SGA MEETING 3/26
CAMPUS CENTER 7PM
Summary of the Meeting
During this meeting we tried out a slightly modified structure. The new E-Board introduced themselves and briefly talked about some goals for their term.The new names of the agenda points were discussed as well as the new aspects of the meeting such as separating out upcoming events from announcements and the new trivia section that involves a run competition among the Representative Council. Announcements and Upcoming Events were shared and can be accessed easily in the SGA newsletter also attached in this email. Following these announcements there was a discussion about the Spring Plenary. The meeting broke up into five smaller groups and discussed What they think went well/badly and what they think could be improved. There were many very exciting ideas that came out of these discussions that will hopefully be able to be utilized for the next Plenary. Finally there was the trivia question and the red team won the point!
Introductions
Alisha Clark ‘18: My name is Alisha for anyone who doesn’t know me. I am your new SGA president. And I am really excited to take on this position. I am really friendly after a cup of coffee so if you’re talking to me and I seem dead it’s cause I haven’t had my coffee. She loves coffee and particularly Starbucks. The best way to contact her is through email or texting, she doesn’t want people to be to overly formal when reaching out She’s a cancer (a sensitive creature in her natural habitat) goes to sleep at 10:30 latest and likes to reflect at the end of the day
Nanda Bhushan ‘19: Introducing herself as the new SGA Vice President. She wants to work on improving the accountability of the appointed committees and improving the appointments process in general.
Swati Shastry ‘18: Introducing herself as the Head of the Honor Board. She wants to work on making meetings better by incorporating everyone in some way.
Delia Landers ‘19: Introducing herself as the SGA Secretary. She wants to work on making meetings more productive and enjoyable
Anna Huang ‘19: Introducing herself as the SGA Treasurer. She wants to focus on making the bylaws about the budget better and improving the way that the SFC works to make it more effective.
Alisha Clark ‘18: What she wants to accomplish is the platform that we ran on. Making sure that incoming students know about plenary and SGA and know that they are an integral part of being a Bryn Mawr student. We want to make plenary as enjoyable as possible, to make it a party. We want to create a good healthy dialogue within the community.
Meeting structure discussion
Alisha Clark ’18: We want to discuss the ways that meetings will be run for the rest of this year and what should we do for the upcoming year.
Delia Landers ’19: I’m just going to give a brief description of each:
Roll Call
Checking in to see who in the Representative Council is present.
E-Board Introductions
The new 2017-2018 Executive Board will introduce themselves to the community again!
Meeting Structure Discussion
The new E-Board will be discussing the ways that the meetings will be run and other fun new aspects of the weekly meetings and seeing what the community would like to see.
Announcements:
RepCo Announcements
This was previously classified as New Business. During this time any member of the Representative council may feel free to make an announcement.
General Announcements
Announcements may be made during this time from any member of the Bryn Mawr community.
Upcoming events
This time will be used to discuss and publicize upcoming events.
Plenary Recap Discussion
We will be using this time to have reflections and discussions on the 2017 Spring Plenary and looking forward to future Plenaries.
Let’s Revisit!!
This was previously known as Old Business and is a time for folks to bring up a topic previously discussed at a weekly meeting.
Community Forum
This was previously know as Your Two Cents, this is a time when anyone in the Undergraduate community can come forward to create a discussion, ask for a straw poll or vote, and engage with SGA.
Trivia Time!!
This is a new edition to the weekly meetings that will be a fun way to have a little competition. Come to the discussion on meeting structure to find out how this will work!
So I’ll just explain the ways that the Trivia will work. So I have divided the Representative Council into five teams that are based on the 5 class colors. So I am going to email each of you and let you know what team you’re on! Every week we are going to have a different trivia question and who ever answers it first gains a point for their team. Whichever team has the most points at the end of the semester wins a prize!
Alisha Clark ‘18: The prize will be a Wawa gift card and don’t worry your SGA dues are not going to go
Jessica Breet ‘18: I am going to be honest I didn’t know what the old and new business meant before
Aly Robins ‘17: If I am not a member of repco may I still answer the trivia question?
Delia Landers ‘19: Yes but the point won’t go to any of the teams?
Aly Robins ‘17: So can I not win the prize? What if I answer the most amount of questions?
Delia Landers ‘19: If you answer more questions on your own that the teams do we will definitely get you Wawa.
Alisha Clark ‘18: We only have a few weeks left and so we are trying to have fun in these meetings and see how things work out and we can re-discuss the things we need to at the end
RepCo Announcements
Bridget Murray ‘17 and Kyra Sygal ‘17: Hall Group & Multiple Occupancy forms should be submitted by Tuesday (3/28) at 5pm.
