Next week is National Engineers Week at UCSD. What makes it so cool is that much of the week is completely organized and executed by students. They are totally in charge of three major campus events: E-Games (engineering design competiton), ENSPIRE (400 8th graders come to campus for a day) and DECaF (huge engineering job fair with more than 90 companies coming to recruit Jacobs School students).
The students have been blogging about all their prep work.
My favorite part of this blogging so far is the description of using mail merge for organizing the career fair. I've pasted an exerpt below. You can read the full post here.
Imagine having 200+ professors that you want to personally email to invite to an event of yours, like the Dining Etiquette Workshop. And you obviously don't want to start out "Dear Professor" because then they'd just write you off as another one of those "generic email writers." What can you do? Mail Merge lets you write and format an email invitation in Microsoft Word, personalize that email to a specific professor that you've listed in Microsoft Excel, and it emails your invitation to every email on that Excel Document through Outlook! Ingenious I know. So you're like "So What? I don't really think professors care that much about having a personalized email, what's the point?" Well imagine having a gazillion industry representatives and recruiters and officials whom you want to email to come to DECaF. Yes, let's just put ALL their emails in one "TO:" box and send it out. Yaknowadimean?
