• Agenda
• Attendance
• Minutes

Agenda

1) 5:45 FOOD (thanks Anwei!)

2) 6:00 Welcome with introductions (Kristina)

3) 6:05 Announcements (Kristina)
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 (1/16/07) with the following change:
a. Specify that comments in Go-Pass discussion and GCC usage policies were made by Adam Beberg.
b. Add Maria Spletter, Jon-Michael Knapp and Dave Mellert to the attendance.
c. Change the first “Unknown” during the Go-Pass discussion to being Dave Mellert.
d. Correct the spelling of Jon-Michael’s name in all cases.
e. Correct the spelling of Heather’s last name to Houser.
f. Amend Melahn’s comment regarding the opinions of engineering students on the Go-Pass to read: Melahn reported that over 140 engineering students had responded to the proposal and the majority vehemently disagreed with it."
g. Specify that we approved Matt McLaughlin as the AFM by consensus

iii. Need volunteers for tax workshops in February and March. Talk to Maxim.

4) 6:15 Funding (Polina)
i. Stanford INFORMS
ii. Stanford Taiwanese Student Association

5) 6:25 ASSU Update (Hershey)

6) 6:30 Meeting members of the Committee on Graduate Studies (Kristina)

7) 6:50 ASSU Elections (Ryan)

8) 7:05 GCC Usage Guidelines (Justin)

9) 7:25 Programming (Adam S. and Justin)

10) 7:35 New business

Attendance

Voting members present:
At large 1: Maxim Afanasyev (proxy Matt Turk present)
At large 2: Hanna Muenke
At large 3: Kristina Keating
At large 4: Lan Wei
At large 5: Polina Segalova
Business: Rhyan Uy
Earth Sciences: Kyle Anderson
Education: Michelle Brown
Engineering 1: Melahn Parker
Engineering 2: Zeng Fan (proxy Anwei Chai present)
Humanities: George Bloom
Medicine: Yana Hoy
Natural Sciences: Fen Zhao
Social Sciences: Euan Robertson

Voting members not present:
Law: Unfilled

Others in attendance: Justin Brown, Adam Beberg, Min-Chun (Jim) Hsu (STSA), Susana Montes (Daily), Alex Ene, David Hutton (INFORM), Yan Yan, Ivette Esay, Maria Spletter

Minutes

1) 5:45 FOOD (thanks Anwei!)

2) 6:00 Welcome with introductions (Kristina)

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We add what TV show we’re watching.

3) 6:03 Announcements (George)

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i. Please be aware that all meetings are recorded and will be made available on the GSC website.

ii. Minutes from the last meeting (1/16/07) are approved by consensus with the following changes:
a. Specify that comments in Go-Pass discussion and GCC usage policies were made by Adam Beberg.
b. Add Maria Spletter, Jon-Michael Knapp and Dave Mellert to the attendance.
c. Change the first “Unknown” during the Go-Pass discussion to being Dave Mellert.
d. Correct the spelling of Jon-Michael’s name in all cases.
e. Correct the spelling of Heather’s last name to Houser.
f. Amend Melahn’s comment regarding the opinions of engineering students on the Go-Pass to read: Melahn reported that over 140 engineering students had responded to the proposal and the majority vehemently disagreed with it."
g. Specify that we approved Matt McLaughlin as the AFM by consensus

iii. Need volunteers for tax workshops in February and March, primarily to set-up and break down the room. Talk to Maxim if interested. Will be in Havana room on Jan 24, Feb 22, and March 24th from 2:30-5:30. Think they have enough people for this month, will do another call later for the future events.

iv. We have a nice book with pictures from the Thanksgiving dinner that is being passed around. GSC will keep a copy, another will go to the Provost.

4) 6:06 Funding (Polina)

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i. Stanford Taiwanese Student Association – Having a Feb 3rd New Year party in Oak Lounge with performances, good food, etc. This is the first time they have come to us for funding this year. Recommended $1300. Questions about whether there might later be additional costs for security, which we have seen some groups need this year. STSA has not needed security for holding this event in the past, and haven’t heard otherwise for this year. Giving $1300 passes by consensus.

ii. Stanford INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Science) – Have a number of smaller events, with 50-100 people expected each. Many are events they have done in the past, so no big surprised.
a. faculty barbeque – social event to get students and faculty connected.
b. senior faculty tell-all. A chance for faculty to talk about their experiences in making academia a career.
c. seminar series in winter and spring– students discuss their research interests, asking for snack money.
d. study break during “dead weeks”
e. wine and cheese events throughout quarter, generally Friday afternoons.
f. junior faculty tell-all – get a closer perspective to what grad students who want to stay in academia will face in the early years of starting a career.

