Summary of the Graduate Affairs Committee meeting Nov 8, 2012. Present: Stephen Cook (GAC Chair), Leanne Dawkins (Undergrad Office), Steve Easterbrook, Nosayba El-Sayed (student member), Wayne Enright, Celeste Esteves (Grad Office), Yashar Ganjali, Ken Jackson, Allan Jepson (Grad Chair), Vinod Vaikuntanathan. Regrets: None ITEM 1. Review of Mentors on PhD supervisory committees. From the DCS Graduate Student Handbook 2012-2013: "In addition to the requirements set by SGS, the student's PhD supervisory committee must include at least one faculty member with a budgetary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. If the student's supervisor does not have a budgetary appointment in DCS (i.e. he/she has a CSA appointment in DCS), then one of the committee members who has a budgetary appointment in DCS must be designated as the student's mentor." The mentor role was described more thoroughly in the 2011-12 handbook: "The student's mentor assists the student in planning his/her graduate studies, and makes sure that the student is aware of all degree requirements. ..." Currently the mentor role is neither publicized nor enforced by the grad office. One problem with the mentorship rule is that budgetary faculty members in small research groups are sometimes required to serve as a mentor on a great many supervisory committees. It was agreed that a good long term solution to this problem is to make sure that CSA (Cross Appointed, Status Only, Adjuncts) supervisors of DCS students are familiar with the graduate degree requirements and procedures in DCS, so that mentors would be unnecessary. It should be up to the CSA committee to be aware of these extra requirements when deciding on which CSA faculty are eligible to have a full DCS-SGS appointment. It was also suggested that the grad office could help out by sending out periodic notices to *all* supervisors of DCS grad students reminding us that in addition to research supervision we need to give advice on courses and course requirements, checkpoints, etc. It was decided to keep mentors in place for the present. ITEM 2. DCS graduate student costs for CSA faculty supervisors. Currently CSA faculty who want to admit a new DCS grad student are asked to commit the same funding as budgetary members of DCS (unless the new student is international and is considered to be outside of the international quota for that recruiting year, in which case they pay the full cost w/o departmental "tax"). Funding Proposal: Not including exceptions (see below), CSA faculty wishing to supervise a new student are asked to pay the full cost, MSc 21.4/ PhD 22.9 + 10.4(fee diff for international) EXCEPTION 1: For the *short term*, due to difficulties recruiting enough domestic students, the department will discount the cost for domestic students (only) by: (7.4 UTF - 3 tax) = 4.4K So the costs are: domestic MSc, 17K, and domestic PhD, 18.5K. If in the future we can reach our domestic quota of 110, this deal goes away. (Likely in 2015.) EXCEPTION 2: If the CSA faculty is taking over the supervision of a student who is switching supervisors within DCS, the department might be expected to give them a break in funding, as they are doing us a favour. Similarly with other situations that are benefiting the department wrt its prior commitments. Pros for increasing the funding asked from CSA supervisors: DCS is providing: - guaranteed funding for that student, - guaranteed supervision if initial supervisor does not work out, - our department's reputation in their recruitment, and on their future degree, - DCS courses, DCS breadth review, - for PhD students: checkpoints, supervisory committee members, mentorship, - access to travel grants, awards and other grants, - desk/lab space, computing support, essentially everything that a DCS student gets. Another pro is: - more subsidy for our own faculty, since CSAs won't draw any. Cons: - possibly a reduced supervisory capacity (esp. important for small groups), Note this is for the group in total, but for an individual faculty member, it may allow our budgetary faculty to take on more students). - possibly a reduced domestic cohort (department overall) - possibly a reduced international cohort (department overall) - some strong DCS students are currently supervised by CSA faculty, which is a benefit to the department as a whole. Increasing the cost of students to CSA faculty can be expected to reduce this benefit in the future. - some CSA faculty have stepped up to assist with DCS students who switched supervisors (these are treated in Exception 2 above). The committee was generally supportive of this Funding Proposal. It was noted that DCS faculty are having more trouble funding students using NSERC Discovery Grants. One reservation made was the possible negative effect of the proposal of discouraging interdisciplinary research. The Grad Chair will bring up this proposal at the next faculty meeting. NEXT Grad Affairs MEETING: Thursday, Nov 15, 10:10 - 11:00 in PT 378. The main issue for that meeting will be how to distribute the offers to new international students across different faculty members.