No stress, just puppies

It’s the last meeting of the year! Bwogger Jennifer Nugent refrains from shouting “School’s out!” and reports back on budgets, events, and constitutional changes to member positions.

What starts with a president’s puppy, ends with heartfelt speeches, and is punctuated by rounds of applause? The final full meeting of the General Studies Student Council! Every member was proud of their work and the team as a whole, which was expressed after every briefing and was heartily agreed upon by the other members of the council. Bwog and students alike will miss the presidential puns, the carefully chosen memes, and surprising productivity of the current GSSC members. However, all this nostalgia did not come at the expense of a predictably packed meeting.

• Finance: Announced a final co-sponshorship for the new GS mentorship program’s end-of-year celebration for mentors and mentees. Finance also presented their year in numbers—the simplification being that their starting funds totaled about $388,000 and they left about $8,000 to add to next year’s school allotment.
• Campus Life: Don’t forget! Passover lunch today, a GSSC-SGA picnic (so suck it mainstream Columbia students) coming soon, and the essential finals snack attacks. For the snack attack, a menu will be released soon, but the overall theme is international cuisine.

• Policy updates: A member of the Coalition Against Sexual Violence came back to the GSSC to re-present and represent a proposal that all the other councils have signed to disallow students found responsible for committing gender-based misconduct from being Teaching Assistants. This is meant to keep the classrooms as safe spaces and applies only to undergraduates as of right now. They are asking for a neutral 3rd party that’s confidential to be able to access this information. The resolution passed!
• Policy’s Constitution review: We need to discuss new changes to the Constitution: “Wellness Rep” is being replaced by “Students with Disabilities Representative.” The University Senate created a subcommittee to look into disabled students’ quality of life, and one of their policy recommendations was that each council have a representative tasked with handling issues that arose. GS, demographically, has a lot of students with disabilities, and the idea is that the Campus Life committee would handle more wellness events and everyone would have wellness in mind. They also want to get rid of the “Four-Council Representative” who coordinates with other councils. Different teams and representatives are already involved and the issue seems largely redundant. Additionally, the council chose to exchange “Multicultural Affairs Representative” with “Diversity and Equity Representative” to widen the scope of the representative’s mission. This also enables the person to focus on socioeconomic, gender, sexual-orientation, race, and religious-based issues. Now we have a few minutes of silence to consider. Bylaw change approved after years of work. More applause.
• Events: Thanks to GSSC, Congressional hopeful Erin Schrode will give a talk in 501 Schermerhorn at 8 pm this Thursday to talk about her experience being the youngest candidate this year.

“I led my last council meeting ever perfectly.” said President Elizabeth Heyman. “You guys surprisingly have made my year very special and I’m very grateful that I only wanted to kill you sometimes, no I’m kidding… There have been so many good moments and there’s no chance that anything I envisioned last year would’ve happened without you all.”

Softies via yasmapaz/CC BY-SA 2.0