The group's second meeting of the semester began with GPSF Internal Vice President Tara Hogan trying to fill the remaining vacancies on the Appropriations Committee and the Finance Committee. About 30 Senate members were present at the meeting to elect statistics graduate student Kouros Owzar to the Appropriations Committee and journalism graduate student Joseph Pardington to the Finance Committee.
With the committees set, Senate members started the task of allocating money for the many projects in which UNC's graduate students are involved. Five appropriations requests were addressed at the Senate meeting. The N.C. Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation was given $500 for a symposium on life after apartheid in South Africa. The Graduate History Society received $250 for an upcoming speech featuring Polish Holocaust survivor Faye Schulman.
Appropriations Committee Chairman Larry Kimmel said it was a challenge to try to give graduate students all the money they wanted. He said that the committee gave money to the organizations that could best use funding and that the committee encouraged graduate students to look elsewhere for money, too.
"We don't want to be the only source of funds," he said.
The School of Dentistry Honduran Service Project, whose participants will travel to a Honduran orphanage to provide dental care, received $800 of the $1,600 requested. Owzar asked why the organization could not give more to this group, sparking debate about the interplay between projects with benefit to the community and the organization's own funding shortage.
Kimmel said that while the project was worthwhile from a public relations and humanitarian standpoint, it was not economically feasible. "(The $800 grant) is more than 10 percent of our money for this semester," he said.
After $1,900 of the group's $7,000 budget had been doled out, Vice President of External Affairs Kleem Chaudhary, a chemistry graduate student, ended the meeting with the GPSF midyear report. Although not required, the report is a GPSF tradition.
Chaudhary mainly focused on saving money and getting members more involved. He also encouraged his members to take an active role in understanding the organization, saying, "If you haven't looked at the GPSF Web site yet, it's a good idea to do it and see what GPSF is all about."
The meeting concluded with members informally walking around and discussing plans for the rest of the year. The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Nov. 6.
