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I sent both of the reviewers, pdf of my thesis more than a month ago. Only one of them acknowledges the receipt, the other one is french.

I sent them physical copies last Friday. They should have received them by now. I sent them an email just in case to warn them I sent it to their University address. Why don't they just acknowledge they received it? I need to contact them again because I misprinted one graph.

marietiara
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Faculty members are busy. One of the many reasons for that is a constant flood of emails. For example, I receive an email message (on my university email account; I'm not counting personal stuff here) on average every 19 minutes and 5 seconds. I imagine that there are people with much busier inboxes than mine.

In such situations, time constraints require faculty members to keep sent emails to a minimum. After all, I cannot spend all my time on emails; I have educational tasks to fulfil, and I would like to occasionally do some research too. So when I receive a PDF of someone's thesis in the mail, I will file it in the right folder, maybe print the thesis, and move on to the next topic. I will definitely not write an extra email acknowledging receipt, because that half minute can be spent on checking off another task or two.

I appreciate that this might strike students as impolite. The one thing I can offer you is that it is exceedingly unlikely that this is a personal thing. It's not that the reviewers don't like you, or that they don't want to acknowledge your existence; it's merely a lack of time on their side.

  • +1 Indeed. Acknowledgements have gone out of fashion 10-15 years ago. It's disturbing, but what can you do. I try to make a point of acknowledging receipt of an important document, though, because I know how unnerving it is. – Captain Emacs Jan 26 '21 at 11:10