Student Association Minutes, Jan. 30th

2/1/12 6:00pm

The following were noted at the most recent meeting of the Student Association on Jan. 30.

• SA President Georgia Lagoudas said that any students interested in serving on the 2013 Commencement Speaker Committee needed to have sent in letters of interest by Feb. 1.
• SA External Vice President Sanjula Jain announced the Center for Career Development's Career and Internship Expo, which was held on Wednesday and Thursday, and requested volunteers for the event. Jain also requested volunteers for an upcoming collaboration with the Rice Student Volunteer Program, Pancakes for Parkinson's. Applications to help organize the event should be sent to saj2@rice.edu.
• SA Director of Elections Chance Marshall said that the SA presidential debate will be held at 9 p.m. on Monday night in Farnsworth Pavilion and requested that students send questions for the debate to wbm1@rice.edu. Because of the debate, the SA meeting will begin at 8:30 p.m. The SA General Election will begin at 11:59 p.m. on Monday night and end at 11:59 p.m. a week later.
• Jones College sophomore Sid Mullick, Brown College sophomore Dandan Liu and Brown College junior Shaurya Agarwal presented a draft resolution on introductory languages based on the language survey presented last semester. The resolution recommended that the workload of the introductory language courses not be increased, that the Center for the Study of Languages continue to update students, that languages with fewer instructors continue to be taught and that flexibility be encouraged given schedule diversity. A further resolution was added to request additional language instructors if this would improve scheduling flexibility. CSL Associate Director Jose Narbona said that because a planned meeting with the registrar the previous week had fallen through, he had little new information to present, but that the CSL planned to have first year language courses include five hours of instruction and second year language courses include four hours of instruction. For the first year courses, two of those hours would be floating classroom hours on Tuesday and Thursday.
• Nutrition Specialist Maria Tsakalis presented on the possibility of creating a standardized food representative for the colleges. Tsakalis said that standardizing the responsibilities of the position would make it easier to organize student concerns and help new students with special diets.
• Baker College sophomore Jenny An presented on Lifetime Physical Activity Program courses and waitlisting. Lagoudas said that about 75 percent of the approximately 100 petitions to register for courses after waitlists were closed that went to Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson were from students attempting to register for LPAPs. An said that there were four options: To leave the system as it is; to reduce the LPAP requirement from two LPAPs to one; to allow varsity or club sports to count towards the requirement; or to get rid of the requirement entirely and allow students to take LPAPs for credit only. The floor was then opened to discussion and further suggestions were made.
• Martel College freshman Kenneth Misner, Rice's campus ambassador for the Bloomberg Assessment Test, announced that the test will be coming to campus for students Feb. 15- 16. Misner said the test is free and open to all students.
• Jones Senator Nick Rizopoulos announced that the syllabi standards policy was passed by the Faculty Senate.

The SA will next meet on Monday, Feb. 6 at 8:30 p.m. in Farnsworth Pavilion.

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