Speaker 1: This is another lecture video for first-year college students, and in this one we're going to cover a sort of social aspect of college or university, and that is interacting with professors. And this is a rundown of the topics that we're going to cover in this video, starting with email. I'm going to make this point by telling you something about my father, and if I get around to it, maybe I'll edit in a photo of my dad, Harold Kaplan. In the early days of cell phones, there were these new things called text messages. You could send a text message to someone instead of calling them. And my dad would start his text messages with, dear so-and-so, and end the text messages with his signature, with his name. That's weird. That's not a thing you do, dad. Email conversations that you will be having with your college professors also have their own etiquette. There's just a way you do it, and if you don't do it the right way, then you'll look weird, like my dad looked weird when he was a kid. My dad was still signing his text messages, because text messages aren't a thing that you sign. For example, a few days ago, I got an email from a student who was, in one of my courses, a first-year college student who's submitting, trying to submit some assignment online. The email is just a screenshot of their device, which is having some problem. It's just a screenshot, and then just four question marks. That's the whole message. Just a photograph. Just a photograph, and this. That's not the way you're supposed to do it. The way you're supposed to write an email to your professor, and these rules basically apply the same in white-collar jobs. If you're going to be working in an office at some point, you're going to be doing basically the same thing. You should start the emails with a greeting. One of the most common greetings that I get from students at the beginning of an email is, hey, this isn't because the students are disrespectful, or whatever, or bad people. It's just that they don't know what is appropriate in this. It's just that they don't know what is appropriate in this professional environment, and, hey, is not an appropriate way to start an email. The best bet, the one that I recommend in every case, in all college courses, is professor so-and-so. You could start the email with dear professor so-and-so, but I don't use the word dear because a lot of the people that I'm emailing are not dear to me in any way, and everyone is fine with just professor so-and-so. Wait, but some of my instructors in my college courses are not professors. That's true. Actually, I'm not a full professor. I'm an assistant professor, which means I'm on the tenure track, or whatever. I'm from assistant to associate to full professor, or whatever. You don't have to worry about any of that. If someone is an instructor for a course, the full instructor, not a teaching assistant, but the instructor of record for the course, then you can address them as professor. They won't mind. They will like it, even if they're not really a professor. Alternatively, if you know that they have a Ph.D. or an M.D., a doctorate of some kind, you can call them doctor so-and-so. That's fine. Whatever. If you know for sure that they don't have a Ph.D. or any other kind of doctorate, then you can address them as Mr. or Ms. But be careful with this because sometimes people who worked hard to get a Ph.D. will be a little offended if you don't use their title. And you may or may not know the history of the female titles here. So, traditionally, Mrs. is a title for a married woman. Ms. is a title for an unmarried woman. I don't use either of these now because it's 2021 and those sound old and weird and who cares if they're married or not. Now, it's pretty standard to just address, you know, adult women who don't have a doctorate as Ms. You want to start an email exchange in this somewhat formal way. You address them, professor so-and-so. My name is such-and-such. I'm in this class that meets at this time. And then you say your thing. And then you sign it. Sincerely or best. And then your name. You want to start in this somewhat formal way and then you want to see how they respond. If they, you know, dial down the level of formality, right? If they just send you a one-word response, a one-sentence response where they don't address you back, okay, well then that's a signal to you that you can dial it back, right? You don't have to be as formal with them in the same thread if they've already responded with a quick response without your name at the top or anything like that. Right? Gauge the level of formality that they are using in that email thread and you match it. You go down from the most formal level down to whatever level they're at. One of the clues that you will find as to the level of formality of the email exchange, right, is that your professor will respond and they will sign their own name usually somehow. And the way that they sign their name will be a clear indication of how they want to be addressed. Sometimes. The reason I say sometimes is that many faculty will respond to your email. They'll say, you know, your name is Alice or whatever. And they'll say, Alice, thanks for contacting me. No, no, no. Here's the answer to your question, blah, blah, blah. And then they'll sign the email