Lawrence Apartments

• Hyungwon Kim
• Jaroslav Trnka
• Ana Bell
• CJ Bell
• Jakub Szefer
• Yavuz Ytim
• Andra Geana
• Daniell Rowles
• Olivia Martel
• Nemanja Antic

1. Shopping carts are missing - Jaroslav will send a warning email to residents to encourage people to return them right away. 
2. Daniell will set out snow shovels when it snows. 
3. Residents who want to organize an event are encouraged to contact GSG Events Board to get funding. Lawrence Committee would focus on the events initiated by the committee or suggested to the committee by residents. 
4. Capital improvements such as buying a ping pong table will be discussed after we hold a first event.
5. The first regular event will be held in late March or early April. The second regular event will be held in the first week of May.  
6. Special event was suggested by CJ Bell. "Paint the Snow" + "hot cocoa serving" event. The resident will contact the grounds manager, David Wagenblast, to determine the most eco-friendly paint/dye/coloring. Hot cocoa will be served by committee around 7~8 pm in building #14 during the event. About 70 servings of hot cocoa will be provided. 
7. The first online co-operative music dj-ing/listening event on Turntable.fm will be held sometime in the next 2 weeks. Ana will set up the online dj room and send out the email to the residents.
8. Any complains about living in Lawrence, such as wi-fi connection or printer, should be forwarded or cc'ed to Olivia Martel. She would speak out with us. 
9. Exit door in the parking level of building #1 is hard to open.

We had a mini-meeting post election.

The following is the attendance list : 
Hyungwon Kim
Jaroslav Trnka
Jose Azar
CJ Bell
Yavuz Yetim
Andra Geana
Ana Bell
Daniell Rowles
Jakub Szefer

1. Outgoing committee members informed incoming committee members of their tasks.

2. Since many people will be away for vacation, there will be no meeting this month. 

3. The next meeting will be Jan 18th, 2012 at 7 pm in the common room in building # 1. 

a.     All committee positions are open to all adult residents of the Lawrence Apartments, including spouses and partners, with the following limitations:

                                               i.     Candidates must have attended at least two committee meetings (The election itself may be counted as one of the two meetings.)

                                              ii.     Candidates for president must have served on the committee for at least one term. If no candidates meet this requirement, the position is open to any resident who has attended at least 3 committee meetings.

                                            iii.     Candidates for the position of GSG representative must meet the GSG's requirement of being a Princeton Graduate Student.

b.     The committee positions are: President, Vice President, Secretary, Social Chair, Webmaster, GSG Representative, and Garden Coordinator.

c.      The election will start at 7:30pm.

d.     To declare your candidacy, email the Lawrence Committee at lawrapts@princeton.edu with your name, the position you are interested in, and, optionally, a one-paragraph statement. You may also email your statement separately later, or choose to give no statement. You will additionally have two minutes to address the Lawrence Residents on election day.

e.     You will be able to see on the website who is running for which position, and modify your position accordingly. The deadline to announce your position will be December 8 at 11:59 EST. You will then have time to change the position for which you are running until December 9 at 11:59pm EST.

f.      If you are not available to vote on December 12^th, please send an email to lawrapts@princeton.edu requesting an absentee ballot or electronic voting before December 11 at 8pm.

g.     Jose Azar and Sevil Cakir Kilincoglu will be in the election committee.  We are currently looking for a third person to be a part of the election committee. If you are interested in being in the election committee, please let us know by sending an email to lawrapts@princeton.edu.

h.     We hope to see you on election day!

• Jaroslav Trnka - "Hello, my name is Jaroslav and I am running for a position of Vice President. I have been part of Lawrence community for last two years and regularly taking part in the Lawrence committee meetings since the beginning of the Fall. I know very well the problems we all deal with and I would like to work continuously on solving them, at least those that are reasonably fixable, e.g. horrible internet connection, lost shopping carts, bad printers (and the absence of scanner), or better information about constructions (we all still remember the terrible summer drilling with little information about schedule) as well as to help all residents with various problems, organize Lawrence social events (e.g. as a new father I would appreciate also some events for small kids) and communicate with the housing department or Graduate School on improving our lifestyle. As an undergraduate I served for several years as the Vice President of the student government and exactly this was my job, so I can surely benefit from this experience. I will do my best to have a positive impact on life in our community.  Thank you for your consideration."
  
  

• Hyungwon Kim - "Hi, I am Hyungwon Kim and I would like serve Lawrence residents as the secretary of the committee. I have lived in the Lawrence apartments since summer 2010 and have known many other people who have graduated and still live in the Lawrence. I understand you may have a lot of concerns about the living in the lawrence apartment complex and you may not have found a convenient channel to talk about the issues. I would like to be the contact point between the residents who have issues and the staff (committee and housing staff) who can actually implement things. I will keep you posted about important events (while keeping the volume of spam down) and make sure you can freely talk to me about any issues at any time. In addition, before I joined Princeton graduate school, I worked at a consulting firm and as a junior consultant, one of my primary tasks was taking notes for the meeting and then revised it for general distribution. So I am confident with the basic function of secretary position. Thank you for consideration."

