Proceedings of the July 11th, 2007 meeting
Agenda 1) 5:45 FOOD (thanks Anwei!)
2) 6:00 Welcome with introductions (Kristina)
3) 6:05 Announcements (George)
i - Please be aware that all meetings are recorded and will be made available on the GSC website.
ii. Approve minutes from the last meeting (6/27/07)
iii. The 4th of July barbecue was a success!
4) 6:10 Funding (Polina)
5) 6:15 Blog group (Jason Shen)
6) 6:30 Discussion on Welcome Back Party and Grad Formal (Adam and Justin)
7) New Business
Attendance Voting members present:
At large 1: Maxim Afanasyev
At large 2: Hanna Muenke
At large 3: Kristina Keating
At large 4: Zeng Fan
Business: Rhyan Uy (proxy Maria Spletter present)
Earth Sciences: Kyle Anderson (proxy Justin Brown present)
Education: Ryan Williams
Engineering 2: Marja Mullings
Law: Shireen Barday – proxy Donna Winston present
Natural Sciences: Fen Zhao
Voting members not present:
At large 5: Lan Wei
Engineering 1: Melahn Parker
Humanities: George Bloom
Medicine: Yana Hoy
Social Sciences: Euan Robertson
Additional attendees – Josh Oeschlin, Polina Segalova, Adam Beberg, Hedi Razavi, Alexandru Ene, Laura Brezin Minutes 1) FOOD (thanks Anwei!)
2) Welcome with introductions (Kristina)
3) Announcements (Kristina)
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i - Please be aware that all meetings are recorded and will be made available on the GSC website.
ii. The minutes from the last meeting (6/27/07) are approved by consensus.
iii. The 4th of July barbecue was a success! Thanks to the volunteers!
4) Funding (Polina)
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The PSA (Persian Student Association) is hosting a BBQ on July 28th from 11am-6pm with standard food and games. They are expecting approximately 80 grad students to attend. The committee recommends $485. Giving the group this amount passes by consensus.
5) Discussion on Welcome Back Party and Grad Formal (Adam and Justin)
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The Welcome Back party will be on Oct 5th. Some theme will be planned for the event (probably not Hawaiian, though Adam wants to use the leis again). It will be held from 9pm-1am. They are telling us this date so early because the event will need many volunteers so everyone should keep that day free.
Grand formal update: Will likely be held sometime mid Winter quarter, to be determined after checking with departments about scheduling. Plan is to keep the event in the same venue, but try to simplify from last year to keep costs down. Also, perhaps expand the event to allow more grad students to attend.
6) ASSU update from Hershey
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Offices have started moving in to New Old Union, so there are at least people there during the day if anyone wants to take a look. Other parts of the building are still in process. ASSU/SSE have already moved in.
The major action update is that they are working on an integrated website about classes (perhaps class.stanford.edu for a domain name, but not yet created) which would be a central source for students looking into classes. This would include the required textbooks, and a listing of people selling those specific textbooks, evaluations of the course from students in previous years, the course syllabus, etc.
The ASSU is hosing a summer jam on July 21st, to which all grad students are welcome. Flyers and other advertising will be posted shortly, once everything necessary is confirmed.
7) Unofficial Stanford Blog (Jason Shen).
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The Unofficial Stanford Blog was founded last year, and is open to anyone from the Stanford community to register as a blogger and make posts. Because anyone can sign up and post directly, this could be an effective way for us to post our own important news of things affecting Graduate Students directly, rather than going through sources like the Daily. The site has approximately 300 visitors a day for now, which is a bit down from what it was during the school year. We have a brief discussion of how we might use it, and conclude that posting minutes every week would be not really benefit the greater community, but posting about important events or present/upcoming issues affecting graduate students and what the GSC is doing to address those is definitely a good use. It seems the advocacy chairs would be important bringers of updates of accomplishments or goals, and could send the information to Hanna to post (or sign up for blogger accounts directly). The blog has tags set-up, which are currently very scattered, but could potentially make it easier for interested students to find all blog posts that we’ve made on relevant topics. Posting to the blog is by user-name, so not completely anonymous, though comments can be made anonymously. They haven’t had any problems with people being belligerent in comments or posting inappropriately yet, but could develop tools to address this if necessary.
8) New Business
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i. Adam B informs us that discussion of joint bylaws and GSC bylaws will be starting soon. Get in touch with Adam B if interested in being part of this. |
