons that this mistake happens more often than not is that students are never made aware of how exactly an e-mail should even be sent. In the current generation, people have grown up using e-mail constantly but never in a professional manner. It was always a fun way to communicate with friends. So the jump can sometimes affect people differently, leaving them to not be aware of how to properly communicate with a professor.

Colleges and even high schools demand that students use the school e-mail to contact teachers with any matter. E-mail is the most widely used type of communication in the educational system. Part of the reason is that administrators are able to keep all forms of communications between faculty and students in one place, making it easy to find any specific communication for any reason.

However, the question of why colleges and universities don’t use different forms of social media such as Facebook or WhatsApp raises the issue of how much more personal communications become between a professor and a student. Social media is much more personal, allowing access to more than just academic performance or curriculum information. Students are able to access personal data about professors and vice versa through these communications and tracking any of it becomes much harder because how big the social media platforms are.

I personally didn’t start using e-mail till about 7th grade which was when my middle school set up e-mail servers for the students and the teachers. From then on, I used e-mail very frequently and still do. However, I rely more on social media solely to contact friends or family because of how much more accessible it is.  E-mail has always been something I saw as being used by me in more professional settings in which I needed to contact an employer, professor, organization, etc.