On Monday, the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly held its first meeting of the semester in Bache Auditorium to announce important updates regarding its financial structure and to elect new committee leaders.
Guest speakers Terri Boslett, associate dean of students, finance and administration, and Johnathan Hart, finance manager, guided members on how to submit budgets and request payments on allocated budgets on the CampusGroup website. The GPSA financial system has eliminated all paper applications and merged the Student Activities Funding Commission and GPSA funding sources with C.U. Tonight, Gender Justice Advocacy Coalition, Club Sports Council and external sources such as co-sponsorships to be managed online on one common platform.
Prior to the launch of CampusGroups, committees were required to submit a paper application signed by the treasurer, president and advisor for both the budget and the payment. To simplify the process, all applications have moved online. Now, executive board members will only need to approve the budget which they can do online via email rather than signing a paper form.
According to Hart, University and Student Services are currently seeking to implement Zelle, an electronic payment system similar to Venmo, in Cornell’s reimbursement system to enable direct payment students and reduce the delay time between business transactions.
Hart clarified that Venmo will not be used as it is not compliant with security protocol.
The deadline for GPSA committees to submit budget requests is Friday, Sept. 27 at 11:55 p.m. Committees must upload necessary documents such as detailed receipts and a copy of the event advertisement as part of their online budgets and have the budget approved by the treasurer, advisor and president to have their funding ratified for the semester.
After the budget discussion, Victoria Kasonde grad, vice president for internal operations, introduced two new documents to update the previous Charters and Bylaws of the GPSA, due to concerns it was too long and unwieldy for new community members to read.
The first document was a one page FAQ quick sheet covering fundamental information on the nature of the GPSA and top ten FAQ on topics relating to the Robert’s Rules of Order and the withdrawal process.
The second document is the Official Onboarding Guidebook, a comprehensive information packet that interprets and re-organizes the original document in greater depth.
The second part of the meeting was an election of new GPSA committee representatives. The newly-elected members are Vice President of Communications Taylor Tejeda, Student Advocacy Committee Chair Jaron Kent-Dobias, Faculty Awards Committee Chair Cody Duell and University Assembly Delegate Shiang Wan Chin.
All the elections for representatives ––with the exception of the vice president of communications ––were uncontested.
Megan Gelsinger, Megan Sawey and Jeremy Faulk were added as new voting members of the Social Sciences Committee.
Positions for the Master’s at Large, Master’s of Engineering and Master’s of ILR committee positions are still vacant.