From September 2004 until August 2005, I served on GRACS, the Graduate Representative Association of Computer Sciences. The organization represents the interest of computer sciences grad students to the department and university. I served with lots of other great grad students:
- Justin Brickell (Fall 2004)
- Allen Clement (Spring 2005)
- Geoff King (Fall 2004)
- Jennifer Lee (Fall 2004/Spring 2005)
- Matt Taylor (Fall 2004/Spring 2005)
- Maria Zolotova (Spring 2005)
We were able to help get a lot of things done, including:
- Improving communication with the department
- CSG meeting, improving way colloquia information is dispersed, increasing awareness for opportunities to particpate in the department.
- Informing grad students on issues that affect them
- Industry vs. Academia panel, CSG meeting, new GRACS website, grad student wiki.
- Improving conditions for grad students
- New microwave in the grad lounge, copier code for grad students.
- Social events
- Bowling night, night on 6th street, karaoke night, new photo album.
Every grad student should get involved in some way, even if they don't serve directly on GRACS. Next time elections come up, considering nominating yourself or someone you think would be a good representative.
I've written some code that parses the department's colloquia WebCal and makes it available in iCal format. To subscribe, go here, then click "Subscribe" in the upper-right corner. The calendar is updated nightly.
In Spring 2005, fellow grad students Harry Li, Nalini Belaramani, and I served as the grad student representatives to the department's GradFest. GradFest is a departmental open house where we get to show off all the reasons why it's great to be a grad student at UT Austin. As grad student reps, we were repsonsible for finding housing for the visiting prospective grad students and for organizing social events for the students.
In the summers of 2003 and 2004, I volunteered to help out with FirstBytes. FirstBytes is a free, one-week summer camp for female Texas high school students. The goal of the program is to introduce future college students to many areas of computer science in the hopes that these students will consider computer science as a major when attending college. The larger hope is that this program and others will address the gender gap problem in computer science (as highlighted by researchers like Jane Margolis).