General Announcements: Dean Marchionini started the meeting by congratulating Melanie Feinberg for winning an Institute for Arts and Humanities Fellowship for Fall 2018! He also mentioned that SILS would be co-hosting a Black Girls Code event at Sitterson Hall on Saturday along with other UNC departments. PhD candidates are also going to be on campus for interviews and such in the next coming weeks, and he also encouraged faculty to talk with companies and ask them fund and provide student scholarships, in addition to hiring graduates.
Accessibility Services and Advice: Tiffany Bailey from the Office of Accessibility Resources and Services came and gave a talk with SILS faculty to talk about how students at UNC request accommodations from professors, how ARS helps students with their disabilities, and gave more general information about what faculty can do to help support students, or who to turn to in case they have questions about how to best accommodate a student.
Master’s Committee Update: Professor Losee, Chair of the Master’s Committee, updated SILS on the idea of allowing master’s students to take an additional 1.5 credit class for people who have already taken 781 but are starting on their master’s paper early. Discussion covered a variety of suggestions, and the general consensus was to not give the additional 1.5 credits, but many topics were covered regarding issues surrounding the master’s paper, such as how to better convey expectations for the paper, what the expected workload should be, how faculty can best advise master’s students, and in general how to calibrate the master’s paper process on both the student and faculty side. No definitive decisions were made, but a proposal was made to bring up the topic again at another meeting with more time allotted to it for further discussion.