LSUW Linguistics Society at UW

Officers job descriptions:

President | Vice President | Secretary | Treasurer | Assistant to the VP | Social Chair | Webmaster

President

First and foremost, you are responsible for making sure all the other officers' tasks are taken care of in a timely fashion. You may have to remind officers of certain things sometimes, or pick up the slack a bit.

You are also the social ringleader. It's important to get the grads feeling connected and involved. You should also encourage them to interact, submit, and get involved in academia and conferences.

The faculty will likely treat the LSUW president as a liaison between themselves and grads when issues of student opinion are important (especially during dept. reviews or changes in dept. set-up or faculty).

You are also a liaison for any visiting students that may want to check out the program, visit a class, and meet other grad students…

Summer stuff:

• Make contact with Ellen in June for contact info for new grads
• Set up mentors – send out call to linggrads for volunteers
• Match up tentative pairs, and OK them with Ellen
• Mentors should:
• Contact mentee over summer
• Have lunch at least once at beginning of year
• Offer advice, answer questions…
• Arrange meeting with other officers before beginning of academic year
• Prepare with chair (Julia Herschensohn) for orientation at beginning of academic year
• Greet students
• Introduce LSUW

LSUW meetings:

• Verify agenda with secretary
• Run meetings; keep them focused (harder than it sounds!!)
• Report on any faculty meeting you may have attended

Generally, the secretary should send out an email on the Monday before the meeting with a tentative agenda, asking for any other agenda items to be sent to her/him before the end of the day. On Wednesday, a second reminder should be sent out with the full agenda.

1st LSUW meeting of the year:

• Welcoming statement
• GPSS – we need 2 volunteers. We also have to
• Submit proposal and be specific
• Arrange 1st pub crawl
• Remind everyone of grad requirements – milestones, etc…
• Fundraising / money issues
• Invited speaker

May LSUW meeting:

• Nominations for following years' officers, open over email for a week or two; to be announced at June meeting
• Get list from Mike of who received a milestone (Summer of last year-Spring of this year). These include MA, PhC, PhD, and tenure. Get volunteers to find and paint the milestones before the end of the year party.

Faculty meetings:

• Usually about once a month
• You listen (and can interact) until you are excused
• You report back to the LSUW at the next meeting
• You may be called on to represent grad student opinion

In essence, be the motivator and chip in as needed. The president has to be the one to ultimately make sure things get done.

Vice President

The Vice-President is responsible for scheduling the linguistics colloquium for one calendar year. This involves:

• Contacting faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate students and speakers from neighboring universities in late August/early September to invite them to speak. (Faculty may also suggest speakers that they would like you to invite). You will be provided with a spreadsheet containing names and contact details.
• As speakers reply, negotiating with speakers to put together the schedule - most people are pretty flexible in this regard.
• Making sure there is a suitable room available for the colloquium (it should seat about 100, and have a projector available for laptops).
• Handing over the colloquium schedule to the Assistant to the VP, so that they can sign up a host for each colloquium.
• At the beginning of each quarter, sending out a reminder to speakers with the date of their colloquium. The reminder should also let them know when you will need them to submit their abstract, and check whether they have any particular equipment needs.
• About two weeks before the colloquium, sending out another reminder to the speaker to request an abstract, and also a short bio which you will use to present them. (Most speakers are happy to provide this, otherwise they will point you to their CV).
• Making sure that the desired equipment is present in the room, and that it is working ahead of time.
• Putting together a colloquium announcement with the speaker's abstract, to go out at the beginning of each week.
• Introducing the speaker at the colloquium, and wrapping up the Q&A at the appropriate moment to announce the refreshments.
• If a speaker comes from another local university (i.e. they can drive here), they receive a small honorarium. They need to stop by Mike's office in order to sign the paperwork for this. You also need to organize a faculty member to act as their 'faculty host' (Being faculty host involves taking them out to lunch or dinner the day that they come to speak).

There are templates for the invitations, the reminders and the colloquium announcements. The Linguistics office staff will help with the arrangements for rooms/honoraria.

Alongside the regular colloquium, the vice-president also contacts the outside invited speaker that LSUW members decide on, to invite them to present. If the first speaker is unavailable, then the second choice should be contacted. The Treasurer and the Assistant to the VP help with the trip details (travel refunds, hotel bookings, funding for the visit and other details). This speaker should also have a faculty host.

The Microsoft/UW symposium has also taken place in the colloquium slot over the past two years - if this is still the case next year, then you will need to contact Microsoft at the beginning of the year, and settle on some provisional dates for the symposium, so that you will be able to keep suitable slots free.

