Council meeting minutes from 2026-04-16

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

Pupils' Information Day

Intro:
The Pupils' Information Day will be on the 21st of April and we will have a booth in Audimax again.
We plan to present the Travelling Salesman Problem there and give some ideas as to why this is a hard problem to solve.


Discussion:
We will need some people for construction and some to be at the booth. Speaking German is a requirement and the time slots will roughly range from morning until early afternoon.


Conclusion:
We have one of us who will take care of shift planning and we already have some ideas for who can help out.

Students' Council Elections

Intro:
The candidacy period for the Student Council Elections has started now and will be going until the 21st of May.
Is there anything that we have to do for this now?


Discussion:
We did not do that much advertising for the candidacy during the last elections. The main reason for this was that everything was on much shorter notice. For this iteration, we should have enough time to properly advertise it.

We should advertise the candidacy period during big lectures. We will also design our own posters and plan to get one in A0 for our upcoming breakfast.

Another option is setting up an Open Table Event („WTF is Fachschaft?“) for which we will need some people that can help out.


Conclusion:
We will use the above methods for advertisement and will talk about the elections (not candidacy) again at a later point.

Dean's Lunch

Intro:
We host a Dean's Lunch once a semester where we talk about varying important topics.
We need someone to organise this, a Moderator for the meeting as well as a Minute Taker (Protocol).


Discussion:
The date will presumably still be early on in the semester.
We will collect some topics/issues to talk about (and possible solutions) outside of this meeting.


Conclusion:
We already found some people for organisation. The remaining planning will be handled by them.

Student Survey on short notice

Intro:
We would like to do a ~5 minute survey to know who students are, how they perceive us, university, their study courses...


Discussion:
We are still close to the beginning of the semester, so there should still be a large number of students around.

We could ask some professors for 5 minutes at the beginning of their lectures to a show a QR code that people can use. Maybe this could even motivate some people to become voluntary members of the FSR.

We also did a vote on whether we like this idea.


Conclusion:
We will do the planning for this independently outside of the meeting (also not in collaboration with a Task Force). There will be a Doc to collect some questions for the survey.

Request for Peer Mentoring

Intro:
We got an email asking about whether we would like to help with this. The idea of having a dedicated mentoring program for our department was also brought up, as this is currently not the case.
Could some of us imagine doing this or do we know some people who might be a good fit?


Discussion:
The people of us that have done this in the past, have said that every single one of them has commonly had issues with „ghosting“. It was brought up that this might partially be caused by people not knowing what offers to use and hence signing up for everything and then backing out of some of them.

Mentoring is also a lot of effort being put into a very small group. We already offer other services that are able to help a much larger group (e.g. our website, events).

It is also difficult for us to find the time to do this, as we already have a large variety of things to take care of.


Conclusion:
We do not intend to offer a dedicated mentoring program for the CS department.
But most of the time, we have some people at our office that are willing to help (within reason of course).
Depending on the context, it might also make sense to point people towards the university buddy programme.

New Meeting Slot

As the new semester has now started and tutorials have been assigned, we need to find a new meeting slot. We have a link for this set up in our Meeting Doc as well as in our internal Signal group.

KIF 54,0

Intro:
The next KIF (Conference for CS Students' Councils) will take place on the 21st - 25th of May in Aachen. The registration is open until May 7th.


Discussion:
The event is really fun to go to and less actual work.
The ticket is 25€ (which includes unlimited food, a tshirt and a place to sleep (if needed)). Both German and English speakers should be fine to attend.

There is also no upper limit to how many members of our Students' Council can attend but at most 2 people can get reimbursed by AStA.
If more than 2 of us want to attend, we could just divide the remaining costs.

Because of the timing, the people that go there could also ask how to motivate people to vote during the Students' Council elections.


Conclusion: /

ZBI CIP Pool and Students Representative:

Intro:
This is a repeat-topic as we were not able to properly discuss it previously.

The ZBI asked us if we have any suggestions for ZBI representatives.


Discussion:
This would also be a nice way for us to have more contact to them as well as more support of Bioinformatics students.
There might also be a payment for being a representative.

One member of our FSR can also be present as a guest (does not need to study Bioinformatics).


Conclusion:
We have someone who would like to attend as a guest and we will ask some people that we know about becoming a representative.