description
I was elected to serve on the Membership Committee of the university’s Graduate Council. This committee reviews departmental applications for newly hired faculty (or newly eligible faculty) to serve as graduate faculty. Members of the various committees on Graduate Council also vote on agenda items of relevance to the whole Council, such as (in the past) graduate student health insurance and stipend raises, curricular changes, etc.

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On this university committee, I helped revise the application for the 2009-10 U-Club scholarship application and serve as a judge of these applications. During the 2008-09 year, the committee received around 70 applications, and we awarded 10 scholarships.

accompanying materials

• revised U-Club Scholarship materials (HTML)

description
This committee is responsible for professional growth of the department, specifically in the areas of alumni networking, a speaker series, and outreach activities such as Homecoming events and end-of-semester parties. This year I have helped organize and served as a greeter at the department’s Homecoming tent and will plan the end-of-year reception.

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During this academic year, the writing program computer labs were undergoing life-safety renovations, so Associate Chair Jim Kalmbach and I took the opportunity to redesign the gutted classrooms to be more pedagogically and technologically sound. (The rooms had not been redesigned since they were installed as computer labs in 1985.) This Task Force was a temporary creation during the 2008-09 academic year so that I could be re-assigned from my previous service responsibilities to focus on this time-intensive and time-sensitive project.

Because these nine rooms are not “owned” by the English department, Jim and I worked closely with university constituents including the University Labs administrators, Facilities leads, the university architects, and the vice-provost, among others. I was responsible for redesigning the rooms with a new layout to accommodate new desks, one additional computer and desk in each room, a mounted projector and new screen, and handicap accessible space, all given the current spatial and electrical constraints of the rooms. One of our main accomplishments as part of this Task Force was to convince the university architect to tear down two walls between classrooms to make them more pedagogically useful spaces and to get him to agree to purchase standardized computer desks to replace the built-in desks that had to be removed in the asbestos abatement. 

accompanying materials

• Jim Kalmbach’s presentation of the redesign at the Computers & Writing 2009 conference (includes final blueprints, the prototype of which I had designed, and pictures of the new furniture) [mov; recommended download first]

description
During the year I served on this committee, our main project was to revise all of the undergraduate course descriptions for the new catalog, which was changing over to a two-year publication cycle. We also worked on revising the Goals of English Studies document, but did not complete that project.

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