Current Initiatives

The work of our committee is achieved through collaborative working groups, which are open for anyone who wishes to help achieve our goals. Our current initiatives are below. Please contact the working group leader if you would like to participate.

Interested in starting your own working group?

Any SCS PhD student who wants to work on something in line with our mission statement is welcome to launch their own working group. If you have an interest or even an inkling of an idea, don’t hesitate to reach out to scs.phd.committee@gmail.com .

Mandatory Anti-Bias Course Working Group

Goal: To develop curriculum for a mandatory course for first-year PhD students on privilege, bias, anti-racism, and allyship. A course overview can be found here.

For more details on the working group, see this document.

Meeting time: TBD

Contact: this survey if you are interested in any level of involvement; otherwise email bflaniga @-andrew-dot-cmu-dot-edu

Social Connectedness Working Group

Goal: Make it easier to build social connections both within and across departments, and encourage mentoring relationships.

Ongoing programs:

• Campus-Wide Graduate Coffee Chat Program
• SCS Research Directory

Past programs:

• SCS Welcome Picnic and Scavenger Hunt (Fall 2021)
• SCS Coffee Chats (2020-2021, replaced with campus-wide coffee chats)
• SCS Virtual TGs in Gathertown (2020-2021)
• Weekly virtual board games (2020-2021)

Meeting time: 3-4pm on Fridays

Contact: hlzhou @-andrew-dot-cmu-dot-edu

Personal Wellness

Goal: This group will focus on identifying areas where individual wellness can be improved across the body of SCS students. This includes physical and mental health and will likely include investigating the resources available to students and understanding how students currently address wellness concerns.

Timeline: Three Semesters

Deliverables: A concise document about the key challenges and current resources as well as suggestions for future semesters.

Meeting time: Summer - Every other Wednesday at noon.

Contact: aajoshi @-andrew-dot-cmu-dot-edu or ppf@-andrew-dot-cmu-dot-edu

Undergraduate Research Engagement

Goal: Increasing SCS undergraduate research participation, improving the undergrad research experience, improving support and resources for graduate student and faculty research mentoring, encouraging disadvantaged and underrepresented individuals to get involved with research! See here for more details.

Ongoing and potential future initiatives:

• Semester Research Mixers for graduate students / faculty to showcase their work, encourage undergrads to try out research, and answer undergrads’ questions about research

• Semester Research Mixers to connect undergrads with specific research projects which graduate students / faculty are offering

• Resources such as Slack workspace to build community among the SCS undergrad research community, “onboarding” documents for prospective undergrad researchers and grad student mentors

• Shadow-a-researcher program, lab-meeting-hopping program

• OurCS-like weekend-long program to encourage URI to get involved with research

• much more to come!

Meeting time: Every Tuesday at 4:30 pm ET in NSH (Newell-Simon Hall) Room 4201 (2nd floor) or on zoom.

Contact: dpac-ugrad-re@andrew-dot-cmu-dot-edu

Administrative Tasks

Goal: We’re the folks who keep this committee running and figure out how to best support all the working groups. This ranges from organizing the surveys and email updates, to communicating with the Dean, to checking in with working groups and helping them meet their needs.

Meeting time: Mondays at 2

Contact: leochen@-cmu-dot-edu