When I lost my university email, my identity as scientist took an unexpected hit

science.org

10 points·pseudolus··6 comments

When I was attending university, we went to an orientation where one of the things they kept hammering into us was that we should start using the university-provided email as our "professional" point of contact.

Then someone asked whether we'd be able to keep our emails after graduation, and the presenter hemmed and hawed and it became very clear that we should not, in fact, be doing that.

I don't even remember if I have an alumni email account; I think I tried to snag something like janitor@alumni.university.email, but I don't even remember where I'd go to check.

There's a niche for an email management company catering to this need for giving reliability to academic identities here, I reckon. The TAM is very big with the current economic shifts in academia.

Does anything already do it, or is it a market left on the table?

There is https://orcid.org which is a persistent identifier for a researcher. It would be interesting if sending email to a researchers orcid handle resolved to their current institutional email address I guess?

My usual workflow is find the person on google scholar, find their uni/lab homepage, and hope they published their email there.

> The TAM is very big with the current economic shifts in academia.

How big is big?

Millions of higher ed employees in the world seeking immutable contact points for others to reach them across changes of institution. With the changes in student intake sizes as different regions respond to changes in birth rates, easily 50% of all professors are exposed to churn, so an established service could reach mid eight digits of ARR.

I have no idea if there is already a firm in this space doing this, though.

Community college email accounts FTW. Support your local district.

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