This year’s first meeting of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate started with a technological hiccup, but recovered quickly.

The first assembly of GPSS began with an old-fashioned roll call because the clickers that were handed out at the beginning of the meeting refused to work.

After the calling of a quorum, the meeting began. The first item on the table was a presentation by Inclusion Workshops, led by Craig Ogilvie, the Graduate College assistant dean.

Ogilvie explained that the workshop’s purpose is to improve the climate for graduate school programs around the university. The program grew from professional groups that are currently traveling the country visiting other universities.

“We decided we’d try in on a low-key scale,” Ogilvie said.

The program involves small groups of students in a workshop environment to help them learn and work on how to deal with discrimination and harassment within their departments.

“Our early survey data shows that 30 percent of our grad students experience some form of discrimination,” Ogilvie said.

The first part of the workshop involves students acting out of script in front of a small audience of graduate students. The scripts are based on real-life scenarios that have occurred within different colleges at Iowa State.

While the details have been changed to protect former and current students’ identities, the scripts still deal with everyday problems and harassment faced by graduate students.

During the meeting, four graduate students ran through an abbreviated version of the workshop, which contained a scenario involving a student being ridiculed for her grants being awarded because of her minority status.

After running through the skit, the senators were encouraged to ask questions of the student actors, who answered in character.

“I was a little surprised that particular scenario happened so recently,” said Zachary Zenko, GPSS president.

Ogilvie said the earliest they will be able to roll out the workshop program to graduate programs will be late September or early October.

“We’ll be really happy if we can get 10 programs,” Ogilvie said.

After Inclusion Workshop’s presentation, the senate moved on to the general housekeeping tasks that needed to be accomplished before the start of the new school year.

Starting with Zenko, the cabinet ran down the table, presenting its reports on the status of its offices, as well as appealing for members to become more active and join the various committees.

After the presentation of the reports, the senate moved on to vote to ratify the year’s new constitution. The biggest change to the rules was about which schools senators could represent, restricting them to the schools they were currently enrolled in.

Along with the changes, the constitution’s wording was also changed regarding the rules about the appointment of various officers and an addition of a new standing committee, called the Social Committee. The new committee will be in charge of social media for the GPSS.

The changes to the constitution were ratified unanimously after the second vote.

Zenko closed with a short speech thanking the senators for a spirited and involved debate on the ratifying of the constitution.

After the meeting, Zenko expressed hopefulness at the coming semester.

“I think the Senate has been expanding its duties and offerings in the past few years,” Zenko said.

The next meeting will take place at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 21 in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.