The Graduate and Professional Student Council held an informal meeting Monday night on the Fuqua Terrace to discuss this fall’s schedule and upcoming events.
After executive board members introduced themselves, representatives broke into committees to discuss future goals and initiatives.
GPSC President William LeFew, a fourth-year applied mathematics doctoral student, stated three specific areas of focus for this year—expanding support offered by career services, researching new health insurance options and increasing communication between students and administration.
LeFew said the first goal was particularly important for graduate and professional students as they enter jobs that are uncommon following their fields of study. Researching available health insurance options is necessary, LeFew said, because that will lower the financial burden for students. Insurance rates on average have risen 14 percent annually due to the rising cost of health care, and GPSC plans to continue looking for ways to reduce this cost for students.
The third area of focus for GPSC will be networking and creating liaisons between GPSC members and administrators. “We want to be able to live, play and work well with the administration and work well with the community,” LeFew said.
A more broad goal for the General Assembly is to attract non-representative graduate and professional school students to meetings so alternative viewpoints are heard.
“One of our main goals is to be able to involve more constituents in GPSC,” said GPSC Vice President Lettye Smith, a fourth-year student in the Divinity School. “We’ll do this by not allowing meetings just to be a place for representatives to gather but as a proactive environment where graduate and professional students can be empowered.”
GPSC representatives are returning from a retreat held last weekend in Beaufort, N.C. The retreat, organized mainly by Nathan Kundtz, a second-year graduate student in physics, was the first annual weekend event that will play a major factor in amplifying representative interest and involvement.
“I think everyone had a wonderful time,” Kundtz said. “We were able to disseminate a lot of information before getting back to school, which will help GPSC have a great start to the year.”
The trip was funded with the help of the Office of Student Affairs and Graduate Student Affairs.
In other business:
GPSC will vote on its budget and the allocation of funds to student groups for the upcoming year Sept. 12. Scott Smith, GPSC treasurer and second-year M.B.A. student, said that although GPSC intended for $29,000 to be given to student groups during the 2004-2005 school year, $2,000 of this was not spent and will be invested instead in social events for the upcoming year.
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