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March 4, 2014

These meeting minutes will not be nearly as witty or funny as Laura's, but you should read them anyway because we discussed a lot of important things at the HSGA meeting this past week. 

MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS WHOLE EMAIL: Attached to this email is the HGSA grant application for this year. Since HGSA did not offer grants for last fall, we are offering two grant cycles this semester. We are offering two $250.00 grants that can be retroactively applied to research and travel done during Fall 2013, and we are also offering three $150.00 grants for research and conference travel for Spring 2014. The application is due Wednesday, March 26 and grants will be awarded sometime in April. 

First on the calendar after grants are due is the department's Accepted Student's Day. It will be on March 27th and 28th. If you are available please please please come to campus on those days to help out and introduce the accepted students in the UNM history community. HGSA and Dr. Ryan are in the process of creating events for the two days including a meet and greet breakfast, lunch, campus tours, and seminar sit-ins. If one isn't already planned, we may put on a colloquium for new students to experience. 

HGSA will also be holding a workshop sometime in April to discuss professionalization and the first steps of the job market including the application process for jobs, post-docs, and publishing as related to the job market. Drs. Florvil, Withycombe, and Gibbs have offered to speak at the workshop. A specific date and time will follow shortly. 

The HGSA book sale will be on April 1st and 2nd, so please sign up outside the HGSA office to help sell books. If you have any books to donate to the sale, please drop them off in the HGSA office. 

Additionally on April 1st, assistant State Historian Rob Martinez will be coming to our meeting to discuss the historical scholars program which awards $1000.00 grants to scholars researching in New Mexico archives. Our department has a great track record when it comes to these grants, and several history graduate students received the grant just this past year. 

HGSA is designing a new official website through UNM.edu. The wonderful Laura Powell attended a website building workshop and has generously agreed to design the site for us. Yay! The website will most likely include relevant forms and applications, contact information, and events. If you have any idea of what else should be included in the website, Laura sent an email about it this week so go back and read it. Or you can email Laura at lpowel5@unm.edu. 

Elena has diligently been attending the GPSA meetings where they have been discussing issues of graduate student funding and how to allocate extra monies not used during graduate assistantships (i.e. the extra three or six units paid for but not used when a funded student only take two or three classes). We discussed whether this money would be better used to extend assistantships or fund students for a semester or two that don't have full funding. We agreed that five year funding packages would be very attractive to current and new students, but that extended assistantships was not in the power of the GPSA. If you are interested in these funding matters please contact Elena. 

Is that enough? Remember the grant application is attached to this email and is due Wednesday, March 26. 

Take care and Laura's every entertaining minutes will be back next month, 

Maggie DePond

HGSA VP