Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 18:00:02 EDT To: advise@MIT.EDU From: Liana Lareau Subject: Programming and Support minutes Goals of the section: -community interaction / campus-wide programming -peer advising and support -professional development -dining -system coordination -staffing and budget -faculty-student interaction -rewards and recognition dining: include the Institute Dining Report; recommend that it be implemented, but don't add much faculty-student interaction: existing House Fellow program needs more staff support, more money for programming. good idea but needs improvement. encourage LGs to interact with more than one faculty person - eg, dinner for faculty where a handful show up. along those lines, the student-sponsored "meet the faculty" study breaks in the Bush Room work well. hard to reserve space, but it's a better setting than grungy dorm lounge. Encourage LGs to do this? money for LGs that have events for faculty, and for families of faculty. EC carnival, for instance, attracts lots of fac. kids. need (part-time) staff member to deal with coordinating this, especially the funding side. perhaps have a faculty rep work with the staffer. Overall, there needs to be a funding group for community interactions (Residential Programming Board or something) GRTs: require them to hold ~2 dorm-wide events per year (term?), in addition to whatever hall events they should be doing, chosen from different categories: social, real-life ed, intellectual, for instance. Many GRTs already do this. make sure that there's funding to both the housemasters and the GRTs for this sort of thing. the program should probably be available for FSILG resident tutor-type things? Community-wide events: Larry's idea: each LG social chair is responsible for one campus-wide event per year, like Blue Man Group. event open to the community, but not necessarily big enough for everyone. perhaps LGs can collaborate for bigger events MIT needs a horizontal org. structure for admins who deal with programming (CAC, athletics, etc) so there's more cooperation "Tuesday Nights @ Baker" is a good model for the sort of thing that should be supported Professional Development: encourage non-fluffy leadership training, like Leaders in Manufacturing(?) perhaps students could get UROP credit for leadership activities, or have a for-credit IAP seminar where people do leadership things independently (UA, jobs, etc) then reflect on them. Peer advising and support: maybe instead of formal RA thing, have an established support network. Could include everyone from "that physics genius on the fourth floor" to Medlinks, dorm judcomm, peer facilitators and counselors. There are training programs for some of these. Then people can find help without it being too formal- maybe a webpage with "who to talk to". Don't want lawsuits and liability for RAs. This idea builds on the current system which seems to work reasonably well, but with it more established, people who might not go talk to someone because they're insecure about asking would know that these people had volunteered to help. Rewards and recognition: "Distinguished Service to Residence System" or something for individuals (Like Compton Award) Also, LGs that do good things will have some sort of recognition , like a honor roll or financial incentive or even better, a writeup in Technology Review. [In my opinion, MIT needs to embrace the positive parts of its system, publically.] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Questions, comments, etc? Liana