History of the GAC
  • Formed in 2008. This was the first year the department had a GAC. Previous to 2008, the grad office (Beth) would assign folders to all faculty members, and all decisions were made at the sector level. Also, all applications were on paper. So paper copies of the applications would be distributed to faculty, reviews would be entered on the cover sheet and returned to the grad office to be compiled in electronic form. 
  • AeroAstroGradAdmissionsPlan.ppt : Slides from Dave Darmofal's (Associate Dept. Head) briefing to the faculty about the plan and purpose of the GAC.
  • GradAdmissionsFacLunchDec2.ppt: Slides from Dave Darmofal's briefing to the faculty at the start of the 2008-2009 admissions season, with the final details of how the GAC would operate. 
  • GradAdmissionsFacLunchMay6.ppt: Slides from Dave Darmofal's final report to the faculty at the end of the 2008-2009 admissions season, summarizing the process, success/failures and lessons learned. 
  • AA GAC 2009 Final Report.doc: The final report to the faculty by the GAC chairs with details of the 2008-2009 season, success/failures and lessons learned.
  • In 2008, we started using a purely electronic admissions process using CollegeNet. This was an unbelievably bad web service, and in 2010, we switched to using the EECS service.
  • In 2009 and 2010, Oli (GAC chair) collected the data from the faculty to manage yields. In 2011, Dave Darmofal (Associate Head) did this.
  • In 2008 and 2009, the transcripts were scanned and uploaded by Beth Marois for every folder. This was incredibly time-consuming. In 2010, there was an initial hope that we could avoid this process because the students can enter their grades directly into the web application form – these would need to be compared against the paper copy, but would still be much less work than the manual scan and upload process. However, it was realised too late that the application form asks the applicant to only enter the relevant grades from their major. As a result, students did not enter their complete transcript, and often out of order, making it hard to see improvement (or lack of progress) over time. To deal with this, the GAC asked for electronic copies of the transcripts. We waited until the folders had mostly been read, and about 1/3 had been evaluated and rejected. Sophia Hasenfus pulled the transcripts for the remaining folders and scanned them, creating one big PDF. Nick Roy then created a text file containing the page number where each students transcript started, and wrote a perl script split.pl that took the PDF and the list of names and page numbers, and used pdftk to split the big PDF into separate PDFs, one for each student containing that student's transcripts. The PDFs were then put on the web at https://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/academics/transcripts-2011 under certificate-controlled access. This process was labour-intensive and suboptimal in that many transcripts have the student's social security number, address and date of birth. This problem hopefully will be avoided in the future by asking the students to enter their complete transcript in chronological order.
  • GAC 2011 Homepage, with notes
  • GAC 2011 Final Report
  • Members in 2011-2012:
    • Hamsa Balakrishnan, Systems
    • Emilio Frazzoli, Info
    • Paulo Lozano, Vehicles
    • Beth Marois, Graduate Administrator
    • Nancy Leveson, Systems
    • Nick Roy, Info
    • QiQi Wang, Vehicles
    • Brian Wardle, Vehicles
    • Annalisa Weigel, Systems
    • Karen Willcox, Associate Dept Head
    • Moe Win, Info
  • Members in 2010-2011:
    • Hamsa Balakrishnan, Systems
    • Mark Drela, Vehicles
    • Jeff Hoffman, Systems
    • Paul Lagace, Vehicles
    • Beth Marois, Graduate Administrator
    • Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, Vehicles
    • Nancy Leveson, Systems
    • Nick Roy, Info
    • QiQi Wang, Vehicles
    • Dave Darmofal, Associate Dept Head
    • Moe Win, Info
  • Members in 2009-2010:
    • Olivier de Weck, Chair
    • David Darmofal, Associate Department Head
    • Beth Marois, Graduate Administrator
    • Manuel Martinez-Sanchez (Vehicles)
    • Brian Wardle (Vehicles)
    • Hamsa Balakrishnan (Systems)
    • Nancy Leveson (Systems)
    • Moe Win (Info)
    • Nicholas Roy (Info)
  • Members in 2008-2009:
    • Olivier de Weck, Chair
    • David Darmofal, Associate Department Head
    • Beth Marois, Graduate Administrator
    • Manuel Martinez-Sanchez (Vehicles)
    • Brian Wardle (Vehicles)
    • Hamsa Balakrishnan (Systems)
    • Nancy Leveson (Systems)
    • Eytan Modiano (Info)
    • Nicholas Roy (Info)
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