ASCIT Board of Directors Meeting: VPSA Meeting
Minutes for December 8, 2017. Taken by Dana He.
Officers Present: Sakthi Vetrivel, Kavya Sreedhar, Rachael Morton, Sara Adams, Alice Zhai, Dana He
Guests: Kevin Gilmartin, Joe Shepherd, Tom Mannion
Call to Order: 12:06 pm
Dean’s Notes:
• President Rosenbaum holds office hours but are unused by undergraduates. Kevin would like to encourage undergraduates to utilize them.
• There is interest in the non-student community in the Spectre library. Tom would like to have a club to manage it.
President’s Report (Sakthi):
• Nothing to report.
Officer’s Reports:
V.P. of Academic Affairs (Kavya):
• Student-Faculty Lunches Recap and Expansion: Would like more funding to increase people and frequency since there is no MOSH. Would also like option dinners.
• Revising option advising: ideas include having multiple roles (course advisors and interest advisors), changing timeline and have meet and greets to get to know advisors, introducing evaluation and awards, and a physics pilot program. Kevin would like to include the Registrar’s Office in option advising, and consider opening interest advising to more than one professor. Also realize that different options operate differently.
• Revising TQFRs: Working with the Deans, CTLO, EOs, and CUE and might survey students. Key points include students interpreting questions differently, having a neutral/acceptable option in a 5-category scale, targeted open-ended questions, and timeline of incentives. Suggestion from Joe to have statements and have student rate from strongly disagree to strongly agree for less question wording bias and also focus on evaluation for TAs. Also try to minimize length of TQFRs and consider having information on students dropping.
• Working on creating a Core/Pseudo-Core Ad-Hoc Committee. Joe would like communication with previous core committee that did not move forward with a similar proposal.
V.P. of Non-Academic Affairs (Rachael):
• New Bechtel site at: http://ihc.caltech.edu/bechtel.html. It contains an overview of the COUCH, google drive folder containing presentations and minutes from town halls, Tech articles (summary of core values and summaries of the town halls), survey results (housing survey and Bechtel occupancy survey).
• Timeline: Have Polaris Latest Draft and Unified report in by next Friday, get feedback and add to before January 1st, COUCH members on campus will go meet with faculty group members over break for background discussion.
Director of Operations (Sara):
• CCF applied for late funding because their email didn’t go through.
Treasurer (Sarah):
• Not in attendance.
Social Director (Alice):
• Marsh Fund not finalized.
• Permission to formalize contract for ASCIT formal venue. Working on layout for formal.
• Ice skating had about 75 students show up.
Secretary (Dana):
• Nothing to report.
If anyone has any questions or concerns about a section of the minutes please email the appropriate officer. We are happy to answer any questions.
Meeting Adjourned: 12:54 pm