February Meeting Minutes

The minutes of the February 2020 BISC Graduate Caucus meeting are available here.

The DGSC student reps, currently Melissa Orobko and Sarah Johnson, will be inserting important updates from the committee into Caucus update emails from now on! To begin, Melissa and Sarah would like to emphasize that they are both open to hearing any individual graduate student concerns, especially with student-supervisor conflict, and assisting in any way they are able to. They keep any information 100% confidential and may be able to assist with mediation through the DGSC.

Also, to help address confusion about degree requirements:

• The SFU Calendar has the most formal, binding requirements for completing your degree program. Any changes to these SFU Calendar requirements that happen after your start date do not apply to you. Note that the link to the most current calendar changes each semester.
• Therefore, we highly recommend you look at the degree requirements in the SFU Calendar for your program for the semester in which you started (archived versions are HERE).
• Information that is only found on the Biology website can be updated on an ongoing basis and these updates do apply to you on an ongoing basis.
• Therefore, we highly recommend that you review this page on the Biology website, especially before starting to prepare for any major upcoming event (e.g. transfer to PhD, Master's proposal, APR details, candidacy exam) to find the most up-to-date information on it. Jenny Cory (the DGSC Chair) is in the process of re-organizing this page so it should look different in a month or two.

January Meeting Minutes

The minutes of the January 2020 BISC Graduate Caucus meeting are available here.

Highlights:

• TMRA and PS applications due Feb ^16th
• MSP campaign: We won!!! Please see tssu.ca/msp for information of the settlement. The settlement has two key parts:
  • Invoices from Sept 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020 will need to be submitted to SFU by March 31, 2020 and you will be retroactively reimbursed by SFU Admin with payments to come by July 31, 2020.
  • From April 1, 2020 onwards those still being charged premiums for MSP will be able to enroll in a group plan through SFU, who will pay their bills just like under the old system.
• Please join the TSSU RA mailing list if you have been, are or will be a research assistant at SFU by registering at researchiswork.com/signup