Minutes from the 13 September 2001 PAC meeting

Next meeting: either Thursday, October 11, or Wednesday, October 10, at 5pm. Please email Susan English at senglish@stars.sfsu.edu with which time is better for you.

This meeting and all future meetings will have food provided.

This is being sent to both PAC@stars.sfsu.edu and students@stars.sfsu.edu until we can get the PAC email to include everyone who wants to be on it. Please email Daryl at dhaggard@stars.sfsu.edu if you do not receive PAC emails and/or if you do and would prefer not to. Also, if you have another email address that you would prefer we use, please let her know. I will be sending out an email soon with instructions on how to access your stars account from yahoo.

Candace Partridge is working on the PAC webpage, so if you have comments or suggestions, please contact her. Great job so far!

Jennifer Kreft brought up a recurring problem - upper-level classes have been canceled due to low enrollment: Classical Mechanics II, Stat Mech, etc. We are looking into lowering the minimum requirement for the courses or finding some other sort of solution with Dr. Lockhart, or the dean, if necessary. These are crucial courses for undergrads (and some grads), even though they are not strictly required for the major.

Mahndisa Rigmaiden mentioned that many of Dr. Neuhauser's classes have engineering students enrolled. Perhaps if we advertised more about the need for students to enroll, we could get enough students into the classes so that under-enrollment wouldn't be a problem.

Several students mentioned that we could nurture 230 and 240 students better (keeping more people in the major and keeping upper-level classes fuller) by offering peer tutoring. We will look into having the department pay tutors the same way that the math department does. Andy Danielson will look into the feasibility of getting a work study grant for this.

In the short term, we decided to talk to the graduate students and see how many would be willing to open up their office hours and help sessions to all physics students since they are being under-utilized. We will post the hours outside the PAC room and get permission to flyer the first three floors of Thornton Hall with the news that office hours will now be open to anyone wanting physics tutoring. Unless someone emails me specifically asking to NOT post their office hours and help sessions, all of the grad students' hours and where they are held will be included in a flyer next week. If the grad students can email me with the information of their hours and rooms, that would be appreciated.

Ryn McCartney brought up fundraising. Since the bookstore is now selling 112 and 122 lab manuals with the texts, we are earning less money with lab manual sales than in the past. She is going to look into buying used textbooks and selling them for a profit. Mahndisa mentioned food/bake sales, a study-a- thon - this is like a walk-a-thon, but you get paid for studying.

Service activities that we might be interested in: Donating money from a study-a-thon to the Red Cross, volunteer to help homeless adults get their G.E.D., etc.

Jennifer buys us veggie food from Rainbow Market (she works there and gets a discount). If you have requests, please write them on the request sheet in the PAC room.

How do we spend PAC funds? As of yet, they have gone towards food for PAC meetings and the Ferguson Observatory weekend.

We need to have a mission statement, so some ideas were written down, but we have not come up with anything formal yet. Here are some of the ideas, including suggestions for what activities PAC could do in the future: a need to nurture upcoming undergraduate and graduate physicists especially by better communication and outreach; increased awareness of what resources are available to students who want them; field trips to area labs such as LBL, LLL, and SLAC; ski trips; outreach to high schools and possibly younger students either at the schools or by inviting them to SFSU; solar observing; movie night in the planetarium.

If there are comments or changes to these minutes, please email Abby Fuller at afuller@stars.sfsu.edu.