Council elects YT committee representatives

In addition to the usual announcements, committee reports and regular business, attendees of the Graduate and Professional Student Council meeting received a visit from a special guest Tuesday night.

The University's first student ombudsman, John Blackshear, attended the GPSC meeting to familiarize students with the services he provides.

Meetings with him are "totally confidential, totally independent and a resource for alternative dispute resolution," Blackshear said. He added that 89 percent of the services he has provided thus far as ombudsman have been to graduate students, as opposed to 11 percent for undergraduates.

An ombudsman acts as an independent party to help students and groups work through differences. Blackshear, clinical director of the Academic Resource Center, was appointed to the position of ombudsman September 2007.

GPSC also used a new electronic voting system to elect members to the Graduate and Professional Young Trustee Screening Committee, a group that narrows down the pool of graduate young trustee nominees to three finalists, who are subsequently referred to the GPSC general assembly for the final vote.

The body also elected Executive Secretary Kat Mitchel, a graduate student in molecular genetics and microbiology, as chair of the committee.

In addition to discussing their visions for the University and the issues they want the young trustee to embody, some general candidates for the screening committee supplied unconventional reasons that they should be elected.

"I have a suit, and being a graduate student in math doesn't give me much of an opportunity to wear it," said Shishi Luo, a graduate student in mathematics.