Council meeting minutes from 2024-06-17

minutes of the students' representative council for study programs of computer science

KIF

The KIF 53.5 would have taken place in Trier, however due to organisational issues this is not possible. Its Date would be the Autumn 2025, i.e. October/November. The HTW (University of Applied Sciences) considers to host the KIF themselves and asked us for assistance. More detailed the only issue would be the amount of helping people. Rooms would not really be a problem except big lecture halls which are only situated here on campus. Other benefits of Saarland University would be the Landessportschule (Saarlands Sports High School) for big sleeping halls. As the Hochschulsport is currently building their own Sports Hall, which would also be a sleeping option. Alternatively we could ask to get the Aula for sleeping.
Commuting between our Campus and HTW-Campus could either be done via normal busses or we rent shuttle busses (paid by BMBF (Ministry of Education and Research)).
Besides that, we could plan some outdoor activities.
There are other universities that could host the KIF instead, so we are not guaranteed to actually get it, we would need to plan it out early.
We cannot really give our approval for these plans, because we would need to talk to some people and some rethinking is necessary. Furthermore, if we are helping out, the people who were in favour should also be present at this time.
The general time plan is to be able to decide on feasibility by October. We are going to create a planning document.

Quiz Night

This Thursday a Quiz Night at Guckelsberg Dormitory will take place. Lizzie will help Lukas with conduction. If you want to participate, please preregister via Email, as there are only a limited number of teams the location can afford.

Public Screening

There was a Watchparty of the Opening Game of the Football european Championships. It went really well, and we are going to do the same for the other matches of Germany. We thank all the people helping out so far.
We also would like to host games after the group stage, but Lukas will not be present at all games. Felix and Kevin volunteered to help out at the dates where he is not there.

NEXT

Last week the NEXT career fair took place. They put up posters to notify people that photos and videos were taken for advertising purposes and people are consenting to that (in german). However they were only put up on some places, it was possible to enter the building without noticing it. Putting up posters is legal, however only if it is restricted to a room, not an entire building. Nevertheless legality might not be enough for what the university wants, especially as not all students speak german. This especially holds true as the NEXT took place at the same time as lectures, so not everybody on the pictures is actually there for the fair. Thus the photos could give a false impression.
In some sense, complaining about this is a little nitpicky because we do not hang up such posters ourselves. However we always ask people if taking photos are okay at our events.
We decided to file a formal complaint to Erich unanimously. Alex will take care of this.

Day of the Open Door

Two weeks ago the day of the open door took place. In general it went really well, we had some really nice discussions. There were some troubles with the 4-in-a-row AI because of the changing lighting conditions. For the next time we will try to get a booth at a different position. What did not work at all was the material at our booth. We basically did not get anything that we had ordered besides one table. To reduce stress for everybody we just helped ourselves. We will write a complaint about that.

Prospective Students FAQ

People on our Discord server ask lots of questions which could be solved with a short FAQ. In general these are prospective students whose questions are usually only to be answered with "it depends" or "we don't know".
A lot of time could be saved if there would be a FAQ for these questions, however we see more difficulties than benefits. People would actually need to read the FAQ, which is equivalent to reading our discord channels. Also we would need to update the document regularly.
An alternative would be an open document where people can add useful information for others. However this again would need maintenance and it is not entirely clear what is useful and what not. Again this means lots of effort for not too much benefit.
We cannot and will not give any commments about the admission process, as we are not part of it at any point. However what we can do is link to the official computer science application page, which also has a FAQ.

Discord Bot

In general our Discord server is very unstructured. We could help with that by introducing a Bot that makes it possible for people to select roles to which group they belong to (students, prospective students, other). Thus it prevents cross-posting and limits communication to where it belongs to. People not adhering to can be better target-timeouted and reasoned about.
Ideas involve to make the channels one does not fulfill the conditions for read-only, or make a short FAQ at the beginning of each channel.
We support this idea, Manuel will look into how to do this.

Collaboration with Computer Linguistics

We were talking to the computer linguistics at the day of the open door. They are in general really nice and interested in collaborating in events together. We are generally open for that.
Another idea was to collaborate during StEP. We are generally open for that too, but we see difficulties in feasability.

Support Infrastructures for Internationals

Last week a network event of Support Infrastructures for Internationals took place. The new vice-president for internationalisation invited everybody to get a hang of how the university fares.
From our perspective we are doing quite well by advertising our events in english, having english lectures etc. for including international students. However in other departments they seem to be a little lost and lonely. This could be improved by making the ZiS (Zentrum für Internationale Studierende/Center for international students) more known, as they make a huge effort to host social events. We think we can improve the knowledge about ZiS by hanging up their posters during game nights and other places.
Excluded from above are Exchange Students, they are generally well connected as their mobility is organised by the international office/welcome center.
In case international students have questions we at the student council cannot answer, we should refer them to the welcome center, because they are connected best to other university organs.
As Saarland University is a Tranform4Europe-university, there is a goal to have 50% of students with internationalisation experience. We don't see this happening short-term.

Game Night

There was a game night a few weeks ago. There were ~50 people attending which is less than usual, which is probably because it collided with the Unifilm open air. We made a list of board games people were wishing for, however this list was carelessly erased. Next game night we are doing the same again for the hope that we can order new board games.