Summary of the Graduate Affairs Committee meeting Oct 25, 2012.

Present:  Celeste Esteves, Wayne Enright, Allan Jepson (Grad Chair),
Ken Jackson, Nosayba El-Sayed, Stephen Cook (GAC Chair), Steve Easterbrook,
Vinod Vaikuntanathan.

Regrets:  Yashar Ganjali, Leanne Dawkins

1.  This concerns a request by a student that he be granted research
area breadth credit towards his PhD for ECE1508: Introduction to
Computational Genome Biology, taught by Brendan Frey (the student
is currently taking this course.)  ECE1508 is similar to CSC2417:
Algorithms in Genome Sequence Analysis, which is typically taught by
Mike Brudno, but CSC2417 is not being offered this year.  Mike Brudno
verified that Brendan's class is `somewhat equivalent to 2417' and
thinks that the student should be given the credit.

Since there is precedent for granting breadth credit under similar
circumstances, the committee decided to grant the student's request in
this case.  However future requests of this nature should continue to be
brought to the committee, and not be granted automatically.

2. In the past we have had the situation where a graduate
applicant that has been rejected by all DCS faculty with budgetary
appointments is accepted into our program by a cross-appointed member of
DCS.

The committee agreed that at least one DCS faculty member with a budgetary
appointment must agree that the applicant is qualified to be admitted.
However admitting a student entails potentially serious financial
(and supervisory) commitments for DCS, and it is not clear to what
extent the budgetary faculty member in question should be responsible
for the student, if the cross-appointed member is not able to meet
these commitments.   This problem is especially acute for small
research groups such as Bio Informatics and HCI.

This is a serious issue with no easy solution.  It is related to
Item 4 on the agenda, which concerns mentors on PhD supervisory
committees in which the supervisor(s) do not have budgetary appointments.

These issues will be discussed in future meetings.

3.  We advertise that when a grad student is accepted then they are
assigned an initial supervisor, but that that assignment is temporary.
 They are told they can change supervisors later.  In practice, there
are strong limitations on this.  The new supervisor (and group) needs
to accept the new student.

The committee agreed that we should not advertise that the supervisor
assignments are temporary.  The admission letter should specify
which group (or groups) have admitted them, and suggest that the
applicant should attend Grad Visit Day, and/or contact the group(s) in
question to get information on potential advisors.

4.  See item 2 above.

5.  Students without supervisors:  For a future meeting.

6.  Regarding PhD students who have gone 12 months or more without
a committee meeting.
 
The GAC agreed that the grad office should keep track of such cases
and contact the student and advisor (and mentor) to make sure that
the SGS rule for committee meetings is enforced.  Note that the
supervisory committee can meet even if it is not for a checkpoint.
The DCS Graduate Office refers to such a non-checkpoint meeting as 
simply a Supervisory Committee Meeting.