Communication

Email Communication

Use your official Hunter email address as much as possible. In theory, any messages or communication attempts from other email addresses could be identified as junk emails and ignored by the system.

From message sent to our GIS mailing list

Many messages sent through gmail had been identified as junk mails by the CUNY/Hunter email system. So, please try to send us messages with a different email address if you do not get a response from me or other faculty members after a few days. 

Ideally, you should always use your Hunter official email address. The official email address from your previous institution may also work, if you still have access to it. Alternatively, you can register for a new email address and use it only for serious business matters (not for any social media or other apps/websites). If you used your gmail address to log in a lot of apps or websites, it might have been compromised. From what I read from my Junk Email folder, there are indeed a lot of phishing or marketing emails sent via gmail. 

As the last resort, you can call our offices or call our department main office during business hours and let them know that you send us emails, which might have been labeled as junk mails. The staff in the main office will notify us.

Filling in and Filing Forms

During your study in the program, you will certainly fill out and file a lot of forms. To make the process smooth, please use the digital format whenever it is possible. Most forms are available as PDF or Word files (Word files can be easily exported to PDF).

On Mac computers, you can use the native “Preview” tool to fill and sign forms in PDF format. On Windows, you can use “Adobe Acrobat” (reader is free), “Foxit PDF reader” (free), and “PDFgear” (free and recommended) to fill in and sign PDF forms. Note that these software also have Mac versions, although the “Preview” on Mac is good enough for simple tasks.

Filling in forms in these software may need to use annotation tools like add text or typewriter. Most of them can use image files as signatures, which you can generate by writing on a piece of paper and then take a photo. Some also support direct writing with mouse, touch pad or scan an image through camera.

Do NOT download a digital form, print it, fill in and sign it by hand, take a photo by phone, and then send us the image file. This takes a lot of time and unnecessarily consumes some natural resources. More importantly, the photo does not look good in most cases. When printed out, such photos will look blurry. If you do need to print a form and manually fill it out, try to scan the finished form using a digital scanner. Or at least, try a scanner app that can clip the image to the right size and can correct image distortion.