GSA Meeting Minutes

• Chancellor Ulmer said that she can't be keynote speaker, but can drop by for a few words
• Decided we should try to get her to come say her words at the mixer
• Lindsey will contact Doug about being a keynote speaker at some point mid-day or afternoon and about alcohol possibilities for mixer
• Invitation looks good
• Symposium Schedule
• Looking at timing, symposium will run from 9am to 5pm
• Changed flyer text to graduate studies rather than graduate research
• Mail schedule and topics with invitation
  
• Tony will print 500 flyers in bright yellow and ask GSS for distribution options
• Matt is meeting with Crickett to discuss set-up
• The Den will be available from 4:00-8:30pm on the 27th for the mixer
• The N & S Cafeteria will be available at 7:30am until 5pm for the symposium
• We reviewed food menu from NANA
• Matt will be calling about ordering buffet for mixer, coffee and pastries for event
• Lindsey will contact Green and Gold Daily and KRUA about publicizing event
• Cody will contact The Northern Light with request for ½ page ad
• Schedule of working shifts day of will be determined over the next week
• Cody and Lindsey can do afternoons/evening
• Tony can do before 5pm
• Budget due to USUAA by Friday
• Budget will look similar to last year's
  

• GAB-meeting was cancelled, GSAT action team hasn't started, email about what students want to see from graduate school or include in survey
• Travel Board
  - Deadline is Oct. 24th., has money to give away, probably 2 deadlines for this year (one fall, one spring), Dave will probably do Travel Board position
• USUAA-budget issues hopefully will be resolved and passed this week
• Our fall mixer.
  - Drink tickets & nametags
  - What do we want to talk about?--what GSA does, what positions are available, notecards & pens for thoughts on what should be placed on survey, Elisa
• UAA-wide Grad Student survey.
  - Should we ask people at the mixer what their concerns are?
  - Might give us a better idea of what to put out to the Big Survey.
• Our Scholarship Program and timeline for applications this fall.
  - Review the RFP.--Matt will send out proposal when all changes have been made, discussion about graduate student preference
  - More smaller awards ($500)? $750 max for this year's grants
• Graduate Studies and Research Symposium.
  

• Graduate Academic Board (GAB) report- The GAB discussed questions about online course accreditation standards, there is a delay in the formal declaration of the Graduate School because of
  faculty meeting problems (it is expected to be resolved soon)
• Travel Board- No current GSA rep on this board. The board is just getting started. Dave or Cody may be interested in being on this board if schedules work.
• USUAA- Not much going on outside of budget approval, John Gregoire is the advisor, our current budget from USUAA is $7600 with an additional $5000 from the Graduate Studies Office
• UAA-wide Graduate Student Survey- We will be administering an online survey to graduate students to determine what projects to work on. The officers group will be working at determining
  questions for the survey. We will have some assistance from the graduate studies office as well on this project.
• FALL MIXER- October 19th 8-11pm at Moose's Tooth. Please help get the word out. Family and friends are welcome. Matt will be working at getting us an alcohol permit for this function per direction
  from UAA personnel. Elisa has volunteered to be our UAA representative at the event. Nametags need
  to be purchased for event.
• GSA scholarship applications- The applications for Fall will be released soon. We are looking at a Dec 1st deadline. These scholarships can be used for funding items such as conference fees, airfare
  to conferences, research materials, etc. See application for exact criteria.
• Research Symposium- Looking at the end of March for this. Matt is looking at reserving the space. We are able to reserve space on Nov. 1st. Graduate Studies Office has volunteered their support for this
  event.
• Delegation to Board of Regents- We have received special funding from USUAA to send two delegates to the Board of Regents meetings in Dec (Anchorage) and Feb (Juneau). We are planning on speaking to the Board during the public time to inform them of what we are doing and what we would like to see happen. There was also some discussion to see if we could get some private time with the Board.
• Alumni Association- Dave brought up trying to do some events in conjunction with the Alumni Association so graduate students could network with working professionals etc.
• Meeting Adjourned. Meetings will be held every other week at 6pm on Thursday in the Lyla Richards Conference Room in the Student Union.
  

• The GSA vote on USUAA PASSED!!!! Thanks to all of you who voted.

• We have been asked to have one or more students sit on the Graduate Council (the graduate policy counterpart to the Graduate Academic Board). If you are possibly interested, contact Matt and I at gsa@uaa.alaska.edu

• We will be publishing a formal announcement about our Spring 2007 GSA scholarship (formerly grant) awardees on the GSA webpage in the near future. We will be posting the name, department, and title of each project in addition to numbers of applicants and total amount awarded all together. If you were awarded a grant and for whatever reason do not want your name, department, or title on the webpage, please email Matt and I at gsa@uaa.alaska.edu ASAP.

