The Graduate Student Senate at Lehigh oversees all graduate student clubs and organizations as well as provides funding for graduate students to travel to professional conferences. GSS also hosts community wide events for graduate students in order to create relationships between departments and colleges, ultimately fostering a greater sense of belonging among our peers.
Currently, the Graduate Student Senate only funds academic (research-based conferences) for up to $150 when a student is presenting or $75 when attending, for up to $225 in travel funding within a given fiscal year. Although these funds are intended to be supplementary to other awards that students receive, many graduate students struggle to come up with enough funds to cover their entire trip and are limited in the number of conferences they are able to attend as a result. However, we have limited funds and as a result cannot provide more funding to students without being more selective of who is able to attend conferences. Additionally, the Graduate Student Senate has been working on rewriting our fiscal governance in order to be more inclusive to students who wish to attend conferences that are not strictly research related (e.g., networking events, workshops), but without a change in our budget this will result in even less money being allotted to each student. This is particularly important given that many sources of funding for graduate student travel are at risk of being withdrawn given current changes to the federal administration.
Thanks to your generous gifts, we can achieve our two pronged goal of (1) being able to provide graduate students with more travel funding and (2) expanding our reach to fund a wider variety of events for students.