Room hunting: When you’re going around checking out dorms, rooms, and common spaces, remember that people live there! Always knock first, be polite, respect residents’ privacy & honor quiet hours and door signs.
We are in need of some volunteers for Room Draw! We need up to three more people for Sophomore draw on Thursday 4/13 from 8:45-10pm. Any current soph, junior, or senior can do it–we’ll tell you all you need to know, and you’ll get a free t-shirt!
Anna Huang ‘19: Because the New York Times is raising it’s prices from $0.70 to $1.00 we are going to figure out how many copies we really need and start ordering less to be put in the dining halls. We might send around a survey to see who reads the paper everyday, and if they use the physical copy because we also subscribe to the online copy.
Aly Robins ‘17: When would this come into effect?
Anna Huang ‘19: Next semester.
Jasmine Rangel ‘17: May I make a suggestion, look and see how many are left over each day to see how many are used.
Anna Huang ‘19: I am actually already looking into the statistical data and I will use that to decide.
Emma Porter ‘17: Does the digital copy have the crossword?
Aly Robins ‘17: I don’t think so, I think that is a different subscription
Anna Huang ‘19: Yeah I’m not sure I don’t actually read it.
Nanda Bhushan ‘19: The elections round is opening up tomorrow for the emergency elections for Appointments Committee members. Send your nominations to the Elections heads.. The appointments round will take place in April after these positions have been filled.
Also just going over the 4 resolutions that we were not able to present at Plenary and reminding people that we will be bringing these up again.
Jessica Breet ‘18:
This Saturday is Erdman’s first dorm party in many years and we still need bouncers for the event, please, please help me. The theme is dungeon party which you can interpret however you want. Please let me know if you want to be bouncers or servers by Tuesday!
Jasmine Rangel ‘17: Is it a one floor or a two-floor party?
Jessica Breet ‘18: the idea is for it to be a two-floor party with two little parties happening on each floor.
Bridget Murray ‘17: This isn’t a question this is me volunteering to help.
Jessica Breet ’18: Awe thank you Bridget Murray class of 2017!!
Upcoming events
Hannah Henderson Charnow ‘17, Priyanka Dutta ‘17, and Connie Lam ‘18: The senior and junior class presidents are hosting a pre-show to the battle of the bands this coming Friday. They brought a musical guest, Raina Sokotov-Gonzalez who is a singer songwriter from Brooklyn. This will be at 7pm in the campus center on Friday. There will be snacks, please click going to the Facebook event. The event is open to everybody!
Jessica Breet ‘18: Where is this?
Hannah Henderson-Charnow ‘17: It is in the campus center
Jessica Breet ‘18: So what you’re saying is on Friday people can come and watch the band and then on Saturday they will come to the party in Erdman.
HHC: Yes everyone will support each other, you come to our event and we will come to yours!
Bridget Murray ‘17 and Kyra Sagal ‘17: Mock Room Draw will be this Thursday (3/30) at 8:30 pm in Dalton 300. We’ll be going through the steps of multiple occupancy/hall group draws, dorm draw, and room selection, so if you’ve never been through Room Draw before (or have but still don’t understand it) this can answer your questions
Are you interested in being a DP next year? Curious about what the position entails? Next Sunday (4/2) before SGA, ResCo will be hosting a Dorm President Mixer from 6-7pm in the Campus Center main lounge. You can hear more about individual experiences from current DPs and the ResCo heads (both former DPs as well) and connect to other students interested in running. Plus, ResLife will be providing food from Campus Corner!
Lillian Oyen Usted: Saturday at 1 there is the lacrosse pink game and all proceeds go to benefit breast cancer research at Bryn Mawr Hospital.
Hannah Rifkin: General announcement about Passover
So if you eat kosher or if you eat halal but would be open to eating kosher. There is food in the kosher kitchen for all of the 8 days of Passover as well as a seder dinner. So if you are planning on coming to the kitchen please contact me if you would like to have something specific, dining services has been working with us. You can email me at hrifkin@brynmawr.edu.
Plenary Recap Discussion
Alisha Clark ‘18: I wanted to save a lot of time for this. I want to use this time for self reflection. This is one of my core values, I like to reflect on times and think how can I do better next time. Plenary is not just for the E Board it is for the entire community and so we should all self reflect on it.
Breaking up into small group discussions:
Alisha Clark ‘18: I hope that that was good for everyone! Does anyone want to share? Did anything tickle your fancy?
