Individual Membership

Join NAGPS here.

 

This page is dedicated to individual membership; if you're interested in becoming an organizational (group) member, please see this page: Organizational Membership

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Thank you for your interest in NAGPS, a student-run non-profit organization founded in 1987.  On this page, you will find information about becoming a member of NAGPS.  If you have any questions, please contact the NAGPS Director of Outreach at outreach@nagps.org.

Membership

Membership in NAGPS is open to both individuals and organizations.  Individual members fall into one of two categories:

1) Graduate individual member - member must submit proof of registation at approved college or university, upon request

2) Affiliate individual member - member must be a person not representing a corporation, organization, or institution

Individual graduate members vote as a caucus at NAGPS meetings, with one vote for every forty individual members present.

Membership Benefits

While NAGPS provides a significant number of benefits for its individual members, the most readily apparent are:

1) Tangible benefits

Individual members of NAGPS get access to discounts on insurance and other benefits for graduate students.  Through our partnership with GEICO, NAGPS individual members enjoy up to 8% off the normal GEICO auto insurance price, depending on state and past driving record.  NAGPS also provides a graduate/professional student health insurance option through UnitedHealthcare.  Often, the savings accrued through these partnerships for individual members outweigh the cost of membership.

NAGPS also provides a number of other resources for graduate/professional students, which can be viewed on the NAGPS corporate partnership page.  Other resources are open to all visitors to the NAGPS site.

2) Connections

Even as an individual member, you can contribute to NAGPS and take what you learn back to your school's graduate/professional student body.  At the national and regional conferences, students present about best practices and current issues at their universities, and all attendees engage in roundtable discussions of issues.  Issues addressed at the conferences include negotiating stipend increases, health and dental care, graduate families, activities, housing, working with the administration, handling budget cuts, advisor-advisee relations, communications, and engaging students. At the conferences’ business meetings, members vote on the Association’s national legislative platform, elect officers, and vote on any changes to the organization’s governing documents. The conferences are an excellent place to build relationships that can lead to further collaboration throughout the year.

3) Advocacy

In order to ensure graduate/professional student issues are known, NAGPS representatives travel twice a year to Washington, D.C. to speak with senators and congressmen about graduate and professional student issues. Currently, the Association advocates in D.C. on topics including graduate student stipend tax exemption, open access to publicly-funded published research, H1-B visa reform, and student loan reform. The Association’s legislative platform evolves with student needs and is able to react rapidly to the ever-changing academic and legislative environments.

To learn more about our upcoming Legislative Action Days, please see our LAD event page.

Membership costs

The most common (and practical) question to ask is: "How much will this cost?"  NAGPS is very aware of its members' and prospective members' fiscal restraints.  There is not a straightforward way to assess how much membership in NAGPS will cost an individual, as the level of the individual's involvement in the Association will determine much of the cost.

Traditionally, individual members join NAGPS primarily for the tangible benefits (health and auto insurance, especially), so the cost in this case is only restricted to the membership dues.

1) Membership dues

The current NAGPS individual membership dues are as follows:

  • Graduate membership: $50
    • This membership option grants immediate access to all of the benefits of NAGPS, and the individual is considered a full member.
  • Affiliate membership: $75
    • This membership option grants immediate access to the benefits of NAGPS except for voting rights or the ability to hold office.

2)  Conference costs

NAGPS holds both regional and national conferences annually.  While it is not mandatory that members attend all conferences, a large benefit of NAGPS is the knowledge and networking gained from our conferences.  Therefore, we strongly encourage members to attend our conferences.  Depending on location, travel costs (airfare, lodging, and some meals) can vary.  Conferences also charge registration fees to partially cover conference expenses; these fees are around $100/person for the national conference and $40/person for the regional conferences.

3)  Legislative Action Days (LAD) costs

Twice a year, NAGPS members can go to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. to speak with their representatives about issues important to graduate and professional students.  While there is no registration fee, travel costs are borne by the attending members.