• Contracts for those awarded are in the final stages of being put together by our resident legal expert, Paula. Thanks again Paula! We will be including something that states the money must be used by the end of Dec. 2007 unless there is a sufficient reason.

• ****IMPORTANT**** Graduate Hooding Ceremony Speaker
  We have been tasked to come up with a speaker for the graduate hooding ceremony the day before the official commencement. If you would like to nominate someone who is graduating this year to speak, please email all your recommendations to Lindsey at aslem22@uaa.alaska.edu BY SUNDAY NIGHT. 150 words MAX. Sorry for the short notice, but we just found this out ourselves. A committee will be picking from the nominations received on Monday, so get them in ASAP.

• Next fall we will be discussing officers for next year as to allow for new people to run for office.

• Recruitment
  *get GSA involvement in campus events such as grad student orientation
  and activity fair in the fall
  *visit classes in the first few weeks (possibly include a survey)
  *flyers around campus
  *GSA free stuff--we are going to get between $500 and $600 of stuff with our logo/information on it to have around campus to increase visibility. We are planning on pens, keychains, and notepads if possible. Keri is looking into this.

• Website forum/list--we are going to try to compile a list of "What grad students should know" from the funny to the serious to add to the website and help with recruiting. Dave is going to look into this along with some assistance from Vanessa.

• Matt is going to talk to Elise and Doug about getting us some storage space on campus.

• GAB report (Paula)--not much to report, the GAB changed some of the curriculum on some education and biology classes

• Travel Board (Jill)--not much to report, there may be one more deadline for travel grants for this semester, but this is not certain

• USUAA (Matt)--Spring Leadership Conference (hip hop theme) April 12th to the 14th. Contact USUAA or Matt at infiniteride@gmail.com for more info

• VOTE!!!!! Spring elections are *Tuesday, March 27 – Wednesday, March 28 from **9:30am to 7:30pm* at the following locations: Student Union, RH,
  SSB, Arts, Commons, and Aviation.* The amendment to get GSA a vote on USUAA is on this ballot. *VOTE!!!!! Flyers advertising the amendment
  will be posted around campus this week. Dave is checking into advertising via MySpace and Facebook.

• Budget update (Matt)--budget was submitted to USUAA for $7,400. Looking into trying to get matching funds from the Graduate Studies Office/Doug Causey

Mugs/pens will be discussed at the next meeting.

Our website is now linked to the Graduate Studies page

• Grants--total amount to give out $8,500 proposals were graded before the meeting individually, if someone submitted a proposal they did not grade themselves and left the room
  when their proposal was discussed scores were complied and averaged the top 10 proposals were selected based on funds available Matt is checking into the necessary paperwork to distribute the funds emails went out to all applicants with a decision on 3/19/07 (if you should have received one and didn't, contact Lindsey at aslem22@uaa.alaska.edu, for those who did not list an email, check your UAA email first) a general information release will be forthcoming giving the list of funded proposals after we confirm with the university what information we can/need to release (name, project/type, department, etc.) (once we know what we need to release, we will email all funded proposals to make sure that the information we are releasing is okay with the individual unless it is mandatory to release). We also discussed possibly tying next year's grants to participation into next year's symposium

NEXT MEETING: April 4th from 5-7pm, location TBA

Status of the coordinator position:

• Mat and Lindsey are now the GSA co-coordinators
• Matt will continue as USUAA person for the rest of this year as necessary
• Lindsey will also continue in her position as necessary
• If anyone would like to step up to these positions contact gsa@uaa.alaska.edu
  

Possible vote on USUAA:

• Matt reported that we have a great deal of support from USUAA and that the GSA vote was unanimously approved for the ballot this April
  
• Now this issue goes to the student election and if passed our representative will have a vote on USUAA next fall and be awarded a small stipend to serve on USUAA
  
• Since we will have a vote we also have to serve on one of the subcommittees… may I suggest the budget subcommittee?
  

