Minutes of Meeting of Graduate School Association (GSA)

Date: June 25^th, 2011

Location: The Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS)

Present: Mr. Hongyu Zhang—President

Ms. Kimberly Kesterke—Vice President

Mr. Zac Watne—Secretary

Mr. Aaron Brantly—Chief of Staff

Mr. Hasan Ahmed—Community Relations Chair

Mr. Bo Feng—Strategic Planner

Ms. Di Fu—Public Relations Representative

Mr. Ed Merecki—GSA Advisor

Mr. Juber Patel—International affairs Chair

The president opened the meeting at 9 am at GLOBIS. He greeted all the members of GSA Council. After a brief self-introduction of each member, the first official meeting started with breaking up committees.

All the members of GSA Council will serve at least one university committee for one year as the voting member on behalf of students’ opinions. Based on personal interest and responsibility, the committees have been broken up as follows.

1. 3. Discussion of Graduate School Orientation

The 2011-2012 Graduate School Orientation for 2011 graduate students is to be held on August 10^th, 2011 at UGA Classic Center.

GSA will set up a reception desk before the ceremony begins at Classic Center. Flyers and gift bags will be prepared in advance and distributed to students when reception begins. The GSA president will give a speech in the ceremony.

The ceremony is to be followed by a special part—Bus Tour, which is supposed to briefly introduce the campus and transfer students to Tate Student Center afterward, where students will be catered lunch. Since the Athens Transit will not host the Bus Tour this year, GSA was considering about to rent school buses. The Vice President Kimberly Kesterke will contact with the person in charge and discuss the details afterward. The preliminary idea about bus tour is to rent three or four buses with one volunteer bus guide on each bus. The route will be inquired later with Jason O’ Rouke, the last president of GSA.

Aaron Brantly proposed SunO Dessert as one of the lunch caterers. He invited the lady who was in charge of SunO to discuss further details in meeting, such as budget, equipment needed, and how to serve efficiently by reducing students’ waiting time. After, Aaron also mentioned the possibilities of attracting other caterers, so he will keep looking for other options until the final decision will be made.

Hasan Ahmed suggested that GSA could provide a checklist for students, so that they can arrange the schedule by priorities and make sure nothing will be missed. To make sure every student will be catered, Di Fu suggested GSA to distribute a particular ticket to each student, who can only receive catering with this ticket. The proposal was based on the fact that the bus tour will not transfer all the students to Tate Student Center at one time. Last year, only the first 300 students who arrived at Tate Student Center early get catering, the rest students who arrived late did not receive catering at all. This ticket idea will be supposed to avoid this situation.

1. 4. Annual Agenda

GSA Council has made an agenda for social activities for graduate students. Monthly Happy Hour will be held in local bars in downtown, the 2^nd Friday, 6-9 pm. The upcoming one will be on August 12^th at Max before fall semester begins. Additionally, Coffee Hour with snacks provided will be held twice, one for fall and one for spring before the finals, so that students can relieve pressure and have fun before they start fighting with finals. Coffee Hour will be held in main library, science library or Miller Learning Center, further information and location will be posted later.

Also, GSA was considering to introduce some comic shows and to display them at theatre for students, which will need further discussion in detail before the final schedule is fixed.

The president also proposed the idea of symposium for graduate students, by attending which students are to be encouraged to share their research paper and exchange academic achievement. Guest professor will be invited to deliver a keynote speech.

All the members have made an agreement on the schedule of GSA monthly meeting, which will be held on the 2^nd Wednesday, 8:30 pm in the fall semester. The location will be posted later before the meeting and everybody will be highly welcomed to attend the monthly meeting.

1. 5. Other Issues

The deduction of student fee was also discussed in the meeting. However, the president addressed the current situation that other public universities near Atlanta such as Georgia State University (GSU) and Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) collected the same amount of student fee, so there was no way to make a change immediately. To work on this issue, GSA Council will meet Vice President of Finance and Administration, Tim Burgess, to seek how the decision making is processed and to which office/board we should press on. Aaron is contacting GIT’s and GSU’s presidents to see if they are interested in making a working group to work on this issue.