EAPS Graduate Student Advisory Council
meetings
Meeting Minutes: 3 Feb, 2003
Hello EAPSters,
We had an EGSAC meeting this afternoon, and as your dutiful EGSAC
secretary, I'd like to keep you posted on what went on:
1. Recent events - the trip to see the flamenco dancing happened a couple
of weeks ago. About 20 or 25 people participated, and a great time was
had
by all.
2. Upcoming events -
Apparently, the long-awaited feature film THE CORE will be coming out
on
March 28th. (Plot synopsis: The core stops spinning and the Earth's
magnetic field dies out. In order to save humanity, it is necessary to
send
a vehicle down to the core in order to set off a nuclear explosion and
re-start the core's spinning. Or something along those lines.) EGSAC will
DEFINITELY be sponsoring a trip to see this movie, so stay tuned for more
info. As a run-up to this long-awaited event, plans are in the works to
have a "Bad Earth Science Movie" film series. Hopefully, we'll be able
to
run movies during Peer Hour on the big screen in room 915. Possible
candidates: Volcano (starring Anne Heche as a seismologist, as I recall),
Dante's Peak, and Tremors (which also features a seismologist as a main
character). Blair Schoene, our very own Peer Czar, is going to look into
making this happen.
Basketball game: Youshun Sun over at ERL is looking into getting tickets
for a Celtics vs. Houston game (for you basketball afficionados, this
is
your chance to see Yao Ming in person) sometime in the next couple of
weeks. It looks like tickets will be around $10 ($20 each, with a $10
EGSAC subsidy). More info to come.
The EGSAC ski trip: This is happening this President's Day weekend. The
trip will leave on Friday and return on Monday (it's an Institute
holiday), so you get three nights in the mountains with food provided
for
the great price of $30. You must register for this by THIS FRIDAY - email
Kerim (kerim@mit.edu).
Pizza peer hour: The first peer hour of the semester is this coming
Friday. It's always a fun and well-attended event, and we'll be having
pizza this week, courtesy of the GSC. So come, see your friends, relax
and
de-stress from the first week of classes...
EGSAC-sponsored Weekly Wednesday: EGSAC will be sponsoring the graduate
student Weekly Wednesday at the Muddy Charles Pub on February 26. For
those of you who don't know, this is a chance to get free food (wings,
I
think) and cheap beer ($5 pitchers, according to reports) and to meet
your
fellow graduate students from all over MIT. So everyone come to the Muddy
on the 26th from 8PM onward - let's have a good strong showing from EAPS!
The Weekly Wednesday webpage can be found at web.mit.edu/weekly.
EAPS Spring Picnic and WHOI Summer Picnic/Softball: Coming soon! Kate
Ruhl
and Jeff Standish did a great job of organizing these last year. Want
to
help organize this year? Contact Lindsay (schoenbl@mit.edu).
3. Ergonomics survey - As a response to concerns about ergonomic safety
in
graduate student workspaces, Vicki McKenna has sent out a mini-survey
to
identify students who are most in need of immediate ergonomic assistance.
Please get those surveys back to Vicki (vsm@mit.edu).
4. Graduate Committee - the faculty Graduate Committee is looking for
a
non-voting graduate student to be involved. I don't think that this is
a
huge time committment. We plan to elect somebody to fill this position
when we have the EGSAC elections this spring, but in the meantime, if
somebody could volunteer to fill this position, that would be great. At
the meeting, we agreed that ideally this should be somebody who is
post-generals but not imminently graduating. If you are interested in
filling this position temporarily, please let me (mlong@mit.edu) or
Lindsay (schoenbl@mit.edu) know.
5. Student concerns document - the sub-committees covering various
disciplines should plan to hold a meeting (if they haven't already) and
write up recommendations ASAP. Lindsay would like to get this wrapped
up
by the end of the month, before the semester gets too crazy.
6. Meeting with Ron Prinn - another graduate student meeting with Ron
is
being planned for later this month. The last meeting was both
well-attended and well-received. We are going to ask Ron to talk to us
about the hiring and tenure process in EAPS specifically and in academia
in general. Meeting details will follow.
7. Other educational opportunities - Lindsay attended several seminars
over IAP in the biology department on careers (for example, panel
discussions featuring people from industry, nonprofits, large research
universities, small liberal arts colleges, etc.) that she said were great.
We will look into having similar talks geared for EAPS students, either
for next IAP or sooner. We'll run this by the Ed. Office and the Graduate
Committee for their input.
I think that's about it. Sorry for the length and thanks for reading down
to the end. Our next meeting should take place on Monday, March 3 at noon
on the 10th floor and will, as always, feature free Bertucci's pizza.
Hope
to see you all there.
Cheers,
Maureen
---------------------------------------------
Maureen D. Long
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, & Planetary Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Office: 54-517A
Office Phone: 617-253-0741
Email: mlong@mit.edu
updated: fall 2004