You know when you’re a senior in high school and you get inundated with brochures and information about seemingly every college in North America and then some.

Well, I was just clearing out my old e-mail account since my dad will soon drop the service and I noticed among the hundreds of spam e-mails one from Babson College. For some reason I decided to click on it. Here’s what it said:

When you were researching four-year colleges, you inquired about Babson. Since then, you’ve likely pursued your education elsewhere – perhaps at a liberal arts school or even at another business college. If you chose not to attend a business school, you may be interested to know about our three-week summer program for non-business majors.

Interesting. I guess I expected to never hear from any of the schools recruiting me ever again once I chose one. By and large that’s true. For the first few years I got annual letters from a few, “If you’re looking to transfer…” but from most nothing. They had money to spend recruiting new students not luring others from their first choice schools.

But it is interesting that Babson kept my information for four years between contact and chose to follow up now. It’s likely if I didn’t choose a major that led practically and obviously to a next step, say if I’d chosen philosophy or English and hadn’t quite decided on what to do with my life, that I’d pursue this opportunity just to see if anything came of it.

Although I’m not a fan of spam e-mail, even from places I once did have legitimate contact with (though I didn’t request it so much as take the standardized tests that gave them my info), this was a tactic I can see worth in.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 8:51 pm and is filed under College, Ideas, Offline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.