Career Services Blog - March, 2011

A friend of mine on Facebook recently posted a link to an article in the New York Times that was titled Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You. The author clearly prefers to communicate via email/text rather than over the phone. The post got several comments and pretty much all of them agreed with the author and essentially said, “Phone calls? Eeww!” But I feel like relegating all communication to stuff that’s typed seems xenophobic. So I disagreed with the article and commented in defense of two-way, dynamic communication. I said that emails/text messages are static communication; they go one way at a time. And they strip away all of the rich vocal and visual cues associated with two-way communication. I was tempted to ask the group if they would also prefer to just read the lyrics to their favorite songs instead of actually listening to them. But that seemed too snarky.

There is no substitute for being in someone’s presence

My preference is for face-to-face communication in a quiet atmosphere, next would be video chats, followed by phone calls, and lastly, email/text. I think it's because I’ve seen several situations where people looked good on paper/electronic documents (resumes, essays, test scores, etc.) and then I met them, and I was like, whoa—maybe not. And I’ve also seen a number of situations where people didn’t look very good on paper/electronic documents, but when I met them, I knew they deserved a chance. There is no substitute for looking someone in the eye, watching how they breathe, how they move, and hearing the tone of their voice. These are the metadata that inform our gut feelings--and we're hard-wired to pick up on them. And you can't get them from letters on a screen.

Don’t get me wrong, I send and receive well over a hundred emails a day, I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and I text a lot. But serious conversations require too much back-and-forthfor one-way communication. “Hey, can you pick up some milk on the way home?” That’s great for text/email. But I had a student send me an email once that said, “How do I do salary negotiations?” I was tempted to reply with “Get as much as you can without over promising,” which wouldn’t have scratched the surface of the terms of any potential offer, the student's salary history, relevant market research, 401k contributions and vesting, and all of the complexities of noncompensitory benefits. To give meaningful advice I need to know the context, the history, all of the relevant details. We could go over those in a few minutes in person or over the phone, or we could protract it over several days and dozens of emails--and by the time the student knows what to do, it’s probably going to be too late.

Bottom line: If you have a quick update, by all means, type it out and click send. But if you have something serious to go over, talk with me, not at me.