This year, under our new president Nathan Kellen, the PGSA is undergoing major changes, dramatically expanding its functions. We have started an Annual Graduate Conference, a biannual internal Grue Bag Conference, and a series of internal workshops called Grue Shops. We have also revised our constitution to include postdoctoral fellows as members of the PGSA.

The Annual Graduate Conference is the spiritual successor of the now defunct UConn-Yale Graduate Conference. The Annual Graduate Conference is a conference with invited graduate speakers, and a faculty keynote speaker, held at UConn using new funding from the Graduate Student Senate.

We have expanded our Grue Bag Series by adding a semesterly Grue Bag Conference, a one-day internal conference with two parallel sessions in which UConn students present their work and receive feedback from other UConn students. We have also scaled back the number of our traditional Grue Bag Presentations (internal graduate student talks), replacing some of them with a new workshop format called Grue Shops.

On Oct. 26 we ratified a new constitution. The most important change in this constitution is that it makes UConn postdoctoral fellows members of the PGSA, with access to all PGSA functions.

We thank our president Nathan, our secretary Hanna Gunn, and many other members of the PGSA for their efforts to make all of these great new changes happen! We look forward to continuing to see our vision of a new PGSA put into reality, and we hope that these positive changes carry forward well into the future.

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