Best Practices for Managing and Triaging Student Emails

- By Dominique Mick

Students email at all hours of the day and night, with little to no consideration for regular business hours, or when anyone will be available to respond to their questions or issues. As academic advisors, we also know that we might not have all the answers, because they are questions about financial aid, housing, dining, tutoring, or complaints about their individual class, or professor, or even very personal concerns and issues. Here are some ideas for how to address student concerns/problems/issues/requests in a prompt and professional way:

1. Utilize email forwarding or sorting. I filter all emails that are from Navigate/EAB into a separate folder, so that they don’t clog the machinery and students can use my availability link to schedule with me without my having to delete each notification I get. I also filter out all emails concerning teaching concerns, and all emails from the Academic Advising Council Listserv, because they are not urgent, and I don’t need to respond to them within certain time parameters, unless I am teaching that semester (and if I am teaching, I check the teaching folder once a day, which is how often I tell my students I will be checking it, in my syllabus.)
2. Just because a student is using a tone of some urgency or has bolded or written their subject line in all caps, or is employing extremely rude, unprofessional, or aggressive language to get your attention does not mean that the email actually is urgent. More likely the student is frustrated that they have not gotten the answer or response that they wanted, or their response was not instantaneous. Since we live in an instant-gratification culture, and since students have gotten used to the somewhat transactional nature of guidance-counseling in high school, our job is to respect everyone’s boundaries—especially our own—and communicate with students in the most professional tone, and in the most reasonable timeline we can. It’s important to realize that this is a learning experience for the student as well, and we are showing them a skill they can emulate. When they realize that they are going to have to behave like an adult during their advising interactions, nine times out of ten, they will rise to the challenge.
3. Mark out time in your calendar that you know you will be away before you send out an availability link, or initiate a Navigate Campaign. If students cannot block out time to meet with you within five minutes of checking their email, they will be forced to wait until you are free to book their appointment, and they will be more likely to be calm and clearheaded when that meeting takes place, because they will have had the time to do some creative problem-solving on their own. During Advising Week, my serial emailers will email seven times in a row, but the last email is invariably: “Never mind! I figured it out myself, sorry to bother you.” So other than recording that email in my private student interaction spreadsheet, I don’t need to take any further action.
4. Memorize (to the best of your ability) the academic calendar for the year. Bookmark the calendar the Registrar and Provost write each year. This will let you know when you will be super-busy, and overwhelmed. If you are teaching, mark off when big assignments are due, and then when you will have to have them graded. Mark off priority Registration dates in your calendar, so you know when to tell students NOT to schedule meetings with you, or when you will need to leave open space in your calendar to lift holds, build study plans, or message students about their grades. If needed, block off times in your calendar when you know that you personally will not be able to handle student meetings that day, for a doctor or dentist’s appointment, or even just because. You are one person. There are hundreds of them. Take your time.
5. Take time for yourself before you answer the doozys. I loved the little cross stitch pattern I saw at Hoot and Howl once: You Are Responsible for the Vibes you Bring into this Space. When you know that an email is going to trigger you in some way perhaps because of the subject line, or who wrote it, or if you recognize the phone number, take a minute before you answer. Get a snack, take a walk, or even observe what my best friend calls the 24-hour rule, and sleep on it! If you need to write a draft and put it away first, go for it, but usually things look very different after a good night’s sleep, and you will not be nearly as reactive as you might have been upon the first reading.
6. Observe the 24-hour rule when scheduling appointments. Unless it is the last day of add/drop, or the last day to withdraw from classes for the whole semester, or the last day to write an Academic Success Plan (and it’s good to mark those days in your calendar, like I said in number four) almost no meeting at all is required on the literal day that the student emails you. Navigate usually can be programmed so that a student cannot book an appointment with you on the same day that they log on, they usually can’t open your calendar until the next day, so do the same thing for students who don’t use Navigate, and give that time back to yourself.
7. Use all technology we have. Teams, Navigate, the Outlook Calendar are great tools once you know how to use them. Practice, and ask for help whenever you need to. No one person knows everything. If a student came to this university knowing everything, they came to the wrong place. This is a place to learn, and we are included in that population!
8. Believe in a benevolent universe, but acknowledge that higher education is dysfunctional. So many of our students have come from less than ideal domestic, personal, or academic situations. By nature of what we were hired to do, we are more available (at least physically) to their needs. This means that on some occasions, we are the scapegoats for everything that is wrong in higher education, and in their lives. The only way to counter this is to hold your boundaries as firmly as you can. Holding your boundary (they are not allowed to shout at you, they are not allowed to threaten you, (physically or otherwise) they are not allowed to insult you) will allow you to retain any measure of compassion that you have, when things feel really rough.

So much of what we do is based on intuition, or a gut-sense of what is really going on, regardless of what the student or their parent is telling you. I am a firm believer that we wouldn’t have become advisors unless we knew that our gut-sense about people was solid. The first few triage-appointments, or emails will ALWAYS feel like a firehose to the face, but once you know that you will be able to manage your own expectations and respond accordingly, which means you won’t be as reactive, or as stressed. Furthermore once you can downregulate, the student can sense it, and will (usually) be able to start downregulating as well. That’s when advising becomes enjoyable, and not a triggering stress-fest. Of course you will always run out of patience before you run out of empathy, but by managing how our caseloads make us feel, we will have better access to our own empathy when we really need it.

Good luck and Godspeed!