Officer

Minutes

Psychology Club Officer Meeting Minutes

November 18, 2009
Informal inductions for Psi Chi are Wednesday, December 2nd at 6pm in Williams 220. Dress will be business casual, and there should be about 20 new inductees. The food budget will be about $100 for pizza and soda. Psi Chi Cords will be ordered this week. Rose will be putting up new pictures from the social on the website, and deleting old ones from previous years. The new pictures will also go up on Facebook. Dr. Friedman approved the t-shirt idea, and the t-shirts will be given out at the first meeting next semester. The first officer meeting of next semester will be on January 20th.

October 21, 2009

We discussed the social for next week, which will be a Bud Foster's. We spent about $500 on the food, and we will charge $5 per guest. We will bring the membership list to check people off, and we will also bring candy for Halloween. A few officers will meet some people in the Williams lobby if anyone needs a ride. We discussed the t-shirts and slogans, which Emily will run by Dr. Friedman. We also verified the color of the shirt, and we are still planning on ordering 150 shirts. Jackie said that Cindy has the Psi Chi applications, and is checking over them to verify the information and to make sure they meet the requirements. We are keeping the requirements at the top 30% of the class. Rose will change the website to reflect this requirement, as it still only says that the minimum requirement is a 3.0 GPA. Brenton said that he is meeting with an SGA representative tomorrow to talk about the Psychology Club taking a part in the Actively Caring campaign. We discussed the graduate workshop, decided who would ask the specific questions and decided on how the meeting would proceed. By the way, Dr. Friedman, the graduate workshop went very well. Dr. Dunsmore even commented that she was impressed with how smoothly it went. I told her it was all thanks to Dr. Hoffman, because he was so involved with it from the very beginning. Still, it was definitely a complement towards the Psychology Club, and will hopefully open up more faculty members to be willing to participate in future Psychology Club sponsored events.

October 7, 2009

The officers made "Thank You" cards for the graduate students who participated in the graduate panel last week. The officers talked about the upcoming graduate school workshops with Dr. Hoffman. The first workshop will be held October 21st from 7-8pm, but the location is TBA. We want to get a list of graduate students and their contact numbers to hand out at the workshop so undergraduate students will have them to use as resources. Dr. Hoffman would like to be able to see personal statements on a rolling basis. Possibly have a box in the office where people can drop off their statements for Dr. Hoffman to review. The officers were wondering how the room should be set up. We at first thought about having each department in a separate room, but decided that most people may want to hear from all three departments, so it would be best to keep everyone in one room as long as it does not get too crowded. We thought it would be good to let each field have about 10 minutes each to talk. We also thought it may be a good idea to have about 7-10 specific and unique questions that most people may not think about, but that would be beneficial. These questions could be sent to professors so they can prepare to answer them in advance.

-What would be a "kiss of death" to have on the application? (Dr. Hoffman's idea)
-Is there really a cut off for GPA?
-What programs might require application to a program instead of a person, and how will these processes differ?
-How do I narrow the search when looking for programs to apply to?
-What features should I be looking at on a program's website?

We want to target juniors and seniors, so we will be handing out notecard sized flyers in classes and making announcements. We would like to write some helpful websites on the board, such as gradschools.com We then covered some basic housekeeping Amanda still has not heard back from Bud Fosters, where we want to have the fall social, so she will call them or go by the restaurant sometime before the end of this week. Rose contacted the nursing home about having the holiday dance. We think we might have a Valentine's Day dance on February 13 instead of in November when people will be having exams. In order to do the canned food drive, we need to sign up by November 25th, so Amanda will be looking into that. Dr. Geller will be at the next meeting to discuss his actively caring bracelets. We were going back and forth on how many t-shirts to get for the club this year, so Kimberly is going to send out a survey to see how many people want a t-shirt and what size they would wear. Rose has updated the website with the new list of paying members. She will also try to add links for the undergraduate research institute and the Facebook group page.

September 23, 2009

We met with Dr. Hoffman again to discuss the upcoming graduate events. We went over the survey that was sent out, unfortunately there were only 42 replies. Possibly the survey was only sent to seniors, so we decided to sent it to the juniors this time. The main interests expressed in the survey were in clinical and counseling. There was also a decent bit of interest in neuroscience and developmental, so are planning on getting a person from each of those departments. Dr. Hoffman wants to get someone from a terminal Master's program in counseling education from the Roanoke campus. Dr. Hoffman would also like to do something for graduate school applications, so people can know what they need to do to have a good application. If there are enough people interested, we may break it up into two weeks with two to three fields represented each week. Emily will order a checkbook for Nicole. Emily told us about the psychology club listserv: psycclub@listserv.vt.edu Everyone told what success they had looking for places to volunteer. Emily said that the Blueridge Autism Clinic requires background checks, which would complicate matters too much. Other suggestions: The Montgomery County Christmas Store Campus Core, a new club that promotes mental health and awareness of mental illness, possibly coordinating events with them Best Buddy Program, just mention this to people at the meetings New River Community Action: Headstart and CHIP, both seemed promising Nursing home visit, sponsoring and event for the seniors Read Across America Relay for Life Emily told us to start thinking of t-shirt designs. We decided on a dark green shirt with white print, but everyone is going to try to come up with something humorous. If there are enough ideas, we may have the club vote on what the design/slogan should be. We talked about the grad panel for next week. We will be getting them food from Jimmy Johns with a budget of about $50. WE will have cards with names and fields for each graduate student. Dr. Geller may be speaking the meeting after next, Amanda will formally invite him. We decided to try to do icebreakers at the beginning of each meeting just to get everyone warmed up and to make the environment more comfortable for everyone. For the social, we decided on a Halloween theme, with decorations and candy. We decided to hold the social at Bud Fosters with around a $350 budget.

