List of Meeting Minutes
BGSA meeting, 1 March 2011
# of attendees: 13
Smriti Bhotika, President of BGSA,
presided over the meeting and presented following agenda, which was
distributed earlier today to the biograd list-serve
- Brief presentation by GAU (the graduate student union)
- Election Procedures
- Suggestions for Committees
- merge Treasurer and Secretary
- reduce size of welcoming committee to 3 people
- form new fundraising committee for tshirt sales (2 people)
- reopen awards committee for nominations rather than elect from R-O recipients
- Seminar Committee
- information from Alice; can submit proposal to faculty
- move R-O awards to Fall semester
- move grad forum back to lunch time
- conduct Grad Invited Speaker nomination during spring instead of summer
- Treasurer’s Report (including update on Snack/Soda Store)
- Fundraising Efforts (Tshirts and Mugs)
GAU
Graduate Assistants United (three representatives present) informed us that a new bill in the Florida Legislature may dissolve our status as a labor union unless our membership increases to 50% of the graduate assistants at UF (currently, we have 20% membership) by July 1 2011.
Jane Brockmann attended the first 10 minutes of our meeting to communicate that she, along with many faculty members, is concerned that this bill will jeopardize our basic rights and benefits as employees of the University of Florida. The Biology faculty – as a whole – does not want its graduate assistants to lose healthcare benefits, legal representation, and other rights assured by the existence of GAU as a legal union. She urged us to consider joining GAU and she reported that the Biology faculty are working to support the continued existence of unionized graduate assistants at UF.
Michael Mayne (michaelmayne@gmail.com), a representative from GAU, followed up with specific information about the bill and GAU.
About GAU: Graduate Assistants United is a Labor organization. Every year, GAU represents graduate assistants in an employment contract negotiation with UF. Examples of important components of this contract are the tuition waiver (won in 1986), fee deferment and cap (2010) and a healthcare plan (~2006). The yearly contract is legally binding (because we’re a labor Union), provides us with a legal representative for grievances with the University, and works to ensure that our rights as employees are maintained through changing economic times.
About the (dreaded) bill (HB 1023): proposed by the supermajority in Tallahassee, requests that maintaining Union status require a 50% membership, which is much higher than our current membership of 20%. If this passes and we do not reach 50% by July 1, GAU loses its status and we lose our legal representative with UF. The result is that our tuition waivers, healthcare benefits, and other GAU benefits become vulnerable to suspension without legal consequences.
The g’s: GAU is supported financially by its membership dues. Members of GAU pay 1% of their yearly salary. If you joined but aren’t sure if you’re still a member, check your paycheck. The 1% deduction should appear in the description provided through my.ufl.edu. To become a member, check your mailbox for a membership contract. If you are abroad, you can e-mail Mike (see address above). GAU website: http://ufgau.org/ contains membership form, copy of this year’s contract, and other information about socials and officers.
If you have further questions and would like to chat with a GAU representative in person, you can visit their table in the Plaza of the Americas any Wednesday afternoon.
Currently, our steward is Stein Servick. Alfred Thomson volunteered to become a second representative for our department to GAU, given the current increase in demand for communication and cooperation between graduate assistants and GAU.
There was concern about the cost of joining: 1% of our paycheck is $120, which adds up. Hannah wondered whether GAU is open to reducing the cost. Mike said no (other unions charge up to 5% and the money that GAU makes is used to pay lawyers). He called our attention to the less conspicuous benefits (gov’t employee discounts for car rentals and other services).
Smriti and Gaby requested a list of the additional benefits; this list may be useful for students who are very budget-conscious and simply unaware of the net cost of joining. We think the list is coming…will check back with you when we have it.
New Election Procedures
Smriti and Hannah are updating the officer descriptions on the BGSA website (see here) in order to ensure consistency through transitions and to clarify questions about BGSA’s officer positions. The updates were e-mailed to the graduate student list-serve for comments and suggestions.
