Done.
It was quick to do, but in many ways, it signaled the end of an era for me.
An institutional email address is central to modern academic life. It is the first point of contact that people look for if they are trying to connect with you. More than office space, building keys, an ID card, or listing on an university website, a .edu email address defines your affiliation with an institution, both to that institution and to the rest of the world.
The UTRGV email drives home for me that UTPA is coming to an end.
Since I practically live online (“Hi, my name is Zen, and I’m a netaholic”), I have made the problem much, much worse for myself. I use my academic email for a lot of online services, and now I will have a long, slow trudge of switching all the profile account information. Updating a single paper in my academic sites took me half a day. I have no idea how long it will be before I swap over all my accounts to my @utrgv.edu email addy.
This is probably a good time to start listing my university affiliation on new manuscripts I submit as “University of Texas Rio Grande Valley,” too.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this, because I am watching how this institution is developing. And I am not always feeling optimistic about what I see. But maybe that’s another post for another time.
Related posts
Updating, updating. and updating some more
This is one reason why an increasing number of academics are using a non-institutional address as their primary email contact. In the end, an email address indicates an individual, not an institution.
ReplyDeleteYours,
Mike Taylor, University of Bristol, dino@miketaylor.org.uk