Hello everyone, You may remember that we raised a little bit of money at the last meeting, which the SIGCIS Executive Committee decided to earmark for support of graduate students presenting at the meeting. We'd originally decided to limit this to official SIGCIS sponsored panels, but unfortunately our grad-student heavy panel was rejected despite being a very strong proposal. So we decided to broaden things out and offer our tiny $600 fund as support to any existing SIGCIS members who are graduate student and presenting at SHOT. It seems from the program that there are a decent number of such people. The amount of money involved is quite small (max $300 per person, but very probably less) so it seemed excessive to charter a new committee and force people to submit a fancy application form. On the other hand it would be arbitrary for us to pick people without information on other funding sources (including SHOT), etc. So our stroke of genius was to get the main SHOT committee for graduate student funding to agree to make decisions on additional funding based on the mass of information you already supplied and their knowledge of how much money they already awarded. If you are interested, please email me and say so by August 22nd. YOU HAVE TO DO THIS EVEN THOUGH YOU ALREADY FILLED THE FORM IN FOR SHOT. However you don't need to send any other info. I will then collate the names, and assuming there are more than two people interested I will pass them onto the main SHOT grad student travel grant committee so they can figure out who gets what. (If for some reason you didn't apply for the SHOT money then let me know anyway and I'll figure out what to do). We'll be aiming to raise more money at the meeting to pay for next year's travel assistance, including a continuation of last year's successful book auction and our traditional passing of the money bowl. Thanks to all those who contributed in DC. Best wishes, Tom