The department runs a UTCS New Graduate Student Orientation session the week prior to classes in the fall semester. This is usually a morning event, followed by a lunch/social event open to all UTCS grad students.

The department Graduate Coordinator and GRACS' New Students Committee jointly organize the event during the summer.

GRACS' New Students Committee needs to:

• Develop an agenda of “important things new UTCS Master's and Ph.D. students should know”.
• Find speakers for each agenda item.
• Organize the lunch/social event that immediately follows the session.

GRACS needs to advocate for making the session impactful and useful for new UTCS grad students. It would be easy to fill the session with administriva, and in fact this has happened in some years.

Keep in mind that this is the first impression of the UTCS grad program for the new students. It's important to start with the right focus: namely the “big picture” of graduate CS scholarship.

Here are some agenda items we have presented at recent UTCS New Graduate Student Orientation sessions:

• Welcome from Department Chair
• Welcome from Graduate Adviser
• Academic integrity
• How to be an effective UTCS student (presentation, ZIP-ed Keynote file) (presentation, PDF file)
• Get involved with the department (for example, join GRACS, even as a first year)
• A bull session, led by GRACS
• UT Libraries
• The GRACS wiki
• Department staff services and facilities: GDC, gripe, officereq, labs, etc.
• OEA services for grad students (UTCS career services, printing, etc.)
• Career Services Center of the College of Natural Sciences
• UT's Graduate Student Assembly
• Legal Services for Students's Student Information Guide
• UT Data Security Policy
• “That really awkward hygiene discussion”: North American conventions for bathing and fresh clothing. “Americans will back away from and not befriend or do business with people who smell bad.” We've had problems with this in past years.

Some of these items are a bit too “administrival”, so in some years, GRACS has put together a “online supplement” (on this wiki) to the session that included the more trivial matters, in order to keep the focus on the important topics.

When developing the agenda, look at the Graduate School's orientation session's agenda, and avoid overlap in content.

In the past few years, we've organized a pizza-and-games event at the Union Underground in the Texas Union.