Jeff Bergthorson, Jason Cohen, Michael Fleming, Florian Gstrein, Michael Johnson, Melvin Leok, Tim Lesko, Chunhui Mo, Jose Mumbru, Steve Pracko, Cecily Ryan, Chip Sumner, Alex Tobias

The minutes were not approved and will be looked at during the next meeting time. The issue surrounding the ‘sports czar’ position will be added to the agenda.

I presented these results to the BoD. The tallied results as nice little pie charts are attached at the end of this document. Given that I was giving this presentation, the minutes for this one piece may be a bit leaky, but I will try my best.

These results need to be presented to housing immediately. They [the results] seem to point to there being a large interest in obtaining high speed internet based on those who live in the cats. In addition it seems that the addition of high speed internet would likely increase the demand for housing, which would allow CABS to constantly maintain fully occupied buildings for now and into the future. The results seem to warrant that we write a petition or some type of statement to the administration or housing for them to take our efforts and desires here seriously.

There was some worry expressed that merely having 231 people respond to the survey could have presented some selection bias into it. However, looking at the data, it seems that a large percentage of those who responded were not Catalina residents, and this also could have presented selection error in the opposite direction. The merits of a survey were discussed and in the end, we decided that when a survey is open and available for all to take that we need to go with what we have. When asked whether people in the room had taken the survey, everyone nodded that he/she had done so.

In addition to the students here wanting ethernet in the Catalinas, it should be pointed out to the administration that all of the other top universities in the nation provide these services for their on-campus graduate student housing. It was approved by consensus to pass this along to Tom Mannion in the form of a petition to get the process started and rolling.

Vice President Horvath said he would be willing to have undergrads talk about parking issues on the campus. Andrew, who spoke here last month on the topic, was willing to sit on the new parking committee as the graduate student representative. Based on the Caltech by-laws, we are not allowed to access this meeting, however the VP was gracious to us and allowed this benefit to us. We gracefully are going to opt to take advantage of this opportunity to allow student perspectives to be heard on the issue. This looks like a hopeful way to gather student inquiry and to pass it along to the committee. More will follow with this as we find out more from Andrew.

While always tasty, the demand for the alternate snow-cone production potential found in ice skating seemed to win out for the social activity for the upcoming month. In addition the following considerations also helped to aid our subsequent decision: it is starting to get cold outside and the old ice cream guru, Steve, is wanting someone else to help him out with taking charge of the event. After some discussion along all of these lines, it was decided that we delay the ice cream social for a term and instead focus on the ice skating event.

The talking about the term party also started from this line of discussion. It was decided that since graduate students are here for the summer, and since this term is nearly over, that it may be best to hold our three budgeted term parties during the winter, spring and summer terms. This would also cut down on the number of undergrads who come and raid our party.

The gym is placing a semi-permanent baseball fence on the north field. This fence, once erected, will be up for the ENTIRE baseball season. This will effectively end GSC Soccer, ultimate frisbee, and rugby, forcing these onto the south field. The gain to doing this the gym tells us is that it would accommodate the undergraduate baseball team, so that it can have a home run definition for its home games.

When this was mentioned, the first idea which we talked about would be why the gym was wanting to do this. It would seem less expensive to just use a cheap fence and to place it up and take it down for the game day. Another issue mentioned was that the south field is not in the current state of good repair that the north field is in. Hence the athletic center may wind up incurring added student injuries or lawsuits, unless it is willing to place more money into upgrading the facilities of the south field, yet another added expense of this new policy.

One advantage of having a permanent sports czar is that in the future when such a situation as this occurs that we can interact and communicate trough the decision process, rather than reacting to the decisions once the are made and announced to us after-the-fact.

Once we started to focus on constructive approaches to how to deal with this, we started to draw some workable conclusions. We have asked if representatives of GSC Soccer, ultimate and other clubs who use the field, would be willing to write letters to Vice President Brennon to get him to look into the issue. It was decided to first try and approach athletics directly and see what it is they can do for us, with the idea of approaching the Vice President later on and with the more serious concerns of student liability and the additional student services expenses that this plan would incur.

The reasons for the budget cuts were explained. When asked about the large donation, we were told that while it was promised that it is slow to arrive and much of it is earmarked for very specific uses only.

Some specific budget cuts mentioned included a planned cut back in the student health insurance plan, yet again. Currently health insurance costs the institute 2.2 million dollars out of a total of an 18 million deficit on a 400 million a year operating budget. It is seen that health insurance can be one way to help close this 18 million dollar gap.

Fok, the graduate student representative on the faculty health insurance committee, told us that last year human resources only submitted one idea to the committee for approval. He [Fok] thinks that if we get the faculty committee to start meeting earlier on during the year, that it will have more time to consider a greater number of options for the upcoming round of changes.

The students on the GSC feel that health insurance is one of the more considerable issues of importance to maintaining a happy and productive graduate student body. Health care can be quite excessive and is a necessity in order to just live. We think that by opting to raise premiums around $150/person/year that it will only generate a tiny dent in the 18 million deficit, while affecting the people greatly. This is also going to ultimately shift money out of the research advisor’s accounts to help to cover for it, while encouraging many strong candidates who apply here to possibly consider other scholarly choices.

Chip has volunteered to help out and join Fok on pursuing this topic further.

There are currently three scales being looked into at the current time. The first one is to build a large central library over the long term. In the medium range time scale, the committee is looking into moving the administration into Millikan. On the short time scale, the committee is looking into what to do with the current collections, which are in the library at the present time.

We really need to look into the current issue; at the present time the library is not structurally sound enough to support the added mass needed to place more books inside of it. SFL is also not built at the present time to accommodate many more books. In addition, there are strong political forces in the HSS department to have the administration move out of Dabney Hall, so that it can reclaim the entire building, as was the case in its far past. These two reasons create a complex picture that needs to be addressed shortly, for the building of a new library is still a far off goal. We thought that talking with faculty and our peers on this present issue could possibly yield more information and ideas. We will talk more about this at the next meeting.

Michael J has volunteered to run the wine tour for this academic year and Alex T has volunteered to organize the ice skating night.

The alpine club event was very well attended, with about 45 people participating. The pre-Halloween party was poorly attended. Although it was well organized in terms of food and activities and had the makings of a good party, it seemed to fall short thanks to non-sufficient advertising and being held outside (as compared with similar events in the past which have been held indoors).

Congratulations to the two new CHCCs Chunhui Mo and Neil Garg