Student Union

So as I mentioned in my earlier blog, Dean Biggs is planning to come to speak at the Academic Affairs committee to answer questions and take some suggestions on the topic of course evals.  The time and date have now been set and he will be speaking today (Thursday) at 6:15.  The meeting will be held in the first floor office area of the DUC.  

Dean Biggs plans to be at the meeting for around 20-30 minutes to answer questions about the course evals but also about undergraduate research and the pre-health department.

If anyone has any questions they would like to be asked, feel free to email them to me at ebschwartz@wustl.edu.  Also, feel free to drop by the meeting and see what he has to say.

This friday, I had a meeting with Dean Biggs to discuss several areas which he currently oversees.

The first area of discussion was the Office of Undergraduate Research.  As the liasion to this office, I met with him to go over some of the important things that they are working on.  One thing that Dean Biggs was very proud of was the fact that for the upcoming research symposium, there will be roughly 300 presenters, which is an outstanding turnout.  This symposium is being cosponsored with HHMI and the career center as well.  The symposium will be October 24 from 10 to 2 in Lab Sciences if anyone would like to go and see what some fellow students are working on.  Dean Biggs also encouraged me to check out the Research Digest, which contains a large selection of research from every area of campus, as well as the WUSHTA, a new publication containing senior honors theses.

The other big news is that the department is now going to be combining with the pre-health department, which of couse works with the many premed students as well as others going on to work in health care.  Dean Biggs informed me that a big goal of the department is to move to a more online based system for submitting things such as recomendations and personal statements.  This ties into the fact that personal information reviews are due on monday (September 12) for anyone planning on attending med school in fall of 2011.  This is an important document that is heavily relied on in writing cover letters for applications.

The other area of discussion during this meeting was the course evaluation system and how it could be improved.  We had a discusson about some of the things that could be improved upon with the Artsci system and how that might happen.  This is a conversation that will continue in the near future however as Dean Biggs will likely be attending an ucoming Academic Affairs meeting to discuss with the entire comittee some of the things that can be done to improve the current system.  I will give more details about that once we know exactly when this will be happening

So this is my first weekly Treasury Recap Blog (not to mention my first blog ever!)  Each week after Treasury, I will recap what went on in the meeting, the appeals heard, and some of the main arguments to fund/not fund each appeal.