• Josephine Duh - "I am a fourth-year graduate student in the Economics Department, and I am running for the position of Secretary on the Lawrence Committee.  I believe that the Secretary serves two key functions: (1) record-keeping and (2) disseminating information.  On record-keeping, I will take succinct notes during meetings and promptly make them publicly available; maintain a file of suggestions and complaints from members of the community; and, when appropriate, take photos during Lawrence social events and post them on the Lawrence Apartments website.  For publicity, I will focus on utilizing the Lawrence Apartments blog and social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Google Plus) in order to minimize spam emails and paper fliers.  As Secretary, my goal would be to make information concise and easily accessible without being intrusive.  Thank you for considering my candidacy."

• Daniell Rowles - "For the past 2 years I have served as the social chair for the GSG and have learned many things in this position. One of the lessons learned is that many student run activities and events are much more effective in a smaller community setting as opposed to larger on-campus settings. I want to have to opportunity to switch gears and focus on community based events which I was unable to implement through the GSG. Given my previous accomplishments as a social chair in a larger organization, you can trust me to follow through with the responsibilities of the Lawrence committee social events. I would be a very efficient social chair since absolutely no training for me is required since I am already familiar with university polices and student events funding.  Besides my duties as social chair, I look forward to addressing issues of the committee as a whole whether it's gardening in the spring or snow shovels in the winter. I am also excited to work on new projects with fellow committee members and encourage the community as a whole to be involved. "
  
  

• Ana Bell - "I want to become more involved in making Lawrence more of a community rather than just an apartment complex. In addition to the regular webmaster duties of updating the website, I want to use my computer science background to improve the Lawrence experience. Specifically, I want to address one complaint that Lawrence residents have: laundry room availability. Since there are currently not enough funds to renovate the laundry rooms with sensors, I'd like to propose the use of a co-operative laundry website, where residents can increase or decrease the number of washers and dryers available, depending on how many they are using. I have created a prototype, which you can test out here: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~apop/laundry.php . If elected, I will add more features and promote its use - it will only be useful if people participate in it (much like any other social site). I also want to work together with the social chair to create some online events that residents can participate in, such as co-operative DJ-ing and listening to music with the help of turntable.fm, for those late nights spent studying (and maybe procrastinating)! Thank you for considering my candidacy."
  "
• Yan Lau - "Hello. My name is Yan and I want to be YOUR webmaster. My first webmastering experience dates back to high school, when I created a website for my class. In between then and now, I have coded up several websites and blogs, including a food blog and this personal website for grad school (www.princeton.edu/~yanlau/). Yes, that's a picture of me! I know nifty things like HTML, CSS and Javascript, which is definitely a plus for this job. And one idea I want to implement, should you vote me into office, is to bring Lawrence into the TWITTER AGE. Twitter will allow the Lawrence Committee to be better able to disseminate timely information and updates in harrowing situations (like that power outage we had!), or respond to resident suggestions and community feedback. To summarize: I've done this before; Twitter; vote Yan! =]"

• Phillip Isett - "My name is Phil Isett.  I'm a fourth year grad student in the math department, and I would like to serve as your delegate to the graduate student government.  I've been living in Lawrence Apartments since summer 2008, so I know how many things affect life here: from construction work, internet service, and on campus transportation to our graduate student events.  As a delegate, I would be ready to record the concerns and suggestions of the Lawrence community, and to represent your interests as a persistent voice both in the graduate student government and also in dealing with the external organizations that affect our lives.  Thank you for considering me as your delegate."
 
• Andra Geana - "My name is Andra, and I would love to serve as your GSG representative. I moved into Lawrence from the GC last June, and I've quickly come to enjoy our community, and to want to be more involved in it. I have previously served as residential community assistant during my undergrad, which gave me a chance to work as liaison among students and the different university services. During that time, I've dealt with a variety of community-related issues: faulty fixtures, parking hours, and even squatters! It's been an incredibly rewarding experience, and I would love the chance to do it again! I'm ready to invest the time and enthusiasm to get our concerns heard by the GSG and the School, and work with the Committee and the school to come up with acceptable solutions. Thank you for your consideration! "
  
  

• Jakub Szefer - "Dear Lawrence Residents.  My name is Jakub, I'm the current Lawrence Garden Coordinator and would like to run for re-election for the upcoming year.  This is my 3rd year at Lawrence and I have 1 year experience in the position of the garden coordinator.  I would like to continue my work to further improve the Lawrence garden.  I feel we have had a successful past year, but could make many improvement by making the garden more visible to the community.  One of the problems which gets repeated each year is the weeds which tent to take over the garden at the end of the season.  Major contributor to this is the fact that a number of garden lots are unused, around 1/3, and many lots that are reserved become abandoned.  I would like to coordinate with the social chair to make some social events in the garden to make residents interested in picking up the empty lots -- maximizing used lots will minimize the space where the weeds can spread.  Also, parts of the garden could be seeded with grass or we can plant some perennial plants to keep the weeds at bay.  This would in turn create the space where we could hold the social events.  I hope you will consider voting for me and join the garden during the next season!"