J.D. What does that mean? Does that mean that they want you to call them J.D.? No. No, it does not. It never indicates, never, that they want you to call them J.D. If they sign their email with their initials, what that means is they still want you to call them professor. So-and-so, but they don't want to seem like the kind of stuffy person who signs their emails professor so-and-so. So they want to seem kind of casual, but they still want you to call them professor so-and-so. They definitely don't want you to call them by their initials. They never want that. The other most important thing about sending an email to a professor is this. Remind them which class you're in. Think about it from their perspective. Your college professors are teaching two, maybe three courses in the same semester. Maybe more. They may know all of their students' names, but it's very, very difficult to remember which students go in which classes. So when I get an email from a student that doesn't say which class they're in, right? If I'm teaching two sections, a 9 a.m. section and a 10 a.m. section of introduction to philosophy, and then I'm teaching a 2 p.m. afternoon course in the philosophy of language, I get this email from a student, and I have to open up my course lists for my courses and look through the courses. I have to look through the course lists alphabetically to find this student's name in all three of those course lists. That's super annoying. I will not punish you or hold it against you that I have to spend, you know, 60 seconds doing this. But it's nice if I don't have to do it. A few other norms for emails in academia. If you have to send your professor a paper or a document, right, something, you will attach that document to an email as a PDF or a Word file. Those are really the only two that are standardly used at this moment in the fall of 2021. Don't, for example, send a link to a Google document or something like that, some cloud document or something like that, unless you're specifically told to do that. These are just the norms that exist right now in 2021. This could change, right? It could become standard to send links to Google documents or whatever. But at the moment, that's not the standard practice. The only electronic ways that you should contact your professor, your college professors, are by email or in the messaging, you know, part of your learning management software, like if you use Canvas or Blackboard or whatever. Don't send them text messages. Don't friend them on social media or whatever. Nothing on TikTok. These are the professional ways to contact your college professors. And your emails shouldn't use any weird fonts. They should just use whatever default font comes with your email thing, some kind of sans serif or Arial-style font without any frilly things on it. That's the standard email font. That's the one you use. There was a time, you know, in the 90s, I remember, when emails were new and you didn't have lots of different fonts. And then in the 2000s, when new fonts showed up in emails, people were starting to use weird fonts and colors and big bolded things in their emails. And that happened for a few years in the 2000s. And then everyone realized, oh, that's actually super annoying. And so we, as a society, have just settled on the default font. Every once in a while in your life, you will encounter someone these days who uses some weird font in their emails. And they're a weirdo. They're weird. They're not doing the normal thing. It's fine to be weird, but it's not typical. In your emails with your professors, just let the content of those emails stand out rather than the shapes of the letters or whatever. And of course, the font that you will use in documents, like if you write an essay, right, you should use a standard font like Times New Roman. That's a serif font. It's different from the one you use in emails, but that's the standard one for writing an essay on a document. And the standard one for email is Arial or whatever sans serif thing. You might think that these conventions are arbitrary. They are. But there's just a certain way of comporting yourself in certain contexts. So, for example, if your friend is over at your house or apartment and you're giving them some food from the kitchen, you will talk to them in a certain casual way, and you will hand them the stuff in a certain way. It's just you and your friend. You know each other really well. That's a completely different way from how you will comport yourself if you're a server in a restaurant and you're giving someone food. You'll address them in a more formal way. You'll hand things to them in a different way. Because in a restaurant, it's a professional environment, and this is a professional interaction. Well, when you're sending an email to your college professor, this is a professional environment, and you're having a professional interaction. And so you have to follow all these conventions. Office hours are a few hours a week. One, two, three hours a week when the professor is going to be sitting in their office with the door open, waiting for students to just show up and ask questions about the course material or whatever. This is an incredible thing. It's an incredible resource, an educational resource that's available to you. You can just show up there