Harvard Graduate Council Launches Initiatives to Increase Engagement

The Harvard Graduate Council voted at a Monday night meeting to increase its engagement efforts with graduate students, such as by increasing the number of outreach emails and submitting op-eds to The Crimson.

“Now that we have content to actually communicate about, I think it’s time to really step up the comms,” Dalton Fogarty, the HGC president, told the group.

HGC also solicited volunteers for a committee tasked with creating a University-wide calendar of graduate student social events, which they also discussed during a Nov. 18 meeting. The effort aims to unify graduate student social events across Harvard’s schools, which currently publicize their events independently on several different platforms.

Fogarty instructed committee members to identify data sources for finding events by the end of December. Then, he suggested the committee filter through the events and publish a finalized calendar by the end of January.

Victor M. Lee, the council’s advocacy chair, suggested that HGC find undergraduate students in courses like Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science,” Harvard’s flagship introductory CS course, and propose that they code a calendar website for a potential course project.

During the meeting, HGC also discussed the search for a location for its annual masquerade ball.

Cynthia J. Alvarado, the council’s finance chair, said they had shifted focus to finding an off-campus venue — including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Boston Public Library — after being told Annenberg Hall must be booked one year in advance.

Fogarty also proposed a speaker series for graduate students during the spring semester, though his proposal left the topic unspecified. He suggested that HGC circulate an interest form to help inform venue booking.

The meeting, which was held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, opened with a presentation by two council members — HGSE Masters degree students Débora Menieur Núñez and Larry “Queens” Malcom Smith Jr. — on the state of HGSE student life.

“I'm going to be really cheesy, but listening to that, you guys put the hug in HGSE,” said Fogarty, after their presentation.

—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.