- Attend meetings of the graduate committee. The grad rep’s
point of view is particularly valued for policy decisions that affect students.
Also, the grad rep can and should bring concerns of other students (perhaps
anonymously) forward to the committee. For committee discussion involving
individual students, the grad rep will be asked to leave the room. For
meetings devoted solely to discussion of individual students (e.g. spring
meetings for making offers of admissions), the grad rep need not attend at all.
For the 2008-09 academic year, I attended perhaps half a dozen meetings.
They lasted at most an hour. Committee work is an excellent CV item; this
particular committee work was not time-consuming.
- Coordinate the weekly grad tea. This is traditionally 3:15 Tuesdays
in the grad lounge (room 401N). Moving the time is done at one’s own
peril — core-course, seminar, and colloquium times are fixed year after
year. Traditionally, we do not submit the grad tea to the departmental events
calendar.
The grad tea is for pure and applied grads. The grad rep should send out a
reminder e-mail to the grads-math and grads-applied e-mail aliases. Coffee,
tea, cups, and two bags of cookies should be obtained from the front desk. The
room should be set up before the tea, and cleaned up afterward.
There is also an applied grad rep. This year, the applied grad rep did
room scheduling for the grad lounge. For next year, conceivably the pure and
applied grad reps could swap the grad-tea and lounge-scheduling duties.
- Maintain the grad board in the display case outside room 108.
(This will take a few minutes, once or twice a year.) The key to the display
case can be checked out from the business office.
- The department has a weekly colloquium speaker. A faculty member will
be in charge of scheduling colloquia for the year. The grad rep should
communicate with that faculty member to schedule a lunch with the speaker
and graduate students. The current departmental policy is that the
department will pay for lunch for the speaker and up to five grads, up to $15
per person, no alcohol.
The grad rep needs to contact grads early in the week; secure the scheduling
of the speaker with the faculty colloquium coordinator and front-office staff;
obtain the departmental P-card from the business office immediately before
lunch; take the speaker and grads to lunch, paying with the P-card; return the
departmental P-card to the business office immediately after lunch. If for
some reason the grad rep can’t come to lunch, he/she should be sure to
let attendees know when and where to meet the speaker, and designate someone to
take care of the P-card.
- The pure and applied grad reps must plan to participate in the entire
weekend (Saturday afternoon through Monday evening) of the department’s
spring recruitment workshop.
The grad rep accompanies students to Saturday-evening dinner, Sunday morning
hike, Sunday evening party, and Monday evening dinner.
- The next year’s grad rep is elected at the end of the
academic year, by current students in the pure-math program. (Applied students
should vote for their choice of applied rep. Incoming students, i.e. those
will be first-years in the coming year, do not vote.) You should issue a call
for nominations; then, hold an election. It’s up to you whether you do
this on paper, electronically by e-mail, etc.