The Engineering Graduate Student Association has recently been discussing the issue of mail delivery for graduate students in the various departments in the College of Engineering. Through our discussions, we have learned that policies and practices vary widely. We would like to take this opportunity to present what we feel are "best practices" and "worst practices" with respect to this issue. We urge each department to consider adjusting their policies, where appropriate, to fit within these guidelines. Our underlying assumption is that graduate students are professionals within their respective fields, and that their mail should be handled accordingly.

Best practices:

• A staff person (or work-study student) should be responsible for sorting and delivering mail on a daily basis.
  
• Each graduate student should have an individual mailbox or file folder into which mail addressed to them is placed.
  
• Personal mail should be acceptable, if discouraged for reasons of volume.
  
• Graduate student mail should be kept in a locked space that is not accessible to the public.
  

Worst practices:

• It is not acceptable to ask graduate students to sort their own mail. For example, to put all graduate student mail into one pile which is then sorted whenever someone decides they want to. This is problematic for many reasons including: (i) the explicit lack of privacy (a graduate student has to invade everyone's privacy to deliver the mail), (ii) the lack of accountability if an important piece of mail is lost, and (iii) the implication that the professional correspondence that graduate students receive is not as important as that of faculty or post-docs.
  
• It is not acceptable to simply remove someone's mail because it is "personal." (In one instance, a graduate student had their tax forms removed by a staff-person and given to their advisor. The student was then berated by said staff-person for receiving personal mail in their department.) We feel that while personal mail can be discouraged, it should not be disallowed. There are any number of legitimate reasons why someone might need a piece of personal mail (or what merely looks like personal mail) to be delivered to their Cornell address.
  
• It is not desirable for graduate students to have to share mail space with others. For instance, some departments assign a box or folder per letter of the alphabet. A consequence of this is that some boxes are always overflowing (often with mail for students who are no longer at Cornell), and others are almost always empty.