Does the institution provide institutional e–mail accounts for all students and use e–mail as an official medium of communication?
E–mail has become an essential communication medium, not only for social connections but also for academic work. Some faculty, indeed some courses, rely on e–mail and other interactive electronic media for communicating directly with the entire class and individual students and for facilitating communication among teams of students. Student services offices, such as the registrar, bursar, and financial aid, may send you via e–mail key deadlines or instructions for conducting such transactions as future semester registration, paying bills, or applying for financial aid.
If your friends, family, classmates, faculty, and others have e–mail accounts and communicate regularly via e–mail, it will be an important resource. E–mail allows members of an institution's community to expand the boundaries of that community. Students in every disciple are able to join discussion groups on academic or non–academic topics. Participants in such discussions can be from the room down the dormitory hall, a NASA research lab in Pasadena, or from anywhere in the world.
Some key questions to ask include: Does the institution provide all students with an e–mail account? If so, does it happen automatically or do you need to ask? Are academic advisors and campus administrators accessible to students via e–mail? What policies govern students' use of e–mail? If you have other, non-institutional, e-mail addresses, how can you manage mail to the different addresses, i.e., can you forward mail from one to the other?