waiting there for you to go ask them questions. You should go. You might feel intimidated going and having a one-on-one conversation with the professor. That's normal. Feel the intimidation, swallow it, and go anyway. The best way to use office hours is to do the readings and assignments in advance so that when you go to the office hours, you have specific questions, right? If you've read the thing, then you can have a specific question. You can say, in this paragraph, the reading says this, and I don't understand what it means. That's an awesome question. Go to office hours and ask that question. Or if you're doing an assignment and you're struggling with a particular thing, go and ask about that particular thing. That's the way to take advantage of your professor's availability in office hours. And you can only do that if you do the reading and the assignments on track or even in advance of when you're supposed to do them. I recommend that students list the office hours of all of their professors on their personal calendar. I recommend that all the students do that. If you list their office hours on your personal calendar, the calendar that you check every morning, then most of the time you won't go. But you'll see those office hours and you'll remember they exist. And then the three times during the semester when you have a question, you'll see that and you'll be like, oh, I have this question. All right, I'm going to go today. And then you'll go to their office hours, which you wouldn't have done if you hadn't seen it listed on your calendar. And then you'll get an answer to your question. And then you'll get that question right on the exam. And then you'll get an A in the course. If you're going to eventually ask your professor for a letter of recommendation for graduate school or for a program that you want to participate in or for a job or whatever, if you're going to ask them for a letter of recommendation, it helps if they know you. They will write a much better letter if they know you. And one of the main ways for them to get to know you is for you to go to office hours and ask substantive good questions. You don't have to know the answers to everything. You don't have to understand everything to go to office hours. They're there for you to ask questions about things that you don't understand. Okay, now I'm going to talk about the types of questions that you want to ask. And I'm going to illustrate this by letting you in on a meme that exists among college faculty. And the meme is, it's on the syllabus. And maybe I'll edit in some meme photos. There's T-shirts and mugs and all sorts of paraphernalia. This is widely known. This is a meme that we, the college faculty, have, and we all know it. And the point of the meme is this. Lots and lots of students ask us lots and lots of questions about administrative matters about the course. Like, when is the midterm? And, you know, do we have to do any reading for this day of class? And all that sort of stuff. And all of that information is on the syllabus. And faculty don't love talking about that. If someone got a PhD in chemistry, they love talking about chemistry. They didn't do it because they love talking about when the midterm is. You can ask them when the midterm is scheduled if you need to, of course, of course. But check the syllabus first. If you want to be the type of student who comes to them and asks them questions that they're excited to answer, right, then ask them questions about the course material. I've decided to add a new section in this video about letters of recommendation. It's going right in here. It's happening right now. Here's something that 90% of college undergraduates don't really know about, but that is actually kind of important when making decisions about, you know, how to get letters of recommendation from their faculty. There are different levels of faculty. There are different kinds. Okay, let's start with the tenure track faculty. In the United States, some faculty at some universities can get tenure. That means that the contributions that they are going to make to the knowledge of our society is so great that we want them the freedom to say whatever they want, even if it's controversial. And so therefore, it's going to be very hard to fire these people. Whether or not this is a good system is another question, but the point is there's a system and this is why we have it. Faculty on the tenure track are the most prestigious type of faculty. They start off as assistant professors. That's what I am right now here at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This means that I don't yet have tenure, but after my first six or seven years, I have tenure. I will put together my portfolio with all of my accomplishments and my research and teaching, right, and committee work and whatever, and the university will decide whether or not I get tenure and get promoted to associate professor. And then several years later, usually in their 50s or 60s, faculty will reach the rank of full professor. The higher the rank, the better when it comes to letters of recommendation, but that's not the only thing that matters. Of course, the substance of the letter, what it says in the letter, of course, matters too. Maybe it matters much more. And so you only want to ask for letters