Jon Leong, PGSA Faculty Liason 2007-2008

The position of faculty liason for the PGSA has been a lot of fun this year. It's job is to act as the intermediary between the PGSA and the

faculty. This year I saw this role as comprising of three parts. All of them require a very comfortable relationship with many/all of the faculty in our department.

The first was to find people to sit on the various faculty committees which have particular relevence to us grad students. Here is a list of

the committees that we have played a role in during the past year:

* Graduate Admissions (Zak Staniszewski)

* Graduate Review (JL)

* Colloquium (JL)

* Condensed Matter Seminar (Tim Peshek)

In the near future we would like to also have representation in these two committees:

* Graduate Curriculum

* Particle-Astro Seminar

In principle, the faculty liason does not need to sit on any of the committees and can delegate this to other willing bodies. However, this

delegation works by negotiation with the faculty chair of that committee.

The second responsibility of this role was to initiate and organize the working out of issues brought up by either the PGSA or individuals within. An example of this are the many issues (which mostly have to do with the quality and timing of classes) which surfaced as a result of the survey that was handed out from the Graduate Review Committee. Once these issues were raised it was the faculty liason's job to work with the department chairs and the rest of the PGSA officers to work out a reasonable solution to these problems (simply involves calling/organizing meetings for discussion).

The last responsibility of the faculty liason was to try to improve relations in general between the graduate student body and the faculty.

For this, as you all know I've been setting up weekly lunches with a faculty member.

This summarizes my work this year as faculty liason. If you would like a more detailed description of the various committee operations contact the person who sat on those committees. I think that we have made some headway into getting a little more involved in the department and have showed some very positive results. I hope that we can continue this on with the lead of future faculty liasons. Thank you for all your help and input this year for making the department a better place for us Physi-G's!