Satow Room bureau chief Sarah Ngu brings you the highlights from this week’s CCSC meetings. Rising political correspondent Maren Killackey also contributed reporting.

CCSC TV

This thing:

The awkward pauses by the students are cringe-worthy, but most people will agree that they don’t really know exactly what CCSC does. The rest of the video gives the “Sparknotes” breakdown because sometimes understanding Council is as much work as reading the Iliad, with less of the blood, sex, and death stuff to keep you going.

Although worth the watch, the breakdown isn’t fully accurate, as it suggests that Columbia College Senators are completely under the jurisdiction of the CCSC e-board. Although both parties often collaborate, Senators are much more independent than the rest of the Council members. CCSC focuses on the college’s internal activities (think local city), whereas the Senate is the University-wide body that has representatives from every school (think our national Senate).

Though titled ‘Episode 1’ there are no promises of regular installments, so the series is more likely to be posted to yourccsc.com on an ad-hoc basis. It seems like it will be more effective at dealing with major policy issues than at communicating meeting recaps and events listings. Kudos nevertheless to Virat and his communications team in taking things multimedia and hitting the streets, talking to us average folks.

Policy changes

For international students: University Writing will now include two optional sections for international students aimed at teaching standard structure of American academic essays.

For soon-to-be juniors: After last year’s screw up of junior housing assignments, administrators have guaranteed Ryan Cho, VP Policy, that this year there will be greater systemization of the process, which apparently translates to “it will not be done manually.”

Funding

To give or not to give $1,000: TEDxColumbia, a conference surrounding themes of Technology, Entertainment and Design, is requesting a $2,000 co-sponsorship from ESC and CCSC. The conference is headed by a SEAS student committee, so questions were raised about whether it would be relevant to College students, especially since the post-conference activities have been referred to as “SEAS career outreach events.” Decision on whether CCSC would match ESC’s contribution of up to $1k was tabled. The funding committee meets at 5pm at Lerner 568 and will decide this question next Sunday.

Don’t forget about Bwog’s handy budget breakdown, a useful reference for understanding and contextualizing funding decisions.