As you transition to post-Carleton life, there are a few things you should take care of in the weeks and months before your departure to transfer or archive your digital materials. During your time at Carleton you have created documents, presentations, posters, and more that you may wish to keep. You may be the owner of resources for an organization or committee which you now need to transfer to someone else. And, of course, there's likely to be a lot of email that you may (or may not) want to keep for future reference.
For more detailed information on each of the options presented below, please refer to our corresponding Carlpedia wiki article.
Most Important To-Do's
The following are the most important things to consider wrapping up as you approach your departure
- Transfer your email: spend time curating - you probably don’t want all of it.
- Transfer your cloud files: check storage limits on personal accounts - it’s probably lower than your Carleton account.
- Transfer ownership of shared files: shared files disappear from all accounts when the owning account expires.
- Update your email on external accounts: verification emails are often sent to the original address as part of the process.
- Accounts expire for real: there is no such thing as temporary reactivation after your account expires.
- Start sooner rather than later: this all takes more time than you expect.
Faculty and Staff: Returning Carleton-Owned Technology
- Please let us know that you or someone you supervise is leaving Carleton so that we can arrange for hardware return and software license reclamation.
Archiving and Transferring Email
- Set an Auto-Reply on your Carleton email alerting your contacts that your email address will be changing (this auto reply will end when your Carleton email account closes)
- Select a transfer or archiving method and get that process running several weeks prior to your departure
You may also elect to set up email forwarding. This service would continue until your Carleton account is deactivated.
Note: we have had reports that some people were unable to successfully configure email forwarding. If you have problems, please contact the ITS Helpdesk so that we can help test and troubleshoot.
Collecting your Documents and Files
During your time at Carleton, you have undoubtedly written and created a lot of material which is stored digitally in various places on our network: Course assignments in Moodle, files in Dropbox, files in Google Drive, etc. Once your Carleton account expires, you will lose access to these files which will eventually be deleted from our systems. The links below provide more information on accessing and transferring these types of files.
Transfer Ownership: Groups, Files, and More
When you leave Carleton, it's important to transfer ownership of any Dropbox files that are important to your successors or collaborators, as well as any Google Drive files and folders, and Google Groups. Shared files and Groups with no active Owner will remain available as long as there are on-campus participants, but no one will be able to manage sharing or membership or deletion without an active Owner.
Special Note for Student Organization Resources: Be sure to pass on Google Groups and Google Drive files to a student who is not graduating! Mailing lists and organization resources that have no on-campus owners will be scheduled for deletion.
Add Personal Email Address to Workday
Before graduating, you need to add a personal email address to your Workday account. After July, you will no longer be able to access Workday (e.g. to get your 2025 W-2) unless you have your personal account set as the “Home (Primary)” email address in your account.
Update External Accounts That Are Using Your Carleton Email Address
You should plan to update your contact information on any external accounts that use your Carleton email address before it is shut down.
For example: if you have a social media account, or an Amazon account, that you created using your Carleton email address, you will need to update that before you lose access to your Carleton account.
Most sites want to send a confirmation email to the original address as a security precaution, to ensure that the owner of the account is authorizing the change. If you try to make this change after your Carleton account is deactivated, you won't be able to receive that confirmation. Please note that it is not possible for ITS to "temporarily reactivate" your Carleton email account after it expires in order to accommodate this. The account is not simply deactivated, it is deleted and no longer exists.
Alumni Accounts post-Graduation
Graduating Students, once your account finishes its transition to an Alumni account, you will no longer have access to many Carleton systems (such as Moodle) but you will still have access to things like the Alumni Directory.