Meeting Minutes for May 16, 2008

This meeting was conducted at the beginning of the summer to make plans for the following Fall.

Attendees

Deana, Paul, Alan, Vitali, Ryan, Nancy Van Ness

Enrollment note for upcoming Fall 2008 courses

Numbers in () represent graduate portion of the enrollment for grad cross-lists.

Course	2007 S	2007 F	2008 S	2008 F
CS 3345		6		18
CS 4348		6		2 (10)
CS 4341		7		17
CS 4384	7		12
CS 4347	4		3

UNIX Course changes

The UNIX course will probably change in the Spring 2009. These changes will be represented in the course catalog in the following Fall.

Plans for teaching C/C++ crash courses

Two plans for approach

1. Teach major differences in a half day session. Example: Sockets, Threads, Dealing with pointers
2. Teach 'differences' from Java in many sessions throughout the semester that provide iterative information about the differences.

Contact Dr. Cooper for more information. She will probably have good pointers for creating a tutorial.

Research Expo

The idea is to get professors who are seeking undergraduate students for research to attend a research showcase. We will ask each of them to come and give a stump speech to attract students. Tentative date for Research fair is Wednesday, Aug 27 @ 6:30.

Orientation Booth

We will get a booth at each ECS Orientation. This booth will have people to man it. We will also talk while the advisors are addressing the incoming student body and their parents.

Undergrad Research Journal

1. Do we need to referee the submissions to ensure quality?
2. How do we ensure format?
3. How do other Universities handle undergraduate research journals?
4. How often do we publish the journal?

Summary of acceptance requirements

1. The manuscript must be formatted as per a standard template. (IEEE Standard doc or Tex template)
2. We will require a faculty member to approve of every entry. That faculty member's name will appear on the entry. (To encourage the faculty member to screen for quality)
3. The student must request the article be published in the UTD journal.
4. We will not edit the contents in any way
5. We have no problem publishing all faculty approved entries as long as it does not satisfy the requirement for receiving honors with distinction.

Continuing to assist with ComputingFest?

1. We would like to continue to contribute to ComputingFest?

Recruiting Officers

1. Hold an open house at the beginning of the semester in the lab.

Incoming Officer

Sai has expressed interest in contributing as an Officer and has come @ 1pm for us to introduce him to the group and some of our high-level events.

Remaining Problem

Students still think that honors will kill their GPA.

Non-profit organization web page help

ACM is seeking to assist non-profit organization with establishing a technical presence. (Webpages, electronic databases). Honors feels that we can advertise for this to our members and see if they would like to contribute.

Follow-up Items

1. Coordinate tutorial with Dr. Cooper she may already have some tutorials we can use as a base
2. Deana will talk to Ntafos about funding opportunities for undergraduates in research
3. I will email Gupta about advertising to professors to ask for their attendance
4. We will signup for a booth to advertise the student organization @ freshman orientation
5. We need to get the dates for all of the orientations and make sure we know who will attend each one
6. We will reserve the TI Auditorium for this
7. We need to find funding for the food for this event (Send request to Jerry Alexander)
8. We need to continue to look for ways to keep students from being scared of honors (due to more work and potential to drop GPA).