Today, Patrick and Dave presented along with Jenna Bishop from the business office about making purchases on campus, safety training, machine shops, shared facilities, and 3D printing. Next week will cover reference managers and writing using LaTeX. More details will come later.

This week’s presentation can be found here: GL101 Working on Campus

Patrick Stanley presented information to grad students on what their mandatory student fees went to and how to make the most of things they have already paid for. Topics included services across campus, athletic events, gyms, and art presentations. His presentation can be found here: GL101 On Campus Activities.

For the first Grad-Life 101 session of 2017, David Shahin presented various tips and tricks to navigating campus and the DC area. His presentation for future reference can be found here: 2017-09-08 Grad Life 101 Campus Nav and Testudo

Congratulations to our new officers!

President: Evans Gritton

Vice President: Naila Al Hasan

Treasurer: Sabrina Curtis

Secretary: Jack Flowers

MSGS held a general body meeting on April 7th, at 12 noon in 1302 Chem/Nuke. All members were invited to attend. The current agenda was as follows, amended with meeting notes:

12:00

• Call to Order: Arrival and pizza!
  • Thank you to Kathleen, Dr. Phaneuf and the MSE Department for the food!!
• Introductions
  • What we do, and who we are!
  • Officer introductions and brief description of roles
  • List of annual MSGS activities
• Old Business
  • Membership and Orgsync: Join on Orgsync, more things coming
  • Research Fest: Max and Nalia, submit posters and talks, CFP coming soon
  • QE prep: Zoey and Eugene, starting soon
  • Discussion of next voting cycle, all positions are open, exact voting and nomination mechanism to be determined.
• New MSGS Business
  • Advocates for Science and the March for Science
    • Discussion and vote, statement approved unanimously: MSGS endorses AfS
  • SLOAN PEM: Sarah Mburu, free food to write, sponsored by Dr. Lloyd on Saturdays from 1 to 4 PM
• Open floor for announcements
  • Sustainability Workshop Poster Competition (http://www.energy.umd.edu/sustainability/workshop-2017)
  • CASE (http://case.umd.edu)
  • UMD Social Justice Day (https://sph.umd.edu/event/umd-social-justice-day)
  • Optics Society Poster Competition (http://umd.orgsync.com/org/osaatumd/poster_2017)
• Adjourn by 12:55: Seminar time!

On February 2nd and 3rd, prospective graduate students from across the nation came to UMD to visit the campus. MSGS helped by interacting with the students, answering questions, and taking them out for dinner both nights. The first night we stayed local at Nando’s Peri Peri in College Park, but on Friday night we wanted to show them how accessible D.C. is so we took the metro to Gallery Place/Penn Quarter to eat at one of our favorite pizza places, Pi Pizzeria. I hope the prospective students enjoyed the experience as much as the current grad students did, and we look forward to seeing many of them this fall.

2017’s Prospective Grad Students visit over dinner at Pi.

Hello and welcome to the new version of the MSGS website. Please be patient while we get it up and going. Eventually we will redirect msgs.umd.edu to here, so it will all be one. But for now please enjoy the progress.