Every association takes pride in its history and we are no different.
The Computer Science Graduate Student Board (CSGSB or GSB) was founded in 2002 when a dialog between the department chair and graduate student officers of Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) took place. The graduate community at Purdue Computer Science is very diverse and spread throughout the campus, thus it was necessary to have a uniform body to disseminate information amongst the students. In addition, Purdue Computer Science is a very large graduate program, and it was extremely necessary to have a body to represent the students' views at the level of the College of Science and the PGSG. Thus, the Computer Science Graduate Student Board was born.
The Computer Science Graduate Student Association (CSGSA or GSA), founded in 2020, is an official student organization of the computer science department. The purpose of the CSGSA is to provide graduate students with social, academic, and professional opportunities to improve their career at Purdue and afterwards. All CS graduate students are automatically members of the GSA.
The responsibilities of leadership of the GSA are delegated to the elected Board. The CSGSB consists of members representing sub-groups of computer science graduate students. These representatives are from research areas such as Security, Databases, Systems, Networking, Programming Languages, Computational Biology, Computer Graphics and Visualization, as well as other representatives from the First and Second Year TA's and Fellowship holders. These members are liaisons between their respective groups and the board. Each board has elected members for representing graduate students at the graduate committee, undergraduate committee, faculty search committee, and the PGSG. We also maintain relations with corporations and conduct social events for the graduate students, faculty, and staff at the Department of Computer Science.
The GSA's activities have been on the rise since its creation. One of our successful efforts in the year of 2004-2005 was the first research bulletin highlighting the graduate research at Purdue CS. We have also initiated a training class to train Purdue Computer Science programming contest teams and a mentoring program for incoming graduate students to help them adapt to the program faster. We have conducted various academic events in the past, such as an academia job search panel and tenure track panel. We also offer travel grants to graduate students who would like to present their work at conferences but do not have the required financial support. We meet with faculty candidates and present our opinion of them to the faculty hiring committee. We also work with the Dean and Department Head to make improvements to graduate life in the College of Science and specifically the Department of Computer Science. We have hosted a series of technical talks by inviting professionals from industry and academia to present upcoming technologies to graduate students. In addition to academic events and projects, we have also been conducting social events like bowling nights and dinners. These events are crucial for keeping the students in close contact with each other and help make them aware of the diverse cultures that we have in Purdue Computer Science. We also work closely with other student organizations like the Association of Computation Machinery and the Undergraduate Student Board.