GSC Meeting Friday 8 December 2006 Minutes (Last Meeting for Fall Semester)


Thanks to all who attended:

(GJ Halfond, Daron Vroon, Marshini Chetty, Alan Wagner, Tracy Westeyn, Shwetak Patel, Gillian Hayes, Julie Kientz and Helene Brashear)


  1. Report from faculty meeting reps – Steven Dow of IIC and Daron Vroon of CSS, Kamesh Madduri of CSE


  1. Updates

    1. Coffee and Cookie Breaks/Grad teas

Marshini informed the CSS people (no CSE people were present) about the coffee and cookie breaks and possibly implementing something like this in Klaus in Spring.

Actions: Daron Vroon will ask Ellen Zegura about this after things have settled when the move has completed

    1. Travel funds policy update

Marshini reminded everyone that the travel funds are open and that people should apply

    1. PhD job hunting seminar

Julie Kientz, Gillian Hayes and Shwetak Patel told everyone about the PhD job hunting seminar, a prep seminar for people in the last 2-3 years of PhD. Interested parties can subscribe to the job hunting mailing list on mailman. Gillian will also send out another email about the Spring seminar to PhD List. Next spring, Julie and Shwetak will help with seminar prep for IC but someone from CSS/CSE needs to help if possible in Spring. It was suggested that the faculty be informed so that they can pass the word to students.

Actions: We need to possibly create 3 more GSC positions for PhD job hunting seminar (one per division) to formally keep this going – this needs to be in place for Fall 2007

Also, for now Gillian will work with Leo Mark and Ling Liu to get more CSS/CSE faculty involved.

    1. Spring recruiting – suggestions for what to do and what not to do

All those with experience doing the recruiting weekend organizing suggested that 1 weekend was better than splitting recruiting into groups over multiple weekends because of the workload involved.

Generally, people were concerned that students have been given more responsibilities than in the past in this position and this makes it an unattractive position. Thus far, no one has volunteered although some people have shown interest.

Actions: Clarify what is expected of students for helping with recruiting; find out who the faculty recruiting weekend organizers are. See if Office of Diversity can help with organizing events since they have prior experience with this (and have organized the women@cc events during recruiting before).

    1. Concern voiced: Since Exchange is the new scheduling system for faculty, its difficult for students not to have access to the system when they want to arrange meetings

Action: Unclear

    1. General concern: Students are expected to do more and more (lab czars, more duties when helping with recruiting etc) and the lines between student responsibilities, faculty responsibilities and admin’s responsibilities are getting blurred. This makes it difficult for students to volunteer to help with positions since more work means more of a time sink. Also, less 1st and 2nd years are interested in GSC – how do we get more people to volunteer?

Action: unclear at this point

    1. Faculty recruiting report:

Julie reported that faculty recruiting for IIC will begin in Spring – she’s not certain when the other divisions will begin recruiting (Bryan Payne and Yan Gu are the other faculty meeting reps)

    1. Which faculty from various committees?

Alan Wagner (who is in IC, not CSS as Marshini thought :P) needs to know who is on the PhD admissions committee for Spring and generally it would be nice if we could look up who the contact people are for each GSC position.

Action: Alan will email Steven about getting info on the PhD admissions committee. We will also try finding out if there’s a way to find out who’s on the other committees.

<End of Meeting Have a great winter break!>



  1. Next Meeting scheduled for Jan 26 2007 (first meeting for Spring semester)