Minutes for Mar 14 meeting

Attendance

In attendence: Justin Carlson, Aaron Courville, Raghu Donamukkala, Nikhil George, Aaron Greenfield, Nidhi Kalra, Jeremy Kubica, Bart Nabbe, Caroline Pantofaru, Tom Stepleton Ranjith Unnikrishnan, Chris Urmson, Rob Zlot

Action Items

• Justin will talk to Matt Mason and other people about giving the tour whips better sticks to motiviate people to give tours.
• Caroline will make sure the Open House events get organized.
• Nikhil and/or Ravi will organize the Cool Person award
• Nikhil will look into the feasibility of getting on the faculty/staff health plan, and also gather information about the needs and availabity of help in finding jobs for Masters students.
• Raghu and Ranjith will look for Tour Whips from their respective years.

Notes

• Tour Queue Reform
  As tour whips from last year, Rob and Aaron spoke about the problems in the past associated with being a tour whip. The primary problem seems to be that there are a few people at the top of the queue who will not participate. This makes it harder to convince more civic-minded individuals further down the queue to take a tour, because they aren't at the top.

  One proposal was to have a single class take care of tours, probably the 2nd year class. Nidhi reported that, when feedback was solicited about such a plan the 1st years were pretty open to the idea, generally being optimistic about finishing their tour duty in a year. The later years were pretty opposed, feeling that the 2nd year is already busy and the addition of full tour responsibility would be onerous. It was generally noted that such a system would need to have some mechanism to allow non-2nd-years to volunteer to give tours.

  Another proposal was to try to find out about giving tour whips effective tools to pop the queue. At the moment, the tour whips have no real recourse if someone consistently refuses to do their part. It was also suggested that it would be helpful to remove those "problem people" from the tour queue normal listings, effectively giving up on them as too much work. This suggestion was met with some resistance in that it would be rewarding anti-social behavior, but the consensus was that this would help matters.

  Yet another proposal involved abolishing the tour queue and finding people that like to give tours, forming an official set of tour guides. This proposal was generally agreed to be infeasible, as there was great skepticism that enough tour guides could successfully be recruited without significant compensation of some sort.

  In the end, there seemed to be a reasonable split between people who would rather go with the class tour idea and people who would rather tweak the existing system. Justin agreed to investigate the feasibility of giving the tour whips some official recourse for those people who don't do their part. Raghu and Ranjith agreed to look for Tour Whips from their respective years.

• Budget
  Budget was tabled.
• Open House
  Roboorg needs to take care of the Saturday night party and the Monday pizza lunch. Dan Wilson has already volunteered his house for the Saturday night party. Caroline volunteered to make sure the events happen, either by organizing them herself or finding a volunteer to do it.
• Cool Person Award
  Nikhil volunteered to do the balloting for the Cool Person award.
• Thank yous/congratulations
  Raghu and Ranjith were thanked for their excellent coordination of recent (and near future) Post seminar receptions. Nidhi has done an excellent job with several events recently, including a Habitat for Humanity workday, and organizing funky bowling for that evening.
• GSA Report
  Tom noted that he had not been to the previous GSA meeting, but that the big issue on the table at the moment is the large increase in health insurace costs next year.

  Bart mentioned that last year there was some mention of finding out whether it would be feasible and cost effective to be covered under the faculty and staff health insurance plan instead.

  There was some discussion about how people were going to cover the increase in costs. No clear guidelines exist as to whether or not it is appropriate for RoboOrg to lobby the RI with respect to graduate student compensation. Just agreed to talk to Chuck Thorpe about it to see if the health insurance hike was something the RI was planning to address in any way.

  Nikhil agreed to investigate the possiblity of coverage through the faculty and staff health insurance plan.

• Post-degree help
  Nikhil brought up the fact that is feeling among the graduate students that the RI is not doing enough to help people find jobs after finishing the program. It was noted that PhD students generally have very different job searches than Masters students, and the concerns were primarily from the Masters students.

  There was some discussion about the relatively small size and high specialization of the program limiting the opportunities to bring in employers in "career fair" types of events.

  No full resolution was reached. Nikhil agreed to investigate what other similar programs do, what the current Masters students would find helpful, and what recent Masters graduates would have found helpful. The topic will then be re-addressed at the next meeting.

• Next year IC
  Tabled.
• Website updating
  Tabled.
• Cleaning the lounge
  Tabled.
• Open forum
  Tom said his new hockey-for-everyone nights were going well, with good participation from the community.

  Nidhi mentioned that her general plan for the year involved smaller events on a more frequent basis. She mentioned that, if there was only 1 happy hour this year, she could do a lot more events like the funky bowling event tonight.

  Both items were generally lauded.

• Meeting adjourned at 1:10 pm