I am not a parent but, I was wondering if I could get the opinions of some of the parents here. I want to create an email address that I can use to communicate with former professors, classmates, etc. once I graduate in May. Unfortunately, most formats of my name have been taken. So I was wondering which of these formats you think would be best to use:
first name initial, last name, school initials (e.g. jsmithub) or first name initial and the last two digits of the years in which I graduated both from undergrad and grad school (e.g. jsmith1215).
Have you checked with your college to see if they provide alumni email addresses? I have a friend whose email address is first@collegealumni.com. If not, I think either option you mentioned would be good.
Some colleges allow you to keep your college e-mail address permanently. But if you can’t do that, or you prefer a service such as gmail, any part of your name plus some extra numbers or letters that don’t spell anything would be fine. Just don’t make it jsmith666 or jsmithsex or anything like that. You may want to use your personal e-mail address for business purposes, so it shouldn’t be silly.
Keep it short and simple. No one likes to type in an extra long name. Mine is long and prone to misspellings. How often do you really think professors and the like will want to keep in touch??? Some schools keep the college email address for about a year, others cut you off at graduation. I presume you have more than your college email address- use one of those. Or use the college one but with another .whatever if you can.
