SBA Summer Planning

The new SBA Board is entering its 5th week of work and our efforts have been invested in planning for the Fall and the incoming class.  For my own part, I have been spending the time meeting with the newly chartered and returning student clubs (either in person or by phone) to learn about their goals for the Fall and Spring.  I can say with confidence that they are hard at work.  I still need to meet with a few more, but I have touched base with all of them and plan to wrap up after the 4th of July.  This meeting process is part of my campaign promise to have an SBA that is more engaged in partnering with student clubs.  To act rather than react.

Did I take the right classes to graduate?

Before leaping into SBA planning, I wanted to cover this topic as I have heard from a number of you that figuring out the curriculum requirements is a challenge.  Unless you are super organized, you are probably starting to wonder what the heck is the difference between simulation and practicum courses, how many units did you need to finish, and (for those of my year) probably needed a refresher on what courses counted as practicum/simulation last year.  Hopefully the following links housed throughout the McGeorge website will provide some assistance.

If you have any lingering questions, I strongly suggest you contact Dean McGuire.  I have found meeting with her to go over what I have remaining to be extraordinarily helpful in resolving any remaining confusion.

Links

Blackbook pages 9-25 have the requirements for all of our class years.  Note that the requirements to graduate have changed from year to year so just double check that you have the right courses fulfilled. (http://www.mcgeorge.edu/Documents/Students/MAPBookWeb.pdf)

This next link has the list of previous course years so you can double check your past classes to see what counted as practicum and what counted as a simulation course (http://www.mcgeorge.edu/Students/Academics/Academic_Schedule.htm)

Sunday meeting, Brainstorm session

Yesterday, the SBA Board had its first group meeting to informally brainstorm on the new school year.  I want to express a sincere thank you to our McGeorge Library staff who accommodated our needs to have access to video conferencing equipment (4 of the SBA Board were across California with one currently in Italy) so that we could have nearly the entire team present for discussion purposes.  No official actions were taken as this was just meant to be a brainstorm session.  We discussed things such as the objectives of the SBA Committees, funding policy for student clubs, feedback we are hearing from the student body, challenges with connecting to alumni, and reviewing the projected budget for the upcoming year.  I also presented to the SBA Board my proposal for a mentorship program (more on that below).

We are still in the formative stages of discussion and by all means you should feel free to contact your Reps and the leadership team with your ideas.  Our goal is to finalize any changes we make to funding policies that affect student clubs before the mandatory meeting on July 26th.  Other proposed changes that are subject to student comment will be distributed with the plan to have any final vote shortly after we begin the Fall semester.

Mentorship Program

I presented to the SBA Board my proposal for a student mentorship program here at school.  It combines the First Year Insight program SBA Rep at Large Monika Troike began with some components of programs I have learned about from other law schools.  I have been fortunate to have met a wide variety of law students from other law schools across the country from my internship at Google and at the Governor’s office because their schools each have different types of mentorship programs with varying success.  I spent the month of June interviewing them on how their programs worked and have incorporated the best ideas I’ve found into this proposal.

If you are interested in participating in this program, please feel free to contact me at e_falcon@u.pacific.edu.

ABA Rep Chosen

I am pleased to announce that Mirwais Haider is our ABA Rep for 2014-2015.  I was gratified to see a handful of students compete for the position with their ideas and proposals.  To say the least, it was difficult to pick one candidate out of many qualified competitors.  As I stated during the application process, the one pager proposal of the ABA Rep will be presented to the student body.  You can find Mr. Haider’s proposals to the ABA position here.  In addition to this ambitious agenda, I have asked Mr. Haider to take a lead on establishing contact with our California counterparts at other ABA schools so that we can discuss opportunities to collaborate.  He will also begin updating the SBA blog with activities and events related to the ABA and his position.