Freshmen, I beg of you, listen to me here. Don’t go signing up to get college emails. Before I lose your attention, please trust me, don’t do it. You’ll be taking the PSAT or SAT, and it will ask you if you want to put in an email for interested colleges to contact you. It seems innocent enough, or if you do think ahead, it might seem annoying at worst. But can’t it provide you opportunities and connections too? Oh how wrong you are. Let’s chat, freshmen. 

I am spammed with emails from colleges about once or twice an hour. So 24 times a day. 168 a week. And for a grand total of 3,153 emails and counting. That’s after I’ve blocked every other college that spammed me (so all of them). On a basic level, this is bothersome and annoying. There are pages on my gmail app that now only show colleges. And on a slightly deeper level, it devalues every other email I get. 

When I see a notification, I don’t check anymore. There’s a 90% chance it’s a sad college 7 hours away from me. I stopped viewing emails as any sort of announcement or message, and merely as an advertisement. But I honestly feel the impact is much worse than just this. What happens when my Gmail inbox becomes so full of advertisements that I will never check it?

And when that happened, I started having very negative reactions towards them.

Opening my email presents me with pages of “It’s not too late,” “application deadline midnight today,” “there’s two weeks left,” “deadline extension for you, [student],” “yesterday was the deadline,” and “you’re running out of time.” These terribly stressful emails attacked me every time I tried to look for an email from a friend or an update from a teacher. It always made me feel like no matter what I did, I was falling behind. And, eventually, I was. I wouldn’t see when a teacher would check up on me. I’d miss it when the school made an event announcement. Important emails from my guidance counselor world got lost in the sea of anxiety-inducing demanding colleges. 

And now I’m late. I missed the real deadlines for colleges I actually liked. I got overwhelmed and it swept any from the shore. And that’s not only the emails’ fault, but I do like to blame them. They start annoying you, then they start making you want to hide away, then you miss everything you do need to be seeing. So freshmen, here’s my advice: only half joking, don’t give the SATs your email. It’s not worth it.

Perhaps it’s silly, but it doesn’t seem like that when college becomes a pressing issue. I didn’t know where to start, and I didn’t have the motivation to wade through whatever was going on in my inbox. My advice? Contact colleges you like yourself. Make a short list of appealing ones, and reach out to them. It shows initiative and it gives you a place to start. A real, solid, connection. 

And it will save you the trouble of having to block hundreds of emails.