Recommended $2060, primarily for some food and minimal location rental.

Also get some funding from management science department (in Engineering), and also have members from the business school. Everyone is welcome, though events will tend to have that management science focus.

Polina mentions that the funding committee is following a loose policy of one facility rental for each group per quarter. David from INFORM says his group wasn’t too affected by this policy, and would likely be able to make use of free facilities or use money from the department.

Giving $2060 passes by consensus.

5) 6:14 ASSU Update (Mondaire) –
Mondaire is not present.

6) 6:15 ASSU Elections (Ryan)

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Introducing Ivette, the new assistant elections commissioner for Graduate Elections, who was selected by a group of people including GSC members after an application process. She wants to get some feedback about how to get grad students to vote. Some of her ideas are raffles or coupons for voting, having an event with food to get students to stop by and learn about the election. We can email Ivette (IEstay at Stanford dot edu) with any comments or suggestions.

Polina – sees the main issues facing grad students as knowing about election, caring about election, and deciding who to vote for. For the latter, perhaps have those running for GSC positions post a blurb on the GSC website. For caring about the election, likes the idea of incentives for voting, but wonders where funds would come from. For knowing about the election, last year we talked about having computers and snacks in high traffic areas, so that even grad students who haven’t put voting on their to-do list might stumble across a stand and stop to vote.

Lots of timeline information in a slide show about the process for getting on the ballot, both for funding, special fees, and people running. All these details will be posted on elections.stanford.edu when finalized.

Ryan will send us an updated elections policies document, which will probably mostly affect the undergrads, but might play a role for us as well.

The elections commission is thinking about giving out stickers for approved campaign flyers, which will be limited in number. Kristina would prefer that this didn’t apply to graduate students, who might be discouraged from running at all, if they need to pass their posters through the elections commission.

Adam B. would like to see flyering up by the eateries, which is where you’ll mostly get grad students around central campus.

Hanna wonders whether it’s fair to have different policies for grad and undergrads, Adam B reports that there’s always been different rules, and Kristina echoes that the elections are really very different and have different needs.

Fen wonders about the election party, which may not happen (as discussed at the retreat), so we still need to figure out what we want to do instead.

Elections commissioner doesn’t officially have the power to disqualify candidates, so instead seeks to give rules a sense of legitimacy so that all campaigns will be motivated to follow them, and also have a basis on which voters can evaluate campaigns based on fair play.

7) 6:39 Meeting members of the Committee on Graduate Studies (Kristina)

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Needed to start recorder over at the beginning of this segment, so missed part of the introduction. We have Chris and Carolyn joining us to talk about their work on Stanford committees, particularly on the Committee for Graduate Education.

There will be four parts to their presentation:
1) The official charge of the committee (what could be the scope of their work)
2) What the committee is actually doing (only a subset of the full charge)
3) Our thoughts on what we’d like to see them focus on.
4) A discussion on joint degree programs, which has become the focus of the committee currently.

The official charge of the Committee on Graduate Studies is as follows. Essentially, they cover anything academically related to graduate students, with the following in particular.
1. minimum standards of academic work
2. policies for admission
3. graduate financial aid
4. structure and quality of curricula
5. initiation and renewal of all graduate degree programs
6. increasing applications and appraising qualifications for external awards and prizes
7. academic calendar
8. systems of grading
9. improvement and evaluation of teaching
10. evaluation of teaching assistants.

The committee was at some point also working on the following subjects; minority graduate student recruitment and retention, exceptions to graduate policies, awards and prizes. However, other committees seem to be working on these aspects instead now.

It seems that those charges were initially adopted in 1969, and amended every 10-15 year, most recently on June 15th 2006.

The committee consists of 10 faculty members from different departments across campus, and members from the VPGE’s and Registrar’s offices.

We see from the charges of the committee above what they could be working on, but their current work has focused primarily on approving and renewing new degree programs, interdisciplinary programs, and joint degree and dual degree programs.

Just to explain some of the terminology:
Interdisciplinary programs - don’t have their own housing department, but are programs put together by a collection of different departments. For example, international policy studies (IPS) is one interdisciplinary program, among many others.
Dual degree – enrolled in both programs at some point while at Stanford, but no double counting of any credits.
Joint degree – double count some credits (generally electives or research units) towards graduating towards more than one degree. Each of these programs needs to be approved by the committee. For example, a JD/MBA is a popular joint degree.

