“If you’ve been wishing that there were a simple way to access information about activities and events of interest to graduate students, your wish has come true,” so said last week’s inaugural issue of Grad Announce, a monthly e-newsletter highlighting campus-wide events organized by the Graduate Life Office (GLO), Graduate Student Council (GSC) and Graduate Student Programming Board (GSPB).

The graduate student population at Stanford outnumbers the undergraduate population by roughly 1,000. But the broad spectrum of pursuits and the richness of the graduate population’s non-academic diversity have made communicating among this corpus a challenge.

“There are currently over 8,000 graduate students on campus and there has been no way of contacting all of them until last week,” says GSC Co-chair Jenny Allen, referring to Grad Announce. “Undergraduates have class lists to contact their entire population, so it made sense that graduate students should have that same capability.”

Allen continues that in the past, GSC members have had to rely on departmental administrators and student life coordinators to forward announcements to appropriate e-mail lists.

“The need for such a list has been recognized by several past GSCs,” says GSC Co-chair Thomas Lee. “Our other methods miss significant portions of the graduate community because students don’t know about the opt-in lists or because of gaps in coverage in the department lists.”

Grad Announce will be received on a monthly basis by every graduate and professional student, which includes co-terminal students but not post-doctoral, according to Allen.

Second year computer science master’s student Pei-Chin Wang supports the new initiative, saying she feels “it [will be] useful, especially for new graduate students.”

“When I first came to Stanford I felt overwhelmed by hearing about grad events from so many different sources,” she says.

Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Director of the Graduate Life Office Chris Griffith says that graduate students have been expressing a desire for “a kind of one-stop-shopping for event information.”

As with many communication initiatives aimed at more effective information dissemination, the roll out of the newsletter did not take place without its share of time and effort.

“The GSC has been advocating for the capability to contact the entire graduate student community for several years,” Allen says.

Lee explains that they had to seek permission from the Registrar’s Office to get access to everyone’s e-mail addresses.

“Discussing terms for access that would address security and privacy concerns took some time,” he says.

Griffith says that “the time was right” for the newsletter’s initiation.

“There is an increased number of events for graduate students and more students are expressing a desire to be involved in the life of the campus community,” Griffith explains. “It was particularly difficult to reach students living off campus. We are excited about reaching off-campus student families to invite them to participate in events planned specifically for families with children.”

The newsletter comes as part of the GSC’s initiative to forge a greater sense of community within the graduate population and to foster more cross-departmental interaction.

“Wouldn’t you want to know there was a free Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, free Yahoo! Music, special workshops on launching a faculty career and grad nights at the 750 Pub?” Allen asks. “We hope that Grad Announce will connect more people with the graduate student community and broaden their social and intellectual life by exposing them to people outside their departments”

The monthly Grad Announce will not replace the weekly Grad Events e-bulletin, according to Lee and Allen.

“We created this list to highlight programming from the GSC, GSPB and GLO, as well as services provided by various University administrative units that are of interest to all grad students,” Lee explains.

Ability to submit announcements is limited to these groups, according to Allen.

“We are trying to maintain a manageable size to the e-mail and therefore will only highlight a select number of campus-wide events,” she says. “If you have 30-plus events included in any e-mail, few will bother to take the time and scroll down.”

First-year electrical engineering master’s student Hattie Dong says she thinks the e-newsletter “has great potential to be very useful.”

“Until now, I either heard about grad events through scattered sources or did not hear about them at all,” she says.

Former GSC Chair Moriah Thomason says she agrees that graduate students often do not hear about special activities.

“Imagine the Thanksgiving dinner for grads sponsored by the President’s Office, the Provost and departments supporting grads all over campus,” she says.

She cites the CalTrain GO-Pass as a second example of useful services that the newsletter can help publicize. GO-Passes are good for unlimited CalTrain, VTA bus and light rail rides until Jan. 1, 2006, and graduate students who live off campus can acquire the passes for free until that date.

“Those passes cost the same amount whether they are used once or 1,000 times and grads should be using them for maximum convenience to themselves and to gain maximum benefit from the financial support Stanford has put into this program,” she says. “There are many more examples - tax assistance workshops, social events, health care issues and support resources on campus.”

All of these programs, Thomason says, are “a ton of work and a ton of reward, but they are dead in the water if they are things grads do not know about.”

“Face it,” she continues. “These are the things that greatly affect a student’s quality of life.”

Students are encouraged to send feedback about Grad Announce to gsc-chair@assu.stanford.edu.