GAPSA, GSAC there to represent you

Recent pieces in The Daily Pennsylvanian have brought graduate student quality-of-life issues to the attention of the Penn community. These pieces have raised questions regarding the means by which graduate student concerns are brought to the University administration and to what extent it has responded to these issues. Graduate students at Penn can be divided into professional students (MBA, Law, etc.) and research students (doctoral and master's students), and they are served by two overarching graduate student bodies: the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly and the Graduate Student Associations Council. In its role as liaison to the administration, GAPSA concentrates on issues that are of concern to all graduate students. Professional and research students have many overlapping interests, just as both share concerns with the larger Penn community. For example, safety on campus is important to everyone; it is exactly this type of issue on which it focuses. GAPSA also organizes and sponsors community-building events for all graduate students. GSAC represents only research students at Penn: doctoral students across campus and all graduate students in the School of Arts and Sciences. Because GSAC does not represent professional students, it concentrates on issues of concern to research students. For the last two years, both GSAC and GAPSA have concentrated their efforts on community building. In just the past year, the organizations have worked with the University administration to: * Secure graduate student space. The proposed graduate student center is scheduled to open on Locust Walk in May. Moreover, President Rodin has agreed to provide dedicated staffing for the center. * Improve social interaction among all graduate students. The "grad blender," a social mixer, attracts more than 700 graduate students each week. * Recognize excellence in graduate student teaching. For the past two years, the University has awarded the Penn Prize for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching to those teaching assistants whose work was nominated by their students. * Provide funding for research activities. GSAC has rewritten its constitution to supplement its traditional funding with a means by which large-scale, interdepartmental research colloquia can be supported. * Reach an understanding on critical issues. GSAC members, responding to the concerns of a representative, met with the administration prior to the termination of the modem pool. We believe that the solution reached -- ensuring that TAs in SAS who relied on the remote access would not incur additional costs -- was satisfactory. Graduate students at Penn owe a lot of our success to the excellent relationship we have with the University administration. The executive boards of both graduate student organizations have regular meetings with the president, provost and others in the administration to make Penn a better school, academically and socially. This is not to say that there are no outstanding issues. Health care costs, housing costs and the level of funding for research students are concerns for not only graduate students, but for the administration as well. The president and provost have detailed for us their plans and priorities for addressing graduate student concerns, which range from fundraising to direct improvements to our quality of life. Our administration is composed of scholars who recognize the importance of working with the graduate student community to continue Penn's excellence. We invite all members of Penn's graduate student community to work with us to improve the quality of graduate education for all Penn Students. GSAC meets Tuesday, November 28, at noon in Houston Hall's Golkin Room; GAPSA meets on December 6 at 6:30 p.m. in Irvine Auditorium. Please contact your GSAC or GAPSA representative if you have concerns that you feel graduate student government has not addressed. For those interested, more information about each group is available online at http://www.gapsa.upenn.edu/ and http://dolphin.upenn.edu/~gsac/.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.