GSA Budget Request for 2007-2008 Academic Year

• We'll be asking USUAA to double our budget FY 08
• Stipends for our officers
• The group decided to budget some money to support our officers having small stipends
• Officers may decline the stipend if they wish
• Maintained funding for our grant program and symposium
• Also included funding to improve the new student orientation and have another fall mixer

Discussion about the symposium--possibility of postponing until next year to make sure this is planned correctly

Jill: we don't have enough planned by now to really pull this off
Matt: Transition makes everything more difficult at this time, more time to prepare and make sure it's done right, find a better time, early spring semester
Everyone continues to agree about postponing
Resolution: Have a mixer type of event in Fall, start planning that now and also booking a room for the symposium in early spring semester
Erin: we need to make progress toward our big goals to attract people to help us with big projects like this
Keri: advertise what people do with the grant money from this year
Erin: Use KRUA, N. Light paper
Max: newsletter showing what grants were able to fund
Vanessa: Should we have a PR Chair on GSA?
Jill: we should use the PR specialist from University Advancement

Granting process:

• Use funds from symposium to increase granting funds
  
• Extension: to Friday, March 2nd at 5pm by email
  
• Get word out the PR in university advancement and on USUAA screen
  
• We'll be review grants at the next meeting, if you would like to sign up email gsa@uaa.alaska.edu
  
• You are allowed to be a grant reviewer even if you are submitting a grant, but you must abstain from reviewing your own grant

-Dave is going to ask Joc. About having a student on E-Board

-Erin will ask Felix about improving our website

-Keri and Jill look in to pens and mugs or water bottles to help spend done some of the money that we haven't spent this year and boots our campus recognition. Plus all agreed that a GSA mug or water bottle would be pretty awesome.

Next meeting will be: March 14th, 2007 5-7pm

GAB report--Paula
*getting together grad school constitution
*Paula wrote the section on the GSA

USUAA report--Matt
*They have a new VP-Kortney Hintsala (VP from last year)
*The Spring Snow Blast is March 17th, free lift tickets etc. can be earned by raising money for challenge (contact Matt for more info)
*They are converting a truck to biodiesel
*We can request to advertise events on the LCD projector in the student union
*Elections for the student regent nominee will be Feb. 13-14
*One of the senators wants to digitize class syllabi--if you want to donate syllabi, talk to Matt and he can put you in contact with the senator
*A resolution has been written about getting GSA a USUAA vote
*Both Matt and Vanessa are going to Juneau on the lobbying trip

Getting a PhD program update--Max
*Doug Causey is supportive
*More a matter of when
*We as students need to be more forthcoming
*READ MAX'S LETTER IN THE NORTHERN LIGHT THIS WEEK "Regents, Listen: Approve a doctoral biology program at UAA"--found on p. 9 or online at www.thenorthernlight.org

Coordinator update--Vanessa
*Her last day as coordinator is Feb. 28th. So someone needs to step up.

The request for grant proposals was edited and sent out this week. Jill moved, Lindsey seconded, and vote was unanimous. They are due Friday, Feb. 23rd by 5pm.

The call for symposium abstracts was edited and approved. Jill moved, Keri seconded, and the vote was unanimous.

Symposium update
*Now looking at April 13th (March 30th as backup) for symposium
*Hopefully in the student union north and south cafeterias to attract students hanging around in the university center--Vanessa is checking into this.

Next meeting: TBA (before Vanessa steps down)

 

GSA Meeting Minutes from 1/18/07:

GAB report
* Jocelyn reported that the faculty is supportive of the Graduate School and the by-laws for the Graduate School are in the works.

USUAA report
* currently trying to get GSA the vote at USUAA, seems to be supported by some of the USUAA leaders, a campus-wide vote will likely happen on this issue in early April
* going to explore if our GSA monies can roll over each year so we do not have to give back whatever we don't use at the end of the year

Travel Board update
* Feb 6th is the next deadline for travel grant applications ($750 capon grants)
* Advised to apply for this deadline as money for the year is running out quickly

Treasurer's Report
* We have all our money (~$9,700)
* $2,000 budgeted for symposium, $5,000 for grants
* Possibility of after-symposium celebration to use up some remaining funds and add a fun, social activity for this semester

Brian is still contacting IT about the webpage
* Hopefully it will be up soon, we will know so we can review it before links to it are developed

Vanessa is stepping down as coordinator for this semester to work on her thesis. So if anyone wants the coordinator's job, let Vanessa know ASAP. Possibility for someone currently holding a position to move up into the coordinator's role if interested or someone new.

Discussion about getting doctoral programs to UAA (not joint UAA-UAF programs). If anyone is interested, a subcommittee may be formed to explore this issue/lobby neccessary people. Starting off by talking to Doug Causey to get an update of where we are on this issue.