Florian Gstrein, Steve Pracko, Jose Mumbru, Chunhui Mo, Michael Fleming, Michael Johnson, Jason Cohen, Jeff Bergthorson, Tim Lesko, Nick Pornsinsirirak, Matthew Sumner.

The minutes were approved by consensus.

Some ideas for this were to focus on the topics of graduate student activism, motivation and general energy, finding means of recruiting people to help with both paid and non-paid positions, how to interact with the faculty to achieve results, setting up a potential student advocate, and how to get to where we want to be. There were seven BoD reps that expressed a desire to attend the final retreat. There were either 2 or 3 who volunteered to drive people to the retreat. We are expecting at most 15 people to attend, even though this was advertised quite far in advance, it seems people are dropping out like flies.

The budget needs to be voted on in September, so we need to form a committee to allocate money in short order. If this is not done in advance, this creation step can be a very painful experience for everyone at the meeting, so planning is critical here if we are to function for the upcoming year.

Members were asked to volunteer based on time and availability for this important position.

People involved with the Social Activism and Speaker Series came to our meeting to tell us about what they have been planning for the upcoming year and to ask us for help with funding and advertising their events. At the present time, we were told that they had 3 speakers lined up. The Fall speaker is Jose Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who will be talking about what is currently occurring in East Timor. The Winter speaker is Tim Wise, who will be talking about issues surrounding power, prejudice and race. The Spring speaker is Hanter Evans, from the Rocky Mountain Institute, and this talk will feature environmental issues.

When asked for a budget breakdown, we were told that to recruit the speakers and cover their fixed costs, the series would require $20,300 in total. Of this amount, they were asking the GSC for $2000. The overall budget is $1,250 more than last year’s, however the fact that a Nobel Laureate is included seems to justify the added expense. When asked about other sources of funding, they told us that ASCIT gave them $60. When asked to explain why ASCIT gave them such a tiny amount, they told us that ASCIT wanted them to have some conservative speakers to balance their liberal bend. The GSC thought that having more liberal speakers would better benefit the Graduate Student Body and hence rejected this argument.

In the past, they have held these talks (which are offered free of charge to anyone who is interested in attending) in Beckman Auditorium. This year, they are looking into getting the slightly greater seating capacity Ramo Auditorium, since last year they had to turn away people due to a lack of space to fit them all in. But, since this is open to the entire world community, an alert BoD member asked about the various aspects of participation which were open to just the Caltech community.

We were told that the speaker would have a pre-dinner event and a dinner event, both of which are geared for a small, Caltech-only group of people interested in meeting the speaker. Usually there is a hard time filling these 2 events to capacity.

We did not vote for any money as of yet, since the budget for the upcoming year would not be completed until the next meeting.

A committee met with Dean Kiewiet and we were told that the stipends for fellowships, RA’s and TA’s would all increase by 6% for the next fiscal year. This was partly justified due to the fact that the on-campus graduate housing on average was increased by 5.8% for the next fiscal year. Another result of this meeting also talked about how the graduate office would look into trying to meet the minimal costs which they estimate all grad students need to expend to just eek an existence by at Caltech.

However, just because the graduate office has approved increasing stipends does not mean that all graduate students will see this new rate of payment; advisors still need to actually sign these increases into effect. If students are currently within the newly updated boundaries, some advisors may feel that they do not need to increase the stipends and hence not everyone may see this effect. We would like to urge people to check whether or not they receive the increase which the graduate office has told us would occur starting with the October Paycheck. We want to encourage all graduate students to check their paystubs these next few months.

We do not want to take an aggressive stance at all, but still would like to formally mention that by increasing the stipends, we are merely helping graduate students to meet the minimal expenses which have been rising as the COLA rises and have not been adjusted for in a few years. We are generally pleased however with this interaction with the graduate office and hope that we can continue to work together with them in future financial manners.

There will be a GUSH planned for August 31^st and some type of sporting or game outing planned for the month of September. Up to $250 was approved for this planned outing, with ideas such as paintball and lazertag offered as options for the entertainment.

Not everyone has delivered their magazines to their final resting spot by the appropriate departmental mailbox. Please do this ASAP if you have not yet, for we need to get them distributed.

