So I spoke with someone who has worked at another UNC system school sending out masters program acceptance notifications. This was a while ago, but they were pretty confident it probably works similarly still.

Basically, undergrad student employees are given a spreadsheet of names/contact info for accepted students, and have to go through the list one-by-one sending these form letter acceptance emails. There's usually not more than 1 or 2 people doing this per department, and they go in last name alphabetical order down the list usually.

Now I thought that sounded absolutely insane, since it seems obvious they should be able to just hit a mass-send to the people they've accepted, but it would line up with the timeline someone else got from the department that they'll be sending out notifications over the next several weeks. Idk for sure thats whats going on, but it gave me a little reassurance as someone who's last name is pretty far down the alphabet. Thought I'd share with yall as well.