AGSA Meeting Minutes - March 2, 1998

In attendance:
Seth Murray (pres.), Tom Brunton, Bill McFarlane, Jennifer Coe, Jennifer Trunzo (V.P), Pete Hoeman (Treas.), Carina Iezzi, Daniel Harms, Rick Brown.

Guest Speaker: Scott Corrigall, the GSA president, spoke to the graduate students about the threat of a $200 per student athletic fee. Scott explained some of the history behind this problem, outlined the current situation and GSA's proposed counter-measures. All concerned graduated students are encouraged to get involved in the struggle against the implementation of this fee by attending Students Against Fee Exploitation (S.A.F.E.) meetings, held every other Thursday evening (see flyers in dept. mailboxes). For further info., contact Scott at: gsa-president@acsu.buffalo.edu

Old Business:

1) Annual Review of Anthropology has been received and is in Anthropology Library.

2) Grad Lounge was cleaned: closets organized, trash thrown out, computer room rearranged, old books and journals donated to Anthropology Library.

3) Co-sponsorship contract with Haitian SA was signed and notification of the date that the band will be on campus will be sent along to AGSA-List shortly.

4) Archaeometry conference was a success. Thanks to Monika.

5) MDRF workshop was a success. Thanks to John Floyd, Donna Bonner, and Tim Sullivan.

6) At the last AGSA meeting, we moved to write letters to the department expressing concerns about conflicts in class scheduling, and a letter encouraging dept. to purchase National Geographic CD-ROMs. This has yet to be done and Seth asked if anyone would volunteer: if interested contact him.

New Business:

1) Plesur conference (LTB dept. of History) has several grad student presenting: Tom, Erik, Maury, Peter, whom else??? Tom agreed to post schedule for conference to AGSA-List as soon as it became available. Pete Hoeman will be unable to attend the Plesur since he will be presenting a paper the same day in Kansas City. He is currently looking for a reader for his paper. If anyone is interested and available, please contact him.

2) NEAAs has several UB anthropology grad students presenting (Tom, Erik). Anyone interested in using dept. van and traveling there together to Orono, Maine should contact Tom or Erik ASAP. They will also be presenting their papers to our dept. on Friday, 6th of March.

3) It was agreed that advanced graduate students should again host a typing party for 1st year students' qualifying exams. Jen Coe will determine the date of the exams before next meeting. AGSA will vote on a budget allocation for refreshments at the next AGSA meeting.

4) Sever Ionica proposes that we reinstall the system software on the grad lounge Pentium in order to make more hard disk space available to install SPSS. Everyone agreed to this idea. Carina also suggested a language translation program and Tom recommended a basic GIS software package.

Reports:

The next GSA Senate meeting is Wednesday, 4th of March. Tom will post a summary of this meeting to AGSA-List.

Votes:

1) Vote to fund refreshments for Eric Larsen's colloquium - $20. Approved unanimously.

2) Equinox party will be on Friday, March 21st. Vote for $25 for food and $55 for beverages approved unanimously. Tom will buy the food; Seth will buy the drinks. The location will be decided upon later this week and will be posted to AGSA-List and in dept. mailboxes.

3) Seth proposed that we purchase additional RAM for grad lounge computer. It was decided to put this vote off until next meeting at which time Seth would present different price quotes.

Seth Murray
(AGSA President)