The University is seeing the joint degree programs (particularly in the professional schools) as very popular and a good way to differentiate themselves from other schools. The law school alone has put together 20 joint degree programs in the past year, combining the law degree with various other masters or professional degrees, and thinks that up to 60% of law school students could pursue joint degrees in the upcoming future.

Deciding on whether to approve proposed joint degree programs is difficult, because while individual programs and degrees are very well defined, in terms of minimum credits, etc, when combining degrees it’s very confusing what can fairly be overlapped between them. Each of these proposed joint degree programs must be approved by the Committee on Graduate Education individually, which can be very time consuming, and this is why this aspect has become such a large part of the committee’s current work, at the expense of some of the other goals. Also, joint degrees seem to be coming exponentially more popular, so this could become even more of the committee’s work.

The faculty senate and trustees have also gotten involved in thinking about the joint degree programs. There are some proposals for streamlining this program, which might help the time investment needed.

Adam B. wonders what the committee members would like from the GSC to help with this. They would like to hear what we feel are other things they could focus on instead.

Adam B. feels that many of the charges of the committee might have been taken over by other committees, but the members feel that some areas are just rather not being addressed. Also, even if other groups are working on some of those charges, the committee should have oversight of them, and this has not been the case.

Kristina would like to see education of student services individuals, who are intended to help students make effective degree progress. However, if they’re not on top of their stuff, they won’t be able to guide students, particularly with the potential challenges of joint degree programs.

Maria reports that her program doesn’t get her a Masters degree on the way to the PhD. The program has very few course requirements, so getting a Masters in another area shouldn’t be too hard, but doesn’t see those options laid out. More information to students about potentially available programs would probably increase their popularity.

Officially, these joint programs come from departments, but are often started by students who are motivated by a particular joint area of study. Various hoops to go through, which might make it tough for that initial trailblazer to get approval for the program in time. The committee is creating guidelines that will go to faculty senate after it makes it through the registrar, which sounds like this would free up committee again to work on other aspects.

Polina recommends an inventory for potential groups that are working on each of the committee’s charges already, which would make any potential gaps in effort more obvious, and leave the committee to focus on that.

Rhyan reports that in business school, joint degrees are fairly clear, so he suggests letting departments get joint degrees together fro their students. However, committee members report that other departments are not as organized, and that some overview would still be necessary to ensure consistency.

Adam B. reports that the Law school is trying to offer a joint CS degree, which he says wouldn’t be seen as valid or as challenging as completing the plain CS masters (in that case, perhaps even less than a minor?). That’s why committee is having oversight.



Info in general on NomCom – students applied electronically, then applied for specific committees (rank top 3, writing about why you want to be on them). There’s some (unclear) process by which students are assigned to committees that need student members. Both Chris and Carolyn seem to have found out about the committees by word of mouth, rather than any official process or advertisement, so there might be other interested students who just haven’t heard about the opportunity. Suggest a focus in advertising on what the committees are up to, rather than just advertising the NomCom application in general. Suggestion to have clearer links from the GSC site, and make sure that people know what sorts of decisions that the committee makes, because this is what is likely to gain interest from new students. One positive of working on these committees has been getting to see how dedicated some of the University administrators are.

Chris gives a brief update on the library committee, which he also serves on. They’ve only met a couple of times so far, not nearly as frequently as the graduate education committee. The University wants to reduce the number of books on campus long-term, partially by making more available online instead. With the goal of making this happen, Google is currently scanning books, and the University is working on tools to read the books online. Possible problem in whether it’s legal for people to be able to download or print these web resources. Also, if people choose to print everything out, you’re not saving any paper by reducing the number of printed books.

George thinks that removing physical books would really affect grad students, in that they’re more likely to be looking for a variety of broader resources as they try to get a background in their area, whereas this might not be as bad for faculty who already know that stuff, and would be more likely to look for current articles rather than the background books.

The University is planning to take down Meyer library in 2012, which will affect the East Asian collection in particular, for which there is currently no good solution. Big problem for that in particular is that the characters aren’t searchable.



Overall, we feel that there should be a stronger link between GSC and NomCom, which is part of why we’re inviting them today. Will work to maintain this link in the future.


