Florian Gstrein, Steve Pracko, Jose Mumbru, Chunhui Mo, Michael Fleming, Michael Johnson, Fok-Yan Leung, Benedict Hebert, Jason Cohen, Jeff Bergthorson, Tim Lesko Alex Tobias, Athanasios Nenes, Jonie Tsuji, Nick Pornsinsirirak, Nick Knouf, Melvin Leok, Matthew Sumner, Ying Haung.

This has been a 3 or 4-year annual event. This year, they plan on skipping the pig roast, but still want to hold a large dance party. This wants to be held on a Saturday sometime during the month of August. They would like a total amount of $500 in funding from the GSC. A budget for their event shows that the house is chipping in $500 and they need a total of $1200 for the event to run as planned. They are anticipating about 250 people to be in attendance.

There was a vote to have the party funded at the same level of $500 as it has been in previous years. The final vote count was Yes – 11, No – 1, Abstain – 2. The motion carried.

The minutes were approved in a vote of all in favor with 2 abstaining.

Ying took a picture of the GSC BoD for the Technique

The CDC (Career Development Center) will be holding a fall career fair on October 18^th. Over the past 3 years, this fair has been exclusively for Ph.D. candidates who were being recruited for positions. However, this year, the fair is going to be open to employers looking to recruit people from all different academic degree levels. There will however be a separate tent at the event, which will have employers looking to recruit Ph.D. only level candidates. The event is currently scheduled to run from 10:30-2:30. Before the event there will be a 9am, breakfast meeting for Ph.D. candidates only, to help facilitate companies who are looking to hire them, to make connections.

The CDC does not need any funding from us, but would like people to help advertise the event and drum up student support for the event.

There was some debate centering around why recruiters for BS candidates were allowed to come to this event and if Ph.D. recruiters would also be allowed to attend the spring career day event.

There was more talk and information provided to us about the Student-Faculty Conference. The main aim of this event will be to help improve the quality of student life interests in the Caltech Community.

The general plan now is to form 4 different committees to help draft ideas to cover 4 different aspects of student life on campus. Academic concerns would include such aspects as the lab-reviews project that the GSC has been working on. Quality of life would include such aspects as hardwiring the Catalinas for ethernet. Honor code would include such issues as the operations and effectiveness of the GRB. The fourth committee would mostly focus on undergraduate degree requirement issues.

Some concerns that were delivered to us which we need to deal with were trying to recruit interested people to actually sit on these committees. We need people who are open-minded and willing to work with faculty, as well as being interested in wanting to talk about changes, and yet not being so meek that they let the faculty in attendance water down the student’s ideas. Recruiting people to help write concrete proposals and solutions would be a critical aspect of the success of this proposal.

This can be another chance for us to succeed on helping to convince the administration to listen to concerns that we may have raised in the past but not been successful in achieving change on. However, the general format of the conference committees, their composition and any regulatory power they may have is still undecided at the present time. What is agreed upon is that these committees will have the ability to educate the community about issues which are on the student’s minds.

Recruiting faculty involvement may also be difficult, though the idea of talking with our advisors was floated. Anyone interested in joining however should contact Jose at gscchair@its.

The event has been planned (tentatively) for February 1^st.

The idea for the GSC to give up its penthouse space, so that graduate student housing could take its place was floated. This idea, which had been initially proposed at a meeting between GSC officers and Tom Mannion, was officially brought to the floor for discussion.

The GSC stated its need for office space to store files, equipment, and to use for meetings of various organizations which benefited graduate student life here on campus. However, the GSC also wanted to be self-consistent, especially in light of the current housing crunch for graduate students. The penthouse could be used to house students. The GSC also has space needs for it in regards to holding its monthly meetings. These meetings are large and must remain open to the public.

Ideas were floated to use the blue house next door to the current GSC Penthouse space for storage. At the current time, that house is owned by Caltech Housing, yet is not in a condition to be used for livable space.

Linda Chappell told us that housing could move a total of 5 students up to the penthouse. Our own analysis indicates to us that about 3 students could live in the penthouse. The idea that we use this for leverage to encourage housing to vacate its current 5 Catalina spaces that it occupies (an entire 4-bedroom for the maintaince office and a 1-bedroom for Linda’s office) was raised. In the past it was noted that we had to use on campus facilities to hold our meetings, and that housing also had to do the same.

In the end, we voted unanimously to talk about giving up the office for adequate storage space and a guarantee that if we did give it up, that it would be used for graduate student housing. There was only a motion agreed upon for us to talk about giving up the space, and only if we were offered something which would fit our needs.

