Meeting Minutes 2023-04-06

Exec Updates

The Housing “Situation”

• Zawad: Is there any specific things you want to know from Dorm presidents?
• Arthur: Please tell your residents to cancel their housing if they already have off-campus housing plans and if they are associated with an fsilg or frat/sorority please consider moving into that and also consider their grad housing offers
• Jordan: The deadline for the grad housing offers have been rolling with 48 hours to accept so far
• CAmeron: Is this worth a dorms@ email?
  • Arthur we could do one but I’m not sure it it would have any more impact than the one from housing, if presidents have effective channels to nudge people they should do that
• Zawad: Might also be good to get presidents to reach out to hall/floor chairs and get them to poke people
• Arthur: If you know people in frats/sororities that are short on people to live in their houses, could you reach out to them and see if they can get people to advertise that open space or get them to reach out to Fatima and I so we can coordinate with them
• Aquila: I know there are frats that have a shortage of people living in their houses
  • I think ADP has a shortage of people bc they have been renting out rooms to non-ADP people
• Arthur: Would frats be more open to having boarders?
  • Some already do
  • But sometimes they get pissy about having non-members living in their house
• Questions or thoughts
  • Sara: What’s the backup plan if forcing people into grad housing doesn’t work
    • Arthur: Generally the plan has been to “strongly encourage” people to move into grad housing but there are currently not enough beds in grad housing for this to work
      • They’re looking into an old grad house that is becoming defunct (?) which would give 30 beds
  • Bookbinder: When does the new grad dorm open up?
    • Fall 2024
    • Zawad: GSC housing people are coming to the next exec meeting
  • Bianca: Who are the people being “strongly encouraged” into moving into grad housing? Just EC?
    • Yes, because you can’t force someone out who already has a bed
    • Currently, transfers aren’t happening because there aren’t the open beds for transfers
  • Mohan: So currently are there no transfers because there are no beds?
    • Arthur: Currently we can’t do any 1:1 switches because the system can’t run because there are no beds. If the numbers resolve bc exactly all beds are filled then we can run the algorithm
  • Jordan: There are dorms that are more highly ranked by EC transfers is there a way to make the transfers not 1:1 so that EC people can get the priority they were promised which they are not currently getting?
    • Arthur: Will look into it
  • Zawad: Could you ask HRS if they are considering forced doubles or triples?
    • Arthur: It is but there’s not enough space
    • Lusi: We have to maintain a minimum number of square feet per person so we can only squeeze so much out of forced doubles and triples
    • Leo: We were pretty close to capacity last year already with forced doubles and triples. We’d be able to eke out maybe a dozen more beds at most I think. On that note, do we think assignments are going to be delayed even further past April 11th?
      • Arthur: I will have a better grasp on the situation tomorrow and what the options look like. They might get pushed back but probably not much more than a week past the current date because RACs have their own deadlines that they have to fulfill
      • Lusi: As of right now, we should still be on target for the 11th
        • Jordan: All assignments or just returning residents
          • Lusi: I don’t think we’ll push it back more than a few days beyond that if we do. We’re finagling as much as we can to try to open up as many spaces as possible
  • Arthur: Are there certain subsets of the dorm assignments that would be more helpful than other subsets for the different dorms
    • Random: returning residents and people with special accomodations
    • Next: We still get stuck in the middle of our process, even with returning residents
    • BC: Returning residents are ok, but we kind of need all of them
    • Macgregor: Entry specific assignnments

President Updates

Baker (Chloe Swanson & Katie Crowley)

• Piano drop is happening April 27th, got the piano from McCormick yay!