Note:

It is a good idea to leave a couple of unscheduled slots in each quarter early on, so that you can fit in the guest speaker, and any other visitors to campus whose work is of interest to Linguistics - there can be quite a few.

People find that this position does involve a bigger time commitment, but if you are well-organized, it is not a difficult job.

Secretary

1. Attend monthly LSUW meetings and take notes and attendance. Then, put it all together in an email message. Send that message out to linggrads.
2. Keep in close communication with other officers, especially the President. Usually the monthly LSUW meetings are announced a few days to a week in advance, and along with that, a tentative agenda. Although it is the President who draws up the agenda, the Secretary sends out the announcement.

Additionally, if the President or other officer needs to send out a special announcement, they might ask you to do that.

3. Officially the Secretary is supposed to make sure we have a room to meet in every month (President and Secretary can decide between themselves how they want that to work).
4. It is a good idea to post flyers (hard copies) for our monthly meetings, as email reminders sometimes work and sometimes get "accidentally" deleted, etc. You just have to get to the department to post the announcement on the doors, etc.

One-shot duties--things that need doing only once a year then they're done:

1. Make sure the LSUW constitution is updated. It needs to be updated every 3 years, for some reason. It's not like you have to rewrite it or anything, it's just a matter of checking it over, nodding thoughtfully, saying "Looks good to me!" and resubmitting it to the Student Activities Office, to let them know we're still a living, breathing organization--or at least an organization of living breathing students? Something like that....

2. At the start of every new academic year, you go to ONE orientation meeting held by the SAO (Student Activities Office, in case you forgot). They hold dozens and dozens and DOZENS of these all the time, and make it really easy for you to attend one. It takes usually less than one hour to sit through one, and the SAO people are super nice and want only good things for you and us... that is, LSUW, an RSO (Registered Student Organization).

   You have to attend a registration meeting before October 31st, and fill out the required paperwork before that date too, in order to keep us registered and thus allow us to be eligible for RSO funding, etc., in the future. Anyway, although it is very important that the Secretary do this, it is also very easy. SAO people are the best, and they'll walk you through everything and answer any and all questions. They are super nice.

3. Handle voting procedures, including but not limited to ballot making and ballot counting, etc. Actually, this is a two-shot duty--one for the invited speaker vote and the other for LSUW officer vote.

Treasurer

The role of treasurer has changed over the past year since we no longer get to manage our own travel reimbursements. Currently, the requirements are: read, reread, and then really peruse any e-mails about the "improvements" to the travel reimbursement process, and sign each student's request for travel reimbursement, and take care of reimbursing the invited faculty lecturers for their travel to UW. Not really demanding.

Additional duties could include: being the default treasurer for any conferences, raising cane about people not having any assurance on getting funding for more than one conference a year. (You can apply for reimbursement to as many conferences as you attend as a presenter, but will be prioritized to the end of the list which means that if you really don't have a rich uncle, who loves you, you had best only ask for money for the conference that you most want to attend (any international one), and make sure that your paper is accepted so that you don't regret having not asked for funds for the conference to which you did get accepted the previous quarter. Another role could be planning/managing fund-raising events, i.e. an annual shakedown of linguistics majors. It could really be a piñata
party if held it off-campus.

Assistant to the VP

The assistant to the VP is responsible for scheduling a colloquium host for each colloquium throughout the year. A good way to start is to take the colloquium schedule to the first LSUW meeting of each quarter to recruit volunteers. The schedule can also be posted on the department door, to remind any remaining linggrads to sign up when they visit the linguistics office. Each linggrad is responsible for hosting one colloquium each academic year.

The assistant is also responsible for coordinating hosting arrangements for the LSUW invited speaker, and for any other colloquium-related events throughout the year.

Social Chair

The UW Linguistics department is short on space, especially common space, and students do not have a lounge where to gather. The job of the LSUW Social Chair is to help linguistics students keep in touch with their fellow students, and also with the research being done in the department, by arranging brownbags, pub crawls, and other social events.

Webmaster

The degree of the following responsibilities vary from quarter to quarter, and I'd imagine they might augment if Joyce were to leave (she's been doing a lot of maintaining although she does not have to!).

1. Updating the 'lingweb' website - currently that is mostly just the student web pages, recent grads, honors; however, you will sometimes go in and fix other stuff if you see a glitch here or there.

2. Booting off or booting on somebody to linggrads mailman list.

3. Updating the lsuw site as needed. This is a recent addition. Perhaps just a quarterly update.

Needed skills:

• Working with SSH or SFTP to upload/edit webpages to/on homer (lingweb) or dante (lsuw)
• Knowledge of basic HTML or editing software (e.g. Dreamweaver...) (encourages bad practices)