Keeping a campus notified, a feat Wayne State College’s various offices and departments tackle daily, is no simple task.
Numerous offices handle communicating with students, including College Relations, Student Activities, Hahn Administration and more. They inform campus about sports matches, club hosted events, schedule changes, maintenance updates and countless other subjects.
Jay Collier, the director of college relations at WSC, handles a large portion of the notifications sent out to students and staff through his office. If an office needs to send out a mass alert, College Relations can send it to the whole student body.
“Most offices know if they need to reach students, they can come to us,” he said. “We want to make sure [students] have access to all of the things people are doing for [them]. Since so much it is coming out of College Relations, it’s a trusted source of information for students.”
Some of the notifications Collier’s office helps distribute include cancellation or schedule alteration details, as well as emergency alerts. If a department’s event changes at all, such as a time or location change, it sends the new details to College Relations so students can be informed ASAP.
As for emergency alerts, College Relations is in charge of notifying students of late starts, weather cancellations, closures for construction and more.
“We have a template that guides us through all of these,” Collier said. “Whenever we have to send something out about, say, classes cancelled for snow, we use that system.”
While he thinks email notifications from the school are a beneficial alert system, WSC junior Luke Walters thinks a few adjustments could be made.
“I think the college sends out a good amount of notifications, but sometimes I get annoyed by canvas emails that come in from both my emails,” Walters said. “It’s annoying seeing the same notification twice and it happens multiple times a day. I do think the other notifications are good though because they’ve helped me out a lot.”
Walters said if the emails notification system were more customizable, he would find the alerts to be more manageable and helpful.
On a similar note, WSC senior Cydnee Coutts thinks campus’ notification system is mainly effective for people who regularly check their emails.
“I’ve had events pique my interest, but that’s usually because I keep an eye out for important emails from professors,” Coutts said. “There’s always flyers around campus, but some of us live off-campus and don’t regularly go to the student center.”
Some students may find the plethora of notifications to be overbearing, but the school sends them to maintain a centralized notification location. The new WSC website, set to be released in a few months, may offer students the notification layout they desire.
“It’s incumbent on us to let you know, and it’s incumbent on you all to stay up to date,” Collier said when asked how he feels about the notifications’ benefits. “The things we send out are an effort to get students out of their comfort zones. I would rather overcommunicate than under-communicate and have people say, ‘I’m missing out on my college experience.’”
More information about Wayne’s mass email procedures can be found on the school’s website.
