The Graduate and Professional Student Senate had its final meeting of the semester Monday night.

Jonathan Wickert, senior vice president and provost, shared intentions to expand on childcare options for students with families on campus.   

Housing was the primary concern of the Senate. Rent has continued to increase, but non-residence hall student housing has remained limited, especially for graduate students.

“Childcare is an issue for everyone with children,” Wickert said. “Everybody deals with childcare issues.”

Wickert encouraged students to reach out with any suggestions or concerns they may have.

Ruchir Goswami, Graduate and Professional Student Research Conference committee chair, elaborated on the conference that took place in early April.

According to Goswami, the conference was a huge success and hosted about 1822 members. Graduate students made up 82 percent of the turnout, 12.5 percent was post-doctoral students, 4 percent was ISU faculty and less than 1 percent was undergraduate students.

To reward the work that was required to run the conference, a resolution was passed by the Senate to recognize the GPSRC committee for its hard work.

“They really knocked it out of the park this year,” said vice president Zachary Zenko.

The Senate also passed a bill to allocate this year’s excess GPSS funds to a scholarly communications center for graduate students at Iowa State.

The Senate voted to allocate $1,924.97 to the Academic Communication Program, or ACP, to purchase published resources for graduate student use.

The scholarly communication center, which will be based out of the graduate college hallway of Parks Library, will use the funds to purchase books that graduate and professional students from all departments can use for research.

A list of books that will be purchased can be found on the GPSS website. New books will only be purchased after used books have been considered. 

The last meeting of the year prompted sincere thanks from each member of the executive board during the remarks and reports segment of the evening.

“It’s been a long year but we’ve had a lot of fun,” said Armando Figueroa, senator at large. “It is a very fulfilling experience.”