GSA General Assembly Meeting Minutes
Meeting Date:  February 20, 2008
Meeting Time:  7:00 - 8:00 p.m., HGS 119 A&B

I.  Call to Order

II.  Departmental Meetings

Linguistics Department (Erich Round)

• Met with Linguistics DGS at the last departmental meeting
• Discussed opportunities for teaching
• In this department, you are allowed to give one supervised lecture during a TF assignment.
• Wanted more teaching experience - two suggestions:
• Students in later years should be active in approaching professors and offer to give guest lectures.
• Beyond required courses and electives, perhaps independent study programs could be organized where students work with a professor to develop a syllabus (selected reading, etc…) for a course to be taught during the summer (for undergraduates).  Likely to be a “general interest” course.
• Currently college seminars are a good way to get teaching experience, but positions are limited and people other than graduate students can apply to teach them (like faculty).
• When are the syllabi due for college seminars?  Spring 2009 seminar syllabus due in October, 2008?
• These seminars usually take place once a week for approximately two hours.
• A link to information re: college seminars should be posted on our website.

 
Cell Biology Department (Hannah Chapin)

• Many faculty members have recently left this department.

 
Announcement Regarding Departmental Meetings in General (Sara Nichols)

• Have your departmental meetings!
• Please do not use cash or invoicing to pay for them, but rather, use the GSA credit cards.
• The GSA credit cards can be used to make alcohol, grocery, and restaurant purchase, but will not go through at stores specializing in items other than food/beverage.
• Sara sent her number out to us in case we have any questions and also provided several phone numbers for take-out in the same e-mail.

 

III.             Update on Health Care (Liz Williams)

• Hannah Chapin and Liz Williams attended a meeting regarding birth control pricing proposed and planned by the Yale Health Plan.
• A comparison of both control costs in the Ivy League was presented.
• Health Plan offered to ask the administration about subsidy, but there is a major conflict of interest, as prices of other health-related items have increased as well (inhaler propellant).  Yale cannot subsidize all of these items, so can it subsidize any of them?
• Would Yale offer a lower premium plan that costs less with fewer benefits?
• Another meeting will be held April.
• If this is going to be a big-ticket item for GSA, we should be sure to check how changes will affect constituents with different situations (family, health problems, etc…) - check with the actuary
• Everything needs to be OK’ed by YUHS, the Dean, and then the Provost.
• Information for the Provost meeting - checking into it.

 

IV.              Funding Survey - a plea for help (Bobbi Sutherland)

• In some fields, it is essential to do fieldwork as part of a dissertation; however, Yale does not pay for this.
• In the event of lack of outside funding (fellowships, etc…), a student can take advantage of the University Dissertation Fellowship for a year of funding during this time, but some students need to go more than once.
• We would like to design a survey to find out what students have been doing when they do not receive outside funding for this purpose.
• Does there need to be a “last resort” fund?
• Do people change their subjects/fields of interest on account of this?
• The financial landscape in the Humanities and Social Sciences has just shifted due to the new 5 years of summer funding.
• Two years are spent on coursework, then two years on teaching (encouraged NOT to teach prior to 3^rd year).
• If a student does not get outside funding, then the UDF will need to be used for fieldwork, and the student will have to teach during later years of their degree (precisely what the UDF was set-up to avoid).
• Resources also need to be paid for while studying abroad.
• This problem may be increasing time-to-degree for these students.
• Can a program be set up where students can teach during their first two years or during the summer?
• Now that there are 12-months of funding, more Humanities and Social Science graduate students are likely to be here over the summer (Because they do not need to seek jobs elsewhere).  Could there be more classes during the summer now that more people will be here?
• In the sciences, summertime clinics, even with grad students teaching other grad students would possibly be well-attended (in order to learn different skill-sets).
• Post-docs in the sciences would also be interested.
• Where should we take these ideas?  To departments?
• Perhaps the plan needs to be more official than this.
• Yale has programs that require fieldwork - these students should get funding for this.
• Bobbi would like to survey departments where this is an issue (Archaeology, History, Linguistics).
• Also survey people at multiple stages, recent graduates, and people who have left programs prior to receiving their degrees in order to see if time-to-degree correlates to outside funding.
• Rashad, Erich, and Bobbi will work on this.

 

V.                 Elections Update (Andy Bellemer)

• At-large elections are currently taking place
• Elected at-large reps will serve until the end of the year
• These at-large reps should be encouraged to run for departmental seats for next year.
• How should election ballots be done - with all the names of people in the departments, or just the nominated people’s names?  We do want the ballots to reflect who, in each department, is interested.
• Could this year’s elected at-large reps be automatically nominated for departmental seats in the upcoming general election?
• Let Andy know if you have strong feelings about any of these issues.
• Hope to have general elections done by April 16^th.  The new reps should then be able to attend two meetings.  We would like to have the new reps and old reps at a couple of meetings together.

Motion to adjourn - 2^nd