The new location of the GSC’s storage space will be the little blue house which is slanted and resides just to the west of the current penthouse. The foundation of this building is not structurally sound enough to allow for the city to permit people to live in it, but it seems adequate for our storage needs. Housing will go through the process of cleaning and disinfecting the house, boarding off the less than close to habitable rooms of the house, and will generally help us to move some of our larger possessions to the new house. There is sufficient space in the new house for all of our belongings, and after the locks are replaced, we should all be able to have reasonable access to our equipment (including the sound equipment), with a key-based lock.

Since the penthouse is now no longer available to host our meetings, someone will need to contact people on campus to try and arrange for meeting space for our subsequent meetings. Winnett is both central and easy to access, so it is automatically our initial choice for a meeting space. The idea also surfaced of seeing whether housing could lend us a region, or if we could use the old GSC room in the SAC.

At the current time, people are needed to help out the graduate office with their how to choose an advisor panel and TA training. In particular, people NOT from the chemistry department are needed. There are many poorly represented options and students from these options should apply to the grad office immediately if they are willing to help.

Here is the tentative NSO Schedule:

Date Event Location Time

Sat 22/09 Beach trip with ISP TBA TBA

Sun 23/09 Ice cream social and Jazz Band Red Door Cafe 5:30 p.m.

Mon 24/09 Pub and Caffeine crawl North Cat. Rec Room 7:45 p.m.

Tues 25/09 Movie and Pizza night Roof of Winnett 8:30 p.m.

Lounge

Wed 26/09 Club trip to the Sunset Strip North Cat Rec Room 9:30 p.m.

Thurs 27/09 Movie and Pizza Night Roof of Parking 8:30 p.m.

Structure, North.

Take another breather.

Fri 28/09 Alumni Barbeque Alumni House (Hill) 6:00 p.m.

GSC Party TBA 10:00 p.m.

Sat 29/09: Magic Mountain trip Corner of San Pasqual 9:30 a.m.

and Wilson

Ben was out of town in Montreal, so there is nothing to report.

The distribution deadline for the Technique is ready to go in 2 weeks. There are some last minute changes, mostly consisting of organizational issues. Most of the informational issues which were considered potentially to be changed were not reached by consensus, given the remaining time allowed for discussion before the publishing deadline hit. However there did seem to be issues surrounding a personality conflict between the editor and one of the committee members. This is something which we would hope would not need to arise again in future hirings.

The general scope of the new publication seems different in a few ways from the old technique and we hope that people will like this version more. However, before authorizing payment of funds, we need to check on graduate student satisfaction and on the accessibility and easy of use of the online version.

Steve has compiled roughly 2/3 of the total graduate options into a super email list which he will use to distribute the new E-version of the GSC Newsletter, to hopefully every current Caltech graduate student, without too many double copies being sent. The remaining lists are much harder for Steve to try to compile. Some departments, like GPS, have a master email list, but forbid someone outside of their department to post to it, effectively making it useless for our needs. Others such as EE, MS, and ApH are all a bit confusing, with none having a central email list. However it is thought that given more time and effort (especially contacting the computer gurus in each department), minimally a departmental roster will be able to be compiled for each option.

Congratulations to Jeff and Mike for providing the leadership needed to have this event be a complete success. The contest for a T-shirt design worked out well, with plenty of T-shirts to go around and the winner receiving a free one as compensation. People seemed to really enjoy the events this year, and in particular many lamented fondly upon the karaoke.

On a more serious note however, we went $300 over budget. This was due in part to the fact that the GSC sound system was in use by another club at the time. As for future recommendations of how to make the event ever better, we could increase the budget, make sure that the speaker system is available, or try to implement both.

There has not been a CHCC meeting in more than one month. This is a sorely needed thing if we are to plan social activities for the Cats residents.

Graduate housing has updated the waitlists and is in the process of emptying the waitlists, now that they have the new GSC space to move students into. At the current time, the waitlist is down to about 30 people.

Florian is the new Library Committee representative.

PLEASE POST YOUR FLYERS, following the NEW flyer task force assignments. If we do not do this, we can not operate as an efficient organization to meet the students’ needs.