Some married students approached us with a complaint that they felt the housing process was not transparent enough for their needs and they thought that the process was unfair. We investigated these accusations and led a discussion on the topic.

They were confused that the process as explained by Linda was not obvious and transparent. To help on this accord, a separate meeting was set up between Linda and these residents, and some GSC members were in attendance as mediators. When the complainants brought this to our attention, they cited that in the meeting that Linda gave concerning the rules, that there were ambiguities that married students who were both Caltech affiliated and married students where only one was a Caltech affiliated person were considered the same. However, for the purpose of acquiring a 2-bedroom unit, only married couples that are both Caltech students can have priority. However, these married couples in which one person is not a Caltech student do have priority over non-married couples for 1-bedroom units.

This made sense to the BoD. We were asked to vote to rebuke Linda and to ask that the two lists be merged into one waiting list. We voted to deny this motion, as we thought the process used, giving students priority was the best process. This motion failed 2 to 12. We agreed with Linda that no 2-berdoom unit should be given to only 1 Caltech student, until every graduate student who wants a place to live in has a place to live in.

We thought it was fair that Caltech housing and room assignments be given to Caltech Graduate students. We thought it was OK for 2 married Caltech students to take a 2-bedroom, since it was two bedrooms for two students, or that it was fair for a one person member of a Caltech couple to take a 1 bedroom, since it was officially 1 bedroom for one student. WE also noted that married students receive priority for the rental properties.

Some arguments brought up in the discussion included whether we should house anyone other than students, and the impact that reshuffling would have on those currently on the waiting list who were not married. It was expressed that people already on the waiting list would be frustrated if they were now being told that they would have to move further down the list (and possibly loose any chance at housing), so that some non-Caltech students could take the now higher spots on the waiting list. One member brought up that students choosing to marry should realize that there are both advantageous and disadvantageous aspects of their new legal status, but since being married is a choice, that it should not be our concern; our concern is housing graduate students. We all expressed the NEED for future processes to be TRANSPARENT. The desire for an obvious and well-advertised process was agreed upon unanimously by the BoD.

We agreed that future study would help to create a better assignment process.

The review contest is officially over. Many reviews were received for auto mechanics, dentists and doctors; not many were received for restaurants. This is Ok, as the old version contained many restaurant reviews. We were asked to vote on assigning money to help pay for small prizes for people who contributed reviews but did not win the grad-office sponsored 1^st prize. We were not sure if there was money available for this purpose.

The idea was brought up to switch to an e-version of the newsletter only. This idea, if executed, would save the GSC roughly $5000 each year in printing and publishing costs. The other advantage of an e-version is that more color and more pictures can be included in the newsletter, as a *.pdf version available online can easily include these wonderful extras, which we could not otherwise afford to publish. It was argued that people who wanted a hardcopy could go to its and print out a single hardcopy of the *.pdf which would be linked to at the bottom of the text-only e-version which we would email out to everyone.

An idea was brought up to have 3-5 hard copies available in each mailbox area for people to read, and to stay in that region. However, if the fate of the current hard copies means anything, then we should not; most of us realized that the current copies tend to wind up in the recycling bin very quickly.

The idea of polling people was raised, to see what the interest was for a paperless version. Additionally, the idea of setting the email version as the default was raised, and that a paper version could be printed out and left with the people in question who specifically wanted it to be, and who requested it officially of the gsc-newsletter editor (I personally know that it took me a few months to realize that I could even get an e-version and it made me very happy to cut down on the paper waste in the end, once I realized it was available).

To do this however, we will need to have aliases, which will automatically send email to every student in each department. Some departments already have these set up. If yours does not, please email Steve Pracko if you can do this. This is very important for us to do and especially so, with regards to the new students, who could very easily otherwise be left out of the loop.

There was a motion to create these aliases for each department and then a master alias to mail the departmental aliases. There was also a motion to start this e-version idea only, at least for the month of August. Both passed unanimously.

We need all directors to distribute TOTEM magazines to the various departments. We need to make up a new flyer task force. This second task will be delegated to the secretary for creation.

We will only have access to 1 pool for the afternoon. There will also be GSC Softball on the north field. We could ask them to move from 10am until 1pm.

We still need to recruit teams and to have logos made up for the T-shirts. We need to recruit people to organize events. There will be an organizational meeting held in roughly 2 weeks.

People were needed to attend the TA/Teaching sessions for the 1^st year grad students. More people were needed to help out with planned social events. There was a decision to cut the wine and cheese from the ice cream social. We need to contact Parandeh to help finalize the details.

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Only people who have already submitted valid nomination forms may vote in GSC meetings.

Yes – 11

No – 0

Abstain – 1