For all of you who missed the meeting (or if you just want to refresh your memory about what happened), the TNDR board proudly presents: Meeting summary in english! (for swedish, look at the minutes which will be up shortly)
TNDR meeting, september 6 2012
We elected some representatives for positions that were left empty at the last general meeting. Marie Anderson is now the substitute for the recruitment committee, Andreas Frisk is our representative to the Centrum for accelerator and instrument development and Fredrik Wahlberg is represneting us at the UPMARC board. We still have some positions open: library collaboration committee, substitute for the assistant profersorship committee and substitute for the UPMARC board.
At the meeting we also talked about the proposal from the vice-chancellor for abolishing the study grant ("utbildningsbidrag"), the PhD students think this is a good idea but our faculty has issued a statement with a negative view of the proposal. The proposal will be discussed at the university board ("konsistoriet").
We have also discuss the "Pedagogic plan of action for the teknat faculty, 2013-2016" (my own translation). A big difference from the previous plan is that now PhD students are included in the plan specifically. One of the points in the plan is to make an introductory course mandatory for all PhD students, and this led to some more discussion. Some people think it's good to have and introduction mandatory, so that supervisors can't keep their PhD studnets from attending. Others thinks these courses should not be mandatory, since if they are good people will go there anyway, and if they are made mandatory but they are bad it will just be a waste of time. We concluded to leave it in the plan, but the representatives at the graduate education board shall raise this question with the course leaders (if you have any specific comments, you can send them to li.caldeira_balkestahl@physics.uu.se).
Then Ling informed about upcoming social events: fika at the end of september and pizza night in october. More info will come.
Representatives from different boards informed about what's been going on:
- at the graduate education board, the pedagogic plan and the grant abolishing were discussed. At this time, we also talked about the course in research ethics and the representatives will take this up in the graduate education board (complains about the existing CRB course and possibility to take courses organiaed by someone else).
-the PhD student board at the university level discussed teaching, swedish course for PhD students from other countries than Sweden and visa for PhD students (now there is only the regular student visa).
