Proceedings of the May 16th, 2007 meeting
Agenda
1) 5:45 FOOD (thanks Anwei!)
2) 6:00 Welcome with Introductions (Kristina)
3) 6:05 Announcements (Kristina)
i. Approve minutes from 5/9 with the following changes:
a) Euan provides details of his officer’s report that should’ve been included: We get part of our budget from the ASSU and spend this essentially on our own costs. The other part of the budget comes from the general fee, which (after refunds and admin costs) comes to $120K to give to groups (administered by Funding under Polina) and $76K that we spend ourselves on programming and our other activities. Of the $76K we have about $10K left, which is good for this time of year and I encourage us to spend as much of it as possible.
b) The Bylaw change that we voted on last week in regards to the LCO needed to pass by a 2/3rds majority, rather by consensus, so the bylaw change is not yet official. We will vote on this again later in the agenda.
ii. Hanna can’t be at the meeting next week (May 22nd), so we need a replacement secretary.
iii. Healthcare article in Daily
4) 6:10 Old Union Status Update (Hershey)
5) 6:15 Revote on LCO bylaw change (Kristina)
6) 6:20 Graduate Life Office (Chris Griffith)
7) 6:40 Fee Budget (Kristina and Matt)
8) 6:45 Update on Graduate Student Life Survey (Hanna)
9) 6:55 Discussion of publicity chair (Fen and Melahn)
10) 7:05 Request for funding for upcoming Block Party (Fen)
11) 7:10 New business
Attendance
Voting members present:
Law: Shireen Barday – proxy Donna present
Natural Sciences: Fen Zhao - present
Engineering 2: Marja Mullings - present
Social Sciences: Euan Robertson – proxy Adam Beberg present
Business: Rhyan Uy - present
Earth Sciences: Kyle Anderson - present
Education: Ryan Williams - present
At large 1: Maxim Afanasyev - present
At large 2: Hanna Muenke - present
At large 3: Kristina Keating - present
At large 4: Zeng Fan - present
At large 5: Lan Wei - present
Voting members not present:
Engineering 1: Melahn Parker
Humanities: George Bloom
Medicine: Yana Hoy
Additional attendees:
Josh Oechslin, Alexandru Ene, Hershey Avula, Phillip Hon, Anthony Bestafka Cruz, Dan Bacon, Ben Fong, Linus Liang, Anwei Chai, Maria Spletter, Stacie Chan, Niraj Sheth
Minutes
1) FOOD (thanks Anwei!)
2) Welcome with Introductions (Kristina)
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3) Announcements (Kristina)
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i. Minutes from 5/9 pass by consensus with the following changes:
a) Euan provides details of his officer’s report that should’ve been included: We get part of our budget from the ASSU and spend this essentially on our own costs. The other part of the budget comes from the general fee, which (after refunds and admin costs) comes to $120K to give to groups (administered by Funding under Polina) and $76K that we spend ourselves on programming and our other activities. Of the $76K we have about $10K left, which is good for this time of year and I encourage us to spend as much of it as possible.
b) The Bylaw change that we voted on last week in regards to the LCO needed to pass by a 2/3rds majority, rather by consensus, so the bylaw change is not yet official. We will vote on this again later in the agenda.
ii. Hanna can’t be at the meeting next week (May 22nd), so we need a replacement secretary. Kyle will bring laptop, and Marja will take minutes. Thanks!
iii. Kristina tells us about a healthcare article in the Stanford Daily today (5/16/07) that we should all read to get updated on dependent healthcare around campus.
4) Old Union Status Update (Hershey):
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Kristina and Hershey did a walkthrough of some of the new space. The office space looks good. There are some meeting rooms of different sizes, with the goal that they will be open for reservation. There are also some lounging rooms. The café also looks nice. They are currently working on security, thinking about card/key/keypad options for the different offices… The building will probably be open until 3am to everyone, with limited access to necessary individuals after that. Opening June 24th for moving into offices and such, and will have a grand opening in the fall during new student orientation.
5) Revote on Legal Counseling Office (LCO) bylaw change (Kristina).
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This is an item that we discussed last week, but realized belatedly that it needed to be voted on, rather than decided by consensus, which is what we did last week. Thus, we are voting today to approve the bylaw change. The main idea of the bylaw is to add a representative from the Senate and GSC onto the policy board.
Vote: 10 for, 0 opposed, none abstaining. Passes with 2/3 majority.
6) Graduate Life Office (Chris Griffith)
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Chris Griffith was unavailable, but the other graduate deans Andy Hernandez and Ken Hsu came to talk to us about the role of the Graduate Life Office. They play a general role in supporting graduate students. Each of them works with specific living areas, but they also all take turns being on-call to support students at all times.
