CS Grad Council Meeting Minutes – Mon., Sep 24, 2001

Secretary – Pete Schoenhoff

The meeting was brought to order at 9:10 pm. Members present were Ameya Datey, Wendy Schafer, Pete Schoenhoff, Josh Steele, and Marc Vass.

1) Marc Vass reports on the faculty meeting:

a. Two new faculty will be hired for next year, in addition to those slated for hire through the Bioinformatics grant.

b. The department is exploring the creation of a Computer Science / Information Technology School, which would not be under the umbrella of the School of Arts and Sciences.

c. Mentioned again the October 20 recruiting banquet for the CSGrad Dept.

2) Pete – The online survey is finally getting response. Pete sent out a notice last week asking people to take the survey, but there was no response. Originally, he assumed that the lack of response was due to everyone’s attention on the national terrorist crisis, but earlier today he discovered that some mail setting had been changed at the root level, and that survey submissions were simply not being forwarded to the collection system. He fixed the problem, sent out a new message, and three new surveys have been submitted since.

a. So far, most discussion on the surveys seems to be regarding the gradlab conditions.

3) Pete has been in contact with Dr. Balci for the awards committee. The semester’s meetings for the committee have been arranged, and Pete is set for them.

4) Josh – reporting on the research space in McBryde 565:

a. Students are not allowed to use multiple ports in 565. If you want a second port, you must provide your own line splitter / hub and pay a fee of $7 for the year.

b. Chris Arnold is taking care of the csgrad settings.

c. Chris is also investigating a potential solution to the multi-page printing problem. (If you attempt to conserve paper by printing four pages to a single sheet of paper, the quota system charges you for printing four pages instead of one.)

d. The new machine in the mailroom is the curator (auto-grader for undergrad projects) server. A small number of GTAs have access to it, which is why it has been located in the grad mailroom.

e. Re: the broken chairs – Josh will talk to Gay again.

f. Some of the locks on the lockers will not open. Josh is investigating a solution.

5) Marc – re: budget – we have the same amount of money we had before. About 20% - 30% of students have paid grad council dues, which gave us about $430.00.

6) Ameya is still trying to recruit for the seminar series. His efforts are confounded by the fact that we’d like to get speakers from outside the department (for variety), but we have no budget to pay a guest speaker.

7) Pete – raised a concern about the lack of any quality office supplies in the gradlab. (Staplers, hole-punches, scissors, etc.) Josh will ask Sandy about this. Pete suggested that 1) we ask the department to provide the materials. 2) If they can’t or won’t, we allocate some funds from our treasury for this. 3) If that is not an option, we appeal to the grad students to each donate a dollar (or so) toward this cause.

8) Wendy – said that we are now investigating a hiking trip instead of a picnic, due to weather problems, time given to jobsearches, etc.

9) Josh said that “sudo” is/should be available for use on csgrad instead of Super-User access. He will ask Gay/Chris about this.

10) Fernando supports giving assistantship money to incoming students. There was some debate and discussion about this. The core of the dilemma is the fact that we want to both attract new students and keep existing students.

11) Ameya asked about a program which he’d heard of through GSA by which Thesis students could get $300 and PhD students could get $500. Wendy explained that this was travel reimbursement for grad students presenting at conferences.

12) Pete was asked about when minutes would be posted/available. Pete said that with the exception of last week’s minutes, they were already posted. He will send everyone email directions about how to find the minutes.

13) Marc – asked about appropriate use of public systems in the department, specifically citing the observed existence of viruses and pornography on some machines. It was agreed that this is certainly not appropriate on department machines. Offenders are in violation of the acceptable use policy.

14) Wendy points out that:

a. Sandy is now in Brodie 107

b. Ginger Allen now does much of what Sandy used to do, and is an appropriate contact point.