General Meeting Recap

At the general meeting on Thursday, we discussed a few upcoming GSA events such as the St. Patrick's Day Social, the Q&A for undergrads and the Science Olympiad. We also talked in depth about this spring's commencement ceremony.

Science Olympiad is this Thursday!! If you haven't volunteered yet, but would still like to, there's still time to get you involved. Just send an e-mail to gsa@kutztown.edu.

The St. Patrick's Day Social will be held on Tuesday, March 16th at the Basin Street Grill. We set a start time of 8 p.m., but a few of us will be there before that. Anyone who wears green, upon signing the sign-in sheet, will be automatically entered into a drawing for a free appetizer.

We also finalized our panel for the Q&A with GSA which takes place on Tuesday, March 30th from 11 a.m. to Noon. Meghan Godorov, Patrick Haggerty, Sarah Walker, Christie Himmelreich, Elaine Mara and Wim Mulder will make up the panel. We also will have information booths available to students which will each cover specific topics such as admissions, financial aid/graduate assistantships, housing and more. Students have been selected to work these tables, but we are still looking for additional support. Please let me know if you are interested.

Concerning this spring's commencement ceremony, Kutztown has decided to revert back to the old system of a joint (both grads and undergrads) commencement in an effort to save money on facilities and staff. Myself and many others are not happy with this decision and feel that grad students deserve a separate ceremony in order to properly honor the outstanding achievement of obtaining a Masters degree. It is also in the best interest of the growth and development of the graduate program itself to have its own commencement ceremony.

We are planning on petitioning the decision to combine the ceremonies and will offer a compromise for this spring as an alternative. The compromise that was suggested at the general meeting was to have a combined commencement, but allow the graduate students to be called on stage first and to exit the ceremony, sparing them the long, non-applicable undergraduate ceremony to follow. Graduate students can then proceed to another location on campus for a reception. We feel that this compromise is one that can be easily met by both parties involved. Long-term, the petition would state our desire to have a completely separate ceremony from the undergraduates, beginning at the December 2010 commencement.

We will finalize the petition by our next GSA assembly meeting on March 22nd. If you would like to be involved in the development of the petition, please let me know. A great way to help is to spread the word to as many people as possible.

Also, thanks to Bob Flatley for a great presentation on the library and the free resources it offers for its graduate students. Some highlights from his workshop include Ebrary and RefWorks. He also brought to our attention an information commons that is specifically for graduate students so I just wanted to make that available to everybody.