Some of their roles including responding to crises, academic concerns, other student well being concerns, and dealing with violations of University policy. They often get calls from the police, hospital, academic departments for assistance with students, but would love to help us find resources before things get to that point. There are three of them for all graduate students, which is not much, but they can also be a good bridge to other resources, so don’t feel shy about asking them for help.
We can get more information about the Graduate Life Office and other resources from website is glo.stanford.edu.
7) Fee Budget (Kristina and Matt):
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There is nothing here that should be controversial, because we have approved all budget amounts before. What we are voting on now is how the amounts are distributed to the groups across the quarters.
Vote: 11 for, 0 opposed, 0 abstaining. Fee budget passes.
8) Update on Graduate Student Life Survey (Hanna):
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Hanna presented some general stats about the results of the GSC survey. Some examples include that students do read our emails about programs, that respondents included a pretty even on/off-campus split, and male/female balance. More analysis will be completed over time, with the goal of being finished over the summer. A full report will be written over the summer detailing all results, and shorter reports will be written and given to the President, Provost, etc. Will make sure that advocacy committees have the information from the survey that will support them in their goals, or that may help focus the advocacy areas needed.
9) Discussion of publicity chair (Fen):
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Think it might be good to have a focused person to publicize events that anyone planning events could go to for help in publicizing, which would include making flyers, distributing them to SSE to hang up around campus, and sending out emails. This position was previously in the budget as a publicity / PR role, but the person chosen did not fulfill the role, and thus did not take the salary, and so money for this position was not included in the upcoming budget. It is possible that focusing on just publicity will make it more likely that someone will be interested and able to fulfill this position, and perhaps have someone else to focus on PR, which might include things like writing rebuttals if necessary. Melahn will write up something more formal, and this will be discussed again at a future meeting.
10) Request for funding for upcoming Block Party (Fen):
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The organizers originally thought that they had the money for this year’s event, but it was actually in a future budget for next year’s event, so need to ask for the same amount ($2000) for the 2007* event. This is an event put together by Rains, EV, and the GSC, and all groups put in money to cover expenses of event. Because it is not currently in the budget, the $2000 will come from the reserves. This year’s event is being held Memorial Day Weekend (5/25). There are no objections to the amount requested, passes by consensus.
* Minutes were incorrectly approved saying 2006, but should actually refer to 2007, as now changed above.
11) New business
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i. Cullen went to board meeting for the Alumni Association. They’re already starting to work on alumni mentoring programs. This Saturday is one event, might be used as model for events in the future. One thing they brought up was that mentoring programs are very time and labor intensive. If you are trying to give every graduate student a mentor in the same way that everyone has an academic advisor, you would need huge numbers of mentors, which they don’t have yet. They are thinking about working within individual schools to start, particularly since some schools already do some alumni mentoring. They definitely want more current graduate students to be graduate alumni. They have done a survey, and would be interested in coming in to tell us about it, and also about other things they do. Kristina will contact to schedule a time to come in, potentially after dead week.
ii. Rhyan: thanks ASSU executive committee members for being at the GSC meeting, and asks what their plans are for the next year, and how we can be a part of them.
- Diversity: Plans a town hall meeting about Israel, wants to work on gender neutral housing, intolerance on campus in general, graduate and faculty diversity.
- Academic initiatives – Want to bring back courseguide, which is a more complete description of classes, which might benefit students choosing future courses. There is currently syllabi.stanford.edu, which aims to list the syllabi from each course, but this relies on the professors to submit them. Will work with the professors to increase the numbers of syllabi available. Also interested in working on a grad to undergrad mentoring program, which might also help with diversity, in that it could even out the pipeline. Maria points out that individual departments do have some things, but university wide would be nice. Also, the proposed plan would focus more on professional development, whereas some current programs do not necessarily have this focus.
- Housing initiatives – Also working on gender-neutral housing, which has so far been an undergraduate focus, but would extend this to graduate students as well. Munger is another issue the group will work on. The GSC will have a housing meeting in two weeks, where we can further discuss some of these ideas.
- Social: They host big events, which are all open to graduate students, though it seems like these events are more popular among undergraduates. Fen points out that if you have an event on the Row, for example, you’re much less likely to have graduate students attend an ASSU event there. Potential issue in that these events are funded by both grad and undergrad money, so it should feel open to everyone.
iii. Annemarie reminds us that Nola’s night for graduate students is May 17th and May 31st! Wants us to take some flyers to post around our departments to advertise.
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