Minutes of the meeting held on 22nd of April, 2004

The meeting was held at noon in DH3076 and chaired by Santa, but alas, by the end of the meeting he will no longer be the rotating chair! The new rotating chair is Ansley.

Graduate student recruiting rep: Raj

This is a new post and like all other posts has a duration of 1 year. The faculty needs help from the current graduate students regarding the applications that the department receives. In cases where the college of the applying student is unknown, this is a great help. It was decided that we should not blindly assign students to applications, rather if there is someone from the same country/school then that person should be given the responsiblity to evaluate the application. This is basically one more feedback channell that the faculty wants to use. Dave explicitly asked Santa about this. Raj to look at applications and then delegate students from same country/school to evaluate the application.

Mentoring program rep - Anwis

There was discussion about whether there should be a one-to-one mentor for each incoming student and the opinion on that was divided. Anwis to coordinate whether a student needs one-to-one mentoring.

End of semester picnic

Date: April 30th, 2004.
Organizing volunteers: Ajay, Anshu, Todd.

CSGSA webmaster: Andreas

There was some discussion about the content of the website and everyone agreed that the website had outdated information as well as a lot of useless information. Andreas to send out an email asking opinions about the content of the webpage.

Misc

The issue of paltry attendance at student-faculty candidate meetings was brought up. There were several suggestions. However, the group did not seem to reach any conclusion. One of the approaches to be taken could be to ask for volunteers before hand to be present at faculty candidate talks and student meetings so that we have a definite number of people for student meetings with the faculty candidates. There was a suggestion from Santa that maybe the student meeting could be integrated with the reception but that was turned down since the student meeting has to take place after the students have heard the talk and also some faculty are present during the reception.