from faculty who know you well, but all else being equal, the higher the rank, the better. Then there's non-tenure track, full-time faculty. Instructors, lecturers, there's all sorts of different names, but they don't have the protections of tenure, they don't have as prestigious a title, and so that counts for less in letters of recommendation, especially when those are letters of recommendation for graduate school. If you're applying to medical school or law school or graduate school in any of the traditional subjects, the people reading your applications will know the difference between an associate professor and a lecturer. And a letter from an associate professor saying you're the most brilliant student they've ever had counts for more than the exact same letter, word for word, written by someone whose title is lecturer. These are just facts about prestige, and I'm just telling you them so that you know them. Then there's a third type of college faculty, which are adjunct faculty. They don't get health care from the college or university where they teach. They teach individual courses, one or two or more, but they're paid per course. These are the least prestigious positions, and although many adjunct faculty, who are massively underpaid and underappreciated, are brilliant, actually, their letters simply, unfortunately, count for less, and you should know this going in. The main problem is that most undergraduates don't know anything about any of this. They don't know that these are even forces that exist in this world, and that can lead them to make mistakes about who to ask for letters of recommendation. But when deciding who to ask for a letter of recommendation, as I said before, you don't want to only factor in their rank. You want to factor in whether this person knows you. So you want to, in advance, cultivate a relationship. And then, when you go to ask them for a letter of recommendation, you need to give them the following pieces of information. You need to tell them what exactly the recommendation is for. Give them the information about which courses exactly you took with them. And if you have coursework from those courses, send them that coursework, too. Professor so-and-so, I want to ask you for a letter of recommendation. I'm applying for this. Here are the details of the thing I'm applying for. Just as a reminder, here's the courses I took with you. Here's the papers that I wrote. Here's your comments that you wrote. You wrote on my papers, so they don't have to go look up those comments. Then they're going to use all this information to quickly write the letter. What sorts of requests is it reasonable for you to make of your college professors? College faculty, like myself, are boring adults. And you should know that. And you should think about that when you're asking for things. Like, I kind of frequently get requests from students to meet with them in the evenings. On a weekday, like at 7 p.m. or something. They're like, I'm available after 6.30. Or on weekends. No, I'm not available in the evenings or on weekends. I'm a boring adult. I have children. I'm boring. I'm asleep most of the time when you're doing whatever you're doing. What do you do if you have to miss class? Well, often you just miss class, and it is what it is. But sometimes it'll be appropriate to contact the professor in advance. Do it in advance. And let them know that you're going to be missing class. Now here's what a lot of college students do, and all the professors joke about it, is that they'll miss class, wait until after they've missed class, and then they will send the following email. Hey, professor so-and-so. Had to miss class because of whatever reason. Did I miss anything? This is the standard email, it seems. And we don't like it. Because we have feelings. And it hurts our feelings when you suggest that it's possible that nothing important happened that day. Your professor thinks that everything in their class is important. That's why they put it there. They love it. It's their baby. So instead, professor so-and-so. My name is such-and-such. I'm in this course that meets at 10 a.m. Unfortunately, I have to miss class on this date for this reason. I checked the syllabus in advance, and I know that this is happening. However, I have one question. Can I get this? Or can this happen? Or whatever. That's how you send that email. Just something small about attire. The college classroom is a semi-professional environment. I dress like this, you know, with a jacket, as a way of communicating to my students that I am not their friend. And students don't have to dress this way, and it'd be kind of weird if you did. You should dress the way that most of the other students are dressed, in a somewhat casual way. But, like, for example, I had a student who used to come to class and he would wear these, like, workout shirts from the gym. They would, like, cut out holes. The whole side. It's like a sleeveless shirt, but you cut out the whole side so you could, like, see through the side. You could see the side of this guy's body. If I can see your nipples, that's not the appropriate way to dress. Okay. That's all I've got to say in this video about interacting with professors. I'm going to take a few more minutes and get back to you in a moment. We'll be right back. .