ESA Committee Descriptions

ESA Co-chairs
Facilitate discussion among members; act as liaisons between the student body and the Executive Officer; organize ESA meetings; serve on the Executive Committee ex officio.
Co-chairs facilitate communication among students, committee members and committees; plan and promote ESA meetings and Revels; record and post meeting minutes; manage ESA funds; communicate student concerns to the EO; and serve on the English Program Executive Committee.

Admissions and Financial Aid (has up to 8 student seats)
Read applications and work with faculty to make recommendations for offers of admission.
Serve with faculty committee members to read applications and make recommendations for offers of admission. The committee as a whole forwards recommendations to Graduate School committees for GC-wide fellowships. This committee requires significant time commitments in January, mostly for reading applications, with 1-2 meetings on campus.

Alumni and Fundraising (has up to 4 seats)
Maintain alumni contact info; organize career panels, readings, and other social and scholarly events; create a yearly alumni newsletter with department updates and alumni publications; work with the Website Committee on relevant parts of the department’s and ESA webpages.

Conference
Organize and run ESA conference; distribute a CFP; screen submissions; advertise conference; direct participants and volunteers on the day of the event.
Conference Committee members are responsible for organizing and running the annual ESA conference: distributing a call for papers, screening submissions, arranging a schedule, managing the budget, advertising the conference, and directing participants and volunteers on the day of the event. Candidates for the ESA Conference Committee must submit a description of their proposed conference topic (up to and including a draft CFP) by the time elections begin to be included on the ballot.

Course Assessment (has up to 6 seats)
Oversee the dissemination, collection, and transcription of course evaluations.
This committee oversees the creation, revision, dissemination, collection, tallying, and public posting of course evaluations (on the ESA website) each semester.

Curriculum (has up to 2 student seats)
Regularly review the program’s requirements and make recommendations, including redesigns of required examinations.
Serve with faculty committee members to review the program requirements and make recommendations and reports to the ESA and the program Executive Committee.

Diversity (has up to 6 student seats)
Attend to matters of diversity within the Program.

Elections (has up to 2 seats)
Conduct the election of student committee members and ESA Co-chairs; responsible for including any valid proposed amendments to the ESA by-laws on the ballot.

Executive (has up to 4 students seats, 2 of which are filled by ESA co-chairs ex officio)
This committee is the chief governing body of the English Program. It meets about once a month, including Open Meetings at the end of each semester.

Faculty Membership (has up to 2 student seats)
Consider changes in the doctoral faculty membership; publicize searches for new members; make recommendations to the Executive Committee.

Friday Forum Committee (has up to 2 student seats)
Evaluate the Friday Forum Proposals each semester.
Serve with faculty members on committee to ensure distribution of the Friday Forum proposal form to students; convey information to students if EO or committee has a theme for Friday Forums for the fall and spring semesters; evaluate proposals each semester; report to the ESA on Friday Forum decisions.

Library (has up to 2 seats)
Maintain the ESA library in the English lounge.
Online calls for donations, respond to inquiries from students about books, promote the library.​ Maintain the physical space of the library (about once a month): check in/out notebook, donation boxes, stamping and organizing donated books, and making sure borrowed books are returned.  

Placement (has up to 4 student seats)
Work with the Placement Officer and other faculty members to coordinate job placement efforts; help with collection of job market data; organize job-market-based events; put together a collection of relevant source material for students preparing to go on the market.

Recruitment (has up to 5 student seats)
Recruit potential new students before and during the Open House for admitted students.
Meet monthly (sometimes bi-weekly) to prepare for one Open House event in the Fall semester and one Open House event in the Spring semester. Recruit potential new students, with an emphasis on diversity, before and during these events for prospective and wait-listed or admitted students. Tasks for these events include: emailing calls for fellow student panelists, speakers, and hosts; organizing the format and structure of each event; collecting data from fellow students to connect them with prospective students with questions; and attending and helping coordinate the events themselves. Run the Mentor/Mentee program, which includes pairing student mentors with incoming student mentee and organizing a beginning of the year mentor/mentee mixer. 

Website and Editorial (has up to 6 seats)
Maintain the ESA site; update, expand, and organize the website as needed.
Maintain the ESA site on the Commons while ensuring that the site is accessible; update the Featured Posts monthly; promote the website to the students; solicit ideas and implement changes for the website; maintain ESA presence or communications on other ESA social media. Upcoming: Email new students to create Commons profiles and switch graduating student profiles from the student to alumni category; solicit professional and personal blogs for RSS feed; collect alumni and student publication citations; addition of information related to internal and external fellowship and grant deadlines; the additional of orals lists and prospectuses; a collection of accessible images (e.g., with image descriptions) or accessible videos (e.g., with captions) to add to site accessibility (featured slideshow posts, for example); and coordinate with editorial committee to keep student guides updated. Responsible for the design, maintenance, and promotion of the ESA website, ESA social media, and all other ESA digital concerns. The Committee is tasked with Organizing student guides on the ESA Commons, and proposing and implementing new guides as the need arises. The committee is tasked with gathering, collating and posting exemplary Student materials like dissertation prospectuses, orals lists, and portfolio examinations. The committee is also responsible for ensuring that the list of students on the ESA Commons is up-to-date and new profiles are being made and maintained by current students

Representative Outreach Committee (Has up to 6 seats)

Representatives are asked to coordinate with the Associate Program Officer about which students constitute their constituency at the start of their tenure (the start of the Fall semester). The responsibilities of these representatives will be to regularly discussing program issues and needs with their fellow students, monitoring the “pulse” of how students in their segment feel about various topics and what changes they would like to see. The representatives are required to attend ESA business meetings to speak on behalf of their constituents on any matters where it is appropriate to do so, and then to report back and relaying information about ESA business meetings to their constituents in a form geared toward their specific interests and needs.

 

Dissolved Committees

Editorial (has up to 4 seats)
Organize student guides on ESA Commons; revise existing guides as needed.
Solicit ideas from English program students about what new student guides would be most useful. Consider: existing guides in most urgent need of revision; changes in the program that have made certain guides or parts of guides obsolete; new guides students in the program think will be useful; best method of construction for these guides. Divide up work that can be done individually: e.g., laying out a framework/plan for a specific new guide; reviewing an existing guide and suggesting updates; etc. Coordinate with Website Committee on updating existing guides on the Commons and adding any new guides. – Rolled into Website Committee