Thursday Q&A
The predicted cold weather is headed our way, Deac families. This morning is gray and chilly, and it will get chillier before the weekend is done. For those of you in the ‘blue zones’ we see on national weather maps, my condolences. It is supposed to be in the 40s for us over the next few days, which is cold for us.
Yesterday we sent out the November issue of the Wake Parents and Families e-newsletter. Unfortunately, it went out with a mistake in it – saying the first day of spring semester classes was January 30th. That is an error – classes actually start on January 13. We sent out a correction email with the correct date, and that prompted several other questions in return. For today’s Daily Deac, I thought it might be fun to cover some of that Q&A (if one person had the question, no doubt some others do as well). So here goes.
Why didn’t I receive the Wake Parents and Families e-newsletter? I got the correction notice, but not the original email.
Unfortunately once we hit ‘send’ on our emails, we cannot control how and when our email is received. In the vast majority of cases, if you do not receive the email (and you know you provided an email address to us), the email has been rerouted automatically to your spam or junk mail folder. It is also possible it was rejected by your company’s IT protocol (if you read at work) or your internet service provider (if you read at home) as potential spam and not delivered at all.
If you have the ability to search within your email program, do search on “Wake Parents and Families” and that might show you its location in a spam or junk email folder. If our message did end up in spam, please mark us as not spam and move back to your inbox and I believe that should fix the problem. You can also add the sending address as a contact and hopefully we’ll be recognized next time.
I talked to another parent yesterday who was in our distro list but never got the email. She uses Gmail and did a search of her email for “Wake Parents and Families.” She wrote me back later: “When I search my Gmail I find it and all the earlier ones and it says “not showing correctly” on all of them. They’re not in my inbox or my spam but it shows up on the search.” So if you are missing us, try those tricks. Know, too, that we always archive the issues here so they can be read online.
The e-newsletter mentioned sorority recruitment, but not fraternity. What information is there about fraternities?
They did not have the dates up when we were compiling our e-newsletter (we have to lock down content a week or so before we plan to send Wake Parents and Families out, so our web team has time to code everything). It looks like the fraternity dates are now out on the Fraternity and Sorority Life website.
Is there a spring Family Weekend in 2015?
We are not having a spring Family Weekend this year. Normally we try to hold those kinds of weekends in February during a basketball weekend. This year’s schedule was not offering any great weekend options. In past years when we have piloted a Spring Family Weekend, attendance has been much lower than the fall weekend, perhaps due to the possibility of bad weather or travel issues. Instead of a formal weekend, we encourage Wake Forest families to plan a visit any time in the spring that suits their family’s schedule.
Where can I find information about Commencement 2015?
The Commencement web site is in the process of being updated for 2015. You can go on the Commencement site and see the date for 2015 Commencement (scroll down to bottom left menu). The day prior will be the Baccalaureate service. By looking at the 2014 Weekend Schedule link, you can get a sense of what the weekend might look like for 2015. While I cannot guarantee that there might not be some changes, my experience has been that the schedule has been pretty similiar in recent years. Once the site is updated for 2015, we will post the link on the Parents’ Page.
What is the date for Family Weekend Fall 2015?
It is not set yet. You can find out why (and when we expect to know) on our Parents’ Page Q&A on events.
In other news – Wake Forest was on CBS News in a story about going SAT optional. This is just a couple of minutes long and well worth your time. This is a great story, and as one who was a subpar SAT taker and a great student, I remain proud we made this decision.
— by Betsy Chapman