Graduate Student Ministry (CS Student Representatives)

Permalink for this page: discuss.cs.uchicago.edu/ministry

The public-facing page on the CS website is here, but this post tends to be more updated than that.[1]

See the-ministry group to reach out to us.


The CS department has volunteer roles (ministers) to represent PhD students’ interests, provide feedback to the department, and get students more directly involved in the department’s activities. Contact the Prime Minister for more info about these roles or if you would like to volunteer.

Graduate Student Ministry (CS Student Representatives)

Prime Minister

Responsible for handling most of the faculty-grad interactions and concerns. Acts as the primary interface between faculty and graduate students and is also the person to reach out to for miscellaneous concerns not represented by other roles below.

Graduate Matters Ministers

These are the people to reach out to if students have specific concerns covered by these roles.

Curriculum

Responsible for raising PhD student curriculum interests with the graduate committee and the department chair.

  • Open

Faculty Hiring

Responsible for structured grad student involvement in faculty hiring, including feedback on candidates.

  • Temporarily closed due to hiring freeze

First-Year Liaison

Aggregates the issues of first years and works with other ministers to address them and funnel the institutional knowledge to the newest members of our community.

  • Open

Inclusion

Responsible for advocating for students in the department who identify as female/gender-nonconforming, underrepresented minority, LGBTQ+ or have a disability, both within the department & outside the department, and for connecting students to identity-affirming communities or affinity groups on campus.

Infrastructure

Represent graduate students in the department’s facilities (Space and Computing) committees, which deal with allocating budget for office furniture, ergonomic hardware, and determining the specifications of new machines, monitors, etc.

  • Open

International Affairs

Represent and advocate for international graduate students in the department. Responsible for providing information for international students, identifying problems that international students face, and raising things to the department if needed.

  • Open

Wellness

Responsible for promoting awareness and support of mental, physical, and professional (e.g., relationships with peers/advisors, remote communication) forms of well-being for PhD students. Responsibilities include informing about UChicago Student Wellness services and relevant well-being events on campus, decreasing the stigma around using counseling services and advocating for physical health accommodations, and sharing other appropriate resources to mental and physical health.

Research and Social Interaction Ministers

These roles help increase both social and research interaction within the department.

Caffeine

Responsible for organizing weekly tea, coffee, and snack time when grad students can easily hang out with each other.

Fun

Responsible for keeping a sense of community in the department by organizing social events.

Student Seminar

Responsible for organizing the student seminar.

  • Open

The following independent bodies also represent student voices in varying capacities. The ministry includes them in communications and decision-making.

PSD DSAC Representatives

The Deans’ Student Advisory Committee (DSAC) brings together representatives from all departments in the Physical Sciences Division twice a quarter to discuss division-wide and university-wide issues. We get two reps for Computer Science:

GWiCS

Graduate Women in Computer Science (GWiCS) is an organization that builds a community of support for female-identifying graduate students in the Computer Science department. Our activities include monthly Sounding Board Socials, recruitment, and advocacy. GWiCS is also part of the Women in Graduate Science organization within the Physical Sciences Division. Current chairs are:


  1. The HTML source is at phd-reps.md · GitHub for the department website to sync with this page. ↩︎

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Changelog

2023-11-07T06:00:00Z
Ministry 2023-2024 has been finalized. We welcome all the new and existing ministers and thank the outgoing ministers for their work in the past year – @kbryson, @jchanen1, @hands, @ctkang, @wujibang, @lmseifert, @kmarw

2023-01-06T06:00:00Z
Welcome the ne GWiCS co-chairs, Yitian Hao and Mansi Sakarvadia. Thank you @shahashka and @sophialin1!

2022-11-08T06:00:00Z
Ministry 2022-2023 has been finalized. We welcome all the new and existing ministers and thank the outgoing ministers for their work in the past year - @meliao @arthurborem @adrianlehmann @byronzhong @martinluttap @andrewcchu @j2zhao @ogokdemir @caldwellb @chacha

2022-08-28T20:35:00Z
The new DSAC representatives for 2022-2023 are @pouya and @jchanen1. We thank @macmillan and @chacha for their service in the role in the past year.

2021-10-21T17:21:00Z
Ministry 2021-22 finalized. We welcome all the new (and existing) ministers and thank the outgoing ministers for their service – @cduck, @daniar, @ewenger, @jrding, @kartik, @lefanz, @salac, @zink, @tushant, @ziyuye. :confetti_ball:

2021-09-09T15:13:00Z
@vzhao leaves her positions from the ministry. Valerie had invaluable contributions in her role as the minister of wellness and faculty hiring and will certainly be missed.

2021-07-20T01:18:00Z
@robinett says goodbye to the ministry. We will surely miss his witty tea time announcements.

2021-02-16T16:50:00Z
@hjcho (Justina) departs the ministry, we thank her for her service as the co-minister of Fun!

2020-09-04T16:30:00Z
Ministry 2020-21 finalized. We welcome all the new (and existing) ministers and thank the outgoing ministers for their service – @amfarrell, @csj, @dingy, @ffalzon, @huaicheng, @jennacryan, @jesseastern and @suhail. :confetti_ball:

2020-03-17T20:51:00Z
@cduck starts hosting virtual Tea/Coffee Time right when the COVID-19 crisis started. 2020-07-02T05:00:00Z: we award the honorary title of Virtual Minister to him and thank him for his service and keeping the tradition going! As the current term of the ministry is ending, we could consider making it a full position in the next cycle.

2020-02-02T17:00:00Z
@robinett joins the Caffeine ministry as a co-minister along with Tushant.

2020-01-31T06:00:00Z
@shahashka and @sophialin1 anointed the new GWiCS co-chairs by the founding chairs Jean and Yi.

2019-09-16T21:00:00Z
@jesseastern volunteers to be a helping hand in the Ministry of Wellness in addition to his existing role as Co-Minister of Inclusion.

2019-08-16T15:32:00Z
The vacant caffeine position is now filled with @tushant joining us; looks like more hot things will be brewing! :tea: :coffee:

2019-08-09T16:00:00Z
Ministry 2019-20 finalized. We welcome all the new (and existing) ministers and thank the outgoing ministers – @singular_value, @barbarioli, @kavon, @nmull, @hewj – for their service. :confetti_ball:

2019-05-28T19:51:00Z
@nmull left the ministry but reachable in his position as Minister of Web until officially replaced.

2019-05-10T00:12:00Z
Anne to Karin and Janos:

Kartik Singhal has volunteered to be the new DSAC representative for CS,
replacing Ricardo. Kartik and I will be the two DSAC representatives for
CS beginning with the next meeting.

2019-03-11T19:18:00Z

Ricardo Barros Lourenço (@rlourenco) stepped out of his DSAC position. We can have at most two department representatives on PSD DSAC, so a position is available.

November 12, 2018 8:00 PM

@suhail and @ffalzon join us as the new Minister(s) of Caffeine, something is secretly brewing! :tea:

November 9, 2018 9:27 PM

October 3, 2018 9:04 PM

2018-06-06T17:33:00Z
Department Chair Mike Franklin officially announces CS PhD Student Volunteers and Contacts to phd-students, postdocs, faculty and adminstaff.

2018-05-24T05:00:00Z
Formation. CS Student Leadership Meeting Agenda/notes

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