Mass E-mail Hawks SparkNotes Jobs

A mass e-mail sent by the Social Studies department to its concentrators on Tuesday had some students thinking about the line between academic announcements and spam.

The e-mail, sent to hundreds of current concentrators, advertised job openings at SparkNotes, a company that provides academic study guides online.

A. Nora Burch, the undergraduate coordinator for the Committee on Social Studies, said she forwarded the e-mail to students because her supervisor received it and thought students might be interested.

Burch said she frequently sends out e-mails about job openings at non-profit companies that work in areas related to the Social Studies curriculum. The SparkNotes e-mail was the first non-Social Studies-related e-mail she has sent, she said.

“It’s just the first non-Social Studies e-mail we happened to get,” Burch said. “We don’t really have a policy for it. If we were to get a lot we’d probably screen them.”

But some Social Studies concentrators said they did not see any relevance.

“I was kind of confused why they sent it,” Carolina S. Johnson ’04 said. “I think I actually trashed it. I thought it must be something involving Social Studies so I was clearly surprised it wasn’t.”

While Johnson said she was not attracted by the SparkNotes job offer, other Social Studies concentrators appreciated the e-mail.

“I thought it was cool. I might work there,” said Previn H. Warren ’04. “[Burch] sends out a lot of random e-mails, but I didn’t really understand what the relevance was.”

Warren said that Burch has sent out e-mails about everything from Radcliffe fellowships to an open house at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

“All of it’s good stuff but it’s definitely sort of spammy,” Warren said.

According to one Social Studies administrator, the current editor of SparkNotes is a Harvard graduate and probably sent the e-mail to all concentration departments. She also noted that Social Studies students would appreciate the job notice because many go on to do jobs with a heavy writing component after graduating.

The SparkNotes e-mail advertised positions for students to write SAT II test questions, subject summaries and study guides for the company.

Chris Churchill, a staff assistant in the History and Literature office, said that the History and Liteature department also received the e-mail from SparkNotes but decided not to forward it to their students.

“We try not to bother hist and lit students with stuff that’s not related to history and literature,” Churchill said.

SparkNotes was founded in 1999 by three Harvard graduates. Over 100 Harvard graduates now write for it, according to its website.

—Staff writer Anne K. Kofol can be reached at kofol@fas.harvard.edu