Dont Screw Up Your Username

Don’t Screw Up Your Username Tomorrow is, yes, the First of May[?], which means those of you who have decided to join the incoming class have a very crucial choice to make: choosing your MIT username. You may not appreciate yet how big this decision is: your MIT username (also referred to as your Athena or your Kerberos)  will be your login to the computing systems here, itll be your first (and likely primary) email address while youre at MIT, youll have the ability to edit files at http://web.mit.edu/username, and it will likely remain your MIT email address (@alum.mit.edu) after you graduate. In other words, this is for life. Fear not, though. After consulting with many others (as well as compiling from some earlier blog posts), Ive prepared the following list of guidelines: Your username must be between 3 and 8 characters. Avoid numbers and underscores. You are technically allowed to use them, but they arent needed and add confusion and clunkiness to your username. Say your username out loud a few times to check for clunkiness or awkward pronunciations. Its usually  best to go professional.  Your username will appear all over the place: emails, URLs, academic papers, etc. Choose a username that you wont be embarrassed sharing with your professors.â€"Matt McGann 00 Usernames can often become nicknames of a sort for people, so consider whether youd be comfortable being referred to by your username. In some circles on campus, you may become known by your username, so choose wisely.â€"Matt again If you want to go invent a nickname as your usernameâ€"say, [emailprotected]â€"then go for it! Just also make sure youre ready to answer the question Why is your username flipfrog? for the rest of your life. Often the best usernames involve your name. Some common (and excellent) username structures for a hypothetical student named Alyssa P. Hacker: alyssa (Every once in a while these are available, so try it!) hacker ahacker alyssah aphacker aph Note that if you do throw your middle initial in there, you will receive questions about your middle name. Truncating your name into 8 characters can be annoying sometimes. You might not want [emailprotected] if your last name is Richardson, for instance. Just something to keep in mind. If youre still feeling stuck on what to choose, you should know that its easy to make alternate email addresses later, so in general its better to choose a more standard/professional username for your official MIT account. (To make alternate email addresses later, you can set up mailing lists on whose behalf you can send mail and of which you are the only member, thus making it another email address. This isnt hard and means you can own email addresses which are much more ridiculous, like [emailprotected]  or [emailprotected].) Now go forth and think of your username! Just not flipfrog. I already got that one.