Graduates’ government

Unlike ASUI, many students may never hear about Graduate & Professional Student Association — GPSA. 

But just like ASUI, GPSA shares the same purposes and goals in the UI community.

“We are the graduate students’ form of ASUI. We are the graduate students’ government,” GPSA President Kate Cobb said. “We are pretty much the same, except the demographic.”

Like  all undergraduate students are members of ASUI, all graduate students are members of GPSA.

Cobb said GPSA and ASUI are constructed similarly with a senate, committees and board officers.

“I, as the president, have to go to most of the events that Max, ASUI president does. We have the same interaction with the president and the provost,” Cobb said.

Jerry McMurtry, the faculty advisor and associate dean of College of Graduate Studies said the main purpose of GPSA is to give graduate students a group that helps them engage with each other around campus.

He also said all of GPSA’s funding comes from student fees, and from that funding, GPSA is able to provide a world grant to many graduate students. The grant is typically used for traveling research money.

“GPSA gets a certain amount of money from student fees, and they turn that around, back to the students in travel grants,” McMurtry said. “It’s a way for students to get more support for presentations in conferences.”

Cobb, who is in her second year as GPSA president, said the travel grant program stands out the most from GPSA and is the program that differs most from anything ASUI does.

“If people know about GPSA, that’s usually what they know — the travel grants,” Cobb said.

Travel grants are given to selected graduate students every two months. Students can only receive one grant per year, and the amount of the grant is varied. Students can earn up to $300 for regional travel, up to $700 for national travel and up to $900 for international travel.

Each year, there are six deadlines for students to apply for the travel grants. A student can apply for the grant in a maximum of three deadlines for travel — two deadlines before travel and one deadline after travel.

“If they get rejected on one of them for some reasons, they can reapply as long as they’re in those time frames,” Cobb said.

McMurtry said it can be harder for graduate students to be involved on campus because most of them are busy with research and some already have families.

“Graduate students are very, very busy. It takes a lot of commitment for people like Kate to serve other people,” McMurtry said.

GPSA does host social events like Fall and Spring socials, which are always family friendly.

“We also have coffee and tea hours. For the past couple years we only had them during dead week, but this year we’re going to have them more sporadically,” Cobb said.

Nurainy Darono can be reached at [email protected]

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