GSA Initiatives

GSA advocates to improve academic, social, and living experiences at Yale, for graduate students. Details on our current projects are linked along the right side of every page on this site.

Get Active!

Meet with GSA

We encourage you to attend GSA meetings, and to join any project we're working on. In most cases, the administration will actively welcome any grad student to talk with them, and GSA happens to do the legwork of setting up meetings.

Please check out our calendar on the front page, to learn about our next assembly meeting, or contact the GSA chair.

Why don't we post a forum or petitions on this site?

We do occasionally post surveys, but we rarely post petitions. This has to do with our evolving working philosophy. We have recently found ourselves most effective when working closely with the relevant administrative offices (sometimes along a chain to the top) to develop a viable solution. We roughly gauge effectiveness in terms of how closely we can make Yale's policies and services match the needs we identify in the grad community.

What happens to a petition after it's been signed? It suggests what some group of students want, but it doesn't necessarily suggest a viable solution. Often the resources available don't quite match all that's asked for. Close communication between a Yale administrative body and grad students allows for clarification of needs and creative problem solving to meet higher priority needs with available resources.

Why do we work closely with Yale administrative bodies? We've found this to be effective. For instance, GSA helped Yale's Parking and Transit office create the Orange Route free shuttle, between the East Rock neighborhood and the Medical School campus. Today, the Orange Route transports some 400 students and scholars daily. To create this line, we invited Transit's directors Ed Bebyn and Don Relihan to a GSA meeting, where they fielded questions and suggestions. We then invited all interested grad students (there were only a handful) to brainstorm routes with Ed and Don. And newly armed with a clear picture of what was needed, and a clear picture of what was possible, the GSA Transit committee gave birth to the Orange Route.

GSA constantly evolves our style of advocacy and our working philosophy, depending on who's involved and doing the work! Our style simply reflects the activities of the graduate advocates who choose to work with GSA. If you have a concern at Yale that affects graduate students, we welcome you to show us how it's done, and to utilize GSA's resources to advocate for improvement.