May 15, 2008 meeting

Anthropology Club Minutes

For May 15, 2008 meeting

Present were: Dr. Brown, Dr. Spehar, Tony Pietsch, Chris Wood and Carol Doubek.

We mainly talked about the type of activities that we would like to have next year, especially ones that would attract members. It is important that we come up with the year’s activities before the fall semester starts. We’d like to get them on (Reeve, OSA?) calendar and present them at our table at the Taste of Oshkosh in the fall. If we have our activities all planned out, then we can charge dues for our club. We are planning to meet again during the 3^rd week of August to do this, and will email each other during the summer, if we come up with other ideas.

We thought that our Career/Grad school night was successful, and would like to do it again, probably within the first week or two of school. We talked about having someone talk about McNair scholars, and, maybe doing a video or podcast of the event. And then, perhaps, could put it as a link on the Anthropology department’s website. The professors also said that they would like to begin their presentation with more information on why anthropology is fun, and how they got interested in it.

Some things that the Marketing Club do that seemed like good ideas:

1. offer a discount if the members pay their dues early.

2. have fun fund raisers, like giving the students a shot at professors in a dunk tank.

3. exciting overnight field trips to Chicago.

We also talked about getting involved with other clubs or groups, like the environmental studies club (fair trade, etc) or multicultural center (adopt/sponsor a community), if we could combine our interests with theirs. And if we associated w/other groups, maybe some of their members would become interested in our club.

We talked about doing something community oriented or something that would have some continuity. Ideas were: we could do something with a community garden, adopt a community somewhere, or build a theme around Dr. Spehar’s project in Nicaragua. Everyone really liked this idea. It would bring together her work with primates, including wildlife corridors (which Dr. Spehar will have a class on next spring), working with the community there and topics in Latin America (which Dr. Brown has classes on). We also talked about the possibly bringing in a speaker from one of the communities in Nicaragua, and that we might be able to use money from the OSA for this.

Speakers were another topic that we talked about. We thought that it would be a good idea to try and get anthropology graduate students from within the UW system to come to speak to us, since they would still be excited about their research, and could put it on their CV. Also, another idea was to get someone from the Hmong community to come speak to us. And, Tony said that he might be able to talk to some people at UW-Milwaukee to see if some of them could come speak to us (since he will be going there this summer).

We talked about when good meeting times would be for next semester. Dr. Spehar thought that Mondays worked well. Dr. Brown said that he was available when his classes ended at 4:30. Chris said that he was available any day after 1:40. Tony said that he worked in the evenings. And, Carol said her classes were in the morning, so any time after that would work. I guess we still need to talk about a definite time on this.