From owner-info@gso.bu.edu Fri May 1 18:12:31 1998 Received: from gso.bu.edu (GSO.BU.EDU [128.197.60.71]) by cs.bu.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5/(BU-S-01/27/97-fc1)) with ESMTP id SAA18461; Fri, 1 May 1998 18:12:31 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from majordom@localhost) by gso.bu.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5/(BU-S-02/10/97-v1.0)) id SAA07204 for info-list; Fri, 1 May 1998 18:12:29 -0400 (EDT) Received: from cs.bu.edu (root@CS.BU.EDU [128.197.13.2]) by gso.bu.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5/(BU-S-02/10/97-v1.0)) with ESMTP id SAA07200 for ; Fri, 1 May 1998 18:12:26 -0400 (EDT) Received: from cs16.bu.edu (rip@CS16.BU.EDU [128.197.10.115]) by cs.bu.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5/(BU-S-01/27/97-fc1)) with ESMTP id SAA18453 for ; Fri, 1 May 1998 18:12:23 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Pitts Received: by cs16.bu.edu (8.8.5/Spike-2.1) id SAA07338; Fri, 1 May 1998 18:12:18 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 18:12:18 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199805012212.SAA07338@cs16.bu.edu> To: info@gso.bu.edu Subject: GSO - summary of Thu, Apr 30, 98 meeting Sender: owner-info@gso.bu.edu Precedence: bulk Status: RO Here is a summary of what we did at yesterday's Graduate Student Organization meeting. For the summer, we won't keep the same meeting schedule. Each subgroup (social, etc.) will meet as necessary and we'll plan general meetings as needed. We ask for your help/suggestions in parts 2,4,5,6 below. Thanks, --Rob Summary ======= 1. Survey Distribution of the survey has gone well and there is only a small number of depts. in which distribution is still pending. The few depts. to have returned surveys have shown a good percentage of those surveys distributed being filled out. This is expected to vary from dept. to dept. There will be extra surveys at Tuesday's (May 5th) Pub Night for those students who may have missed the opportunity to fill one out. As a correction, the part that asks about giving $20/semester was likely supposed to be $20/year, but we'll take that into account when we analyze the results. 2. Social Events The next social event is the May 5th 6-8pm Pub Night. Again, the school has given us money to purchase free snacks. Movie night will be postponed. For the summer, we'd like to continue with Pub Nights, but there may be opportunities to have other events. Suggestions are welcome at social@gso.bu.edu. 3. Meeting with Deans Some students met with Dean Berkey and Assoc. Dean Whittaker this past Monday (April 27th) to again discuss the idea of formalizing the Graduate Student Organization, decide what our role would be as a group, and how the administration can help us. Those attending felt the meeting was a little more tense with Dean Berkey at the meeting than the meetings with just Whittaker. Berkey asked questions about how each student felt about their department. He thought that departments would take care of grad students, but we presented issues that go beyond depts., like isolation. Students discussed some ways grad life could be better. Notably, the deans still agree that we should be involved in creating a grad orientation. Students felt that Assoc. Dean Whittaker is still very much *on our side*, but may speak out less in the presence of Dean Berkey. ----- A volunteer from the meeting will send us a more complete writeup of the meeting in the future. ----- Since Whittaker seems to be very enthusiastic about things, Mike Hayes and Gary Garber will continue to communicate with him. 4. Orientation Since it looks like we have been given the go ahead to help organize an orientation, we would like to have a plan to give to the dean in about 3 weeks. Some goals of the this planning stage are to determine what events we want to have, what information we want passed along to new students (e.g., in packets or mailings), and what *budget* we need to pull all this off. Because of the 3 week goal, planning needs to start ASAP. Currently, the people who volunteered to help in this initial planning are: Mike Hayes Cassandra Celatka and maybe Carlos (Math) Since we need more people than that, anyone who is interested in helping should mail Mike. As sources of information to help in planning an orientation, students have suggested contacting: - those who plan the undergrad orientation - those that plan dept. orientations - ISSO (Intl Students) - off-campus housing Please send any other suggestions to Mike. 5. Fall Plans One of the things we'd like to do for the fall is put together a budget to give to the school. The reason we'd like to plan a budget ahead of time is to avoid the current per-event scheme (e.g., Pub Nights) that we have for getting money from the school. Planning the orientation will be a test run to determine what the issues are for creating a budget. We can also probably get help from other grad student groups on campus. With that in mind, we'd like your help in thinking about what kinds of things we should have next fall (social or otherwise). We'd like to have a plan and budget for the fall sometime in the summer. ---- Also, we'd like to think about formalizing our structure a bit more. E.g., how to have each department represented, etc. 6. Web Page Expansion Having a little extra time during the summer, we'd like to expand the resources available on the GSO's web page. Here are our current ideas of things to add: - Healthcare summaries - Survey results (after analyzed) - More on social events (map/directions to Pub, history of events) - Message board (for things relevant to grads) - Housing information - Orientation information The first 3 should be simple enough. Send other suggestions to Rob Pitts ---- Also, we'd like to make our web page more accessible. We can try to get the deans to help us in getting a link to our page from some BU page (Information Technology won't do that at this point). In the meantime, if your dept. has a web page, we'd like you to ask them if they can add a link to our page (http://gso.bu.edu). The text label would likely be "The Graduate Student Organization". If they require the link labeled as an "unofficial group" that's fine at this stage.