JHU Department of Biology Graduate Student Representative Council

December 15, 2005 Meeting

Attendance: Megan Mayerle, Alex Ebie, Aaron Stephan, Jill Weyers

Absent: Sarah Barker (graduating) and Anna Krueger (honeymoon!)

  • Elective Classes

Megan has a meeting with Allen Shearn on Tuesday, 12/20/05 to show him our list of potential elective courses. More news on that next time. Also, Karen Beemon seems quite interested in the list as well. Megan will be forwarding it to her and follow up on that.

  • Faculty Advisor – Karen Beemon

Alex spoke Karen. She’s interested! Alex will send her old minutes relevant to current projects and suggest meeting with her after the new year about what we’re currently working on.

  • Career Development

Career Webpage - Fred is putting the online form for the alumni information together. Then he will be in charge of contacting Alumni and convincing them to give us information. Andrew is helping to set up the form online so that the alumni can fill it out to provide the information. He thinks the forms will crash the server, so there’s a delay on getting this done. The website has its own email address which people (like the Alumni) can send stuff to. Also, there will be a form for faculty to fill out about Alumni that they know. Megan will ask John about some of the programming details on this.

Booklets - The booklets from the career center are no problem to get to pass out because they print them. We just need to know how many we need. After the new year, we will put them in 3rdyear and up mail boxes. After that we’ll release them to new 3rd years and leave some out for those who need replacement copies.

Speaker Series - Tracy Carter from the CareerCenter said she’d be glad to come and speak. There’s just a form to fill out. We could do this in conjunction with launching the website to the students, give an invitation with the booklet.

  • Reps Email Address Jill asked Andrew if we could have our own email address. He submitted it, it’ll take 2 months
  • Progress Reports

Recording - Jill talked to Carnegie, system is $5000 there. Allen was enthusiastic and not phased by this. There’s this official guy on campus, Graham Boutom (), that Jill needs to speak to see if it’s feasible to set up the system and will actually set it up. Could it be moved for Colloquiums and special talks to the auditorium? – unknown. It should record directly to the server. Jill will find out how access to these recorded talks will work. Jill needs to contact Carnegie about how microphones work as well to ensure sound quality on the recording.

Attendance – Alex can/will talk to Karen about how to increase faculty attendance. Alex talked to Cindy about the how much the department spends on coffee and cookies for Thursday talks – she said it’s $200 for a couple of plates of cookies and the coffee from Common Grounds. Perhaps it is better to have someone in charge of getting the cookies and coffee. The main problem is coffee because they bring the carafes as well. Megan has seen a carafe down in the graduate lounge. Aaron will look to see if it’s a carafe or a percolators (meaning it could brew coffee rather than just hold it). Alex will price cookies and coffee from Sam’s Club to determine potential cost. Can we get some sort of budget for this? Maybe someone could be in charge of both the Tuesday and Thursday talks, use that $200 for both, buy peculators. In computer science, their happy hour responsibility rotates through the labs.

Perhaps it can be like happy hour – student run. Further discussion is necessary to determine how responsibility will be handled.

  • New Topic - Carnegie Liaison – Marnie Halpern brought up that we need a Carnegie liaison to avoid schedule conflicts. Jill says that seminars are online anyway, and we do sort of have one, Anna. Perhaps a faculty liaison would be better. This liaison would simply contact us about special happens there. Do we really need this? We’ll wait to talk to Anna since she is over there.
  • Graduation Activities

Graduation Information - Information for graduating is available from university, not the department. The issue with this would be dissemination of this knowledge to graduating students.

Departmental Graduation Activities–Alex talked to Joan, she is in charge of graduation lunch and said it would fine for us to participate/help out with that. The plan is to find out if anyone else does something and come up with a plan to present. Alex will talk to Sarah since she is graduating.

  • Aaron talked to his class. Cara Altimus suggested putting art up in Mudd, it’s so dreary. What about the MICA art project? Is this still going on? Alex can ask Sohum whether it is still going on.

Next Meeting:January 12th, 9am (back to old time) at One World Cafe