Committees play a vital role in facilitating NeuroPIL’s goals. Committees are formed to address issues or carry out specific functions on behalf of NeuroPIL members.

Reach out to us to join or start a committee

• Education

  Mission Statement: The NeuroPIL Education Committee strives to ensure that all neuroscience graduate students are provided with the instruction and resources required for them to succeed in a neuroscience-related field. We seek to work with graduate students and faculty to improve the neuroscience curriculum and increase student representation in the decisions that define our training.

  Goals:

  • Establish the Education Committee as the bridge between students and faculty. The Education Committee should serve as a channel to deliver student course and curriculum feedback to faculty and guarantee that this feedback is acted upon
  • Identify how the current required graduate curriculum could be improved
  • Advocate for more flexibility on specific course requirements across campuses and tracks
  • Place a student representative on the faculty education committee to represent the graduate student perspective
  • Improve the diversity of course lecturers (more women, more URM)
  • Implement changes to graduate curriculum by the Fall 2021 semester
• Student Affairs

  Mission Statement: The committee’s focus is the well-being of the student body. The committee will initially collect student input, advocate for diversity and inclusion in our program and provide resources for students.

  Short-Term Goals:

  • Gather feedback from outgoing first-years
    • Create survey
    • What do we want to do with this info in the immediate future?
  • Work with diversity and inclusion representatives to come up with initiatives, determine what students want
  • Talk to incoming first years to find out how we can support them remotely
  • Exit interviews with graduating students
    • Come up with interview questions
    • How should we best anonymize these if desired?

  Long-Term Goals:

  • Establish a system for collecting feedback from first years annually (bi-annually?)
    • Do we want to collect feedback at other times also (maybe after quals or end of 3rd year)?
  • Establish a system for conducting exit interviews
  • Create a comprehensive list of diversity and inclusion resources
  • Work with the faculty diversity and inclusion committee on initiatives
  • Develop a PI reputation archive
  • Start a student run talk series/ bring in speakers on topics students want to hear about
    • Could include professional development
    • Could potentially work with GUIS on this
    • Student talks to serve as practice among peers and/or TED-style to share information on topics students care about/want to hear about?
  • Plan a bootcamp (maybe a joint project with the education committee)
• Uptown-Downtown Harmony

  Mission Statement: The Neuroscience Program at NYU combines students from two separate campuses, the Center for Neural Science (CNS) and the Neuroscience Institute (NI). While joining the programs is ultimately beneficial, it has also led to some inconsistencies in housing, classes, funding, etc. The Uptown/Downtown Committee will work to alleviate these differences in student life between CNS and NI. With input from the student body, this committee will focus on promoting cohesion, representation, and efficient communication.

  Goals:

  • Maintain an updated list of contacts for each campus with job descriptions to facilitate student communication with admin and faculty
  • Survey student body annually about systematic/cultural differences across both campuses
  • Work with CNS and NI liaisons to eliminate housing and stipend differences
  • Advocate for a balance of CNS and NI student representation on faculty committees
  • Promoting more cohesion and eliminating redundancy across campuses
• Social

  Mission Statement: The goal of the NeuroPIL social committee is to facilitate interactions between students to create a more cohesive and dynamic neuroscience community. These social events will help to unite the NYU neuroscience community so that its members can learn and grow from one another’s experiences.

  Goals:

  • Organize a Welcome Week filled with fun interactive activities for the new class (with other cohors and with faculty)
  • Create cross-cohort informational panels for new students df
  • Help organize Open House events for applicants
  • Organize regularly held NeuroPIL Socials
  • Devise better mechanisms to handle spending/reimbursements for social events
  • Create more neuroscience-wide graduate student events (similar to Sackler happy hours)
• Communication

  Mission Statement: The communication committee is dedicated to promoting and supporting NeuroPIL student achievements, endeavors, and goals. We maintain official NeuroPIL websites and social media accounts with up-to-date information and resources for members and non-members. We aim to promote the great work NeuroPIL and NeuroPIL members do on a daily basis. Anyone interested in writing, communication, graphic or web design, or who has ideas on how to achieve these goals is encouraged to join.

  Goals:

  • Website maintenance: graphic and web design for NeuroPIL sites (internal & external)
  • Social Media: Managing NeuroPIL social media accounts
  • Technical writing and science writing: writing articles about science or relevant happenings within the NYU or Neuroscience community
  • Resource management: disseminating and distributing important documents or information relevant to all students; such as sample grants, rotation feedback, etc
  • Maintaining the event calendar for NeuroPIL and other student-specific important dates