Graduate Student Council Meeting

Date:     September 27, 2002, 16:00
Location: Darts Lab, 2nd floor of CCB

Attendance

Members                          Others
Duke Hutchings                   Justin Jang
Tejas Iyer                       Nikitas Liogas
Amanda Lyons                     Howard Zhou
Elaine Huang                     Vin Scarlata
Joe Tullio                       Fariborz Farahmand
Manas Tungare
Amy Voida
Dan Sternberg
Daron Vroon
Gillian Hayes
Heather Mahaney
Wei Han
Heather Richter
Bob Amar
Quan Tran

Agenda Point 1: New Committee Members

* The following new committee members were introduced:
  - Tejas Iyer      [DLS]                   
  - Shomari Mosi    [Grad Orientation]
  - Amy Voida       [New PhD Programs]
  - Gillian Hayes   [PhD Recruiting]
  - Heather Mahaney [Picnic Coordination]
  - Bob Amar        [UG Program]

Agenda Point 2: Retiring Member

* Rod Peters has stepped down from the UG Program Committee, and Bob
  Amar will assume Rod's responsibilities.  We thanked Rod for his
  work on this committee.

Agenda Point 3: Committee Reports

* PhD Recruiting [Daron Vroon & Gillian Hayes]
  - had some meetings with the faculty representatives
    * need to focus on recruiting outside of weekend visits
    * encouraged students to find contacts at alma maters
    * will also be focusing some recruting efforts through CRA-W

* Faculty Review [Amanda Lyons]
  - looking for the right location to host the event
  - information will be dispersed shortly

* Grad Teas [Joe Tullio]
  - for future grad teas, reimbusement requires a sign-in sheet.  Joe
    will inform grad tea throwers of this new policy

* New PhD Programs [Amy Voida]
  - CoC committee is currently in process of creating a proposal for
    new PhD program to combine many disciplines in human-centered
    computing (HCI, LST, IS, etc.)
  - contact Amy for more information.

* UG Program [Bob Amar]
  - The alternative to 1321 (Media Computation) has been approved

* Women's Programs [Quan Tran]
  - Maureen Biggers is now heavily involved with this group
  - very active this semester - one formal and one informal event
  - sending 7 women to the Grace Hopper Conference in Vancouver

* No Updates
  - Honors & Awards [Brendan Hannigan, remotely]
  - DLS [Tejas Iyer]
  - Grad Committee [Elaine Huang]
  - PhD Admissions [Dan Sternberg]
  - International Students [Manas Tungare]

* Missing Reports
  - CNS [Pat Widener]
  - Faculty Recruiting [Minaxi Gupta, Zack Kurmas]
  - Grad Orientation [Shomari Mosi]
  - Masters Program [Bessie Yang]
  - Seminars [Aparna Bajaj]
  - UROC [David Nguyen]

Agenda Point 4: Seminars

* It was raised that we have still held no seminars this year.  The
  following points were raised

  - issue of grabbing an audience: many people do not know why they
    should attend seminars.  we need to make sure to motivate the
    reasons for holding the seminars.
  - issue of experience and planning: we should make sure that people
    know that they can team up to give seminars and that only a small
    amount of knowledge os really needed to help others learn
  - making personal requests often go further than general
    announcements for people to give seminars.  everyone was
    encouraged to seek out knowledgeable folks and invite them to hold
    a seminar
  - should defnitely target the following areas: text editing (emacs
    and vi), using UNIX environments (incl. shells), electronic
    bibliography tools (bibTeX and EndNote), useful applications
    (frame, make, gcc).

We need to address these issues soon!

Agenda Point 5: News from DAC and the faculty

* the start date for classes has been changed from Jan 3 to Jan 6

* The faculty was informed of some objectives for the CoC as expressed
  at a recent GT Dean's Meeting.  One relevant objective is continued
  improvement of the quality of faculty and graduate students.  Dean
  Zegura committeed the CoC to a study of the current situation of out
  graduate students to gauge our current level of quality and
  effectiveness.  The CoC will be tackling the hard issue of how
  exactly to measure quality.

Agenda Point 6: Qualifying Exams

* GSC will hang Idris Hsi's document off its website and update as
  necessary

* Duke will contact the area coordinators to make sure that the
  reading lists remain stable during semesters and that students
  studying in those areas are informed of changes to the lists

Agenda Point 7: Mentors

* Several suggestions were made for the assigning of mentors
  - possibly have one student per area to act as mentor for many
    students
  - possibly have an initial meeting of all mentors and students to
    ensure that each meets at least once
  - possibly assign mentors on a "by-request" basis only

* Duke will contact the instructor for CS 7001 to guide this process

Agenda Point 7: Health Insurance

* We only had two respondents to a call for participation in a CoC
  committee to further investigate this issue, with only one possibly
  interested in heading the committee

* Duke will hit the grad student population in general to see if there
  is any interest among students who did not previously raise issues.

* Amy Voida pointed out that there is a university committee being
  formed to make an impact on the Institute as a whole.  It may be
  more beneficial to place students on this committee to act as
  representatives for CoC because we can have Institute-wide impact.

* There is an issue of dental coverage: the new health center will
  provide a dentist but only a pay basis.  We should also investigate
  the possibility of adding dental coverage to our current policies.


The meeting concluded around 17:00.

These minutes were submitted by Duke Hutchings, and are subject to
change until the October 2002 meeting, at which time they will become
the official meeting minutes.