Students, alumni, and faculty at Williams college are issued a Unix ID by the Office for Information Technology. The Unix ID is a person's unique and concise login name used to access services such as:
- Novell NetWare
- Blackboard
- Unix
- Willipedia
- the WSO site
- JOSE
- Daily Messages
- pretty much everything that's not PeopleSoft
An undergraduate's Unix ID begins with the last two digits of his graduation year, followed by his initials. In cases where two or more students from the same graudation year have the same initials, the ID is suffixed by an underscore followed by a two-digit number.
Faculty Unix IDs are the first letter of the first name followed by up to 7 letters of the surname.
Graduate students Unix IDs begin with "g", followed by the last two digits of the graduation year, followed by the initials.
Guests (such as students from other colleges who come here for SMALL) have Unix IDs such as "guest11." Students in the Williams-Mystic Program have Unix IDs that begin with "wm" followed by the student's initials, but this ID is literally never used. High school students taking Williams classes are given IDs beginning with "sh" followed by the student's initials.
Everyone with a Unix ID automatically gets a public folder which stores up to 127 MB of files on the network.
Underscores
For a list of students that have underscores in their Unix IDs (and therefore shortcut email addresses), see Unix ID underscore.
Unix IDs must be unique to each individual. When two or more students from the same graudation year have the same initials, the student with the alphabetically prior name gets a "normal" Unix ID, while each successive same-initialed student has an underscore (_) and a number starting with "2" appended (see Unix ID underscore for examples).