8) 7:21 GCC Usage Guidelines (Kristina and Justin)

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Revisiting last week’s discussing about usage guidelines for the GCC. Kristina and others worked on potential guidelines over the past week, and came up with some proposed changes to the original policy that we will discuss today.

In regards to eligibility to reserve a room, their current proposal reads that the following must be true in order to reserve a room:
1. You must be a registered, matriculated Stanford graduate student with a valid SUID number to reserve and use space.
2. Graduate Volunteer Student Organizations and joint grad/undergrad student groups registered with the Office of Student Affairs. GVSO’s must register annually with the OSA. Any officer of the GVSO may reserve space in the GCC.
3. The event must be for Stanford Graduate students.

Point 1 is about the same as the original language. We will add an exception that the GLO office may also reserve rooms.
Point 2 is expanded to include grad/undergrad groups as well, and allows any officer to reserve space.
Point 3 is expanded to allow for events that are intended for grad students, without requiring a check that 50% of attendees are grad students. This new guideline allows events intending to recruit grad students for a joint group, etc.

Next issue is priority levels, which impacts when and how frequently reservations can be made.

Space Reservation Priority Levels not changed much from the original policy, mostly to add GLO. Clarifying the time frames in which different priority levels may reserve spaces, though not changing any contents. The priority levels are as follows.
1. Organizations that server broad community of graduate students (GSC, GSPB, CAs, GLO)
2. Registered Grad student organizations
3. Individual graduate students.

Different windows for each priority level in which they can reserve rooms.
Level 1 – Can reserve rooms 4 weeks prior to the start of the quarter for any day through the end of the year.
Level 2 – Can apply 7 days prior to the first day of classes for any day through the end of the quarter.
Level 3 – Can reserve rooms starting at the beginning of the quarter.


Suggestion to post daily schedules outside of each reservable space, on which individual students could just sign up day-of, or use first-come-first-serve (not counting against any of their limits) if there is open space.


Specific guidelines are presented for each room regarding when it can be reserved, for how long, and for how often.

For Nairobi room, it can be reserved for three-hour blocks of time once a week.

For Sydney room, can only be reserved for children’s events, but if not reserved, can be used on a drop-in basis for all students. However, drop-ins with children always take priority over other students, even if the other student arrived first. Children must always be supervised.

2nd floor kitchenette is non-reservable, but can be used on a drop-in basis.

Reservation for the Havana room has changed the most since the previous document. Different levels of priority have different caps on how often they can reserve the rooms. For each priority level, what was previously the total limit per quarter will now be the limit for weekend events, and an equal number of reservations for weekday events will also be allotted. For example, level 1 priority can now reserve the Havana room for four weekend nights and four weekday nights, a change from the previous four nights total.

Also, if other rooms are full, and Havana room is not booked, consider letting students into there to study, with tables set up for use, particularly during busy times of the quarter.

Adam B. is concerned that the eligibility requirements still seem to imply that you must be part of a group in order to reserve a room, which we want to make clear is not the case. In response, we take out the previously 2nd eligibility requirement, leaving student groups as one of the priority levels only.

Kristina will clean up some of the language and edits that we have discussed, but would like us to approve the changes now, so that the proposed changes can be brought to the GCC Ops committee.

Requesting these changes to the GCC use policies passes by consensus.

The GCC Ops committee will also address whether PowderBound can reserve space for their recruitment event, which previously encountered difficulty because attendance may not have been 50% grad students, despite being targeted to them. There are no objections to the GSC recommending that they can use space.

9) 7:45 Programming (Adam S. and Justin)

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Everyone gets some flyers for the formal, please put them up where you live, where you work, etc! Target attendance is 1500 people. There is no update on ticket sales yet.

10) 7:47 New business

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i. Housing sent out an email linking to an online survey about on-campus housing, which you should fill out.
ii. If there’s anything you want to get into the bulletin that’s printed and sent to all graduate students, send it to Yana.
iii. Polina wants some more people at funding committee, especially because she is leaving next year. Lan and Yan have been attending, and Lan may consider being chair next year, but having more people around would be good.
iv. Hanna passes along Mondaire’s preference that he only come to GSC meetings and give ASSU updates when there are important updates to give (unlike last quarter’s arrangement wherein Hershey attended meetings and gave an update unless he had a specific conflict. There is no formal discussion, but it seems that people’s preference would be to continue getting updates more regularly, in that this has the dual benefit that we know what the ASSU is up to, and they know what we are up to.