As most of you know, the primary objective of BCA is to help the undergrad Cabinet reach their goals each year and ensure some continuity from year to year in the House, which is a nice way of saying that we try to keep the guys from repeating the same mistakes we made in college (that’s why Jeff Sanford is SO valuable at these meetings!). However, over the years BCA has slipped into trying to do a little too much at our monthly meetings. We’ll spend 20 minutes at one meeting planning the brunch for Homecoming, or 30 minutes at another debating what the graduate website should look like and who should maintain it. All of these discussions take critical time away from our primary function of helping the undergrads and making sure none of them use a Bobcat to roll any cars around the back parking lot, and we have decided we’d like to change the direction we’ve been heading. We’d like to focus BCA meetings 100% on the undergrads and what they need, and handle all of this graduate stuff separately. To do that, however, we need to establish a separate organization and recruit those of you reading this article to staff it. We don’t need a lot of time from any one of you – we just need a little bit of time from a lot. So if you think you’d enjoy planning the Couser golf tournament, or helping out with a Gamma Tauk, or serving as a point person for your pledge class to keep them informed of graduate events – but want to do things on your own time and not deal with formal meetings once a month at the house – please read on! Whether you’re one of the ~300 Gamma Tau grads living in or around Atlanta or live as far away as Portland, Oregon like Josh Piper, we can find a way for you to help.

In a nutshell, we’d like to establish some graduate committees to focus on the following areas: Fundraising, House & Grounds, Social, and Communications. Each committee will need a committee chair and a handful of worker bee grads. Some ideas of what these committees will work on are as follows:

• Fundraising
  • Recruit and retain members in 18.48 club
  • Work with House Corp on any major capital campaign
  • Run the Gene Buran Leadership Scholarship program
• House & Grounds
  • Serve as day-to-day liaison with undergrad H&G chairmen regarding all repair issues
  • Develop and maintain list of major/not so minor house projects; coordinate with Fundraising Committee and/or House Corp to fix/repair
  • Work with House Corp on strategy for renovating house – is this 10 years away? 20? 50? Do we need a new house or just a facelift?
• Social
  • Organize Homecoming, Pig Dinner, Braves game, Undergrad vs. Grad softball game, and all other social activities
  • Work with Fundraising Committee to fund all activities
• Communications
  • Gamma Tauk – get grads to write articles, gather Fiji Fables, work with outsourced print shop to print/mail newsletters, try to move Gamma Tauk to website
  • Maintain graduate website
  • Develop network of graduate “point people” to help keep directory up-to-date

These are just a few ideas for a few committees – naturally, nothing is set and stone and there’s a lot of room to run if you’re interested in anything mentioned or not mentioned above. Just contact me at Stephen.pyburn@turner.com to let me know your thoughts and where you’d like to help, and we’ll get you involved. Whether you want to help 1 hour a month or 10, we can find a way for you to make an impact.

Steve Pyburn '97
BCA President