Officers:CSEG Board Meeting 2009-11-17

Date: November 17, 2009

Present:

Nate Derbinsky (President, Curriculum Committee Rep)
Benjamin Wester (Vice-President)
Timur Alperovich (Social Chair)
Denny Vandenburg (DCO Student Rep)
Alex Kuhn (Intramural Chair)
Quang Duong (Grad/Fac Committee Rep)
Kaustubh Nyalkalkar (Secretary)

Absent:

Quentin Stout (Faculty Advisor)
Dave Meisner (GSAC/UMEC/GSF Rep)

Minutes:

- A motion was called to modify the draft constitution.  The motion
would change the requirement of the passage of an amendment [to be 2/3 of all
CSEG members present, and 2/3 of the CSEG board, instead of the current 
requirement of 2/3 of board only].  The motion was defeated by a vote of 5 
'against' (Nate,Timur, Kaustubh, Quang, Alex) to 2 'for' (Denny, Benji).

- Motion to adopt the draft CSEG constitution was passed, with 6 members voting
'for', and 1 member 'abstaining' (Denny abstained because he was concerned
about students who weren't board members, but were CSEG members, not having a 
vote in CSEG's meetings in case they showed up).  The new constitution was
basically updated to keep up with our current practices. The updation was
carried out because a constitution is a requirement for recognition as an
official student organization, leading to an SOAS account, so we can get access
to next year's funding from Yahoo! Hopefully, we can get this access by next
year.
        The new CSEG constitution is now on the web-site at
http://cseg.eecs.umich.edu/misc/constitution.pdf (the link is at the
bottom of the page
http://wiki.eecs.umich.edu/cseg/index.php/Current_Officers)

- Lunch series with professors: Quang has been carrying out the lunch
series facilitating interaction between new students and professors. 5
lunches were carried out during this semester. While the response for
the first 3 was good, there were problems in the last 1 (or 2) lunches,
with students signing up but not showing up, leading to professors
feeling that it was a waste of their time. Discussions on how to avoid
this problem, as well as coming up with a better plan in order to be
able to continue this program next semester too, were postponed to a
later meeting after some deliberation.

- 'Offset from Professor's salaries/research funds': Nate gave an update
on his meetings as Curriculum Committee Representative. The funding that
the department gets from the College of Engineering (CoE) isn't enough
to fund all the GSIs that the department needs. So, there is a separate
'pot' to which the professors contribute different percentages (from
their research funds), depending on whether they're new, untenured or
tenured. This 'offset' mechanism isn't unique to our department, and is
carried out at other universities too. While all of this isn't
immediately relevant to grad-students, the issue that may affect
grad-students is a proposal to replace GSIs with undergrad IAs.

- Propane grills will be purchased this semester, while the storage
place will be ready probably next year. Also, the ping-pong table (from
Yahoo!) should be in the grad-lounge before long.