President-elect discusses email policies; changes to representation in progress
The Graduate Student Government (GSG) held their last weekly meeting of the semester on Tuesday, Mar. 31, at 5:15 p.m, in the ChemSci room 101.
The meeting began with guest speaker Will Cantrell, who is the Associate Provost and Dean of the Graduate School. Cantrell addressed members of the GSG about the issue of MTU email addresses being deactivated three months after a student graduates. Cantrell stated that he has been in contact with IT, and is working to figure out a solution that will work best for the majority of students.
Sam Jensen, who will be the next President of GSG, has also been working to save student emails from being deleted after graduation. He expressed that MTU deleting student emails is problematic because “Institutional emails are widely used on résumés, publications, and miscellaneous career websites. Once your email is deleted, potential employers, colleagues, or advisors may not have the means to reach you.” Jensen has also created a petition on behalf of GSG in hopes that the administration will recognize any disagreement with this new policy from the student body. A link to the petition can be found online here, for access to the petition you can also contact Jensen at sjjensen@mtu.edu.
Members of GSG will also face a change in the number of representatives with the creation of the new School of Health, Human, and Biological Systems which comes into effect on Jul. 1. GSG currently operates with representatives from each department on-campus with each department having at least one representative. Each department is currently capped at four representatives each. There is typically one GSG representative for every 50 graduate students in a department. With the new School of Health, Human, and Biological Systems, there will be far more than 200 students in the department, which will need to be addressed on the reorganization of representatives for GSG.
Additionally, during the meeting the treasurer of GSG, Jessica Czarnecki, gave a report about next year’s budget. This new budget will be voted on at the start of the fall semester. Czarnecki reported that GSG will begin the next fiscal year with an estimated deficit of $650. There are plans to fundraise the remaining amount by potentially increasing the student activity fee for graduate students from $50 to $55 for fall and spring, and from $10 to $11 in the summer semester, or members of GSG could work concession stands at sporting events for $300 per event, and there is the possibility of future donations to make up the difference in the deficit.
