ESA Meeting Minutes 11-15

ESA Meeting Minutes 11/15/16

Present: Elissa Myers, Catherine Engh, Esther Bernstein, Christina Katopodis

  1. Introductions and committee reports
  • Conference committee: Contacting 1st years to invite submissions for ESA conference; Catherine will email Christina list of names
  • Exec Committee
    • Now able to admit more students than we have space for in a given year (25); plan over 3 years will account for the difference in a given year
    • Talia’s suggestion to match up students for ESA mentors based on self-identified need or concern (i.e. adjusting to the city, being a parent in the program, etc.)
      • question of using the list of new students that the department gives us every year to help with this or a Google survey
      • discussion of how to word this to incoming students
  • Faculty-student revels event scheduled for December 9th. We are soliciting volunteers to help us with food and decorating.
  • We’ve finally updated the ESA boards, now we need you to post information, either about conferences of interest, or about meetings.
  • Elections for Grad Council proceeding, thanks to Kristi and Sarah.
  • Next ESA Happy hour scheduled for Thursday, December 1st at Drop Off Service. (where it was last time)

Discussion:

  1. The list of external grants and fellowships is now live on the ESA site, thanks to Danica, Duncan and the website committee. Becausethere seems to be a theme-based limit on the number of items that can go on the primary menu on the homepage of the ESA commons site, there is consideration of removing the ‘Home’ Tab  and replacing it with a special tab for the new ‘Grants and Fellowships’ doc. The ‘home’ tab is a bit superfluous, since the giant ESA logo right above brings the user home. Can we give the go ahead for this?
  • We decided to take away the “Home” button, and replace it with the tab. Catherine contacted Duncan and Danica as well as the website committee about this, and it’s been done.
  • Discussion of concerns about how to keep the page updated. Duncan later says that they have been keeping this in mind and only put on fellowships that seemed like every-year things.
  • We would like to propose a ‘holiday’ themed revels event. Does anyone have any objections? Better ideas? How can we make this event inclusive? What ideas do people have about possible party activities? Some ideas we had: a dorky holiday sweater competition, aloud readings of ‘holiday’ themed texts.
  • A collective booze fund? As in: those who would like to drink would donate ten dollars to a ‘revels booze fund’ and then Catherine and Elissa and whoever else volunteers to help would go buy as much inexpensive alcohol as possible (as in, Trader Joe’s wine and cheap beer) with the collected funds.
  • Discussion of concerns about making holiday theme inclusive. Decided not to go with that, and go with Hogwarts theme instead.

Vote:

  1. Do we want to save some of the DSC budget money that we can’t spend on alcohol (say, 300 dollars) to donate to a good cause in the wake of this election? Like, to support Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the ACLU? Or do we want to spend it all on food and decorations for revels?

PP:https://secure.ppaction.org/site/Donation2?df_id=12913&12913.donation=form1 …
SPLC: https://donate.splcenter.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=463 …
ACLU: https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to-aclu …

  • Tabled voting in anticipation of greater response. This concern may now be moot or there may be less money, since we have found a way of spending more money on booze.