In the heart of KSC lies one of the campus’s essential services, the mail room, but some students may not know the inner workings of the service and what it takes to manage the mail of over 1,000 students.
Elizabeth Clark, who serves as mail services operations supervisor, said towards the beginning of the semester, as many as 250 packages were delivered daily, with that amount decreasing to 125 toward the end. “Most people are pretty good about when a package comes in and they get an email from the shipper that says ‘Your package has arrived,’ from Amazon or whoever, and then they come to the window because they know it’s here,” Clark said.
In terms of campus mail, Clark said there is a large variance.
“It runs anywhere from ten a day to hundreds or thousands a day,” she said. She explained that since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of campus mailings have been sent out electronically, which she said is “really hurting the postal service in general.”
In terms of informing students about the mail service, Clark said there is more that could be done.
“I don’t think students understand that they have to come to the Mail Room to get their mail. We have a lot of students that have been here for quite a while, I’ll actually go around and look at packages, because they’re dated when they come in, and say, ‘You know, you’ve had a package that’s been here for a while, you really need to come to the Mail Room and pick this up,’” she said.
With online shopping being more accessible to students and the COVID-19 pandemic shifting the retail landscape more toward the web, tracking packages and notifications of arrival remain important to some students. Clark said that, at this time, the Mail Room only sends out delivery notifications for packages that contain perishable items or if there has been a shipping issue that requires a package inquiry.
“We are actually just the receiving end, we’re just the middle-man, so we can’t give a package until it’s received, and then we can’t get it to them until they get it,” Clark explained.
In the past, the Mail Room has attempted to utilize a system that notifies students of any deliveries, but due to Keene State’s anti-virus software, the reminders would get routinely flagged, according to Clark.
“We use special software to use for tracking our packages. When they come in we scan them in and when they come out we scan them as delivered. A lot of software has, and they’re tied into their system that as soon as you tag it, it will automatically email the person that the package is here,” Clark said.
“They won’t back software that’s not Keene State approved so that’s where we keep running into [problems],” she said.
Another difficulty with sending out notifications electronically is that some students don’t check their Keene State email address often, Clark noted.
In terms of staffing, Clark said the current team in the Mail Room manages the workload well.
“I do have one full-time other staff member here and the rest are all student-workers. I usually try to rotate the student-workers in so that I have at least two at the same time,” she said.
Clark remarked on the changes seen in recent years with mail, “Before the pandemic, we were really super busy … We used to get five or six hundred packages a day … After the pandemic, everything has really kind of crushed that, and I think it’s more of the spending, not just because of COVID, but people can’t afford to do all this spending.” “It’s changed, the world has changed,” Clark said.
Nathan Hope can be contacted at
nhope@kscequinox.com