Burton-Conner (Camero Kleiman)

• Both I and my RACs don’t really know about how the rooming process works because Sara and the old RACs did it all
  • RAC training probably won’t cut it
  • Go read the BC official housing plan
  • Cameron: I know how to do the BC internal stuff, it’s just the liaising with HRS part
    • Lusi: that will be covered in the RAC training
• How do i3 videos work?
  • There’s an email, your people in charge of i3 will get an email from Tyra about deadlines
• We have some officers that don’t do anything and that’s fine most of the time
  • Should we replace them?
  • Jordan: Something EC discussed is having a chief of staff whose whole job is to manage the auxiliary committees. We thought about that.
  • Aquila: We have our VPs send reminder emails if they’re not spending their email
  • Geoffrey: next house has a VP of relations that manages the student groups and if the student group is inactive then they END THEM
  • Baker Prez: We make them talk about what they’ve done publicly to shame them
  • Cameron: Sounds like harassing people is the solution?
    • Zawad: I think there’s value to having a position that in the future might get excited people
• People keep trying to reserve the Porter room, too much demand
  • Our space reservations policy the spirit of them is that BC spaces are for BC people
    • We’ve had a lot of groups asking for lengthy or occurring reservations
      • Blocked out all reservations over CPW for non-BC groups
  • Reservation calendar is heavily booked for this room and wanted to ask if anyone else was having similar problems?
    • Jordan: Have had similar problems with the courtyard and we wrote a written policy in the fall
      • If there’s an EC resident sponsoring it, no problem because we were getting departments who wanted to book the grills for 17 hours
      • We set time limits and have someone’s job be to say no at an time
  • Are also having admin people trying to book the room for HRS events
    • Current AD is Jacob
      • Get him to loop you in and have things go through students
  • Jordan: You could start charging money
    • We’re not allowed to charge for the courtyard because it’s outside but we did get our house manager agree to assessing fines if people are disrespectful of the space
      • The fee ends up being min $150 - however much it costs to get it fixed if they leave it a mess, or are a noise disturbance then we can assess a fine
      • If it’s a group doing it, get a cost object in advance
      • Loop your house manager in on that
    • Zawad: Charging people might get admins eyes on you, so the fine idea might be better

East Campus (Jordan Tierney)

• working on documentation of everything bc EC renovations
• Had a meeting of renovation advisory committee
  • A bunch of alumni, upper level DSL people, chancellor nobles, EC residents where we tell them what’s up with the renovation

MacGregor (Tyler Ea)

• Tyler and new VP are planning to do an event with exec near the end of semester

Masseh (Mark Mosser)

McCormick (Maria Garcia-Garcia & Zitong Chen)

• Had an elevator town hall because our elevators are very sus
  • dropping, jumping to places, going to random floors
  • tl;dr, it won’t kill you (there’s five ropes each capable of holding the weight of the elevators)
  • company that made the parts for the elevator not doing so well right now so their response time is 2-3 weeks
  • HRS has plans to replace the elevator
    • but not in the short term
• Zawad: many elevators are sad right now
  • If you’ve noticed that all the service elevators are closed, that’s because they all need a part that is no more created

New House (Christian Camacho)

• New New house President just got elected (beastboy@mit.edu) because both the president and the vice president have the same conflict with the dormcon meeting they are currently not able to make it

Next House (Sruthi Parthasarathi)

• Still in AD interviews
  • Every time this happens, HRS feedback deadlines get tighter
  • Somewhere in the process of getting a p-card
  • Will have to find a new location for the next house formal
    • 6th floor of media lab?
    • Sandberg conference hall?
  • Next act musical is coming together

Random Hall (Sara Manos)

• New Junior RAC
• Dryer related Drama

Simmons Hall (Ananda Santos)

• Ball pit has reopened
  • smells just as bad as it was before
  • Will get better balls and maybe a skeleton
• Survived the bomb threat

New Vassar (Alice Yu & Mateo Pisinger)

• Can finally start codifying our policies
  • eg. rooming and financial processes
  • More specific things will probably have to wait a little while, but for many things we can start getting what has worked on the books

Closets?

Aquila: Do dorms have closets with limited access for storage?

Jordan: EC has closets in the basement with limited access

Leo: Next house also has closets for the clubs

Cameron: We haven’t figured our closet situation out yet

Arthur: I think EC also has closets that are used for hall storage and sometimes your floor doesn’t have one because it holds a server room