Gabrielle Smith ’17: Making plenary required because the honor code is required and no one questions that. Who benefits from Plenary? Like clubs. Maybe you should get club funding docked. A sheet that you sign when you’re taking self scheduled exams saying this process has some to you through SGA, Plenary is on this date and you better attend.
Claire Romaine ‘18: We talked about counting and how electronic counting and how improvements are needed for that. There were lots of questions and comments on the mics that should have been brought up at SGA meetings previously and how there needs to be more of a knowledge that these are discussed at SGA meetings leading up.
Aly Robins ‘17: I want to second everything that they both said. Cause as a club leader I know that I wonder why people are not at Plenary, do they want to be part of it?? We talked about counting and we talked about a clicker system that Delia brought up and I brought up the idea of swiping in with our one cards the way that thrive does so we know what quorum is without counting.
Maybe having a way to discern whether a question was just asked or is in the resolution if there was a way to say let’s move on from this because it was previously answered or is in the resolution itself .
Emma Porter ‘17: Okay first, wow technology!! And Gabby you brought up the clubs. And we came up with a similar idea. For sga meetings in general the bulk of repco is the dorm presidents and in order to increase the perspectives that are brought to SGA meetings and to increase the size of the council we were hoping to encourage club reps from every club to come out because it is where the budget is coming form and without these meetings you wouldn’t have that club and obviously you care about that group of people.
Lillian Oyen-Usted ‘19: Is there a way to do incentives with residential spaces to give increases for the dorms that get the most people at Plenary.
Alisha Clark ‘18: That is a great idea and when we have office hours in the upcoming weeks we will reach out to you and ask you to come visit to talk about this idea and we will have to go through our Treasurer to work it out. It’s probably possible.
Claire Gopotchkin ‘17 : Something that came up a few times was having a very solid structure in place for the entirety of plenary. Which inlcudes counting and streamlining the volunteer process and the incretion of tabling and making Roberts’ rules more understood so that we do not waste time on unnecessary things. Making sure Plenary runs much more smoothly so we do not waste time on things.
Bridget Murray ‘17:Something that our group brought up was making the languages not as bulky and the effect that Roberts rules would have on spending more time actually voting things rather than not understanding what we are voting on.
Alisha Clark ‘18: Does anyone know what Robert’s Rules of Order is?? Who’s Robert?? Yes there is an actual reading and thing but at the same time it silences a lot of voices because a lot of people do not understand what is happening and so what they say is not valid after that. Like at Plenary when someone immediately called the vote, I was saying to my group “well you’re silencing voices. Claire said “why don’t people just come to SGA meetings if they have all of those questions” And yes we are going to work on that we want to make the meetings more inclusive so that people feel comfortable coming and this could come from us asking people to come to meetings. So next year if they want to know they can come to SGA meetings. Hopefully spreading more awareness of SGA would be helpful for me.
Aly Robins ‘17: This came up in our group, why 7 instead of 6 for the SGA meetings? Which I say because many people have film classes during this time?
Claire Romaine ‘17: I think part of the reason is because yes dining hall workers can’t be there immediately but they are able to get there within an hour. Sometimes during daytime plenary you get practical closing of the dining halls.
Alisha Clark ‘18:What i am thinking about because we had so many resolutions tabled. I need to see which resolutions are being brought back for next semester and depending on how many we get we may end up pushing the Plenary back to the day time instead of night.Because yes I was dying myself because I’m an early bird. But I will bring that up when we get closer and we can discuss it.
Gabrielle Smith ‘17: What if there was daytime and nighttime plenary and the resolutions will be split up people can just come for the resolutions that they care about?
Alisha Clark ‘18: I was thinking about having breaks scheduled into plenary if it is to long. So that people can get fresh air and get food and then people can come who were at work during these breaks, every couple of resolutions.
Annie Belgum ‘18: If we have ideas about plenary and how to improve it what would be the best way to improve it?
Alisha Clark ‘18: Me
Annie Belgam ‘18: Even if they are big things?
Alisha Clark ‘18: Yes.
Alisha Clark ‘18: You can talk to me every time you see me or email me whenever, you don’t have to be formal in your email to me. We can figure out a time or place to talk. You can also talk to anyone on the E-board and we have weekly meetings and a groupchat so talking to any of us is talking to all of us. I will email back and we can talk about this at a scheduled time and place.
Jessica Breet ‘18: So one of the things we talked about would be cutting back on resolutions especially ones that would be able to be decided in weekly SGA meetings. Operationally the repco may decide on some things within themselves instead of having to present changes to the constitution.
Trivia!
Question: What does SEPTA stand for?
Answer: South-Eastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority
Emma Porter ‘17 Wins the question, point to the red team.