Lost your AirPods? You’re not alone. Forty-seven students posted about missing headphones to Hoagie Digest this year.
The Hoagie Digest, sent out to all of the residential college listservs typically on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, is a compilation of student posts made to Hoagie Stuff. Hoagie Stuff is an online platform where students can send posts to the entire Princeton student body.
Hoagie Digest allows students to post concert tickets for sale, split an Uber to the airport, request sociology surveys, and much more. “Think of it as a Craigslist…for Princeton students,” Dennis Jacob ’24, vice president of Hoagie Club, told The Daily Princetonian.
With the goal of reducing spam in students’ inboxes, Hoagie Digest features three categories of student posts: Marketplace, Bulletins, and Lost & Found. The platform can help with more unique requests too. For example, one bulletin post from October 10 was looking for a person to help clean bugs in a dorm room.
“I started to send out the email, just hoping someone would respond to it and help save me. Get the bugs out of my room.” Alyssa Traylor ’25 said.
She explained that she got an email response within three minutes of sending the email and that a fellow Scully resident helped clean out her room.
“It was really nice that someone was able to come to my rescue that quickly, you know?” Traylor said. “And that he was so willing, even after me asking him to come by late.”
Using the LISTSERV archives of the residential colleges, the ‘Prince’ analyzed the number and category of all emails sent through Hoagie Digest from September 2nd, 2023, to April 6th, 2024.
At the end of each email, Hoagie Digest includes a metric of how many emails are saved by the compilation of student posts. In the 2023–2024 school year, Hoagie Digest has saved a total of 436 emails, grouping the postings in each Digest instead of each being sent individually. Each Hoagie Digest email saves Princetonians an average of 4.31 emails.
Some of the most common postings sent through Hoagie Mail were related to concerts, rideshares, roommate inquiries, and surveys. Of the 20 emails sent through Hoagie Digest requesting survey responses, eight of the emails, 40 percent, were for the class SOC 101: Introduction to Sociology. Only one request was for a senior thesis.
The largest group of postings sent, however, related to listening devices. Forty-seven emails about missing or found AirPods and their cases, Beats earbuds, Studio buds, and Sony headphones were sent this year. Airpod losses peaked in the second week of November, with four Hoagie Digest emails sent.
Hoagie Club president Liam Esparraguera ’24 noted that the idea for creating Hoagie Digest “spawned naturally out of the user needs” among Princeton students. When Hoagie Mail was first launched in Fall 2021, “some of the residential college listservs were a bit hesitant to let [Hoagie Mail] send on there for worry of spam…Given these concerns over the potential for spam, I think that’s what inspired the digest.”
“We are working on transitioning Hoagie from a closed-off team of students working on and developing student applications to an open community of students who are working on creative or technical projects of their own,” Esparraguera said.
To send an email to Hoagie Digest, go to this HoagieMail website, click “Send a New Email,” then select “Student Sales,” “Lost and Found Items,” or “Everything Else.” Through Hoagie Digest, you can ask, and there’s a good chance that a Princetonian will respond.
Shria Ajay is a contributing Data writer for the 'Prince.'
Ruoming Shen is a contributing Data writer for the 'Prince.'
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.