New GSS Executive Elected

The people have spoken and the Grad Exec for 2007/08 will take office April 1.

Chair: Patrick Reed (Philosophy)
Director of Services: Brandy Sistili (Dispute Resolution)
Director of Communications: Joseph Kolthammer (Physics)
Director of Finance: Ian Hussey (Sociology)
Director of Student Affairs: Lee Blanding (History)

Thank you to everyone who came to the Semi-annual General Meeting and participated in selecting your new executive board.

Victory on Fellowships .. partly

The campaign has paid off, we have achieved a significant improvement to the UVIC fellowship policy. It is not perfect, but it does provide more economic security for fellowship holders.

UVIC's new policy will be:
Fellowship cheques and cheques for all scholarships at UVIC (including the new BC Graduate Student Scholarships) will not be withheld unless tuition is unpaid in the previous semester. Therefore, students starting in September will receive their cheques in Septembr, October, November, December without interruption, but MUST pay their tuition by the end of December.
Late fees will apply as for any other student.

This policy will stand until the NOVA system is in place, allowing more flexibility for installments of tuition to be taken off cheques paid to students by UVIC.

The full text of the letter from FGS about this change is available in letter format outside the GSS office.

Stacy

Great new site for Canadian Grad Students!

Check out this site from the publishers of The Peer Review. Its called the Grad Student Survival guide and has links to great information and past articles from their magazine.

Fellowships & Bursary Payments Action

Hi Grad students: great Grad Council meeting last night with lots of debate on the UVIC Fellowships and Bursaries, and the way UVIC could handle this problem better.

What are the next steps on the fellowship and bursary payment campaign?

Not sure what this is about? Check out the GSS reports on the issues here:
http://gss.uvic.ca/fellowship.htm

BC Budget 2007 includes grad student scholarships

The BC Budget 2007 released includes the following:

"Budget 2007 reconfirms government's commitment to create, in partnership with the post-secondary sector, 25,000 new student spaces including the commitment to create 2,500 new graduate spaces. Budget 2007 includes $82 million in new funding over three years for these initiatives to increase access to the post-secondary system. An additional $20 million is being funded in 2006/07 to provide scholarships and internships to support the new and existing graduate spaces."

You can find this on page 9 of the document Balanced Budget 2007 - Province of British Columbia: Part 1: Three-Year Fiscal Plan. Located here:

http://www.bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2007/bfp/

The UVIC GSS is currently contacting the ministry to seek more details as to how this will be implemented.

Another item of interest to UVIC graduate students:
"The Ministry of Advanced Education will provide $15 million over the next two years to plan and implement Aboriginal post-secondary service plans for institutions in collaboration with Aboriginal communitites and develop culturally enhanced curricula, programs and services"

Carleton Grads seek help with RA funding issue

Hi all,

We seem to be having an issue with RA funding that we could use your help with.

Here at Carleton, non-unionized RA funding is currently accounted for as a research grant which is taxable. In the past, only $3000 of this awarded funding was tax-exempt and students could then deduct expenses from the total “grant”. But with the exemption of scholarships and fellowships from income tax, it seems like this practice is going to cost grads thousands of dollars. This is especially disturbing in cases where the research being conducted by students on these RAs falls into the government’s definition of fellowship funding.

So, we were wondering if you could answer the following questions about the way your institution accounts for RAs.

1) How are your RA accounted for? Are they seen as non-taxable fellowships or taxable research grants?

2) If they are fellowships, have there been any downsides or unintended impacts of this arrangement?

Finally, this might be a topic we could discuss at our next NGC meeting. It seems to me that some policy guidelines and best practices might help other schools who find themselves in a similar situation.

Thanks for your time and look forward to getting your responses.

Cheers,

Oren

Oren Howlett

President

Graduate Student's Union

Carleton University

Local 78, Canadian Federation of Students

613-520-2600 x8271

gsa_pres@carleton.ca