Awards and Acheivements

In Progress

• Graduate Student Handbook: We are working on creating a useful guide for incoming graduate students that helps them to navigate not only UNL and the graduate life, but also Lincoln.
• Graduate Student Bill of Rights: Currently there is a bill of rights for all students (i.e. undergraduate and graduate) and graduate assistants. However, there is no university document that describes rights of all graduate students and protects them from such issues as research exploitation.
• Improved Graduate Student Representation on University Committees: Much of university policy is created within university committees. Unfortunately, few graduate students sit on these committees. We hope to change this.
• Campus Level Funding for Academic Conferences: We are currently gathering data to see what funds are currently available for students at the department and college level. We?ll be taking this information to university administrators as we lobby for more funds.
• Increased University Services: These include health-care benefits for graduate student?s families, legal services, and library services.
• Graduate Student Fee Deferment: GSA achieved this for graduate assistants. We are now trying to extend this to fellowship recipients and then perhaps all graduate students.
• Key Card Access: University policy leaves issuances of building key cards to department chairs. Unfortunately, there is an unknown number of departments that currently give key card access to certain graduate students.
• Student and Family Leave Rights: Thanks to lobbying by the GSA, the university is currently working out policies for parental leave for graduate assistants. Once these policies are in place, we plan to tackle the issue of graduate studies deadlines for those students and policies for those students who require medical leave.
• Graduate Student Fees: We will be issuing a survey later this semester to determine what fees we pay are not applicable to graduate students.