The 2011-2012 BGSA officer elections will contain the following new policy:
Graduate students who are interested in becoming BGSA officers can self-nominate. Our previous policy was to allow peer nominations; however this procedure will not be followed for the 2011-2012 elections. A two-week period (to be decided: late March, early April) will be designated for self-nominations and elections.
Additionally, those who are interested in holding an executive position (President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer) will submit a brief statement about him/herself (who are you?) and why he/she would like to serve as one of the executive officers. The goal of this statement is to keep things personal. Now that we are a bigger department, many of us don’t know each other and thus wouldn’t have the information needed to vote.
If a position is still empty during voting time, the secretary will send out a call for volunteers to assist in said positions.
If there is only 1 self-nominated student for a position, he/she will automatically get the position.
There was resistance to the self-nomination policy. Concerns (with responses from the executive officers who discussed the procedure at length) are summarized below:
Concern 1: Self-nominations select for students who are already involved. Response: this concern may be based on a misconception. Many officers actually prefer to step back and get some work done after serving as BGSA officers.
Concern 2: Nobody will self-nominate. Response: this semester, several positions became vacant. Smriti called for volunteers and received quick responses. The hope is that a self-nomination policy will result in fewer ‘drop-outs’ who either cannot serve because of work constraints or are unaware of their nomination until it’s too late to step down.
A motion to vote on this new policy was called: 11 of the 11 graduate students present (two had stepped out before the end of the meeting) voted to support the new policy.
Suggestions for changes to BGSA officer and committee structure
- Merge Treasurer and Secretary positions: Hannah has served in each position and found that the duties are easy to combine. Having a single secretary/treasurer position will result in easier logistics for the president when executive committee meetings need to be planned.
Gaby doesn’t think the positions should be combined. She agrees that the workload for each position is low and prefers that the workload for BGSA positions remain low. - Reduce the size of the welcoming committee from 5 to 3: The main concern was that if 1 person bails out, the welcoming pic-nic is too much work for 2 people. We are, however, willing to see if the self-nomination procedure results in better commitment and/or preemptive replacement of members if something comes up.
- PR and fundraising rep to be a single person who handles t-shirts and updates for the Biology website. Danielle suggested that 2 people hold the position.
- Riewald-Olowo awards committee: we may expand the eligibility criteria to include all students who have received R-O awards in the past. Serving on the committee could be their opportunity to provide an important service in return.
- We will move the R-O deadline to the Fall so that it’s lined it up with the Sigma Xi deadline.
- We are considering moving grad forum back to lunchtime in order to increase attendance. A poll will go out to the graduate students before the grad forum meeting time is decided next year. This will hopefully eliminate schedule conflicts that prevent large numbers of students from attending at 4:00 p.m.
- The nominations for grad invited speaker will go out in the Spring instead of Summer. Smriti thinks that we are now allowed to invite 2 speakers per year but she is going to check on this and get back to us.
- Seminar committee: it’s a lot of work and almost purely a service position with no benefits. Should BGSA be in charge of setting up snacks? Smriti spoke to Alice, who said that in the past, the Botany seminar snack/coffee arrangements were made by a staff member and included non-perishable snacks that didn’t require weekly grocery trips. There isn’t a University-wide policy (some departments put the staff in charge, some departments put graduate students in charge). Alice proposed that the graduate students submit a new policy for seminar committee membership so that the faculty can discuss options.
We are considering the option of transferring the basic duty to a staff member (sans the grocery store trip). If we want extras that are more enjoyable but perishable, the faculty host can provide them.
Treasurer report
We have ~$2,900. We’ve made $300 from candy store since we moved it. It’s self-sufficient again and making profits since it was moved to the grad student lounge. Volume of sales is lower but profit is much higher (i.e. positive and not negative!!!). There are some complaints about the absence of the IOU system but we are going to keep it as is for now.