September 9, 2009

Dr. Hoffman was with us for the first half of the meeting so we could discuss possible graduate school information sessions that he will be helping us with. He had the idea that students should have the opportunity to talk with faculty one-on-one to get information,have questions answered and have CVs and personal statements looked over. This is so students could get specific feedback, which might be more productive than just giving a formal presentation, especially for people who are in the process of applying to graduate school. We thought that the meetings could be at a different time of the week than the general meetings, and we thought that sometime in October would be good because people should really be working on their graduate school applications by that point. We thought that there may be some issues getting the faculty involved, but we would like to have at least one person from each research department within psychology. We also thought that it would be good to get some people who are more focused on counseling, since Tech is so research based. Dr. Hoffman suggested getting someone from the Master's program at the Roanoke campus, or from Radford, to discuss social work and counseling. We discussed just how much the sessions should be broken down, and how many fields should participate (strictly psychology, or should we include human development, sociology, philosophy, etc.). Dr. Hoffman also suggested that we obtain a list of names and contact information from faculty so that even if the faculty do not want to participate, the students can still contact them directly with any questions. IT was also suggested that possibly a few of the officers or graduate students we trained to evaluate CVs for students. We ended the discussion by deciding that it would be best to send out an email survey to see how many people are interested in the graduate school info sessions, and where their particular interests lie. After hopefully getting a decent amount of feedback, we will meet back with Dr. Hoffman to discuss exactly how we should proceed. After that discussion, we went over some basic housekeeping. We decided that we needed change in order to sell shirts, and Nicole should be getting about $40 in change for the next meeting. It was assured that no one needed to use personal money for the pizza and drinks last week, so Nicole was able to write checks for all of that. We decided to sell the shirts from the last two years together for $8, so we can get rid of them more quickly. Brad brought up how he should approach Sharkey's about fund raising with them again this year. We then discussed what events we will be sponsoring this year. We decided that instead of doing Sinkland Farms with Cornerstone in October, that maybe we should waiting until December so we can give them a Christmas party. Amanda will look into this and we will decide later. We also discussed what events we could sponsor to get other members involved. We thought of ideas,possibly for the Veteran's Hospital, the Humane Society, the Blueridge Autism Center, and a nursing home. But none of these seemed particularly promising. Emily gave all of the officers the assignment to come up with an idea for next week. We thought about doing some more fun things to get people excited about the club. Brad thought of some sort of pseudoscience fair, or some other fun events. For the next general meeting we will have someone from Career Services talk about internships and coops. Emily will announce how the violence and victimization lab is looking for male undergraduate research assistants. Jackie will also be handing out Psi Chi applications. We then discussed who we should get for the graduate panel. We thought about 8 people would work, at least one from each of the 4 research areas within the psychology department, and possibly some people from other departments such as education and human development. We didn't decide on which faculty member to invite yet though.


August 26, 2009
5:45pm-7:05pm

Officers took new pictures for the website and bulletin board in Williams. Emily talked to each new officer to make sure that the officers fully understood their responsibilities. Talked to Nicole about how to write checks for the club and pay for food and other club related expenses Talked to Kimberly about making flyers for each meeting, have them approved by Dr. Friedman, and sent to Cindy Sunday before the meeting, and post on boards and classroom signs on Monday We decided to change the time for the officer meetings to 6:30pm due to some of the officers having class until after 6pm Emily went over the general meeting schedule for the semester: September 2- Introduce officers, go over dues fore the club, Jackie will go over Psi Chi, then we will ask everyone what they would like to see happen in the meetings, Emily will show the old t-shirts, and then there will be an Icebreaker game September 30- Graduate Panel October 14- Guest Speaker (TBA) October 28- Fall Social (Possible Themes?) November 11- Guest Speaker (TBA) December 2- Informal Psi Chi Inductions Dues will be the same, $25 semester, $40 year. We went over the schedule for Gobblerfest: We will have a posterboard with information about Psi Chi,the purpose, requirements, and picture.0There will be handouts of the general meeting schedule, a display of the Psi Chi banner and a past club t-shirt. There will also be a sign-up sheet for emails, and a possible free raffle for one of the old shirts for people who sign-up their emails. We went over who can volunteer and when, and Emily set up a schedule. We will also be giving away candy at the table. The first meetings will have free pizza from Papa John's, 15 large, 7 pepperoni, 8 cheese. Nicole and Kimberly will pick them up, Emily will order them. Nicole will bring sodas and Emily will bring plates, cups, and napkins. Emily talked to Jackie about Psi Chi. The applications will be handed out on September 16th, and applications will be due October 14th. At the end we talked about guest speaker ideas. Possibly have someone come in to talk about internships. Amanda will contact Dr. Hoffman about holding a graduate school workshop.