documents

Scientific Computing Student Club

Memorandum

Document No. - W24-009

Title: Presidential Monthly Report

This report contains general updates related to the club for the previous month. In the last month, we:

Coffee Social Hour Program

The first coffee social hour went well. there were not attendants. I think in the future, I might change it to just a coffee hour. The social part might be too much of an investment for new members.

Club Meeting

Our first meeting had 7 members in attendance. 6 In person, and 1 on Zoom. 5 of the 7 were officers in the organization. We catered cottage inn pizza to this event, buying vegetarian, and gluten free options. The total cost of this order was $58.21.

Our first meeting had four components:

It seemed like everyone like the trivia, so we can consider that a success. It also provides and important function by letting the attendees eat thier food before the workshop or presentation starts. If we continue to include food into our meetings, it will be good to include an event like trivia too. Trivia also gives us a chance to record everyone who attends. This system wasn't implemented well in the previous meeting because there was no way to track team names with the people in the teams. There were 6 teams each composed of one person. with small numbers like this, a system isn't really needed, but for a larger meeting, we will need to set something up.

The Trivia question difficulty seemed appropriate. There was a good distribution of scores amongst the teams.

We were not able to finish the planned workshop in time. Perhaps the rest of this workshop can be presented in a future meeting. This might be something we should consider for future workshops; if the presenter cannot finish within the allotted time, they can resume it in a "part II". This might be a system worth developing.

We were able to go through the announcements relativley quick. It only took 5 minutes. I think we all enjoyed looking at the results of the programming poll.

We had one member pitch a project. Once this project gets entered in, it will be the first project the club engages on. The project focuses on re-creating a simulation program, which is one of the example use-cases for club projects. The goal in re-creating the project would be to learn more and share knowledge about the subject domain. I also think the way the project was advertised was perfectly fine and needs no further advertisement. Once the proposal is created, the project committee can create the git repository.

Becoming an SSO took some significant legwork. What made it even more difficult was our long period of being un-registered. It likely would have been easier to start a new club. The process for this registration was as follows:

  1. Gathered enough members to start forming the club.
  2. Drafted and ratified a constitution, laying out the leadership structure and authorized signers.
  3. Advertized our idea of a club to students across campus, hoping to gather the 10 members required for registration (we had plenty of members who said they would join through a google form that was published several semesters previously).
  4. Had authorized signers take an OrgEssentials Canvas Course and attend an orientation.
  5. I (Jacob) had to get the campus center for involvement revive our organization from the depths of maize pages. They then made me an authorized signer to be able to proceed with registration
  6. Began the registration process, making a short and long club description and filling out many other club details, like providing a list of club members.
  7. Nominated Brendan Kochunas as club advisor, who accepted
  8. Worked with Sarah and Vancho to complete our Sponsored Student Organization Agreement, filling in information related to risk-management, advisor, and funding.
  9. Completed our registration form with the constitution and SSO Agreement.
  10. Our registration was accepted the next day
  11. We then had to nominate new authorized signers, and once all accepted through the Student Organization Account Services, we were officially an SSO.

This process was adruous. At many points I felt like we were in the depths of beurocracy. I think for future leadership, it might be helpful if we developed an abbreviated guide for this process since most of the steps must be repeated every year. Even though there are many resources for this process already, our experience might be able to shed more light on what is required.

What does being and SSO mean for us? Mainly, it means we have access to more resources and we can affiliate ourselves with the university. For a few specific items:

We also came right up to the deadline on completing this registration. Passing the deadline would not have meant that much. We would just have to restart the registration process. Related to this, we have the opportunity to re-register starting in March, and we must re-register before September if we want to remain a club.

Official Club Members

Per W24-008 we decided to add all students who filled out the form starting in the fall semseter. Adding these students was a part of the registration form for becoming an SSO, and when our registration was accepted all those students were invited to officially join the club on maize pages. This now serves as our official membership roster. It was suprising to see the number start below 10 but quickly climb up towards the twenties. Many of the people who filled out the form a long time ago were eager to officially join. In addition to adding these new students, I cross checked our spreadsheet with the existing members on the maize page and removed any that were not on both because they were likely members from 2019 or earlier and may not be interested in the club anymore.

College of Engineering Affiliation

Similar to our SSO status, we are now affiliated with the college of engineering. This actually happened before we were officially an SSO because we were still waiting on authorized signers. Similar to SSO, once we applied, it was approved the next day. I think the only benefit we get from being affiliated is we can reserve engineering rooms and I think they put us on some website.

Outlook

Overall, I think we are making great strides as a new club and as new leadership. We are a small club right now, which can feel like failure given our ambitions, but, as I have said before, this is a unique opportunity and provides us with a lot of room to experiment and figure out what works best before we accomadate many more students. I think the best thing we can do now is to slowly put our name out there and experiment with what we want the club to be. Trying to grow too fast right now might seem disingenuous and combining that with ideas that don't really work might turn a lot of people away from the club. While we might not have many attendees at our meetings and we might not have large scale projects, we can still test out many ideas that we get excited about without the pressure of whether or not they will work out. Once we get through the initial iterations of our ideas, we can improve upon them. Then, by the time we grow to a medium-sized club, we will be more comfortable in our leadership positions and have our ideas ironed out.

A small example of ironing-out ideas is how trivia was implemented in our first meeting. The original idea for answer submission was for trivia team to walk their cards to me, but after looking at the layout of the room, I knew that would be difficult, so instead I collected the trivia answers. This approach obviously would not have scaled, so a better trivia system will have to be implemented in the future. If we had 10-20 more members present, trivia might not have worked out as well or could have been a complete mess.

So, for this next month, I think we all need to dive into our roles, experiment with the ideas that excite us, and not worry about attendance. Once we figure out what we need to do, we will have organized a club that is worth spending what little free time students have on.