Fundraising
Fundraising: Francois needs help with a designer for our t-shirts. If we don’t have a t-shirt design by the end of March, we’ll postpone until the Fall semester. Danielle had a great suggestion: we should design it at the beginning of the Fall and sell it at the pic-nic, Zoocial and as a holiday gift.
Meeting adjourned at ~6:20 p.m.
BGSA meeting, 9 November 2010
Attendance: 14 people
Main topics of today’s meeting: grad invited speaker, grad forum.
- Space committee/grad student lounge: to ensure that grad student lounge will stay well-supplied and organized, we will include some grad lounge maintenance duties in the Space Committee description of tasks for next year.
- Frequenly Asked Questions resource: Hannah and Smriti assembled a list of Frequently Asked Questions with answers for graduate students who want to know basic departmental policies: fiscal, curriculum, TAships, etc. They will post it online within the next 2 weeks and are encouraging us to check it out first before going through the trouble of asking questions to people who may/may not know the answers.
- Graduate Invited Speaker – Budget: Caitlin and Smriti asked the faculty some questions about $$ for grad invited speakers. The seminar committee expressed that they will support 2 graduate invited speakers/year (1 per semester), given that in the past, there was 1 for Zoology and 1 for Botany. Smriti asked attendees if there were any objections. There was unanimous support for having 2 invited speakers/year. Clare suggested that we re-visit the option during semesters that involve several faculty hires, given that hiring duties require lots of participation and may cut away from time that the graduate students may be able to devote to hosting an invited speaker.
- Graduate Invited Speaker – Voting: We usually submit nominations and vote on an invited speaker after BGSA elections. Thus, the decision is usually made by the end of the summer. We may need to vote earlier if we are coordinating the visits of 2 speakers. Caitlin would be happy to take nominations before elections (for next year). We discussed the option of constructing categories (e.g. Ecology, Molecular Biology, etc) in order to evenly distribute the representation of disciplines among invited speakers. This idea was not well-received by us. Clare provided a well-articulated argument for no categories: having a single category incentivizes people to choose an integrative person. Thus, everyone will be more likely to participate. Daniel expressed that the scheduling process may be challenging, given that famous people have busy schedules. We will try this out during for 1 year (assuming the risk of having 2 in 1 semester, but trying to have 1/semester).
- Graduate Research Forum/Grad Forum/Graduate Student Research Forum/Research Forum: The faculty in the seminar committee want to institutionalize graduate forum; they suggested the idea of requiring 1 presentation in order to graduate. We agreed that there are several opportunities for students to give practice talks and present results/questions in the department; enforcing this is not necessary. We are going to suggest that 1-2 Departmental Seminar slots be allotted to departmental student presentations (in addition to exit seminars). We want to continue having grad forum because it is informal and useful for people who are getting their feelers out Re: an idea, a graph, etc. It’s more interactive than a formal seminar. The problem thus far has been low attendance to grad forum. Danielle suggested that we advertise by announcing grad forum during weekly seminars. We may also increase faculty attendance by requesting that they sign up to attend grad forum 1 day/year. Another incentive: grad forum presenter gets a free beverage at Zoocial on his/her presentation day. Additional grad forum presentation incentive: lottery. We pull a name out of the group of presenters and give a prize at the end of the semester ($50 book certificate?).
- Curriculum: Bob is teaching theoretical community ecology in the Spring.
- BGSA Fundraising: Francois reported survey results: Winner: T-shirts; 2nd place: mugs. Camila volunteered to draw a T-shirt design if we come up with one. Daniel drew his design (double helix with ecosystems). We liked it; he and Camila are going to work on it together. Danielle: another idea for fundraising: Garage sale/auction, possibly tied into holiday party. From survey results: 2 people said they’d be willing to spend >$100 on fundraising.
