Alfredo Deambrosi

A while ago, I was amazed to learn that one of my friends, who is also a colleague, sends a small birthday gift to each of his students. And he has hundreds of students.

I try to avoid measuring success by comparing myself to others, but learning about my friend has reminded me that I could do more to reach out to individual students.

I have 32 academic advisees. Although I do not send them birthday gifts, I do want at least to give birthday greetings on their birthdays. Something that helps me out is using an internet reminder service. Such a service is an organization that sends me a birthday-reminder email for the appropriate day.

I understand that hallmark.com has a reminder service, but the advantage of birthdayalarm.com, which I use, is that I can enter multiple names and birthdays at once (on one screen).

The benefit of these reminder emails is that since I have my email application open, I can act immediately to email a birthday greeting to the student. (I know, a signed birthday card would be better, but an unexpected birthday greeting from an academic advisor can still be special, even if it is electronic.) I also use the service for reminders about birthdays and anniversaries of friends and family members.

An additional benefit is that the service saves me the work of writing down special days in my calendar every year. The next year that such a day rolls around, the service does the reminding for me.

Another thing that I like about birthdayalarm.com is that I can change my settings for how many days ahead of time that I want to be notified. For example, I can be notified one week before the birthday and then again the day before. Being notified a week in advance allows me to send a package to family members in advance.

The system will not make up for laziness that is part of human nature. It is certainly possible to ignore the email or to move it aside into the to-do folder, which should probably be given a more realistic name such as the “might-do” folder. I will avoid giving personal examples that would justify the name change.

I hope to keep finding ways to reach out to my students or my academic advisees in a more personal way. But a birthday greeting from an academic advisor is something small that might help to make the day a little more special for a busy college student.