From rip@cs.bu.edu Fri Jan 16 17:40:25 1998 Received: from csb.bu.edu (rip@CSB.BU.EDU [128.197.10.4]) by cs.bu.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5/(BU-S-01/27/97-fc1)) with ESMTP id RAA07693; Fri, 16 Jan 1998 17:40:16 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Pitts Received: by csb.bu.edu (8.8.5/Spike-2.1) id RAA26891; Fri, 16 Jan 1998 17:40:12 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 17:40:12 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199801162240.RAA26891@csb.bu.edu> To: aasa@bu.edu, alistair@bio.bu.edu, altvater@bu.edu, amgomez@bu.edu, atrochio@bu.edu, bhattac@bu-ast.bu.edu, btnoren@bio.bu.edu, byrnea@bu-ast.bu.edu, cchamber@bu.edu, celatka@chem.bu.edu, crampton@bio.bu.edu, crichard@bio.bu.edu, desrosie@chem.bu.edu, dkmciver@bu.edu, dmorgan@math.bu.edu, elioff@chem.bu.edu, ganne@bu.edu, garethr@math.bu.edu, ggarber@buphy.bu.edu, herbert@bu.edu, imlac@bu.edu, ingalls@ninkasi.bu.edu, jdunlavy@bu.edu, jric@bu.edu, jwillis@bu.edu, kim1@bu.edu, kpetersn@bu.edu, krlynch@bu.edu, landy@bu.edu, marcusp@bu.edu, mghayes@math.bu.edu, mhmann4@bu.edu, monk@bu.edu, mparks@bu.edu, mramage@crsa.bu.edu, mslobodk@bu.edu, mwalker@bu.edu, obongo@bu.edu, rbresler@bu.edu, rcabana@bu.edu, rip@cs.bu.edu, rolvera@bu.edu, salzmann@bu.edu, scarella@bu.edu, stephr@math.bu.edu, susanlee@bu.edu, tdwalker@bu.edu, th@math.bu.edu, thomsons@bu.edu, wenner@bu.edu, yfederow@truckee.bu.edu Subject: GSO - summary of Thu, Jan 15, 98 meeting Status: RO Here is a summary of what we did at yesterday's Graduate Student Organization meeting. ------- We'd like to think about a regular-scheduled bi-weekly evening meeting time. Please send me information about your free time after 4pm on weekdays so that we can plan something that accommodates most people. ------- - Other Graduate Student Organization. + National Group. Mike Ramage (Earth Sciences) has been in contact with the director of the Nation Assoc. of Graduate - Professional Students (NAGPS). The director, Kevin Boyer, will be in Boston in a few weeks to do some planning for a NAGPS Northeast Regional Conference and a NAGPS National Conference, which will be both held in the Boston area in 1998. The director would like to meet with us on Monday, Jan. 26 some time between 3:30-5pm. We will announce the exact time/place for that meeting to everyone when we get a set time. Also, the director has invited us to a meeting the next day, on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 2pm. This will be a planning meeting for the National Conference and may be a good opportunity to meet members of the Harvard, MIT and possibly other Boston grad student groups. Contact Mike (mramage@crsa.bu.edu) for more information. + Harvard/MIT groups Mike has provided me copies of the Harvard's and MIT's Grad Student Council's constitutions/by-laws. I will bring them to future meetings if requested. Funding ------- The Harvard group receives a pretty decent budget from the school through a $15 fee paid by each graduate student. One of the things that some grad student groups have used part of their budgets for is for travel scholarships for students to attend conferences. We are going to look into whether there are any organizations already here at BU from which money could be used for grad student concerns/events. + Univ. of Calgary Cali Crampton (Bio) briefly discussed her experiences at the Univ. of Calgary and what their graduate student group was involved in as far as graduate student issues, from political issues to social events. I don't have notes on the specific efforts that group were involved in so please contact Cali (crampton@bio.bu.edu) if you'd like those details. + Supporting Organizations By way of Chris Richardson, I have a catalog entitled "Directory of Graduate Student Employee Bargaining Agents and Organizations." It's quite large. Please ask me if you'd like to look at it. - Grad Student Survey. As mentioned, we are planning to distribute a survey to all grad students (at least in CAS/GRS) to get feedback on what are the concerns of graduate students here at BU. We hope to get feedback from both Masters and PhD students. We have a copy of a survey used by Yale's graduate student employee organization (given by Chris Richardson) as a sample, but ours will likely be more general since we are interested in non-employee (i.e., not just TA/RA) grad students as well. The people who have volunteered to begin constructing a survey are: Mike Hayes mghayes@math.bu.edu Yvonne Federowicz yfederow@truckee.bu.edu Jim Ingalls ingalls@ninkasi.bu.edu Fran Altvater altvater@bu.edu Please contact them if you have ideas or would like to assist in the process. - Social Events. Since last semester's "Grad Pub Night" went well, we are considering two types of graduate student social opportunities this semester. 1. Inviting grads to meet at the pub once a month. 2. Some sort of party or event possibly around Spring Break or at the end of the semester. We've thought about having depts. contribute money towards such an event. In the longer term, some people have expressed interest in having some sort of orientation for graduate students. The people who volunteered to look into social events are: Jen Wenner wenner@bu.edu Gary Garber ggarber@buphy.bu.edu Michael Hayes mghayes@math.bu.edu Cali Crampton crampton@bio.bu.edu Brad Noren btnoren@bio.bu.edu Please contact them if you would like to assist. - Gathering/Distributing Information. + Gathering We would like to make sure that issues important to grad students at BU do not go unnoticed. We decided to start monitoring 2 BU newspapers for articles of interest. They will be: Daily Free Press - monitored by Rob Pitts, Mike Ramage BU Bridge - monitored by Brad Noren When we find articles of interested we will copy them and put them in an archive. We will likely bring the archives to meetings or make them available upon request. For articles that we feel are very important, we'll notify everyone by e-mail. ---- Certainly, there are other types of information that we might want to gather or other sources of information. Feel free to make suggestions in this regard. ---- Since we are starting to have some contact with other grad. student orgs., we will continue to try to make contact with other groups. They are an important source of information and experience. + Distributing Since the mailing list is getting quite long, we would like to reorganize it into 2 BU mail aliases: one for announcements (like we currently use the list) and another one with just a few of us on it for people to mail when they want info about the GSO. We'd also like to know what are the e-mail aliases for all grad students in each dept. However, we realize that some depts. use e-mail less than others. For making meeting times/presence of the GSO more visible, we would like to take advantage of the calendar sections of the BU newspapers and perhaps put up posters (as we did for the grad pub night). We will be looking into whether we can have a web page somewhere under the BU main pages. Initially, we are not sure what kind of information we want to put on it, but we believe it would be good to start something for more electronic visibility. Certainly, our group "purpose," meeting dates, events announcements, and grad web resources would fit well on an initial page. Rob Pitts has volunteered for creating/maintaining such a page. We have also thought of the possibility of a newsletter. - Issues for future meetings. + Relationship w/ Administration How we want to built a relationship with BU's administration as a graduate group. On this subject, note that a recent Daily Free Press article mentions that members of the Student Union Executive Board recently met with the BU Board of Trustees' Student Affairs Committee to discuss issues of concern to students (apparently a rare event). + Health Care We'd like to look into the health care plan for grads. here at BU and compare it to other schools. In general, we feel BU's health care plan could be cheaper and better. Rob Pitts and Cassandra Celatka have volunteered to begin looking into health care. This will likely be a longer term process. --Rob