- BGSA Treasury: Votes for spending money: 10% of votes were for a retreat, majority of votes were for research or travel grants. Melania reported that we have $2,262.85 – $300 for research grant. Candy store isn’t bringing any money in. We are concerned because we’re not making much profit – some money is missing consistently. We used to have the candy store and soda store in the secretary office, which likely maintained more loyalty to the honor system? We thought about putting the candy store in the grad lounge; however access to it will then be limited. Do we need to raise prices? We should be making more, now that Lori is buying from Sam’s. First possible solution: put it in the office of a staff member?
- Curriculum: Jamie is interested in helping graduate students improve their writing skills, either by teaching a short/intense workshop or a semester-long writing course. Another possibility is hiring someone from the writing center. Swati summarized her presentation from grad seminar: The woman offers instruction on writing – her background is in linguistics. $3,800/semester is the price of the workshop. YIKES! Francois mentioned that these workshops operate on a more basic level than we need. We might benefit more from a course/workshop taught by a faculty member. Caitlin mentioned that there is a professor in Chemistry who teaches an excellent Scientific Writing course. It may or may not still exist. Bottom line, though: more students would be interested in semester-long course.
- Last item: Mike Gil: appeal/suggestion. He is the departmental sustainability representative and is trying to organize a public panel discussion during which we bring our understanding/knowledge of biology to inform the public about sustainability and conservation. Camila suggested hosting it at the museum of natural history. It’s difficult to make a link between biology research and sustainability. Could we call it Conservation/Global Change? Hannah suggested that Mike define the discussion topics a priori and choose a timely event that is of great public interest (e.g. oil spill). This may increase public interest.
BGSA meeting, 31 August 2010
Kris Callis described the cellphone exchange program: graduate students who purchase cellphones while working abroad can donate/loan their phones to others who may need them when going to work in the same country.
Smriti requested volunteers for the seminar committee: Mariela volunteered. We still need another person.
Gaby, one of the two GSC reps, announced that Martijn will be out of town this semester and she needs two sit-in representatives: 1 for the September 16 meeting and one for the November 18 meeting. Clare and Jessica volunteered.
Smriti addressed some inconsistencies in our voting procedures. She proposed the idea of having anonymous online voting to allow more people to vote. We discussed the implications of both options.
At first, most of the attendees voiced that they wouldn’t go against online voting.
Sea mentioned that key aspects of a vote may be discussed during a meeting, thus only the people who were present should vote because they have the necessary information.
Kris proposed an online discussion forum for issues that require more careful thought.
Christine asked what we would be voting on.
Smriti answered that we will be voting on some issues in the strategic plan and on how to spend our money.
Francois mentioned that regardless of what we will be voting on, we need to standardize the procedure. The vote on the graduate invited speaker didn’t follow policy, partly because the rules weren’t definitive.
Gaby will research options on Survey Money (i.e. can people vote anonymously without submitting 2 votes?).
Hannah and Smriti spent some time this summer drafting new election procedures. Smriti will send it out when next year’s elections are near. We discussed whether the nominees should include a statement on their suitability for the proposed job.
We discussed our budget.
Melania stated that we have $1964 + some candy store money. Our budget has been fluctuating between 2000 and 2500. Smriti said we can expect to make a net of $500 next year.
A few ideas on how to spend our budget money:
- Travel award
- Double-sided printer for the McEdward lab
- Copy machine credit Snacks for graduate research
forum - Graduate student lounge supplies
- Gift certificates, raffle Retreat/get-together
- Don’t spend it.
Last year, we spent $950 on grant money.
Sea proposed that we put the money towards a general category of research grant.
Hannah mentioned that if we devote the money to an award, it goes to a single person, whereas if we devote it to something more general (i.e. printing), it will benefit all students.
Lingering questions: Do we want to benefit all or a few? Do we want to commit to spending money in perpetuity? (i.e. if it’s a printer, we need to buy ink and paper). We decided on a ‘no spend for now’ option.
Do we want to fundraise this year? Please send ideas to Francois.
END OF MEETING.