Contact:Grad phi
Our goals are to create a sense of collegiality among graduate students and provide informal mentoring for the incoming graduate students. We also provide a forum through which the graduate student community can select representatives to committees which require graduate student representation, such as the colloquium committee and GAPSA.
Last year, we held two mentoring events. At the first, we served coffee, tea, and cookies during the first Wednesday of the semester to all graduate students. The stated goal was to introduce new grad students to more experienced students. The success of this event was dubious. The second was more successful. We invited all first year students and five “old” graduate students to a lunch (sandwiches from Erbert & Gerbert's) and invited the new students to ask questions. This was not a panel discussion, it was just an informal lunch. This worked well, and we should have had four of these last year, two in the autumn and two in the spring. Our initiative in the spring semester was lacking.
We organized a catered luncheon between Thanksgiving and Christmas, called the “Random Santa Physics and Astronomy Luncheion”. (This is not to be confused with the Holiday Party which occurs in early January.) This party featured a gift exchange, which was a lot of fun. Marie Lopez del Puerto photographed the event and organized the photos here: http://groups.physics.umn.edu/gradphi/RandomSantaLuncheon/
In the spring, we organized breakfast for the two Saturdays on which we had prospective graduate students visiting. We invited enough grad students to have a 4:1 prospective to grad ratio, which is just enough to invite informal conversation.
