I arrived at Brown just about two weeks before my 18th birthday. Away from my family and friends for the first time in my life, I was excitedly awaiting letters and packages from them to bring me a slice of home. My parents and friends did their part and spoiled me for my birthday, even paying for expedited shipping to ensure the packages would arrive on time. My USPS tracking indicated the packages were delivered, and yet they were not sorted by Brown’s mailroom for an additional four days. Even when they did arrive, finding time to wait in line to get my packages between classes was disruptive in an already packed shopping period.
My flawed experience with Brown Mail Services is not unique. Herald reporting from five years ago describes long pickup lines slowing down students waiting for their packages in Page-Robinson Hall, the single centralized mail pickup location for all students living on Brown’s campus. Receiving packages on time matters, not just for personal and emotional reasons, but for more major ones, too. Students have even experienced difficulties with mail-in voting due to our package delivery system. Brown students need a better mail system, and that starts with 24-hour mail lockers.
As it stands, Brown students can only access their mail from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekdays, and cannot pick up packages at all over the weekends. This system is incompatible with the hectic lives of college students. For example, if an important package is ready for pick up on Friday afternoon and you can’t run to the mail center before 5 p.m., you’ll have to wait until 8:30 a.m. on to finally receive your mail. This can be more than a mere inconvenience, especially for critical mail like medication or a ballot.
Ahead of this fall’s election cycle, we can’t afford to have mail services making the already-difficult process of voting by mail even more complicated. This year is a midterm year, and the most important elections are going on in states outside of Rhode Island. Senate seats in seven states are considered tossups, and 7.2% of Brown students live in these states. Additionally, there are 22 high-stakes elections in the House of Representatives and 46.8% of Brown students hail from states with these toss-up seats. The current Presidential administration is already attempting to restrict mail-in ballots.
Brown has made some improvements to Mail Services over the years, but these have not been enough to remedy the overall system. In 2015, Mail Services was consolidated to a single location in Page-Robinson Hall. The renovation of Page-Robinson in 2018 highlighted just how long it had been since Brown had seriously updated their mail services. Those renovations did away with individual mailboxes, consolidating all packages and mail into a single mailroom while also retiring the Graduate Center mail services location. A queue-tracking monitor was added to the new Mailroom in 2023, but this addition only allows students to track where they are in the Mail Services queue and doesn’t do anything to actually speed up the pickup process.
As inspiration for an improved system, Brown can look to other universities that have implemented mail lockers. For example, Duke University launched a parcel pickup locker system in 2022, which sends each student an email with a unique code to the locker containing their package, allowing them to pick it up anytime.
Quinnipiac University has entirely replaced its mail service window with lockers, where students have four days to pick up their packages and 11 days before the mail center returns the package. The change has received positive feedback, with students describing the system as a “time-saving upgrade.” A student also described how their day no longer revolves around “ a five hour window if you really want your package,” highlighting the advantages of 24-hour lockers. Students at Vanderbilt, which introduced lockers in 2015 and doubled the amount of lockers in 2025, expressed satisfaction with the expansion of their locker system.
A locker system also shifts staff effort from checkout-line service to backend sorting, cutting the line-facing bottleneck without eliminating mailroom jobs. This system might also ease strain on mailroom staff, something Brown hasn’t looked at publicly since 2015.
There are many things in this world that are more important than how we get our packages, but it is important to get the little things right. Students at Brown are required to live on campus for three years and in that time there is nowhere else to get mail delivered. Whether students are getting something obviously important like a ballot or medication, or something more sentimental like a birthday card, there are renovations that could make getting those packages easier.
Sophie Hansen ’30 can be reached at sophie_hansen@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.edu.
