Snow, Bean boots, and emails. What do these things have in common? Well, Hamilton simply has too much of each of them. But especially emails. It began innocently, with an email here and there from HillFresh Laundry and Wellness at Hamilton in August, before I was even on campus. I thought it was a little strange that I was already receiving emails from organizations on and adjacent to campus just because I had enrolled, but I didn’t give it much more thought than that. Little did I know the flood of emails that would inundate my inbox. Then came September, and I was on campus. As a freshman, I was already dazed by the novelty of College Life. Still, the number of emails began to climb: Gaming Club, The Office of Off-Campus Study, Dance Team, Hillel, Anime Club, WHCL, Hogwarts at Hamilton, Language Tables, Hamilton Christian Fellowship, Finance Club, Microfinance Club, Mail
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Post, Smash Bros! It was everything I never wanted. With each Gmail notification, I was thrown a different and singularly niche club. I slowly learned to filter my emails, but they were coming in faster and larger quantities than I could have ever imagined. None of which I had signed up for. I began asking my friends at other colleges, NESCAC and otherwise, and it seemed that they were not encountering the same steep climbing wall of emails that I was, and I absent-mindedly wondered why there was such a discrepancy. But the seismic wave that brought me to this article because of the noxious landfill it made of my inbox came on September 20th, just before the first climate strike. Every single club sent out the exact same email on the same day announcing the campus-wide protest. I could not tell you the number of emails I received, but for each one after the ones from relevant clubs, I wanted to spray an entire can of aerosol into the O-Zone.
