Published on 19 April 2013
I got an email this morning from ScienceCareers. It said that I hadn’t signed onto my profile in 730 days, and that my profile was going to be deleted. I remember signing up, when I was leaving uni in Edinburgh and trying to figure out what I was doing. At the time, I was thinking about pursuing a career as a digital librarian, or a data scientists, and I was looking around all over the place for cool jobs that weren’t necessarily related to Linguistics but still allowed me to say that I did stuff “for science”, like XKCD. That’s how I signed onto ecolog, a mailing list with over 20k users, tons of emails a day, which I followed until around January this year. That’s how I got my internship with DataONE that I had my summer between uni and grad school.
But that isn’t necessarily me anymore. I’m still interested in Science, but I’m less likely to find a job on a website like Science Careers. I’m more likely to know the PI or prof I’m actually interested in working with. This is because I’ve invested lots of time and energy in research and networking over the past few years, and less in searching the annals of the internet for random jobs that might be cool, one day, maybe.
What bothers me is that I get this sort of email all of the time. If you look at the links I’ve chosen to display for social networks on my about page, it’s a bit ridiculous. There’s around 20 or 30, and that’s not even counting the links for organisations I have in the basically blue colored paragraph below that. Every day I get emails from some of them. I just got an email telling me I had a new follower on Twitter. I have around 700 followers on Twitter. I’ve received an email (or a joint email) for every one of them. My lists folder at the moment has around 2000 unread emails in it.
Why is this dirty? Because I’ve got to clean it up. The more websites I’ve signed up for, the more emails I get, the more my name is tossed around. The problem is that they don’t go away. 730 days is nothing on the internet. But the amount of time it took me to delete my account on Science Careers (ironically, after registering for a new password) - that’s something to me. When it’s added on to all of the other things I need to check my inbox for today.
Tl;dr don’t sign up for things and unsubscribe when you can.
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