Non-committee roles in PGSC

Spokesperson

PGSC spokespeople work to facilitate PGSC operations, communicate with the department chair about the work of the PGSC, and field general questions and concerns from the grad student body. Key roles of the spokespeople involve PGSC elections, organizing and running PGSC meetings, and compiling and sending newsletters.

Faculty Meeting Representatives

The responsibility of the faculty meeting representatives is to attend Faculty Meetings and convey department news to the graduate student body in an email report. 

GPSS Senators

The Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS) is a representative body for graduate students at UW and serves many purposes, including the organization of graduate student events, placing graduate student representatives on campus-wide committees, and advocating for policies that affect graduate students at the state and federal level. The GPSS website can be found at http://depts.washington.edu/gpss/about-gpss/. 

Social Chairs

The social chair organizes social events for the physics department. Past events have included PGSC social hours, happy hours joint with other UW departments, and PI day celebrations. The scale and character of these events depends on the demand, desire, and funds of PGSC and the broader physics department. 

Fundraising Chair

The role of the fundraising chair is to raise funds for PGSC that will be used for events for graduate students and for the physics department. It is up to the chair's discretion as well as the demand and desire of the physics community how they go about this role, but possible examples include providing physics department merchandise, bake sales, trivia nights, and so on. 

Committee roles in PGSC

Colloquium Organizing Committee Rep

The colloquium organizing committee is tasked with finding speakers for weekly department-wide colloquia. The graduate student colloquium rep invites speakers to give colloquium based on input from the graduate student body. Up to three speakers per academic year - including one Jacobsohn lecturer - may be graduate-student invited. The rep also organizes each speaker's visits,  dinners with graduate students, and Q&A sessions, etc. 

Climate and Diversity Committee Reps

 The Climate and Diversity committee seeks to uphold the values stated in our code of conduct. The committee has faculty, graduate, and undergraduate student representatives, and welcomes constructive input from anyone in the department. The committee's roles include organizing department wide town halls, organizing social events for the department such as Friendsgiving, providing students with valuable resources on the committee website, and much more. 

Graduate Admissions Committee Rep

The Graduate Admissions Committee primary purpose is to review the graduate school applications the department receives. The applications are reviewed by multiple committee members, after which each member makes a recommendation from reject to strong admit and provides a brief discussion of what lead them to their conclusions. The PGSC Representative is also the point of contact for graduate students who have questions about the admissions process. 

Graduate Program Committee Reps

The graduate program committee works on all things related to the physics PhD program. This involves soliciting ideas from our peers for special topics courses, and discussing the upper level graduate electives offered. Further responsibilities depend on specific charges from the department chair. In the past, the graduate program committee has been charged with redesigning the first year MRE system, reformatting qualifying exams, and discussing topics covered in first year classes.

1XX Coordinating Committee Rep

The 1XX committee develops curriculum for intro physics classes, as well as provides support and organization for the course instructors. Previous tasks have involved redesigning the 1XX labs and choosing a new textbook for the 1XX lectures to follow.