Alumni Advisory Board Meeting Mar 3 2011

March 3, 2011
6:30-900 PM
UCLA Faculty Center

UCLA CS Department AAB 2010/2011 Winter Quarter Meeting

Attendees: Cristina Cano, Mike Erlinger, Bill Goodin, Jacquelyn Leong, Rajiv Makhijani, Carey Nachenberg, Wade Norris, Jens Palsberg, Sze Ke Pat, Maria Penedo, John Rosati, David Smallberg, Jim Winchester, Ben Zamanzadeh, Laurie Leyden

Jens Palsberg Chair
– No more oral or written exams for PhD students.
– Placement of UCLA PhD students in university professor positions is on the decline – 9 total placements for ’09 – ’10! Hiring environment issue according to Jens: There are very few faculty positions openings in top universities.
– Recently CS Department hired a machine learning expert.
– 6 job openings in CS Department
– Jens will send out his slides (attached here)
– Entrepreneurism is increasing in LA.
– Jens would like to hold a mixer
– Could we hold a joint Anderson + CS entrepreneur class?
– Projected to have 15% cut proposed for CS Department

Student Representatives
UPE Update (Wade Norris, Christina Cano)
– Held 8 different events since January ’11 – including resume workshop, info-sessions, etc.
– Holding CS research fair soon to help students find research projects

Honors Mixer Feedback
– Good event overall—but could use improvement.
– Not enough candidates/members attending, the attendees were mostly officers of UPE.
– Need name tags.
– No one had resumes
– Too close in time to other campus recruiting events, so event may have been forgotten.
– Recommendation to have UPE: coach students on networking skills.
– Most students looking for internships but not full-time jobs. Companies wanted to meet students interested in full-time jobs.
– Need to limit company representatives to one per company.
– Unclear what the expectations were for the industry representatives.
– Had to cold-call companies to get them to RSVP.
– Needed CS Department Professors to attend event to represent CS Department.
– May need to hold during fall rather than spring to target full-time job candidates.
– We could use this as an affiliate recruiting event.

ACM Student Update (Rajive Makhiji)
– Hosted several info-sessions (Facebook, Xinga)
– CS undergrad town hall
– Next year: classes taught by undergrad and grad students- cPhone dev(?), etc—(just extracurricular classes)
– Will be offering various programming courses
– Trying to recruit more officers

Event Update
– Entrepreneurship Panel went well, 120 – 130 people showed up
– Bill Goodin: asked if we can do it twice per year?
– Jens: Could hold a small mixer with UC’s for ~25 students.
– Jens wants a reminder email (and our involvement) to set up a mixer in Santa Monica, Pat will take care of this
– GOAL: Schedule next panel for Fall, then Spring à 2 times every year rather than once.

Upcoming Events
– Alfonso was concerned about young alumni event.
– Said the faculty would not be interested in participating
– We already have a curriculum advisory board so maybe this event is superfluous.
– We’ll cancel this since it’s redundant.

Freshmen Open House Planning Update
– Need more alumni participants because parents like to ask questions to people/alumni in industry.
– Might be good idea to have Glen Reinman or Eddie Kohler run the event to “pep” it up a bit.
– *Can we get the UCLA “DAPPA Grand Challenge” car out for the event and invite former undergrad students to table?
– *We have an arcade machine built by students (can we demo it?— Rajive to investigate)
– For ABET Alumni surveys, we should speak with CS seniors before they graduate and encourage them to respond (so they respond to the survey after graduation).

Action Items for March 3rd meeting:
Send VC references to Jens to be used for Mixer (Ben and all AAB members)
Send Mixer info to Jens (Sze Ki) —completed
Schedule next Entrepreneurship Panel (Jacquelyn)
Send emails for CS alumni to Sze Ki for freshman day (Ben, Bill, Board)
Figure out if it is possible to do next panel in Fall (Jacquelyn, Carey)