Meeting Minutes 2007-02-14

From Diversity

Notes from the 1st Diversity Committee Meeting Feb 14, 2007 Present: Bob, Ellen, Ganesh, Juliana, Suresh

- Action items:

• apply for grant from the State of Utah
• pizza for pre-majors (Liz and Juliana)
• lunch with majors (Ellen and Juliana)
• try to get a list of all minority students from Kara
• create Wiki for our committee where we can share notes, articles, etc

(in progress)

Notes:

• Before we start any new effort, we should do a market analysis.

There are several ideas we can pursue:

1) Have an event (or series) of events for high school teachers--this would not only serve as 'education' for them, but it would also give us access to them, and they could give us feedback and suggestions for our outreach activities.

Ganesh suggested we get Sneha involved in this.

Ellen suggested we have high-level technical talks. Our PhD students could give these talks once a month.

Peter Jensen has interacted with high-school teachers, and says they are interested in ideas (e.g., projects) to help them teach CS. He suggested these events be a forum where we teach them how to teach interesting CS projects. He also mentioned that teachers have a required number of hours of training per year--although this would require us to go through some bureaucracy, we could try to set this up as "formal training" that is accepted by the school (this would also help us attract more teachers).

Peter Jensen can get a list of high schools.

2) Our efforts should target both women and other minorities. One idea is to also target high schools (and middle schools) that have a large percentage of Hispanic and African Americans.

3) Coordinate with existing efforts in the College.

Peter Jensen is aware of those. He has been to a meeting (on Feb 14) and will give us an update on that.

4) Apply for a grant from the State of Utah to fund some of our activities. Ganesh will prepare a draft of the proposal.

This grant, if fund, could helpp pay for: summer camp, mentoring students (e.g., to prepare for the science fair), and other outreach activities.

5) Changes to the curriculum.

This is a longer term effort and it being handled by the Curriculum Committee.

6) Innovation forum

Suresh suggested we have a year-round mentoring program.

This requires coordination with schools wrt grades.

7) Undergraduate retention.

One idea is to have student advisors. These could be senior undergrads or PhD students. One issue is how to 'define' the program: should we have advisors only for women and minorities? Maybe we could have a program of all students, but by having women as advisors, women students would be more likely to sign up (?). Another issue is how to fund the student advisors.

Another idea is to have Profs to sign up to be advisors too.

We should host events to foster a sense of community among the women (and minority) students. Although the graduate students have a monthly event, they are not attended by undergrads.

We are planning two events: one for the pre-majors; and another with majors (see action items above). We should use these events as part of our market analysis and try to understand what they need/want and issues they have encountered. Some questions we can ask them:

      - why did they choose CS as a major?
      - what turns them down? e.g., in our curriculum

We can also make sure they know that they can get advise from Profs (i.e., they can knock at our doors).