From: Michael Ernst <mernst@cs.washington.edu>
To: First-year grad students
Subject: Feedback from new grads
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 09:48:54 -0800 (PST)

I'd like to thank all of you who attended the first year grad student
feedback session last week.  Some people stayed as long as two hours, and
we covered a wide range of issues.  If you were not there, or if you didn't
have time to raise a topic (or forgot to mention it at the meeting), please
feel free to talk to me, Frankye, or Carl Ebeling about it.  I can pass
along your comments anonymously or with attribution, and likewise for
Frankye and Carl, who are just as easy to approach.  We've discussed the
meeting a bit (I've tried to clarify or explain some issues from the grad
student perspective), and we all agree it's important to get as much
feedback as possible, both to clear up misunderstandings and to correct
real problems.  Carl has drafted a memo to the faculty noting many of the
concerns and suggesting some concrete actions.

Meanwhile, let me make a meta-suggestion:  when there is something wrong,
please don't just live with it.  If you feel at all comfortable with doing
so, bring it to the attention of the powers that be:  your teachers, your
advisor, the system support staff, or Frankye, Carl, or even me.  If no one
knows there is a problem, it's very unlikely to get solved and might even
become larger; at the very least, it will continue to annoy you.  At UW CSE
we are fortunate to have a faculty that really cares about the students
here, and they are extremely approachable.  Corny as it sounds, their goal
is to make every student succeed, and they do work at it.  So let them know
how to reach that goal, and don't wait for the annual gripe sessions
(though they are an excellent resource when ordinary efforts have failed).

					-Mike