Plant Biology Graduate Student Association
PBGSA Chair: Caylyn Railey
The PBGSA is the Plant Biology Graduate Student Association: all Plant Biology grad students are members. PBGSA is an important group as it is a place for Plant Biology students to get to know each other, it interacts with Plant Biology faculty, and it helps plan many important annual events, such as recruitment. If you want more information about PBGSA, just talk to any officer.
Events planned by PBGSA: Student invited speaker: PBGSA invites a professor to speak at a Friday Plant Biology seminar. This includes selecting the professor, inviting the professor, helping to plan the visit with Plant Biology administrative staff and acting as the host for the speaker. This happens once per semester or once per year.
Recruitment weekend: PBGSA helps to plan and facilitate the recruitment weekend. This includes planning the activities on Saturday afternoon, helping to transport recruits and organizing graduate student attendance to events over the weekend. This is the most important event of the year and PBGSA is a large part of it.
Social events: Events include the annual SIPS Chili Cookoff and Crossroads, a semi-monthly event when a professor invites the graduate students to their house for dinner and a paper discussion. Other social events have included brunch, picnics, ice skating, and fossil-hunting trips.
PBGSA officers:
- President: Oversees most of the day to day function of the group, plans events
- Vice president: Helps with the day to day function, attends GSC meetings, plans events Treasurer: Helps to set up monthly budgets to submit to the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly (GPSA) Finance Commission (see below), tracks finances
- Secretary: Write up the minutes to send out after meetings
- GPSA Representative: Attends bi-weekly GPSA (see below) meeting to allow for funding
Funding: Funding is obtained from the Graduate & Professional Student Assembly (GPSA) and is used for community events (e.g. skating, fossil hunting) as well as paying for a student invited speaker for the Friday seminar.