Membership Expectations

While no members are required to do anything more than pay their dues, NAGPS expects that members have joined the Association in order to enhance the lives of graduate and professional students.  To that end, NAGPS expects that members will do their best to try to attend the annual national conference and their respective annual regional conference, and one or both of the Legislative Action Days.  Of course, budget and time constraints often make full participation at every event impossible.

NAGPS also expects that members will communicate with NAGPS when asked to do so, in order to ensure that the needs of all NAGPS members are addressed in a timely manner.

Conferences and Advocacy

NAGPS holds two types of conferences, the national and regional conferences, and also administers Legislative Action Days (LAD), for which members can go to Washington, D.C. to advocate for graduate and professional student issues.  Below is a description of each event.

1)  National conference

As NAGPS is an organization that spans the entire United States, the national conference is our cornerstone event.  At this conference, held annually in the fall, attendees present about their organizations' best practices and current issues, company representatives talk about current issues in the field of higher education, and members vote on the Association's legislative platform and elect officers.  This event provides attendees an excellent platform to learn about other universities and their graduate/professional student organizations and to form relational ties.

The 2010 national conference will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the MIT Graduate Student Council in Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 11th-14th.

2)  Regional conferences

NAGPS is divided into five geographical regions (see map, with links to regions and their conferences at the bottom), and each region holds an annual regional conference in the spring.  Like the national conference, each regional conference is meant to inform members of other organizations' practices and issues, and to strengthen bonds among groups.  Regional conferences are shorter than the national conference, and since they are physically closer to their members, they are often more accessible for members who may not otherwise be able to travel to the national conference.

3)  Legislative Action Days (LAD)

During LAD, held once in the spring and once in the fall, members carry out one of the most important missions of NAGPS: to advocate for its constituents.  At LAD, NAGPS members meet with their congressional representatives and address the issues they face as graduate and professional students.  To help with the advocacy work on Capitol Hill, NAGPS runs an on-site training session for all LAD attendees and provides other materials to help attendees prepare.  Click here for the LAD event page.

Current issues for which NAGPS advocates on Capitol Hill include:

  • Tax exemption for graduate student stipends
    • Since 1986, graduate student stipends have been subject to taxation.  By exempting student stipends, the government would be financially encouraging more students to pursue advanced degrees and would be investing in the educational future of the United States.
  • Raising or eliminating the cap on H-1B visas given to holders of advanced degrees
    • The supply of high-level technical positions in the United States is greater than the number of people who can fill them; these are the positions that significantly drive economic growth.  Currently, the federal government caps the number of holders of advanced degrees who are allowed to stay and work in the U.S., resulting in a "learn and leave" phenomenon in which many of the country's brightest foreign-grown minds are educated in our universities and forced out of the country after graduation.
  • Open access to federally-funded published research (the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009, FRPAA)
    • Currently, individuals and libraries pay large amounts of money to publishing companies with high profit margins in order to access scholarly research.  The purpose of such research, however, is to be as widely and freely accessible as possible; its purpose is not to fund the publishing industry.  FRPAA would ensure that much of the research done with federal taxpayer money would be freely accessible to the public, thus allowing greater access to knowledge and more governmental transparency.

You can view the entire NAGPS legislative platform here.

Organizational Structure

 NAGPS is governed by a 17-member Board of Directors, which is ultimately held accountable to the membership.  The members of the Board of Directors are:

Each individual region may also set up its own governance structure.

The Future of NAGPS

Though NAGPS has had a strong existence for 23 years, we are not easing up on our pursuit of improvement.  The following is an incomplete list of current projects we are undertaking, with the goal of continually striving to meet our members' needs and requests.

  • Website overhaul - our current website is not as user-friendly as we would like, and our Director of Administration is working diligently to convert to a new, cleaner, easier-to-use version.
  • Conference videocasting - we realize that it is often difficult for some members to attend our conferences.  For that reason, the NAGPS President has committed to video streaming some of the 2010 National Conference so that even members who can't attend in person can enjoy some of the conference's content and make informed votes in the business meetings.
  • Concerted national advocacy efforts - we are making a significant effort to collimate and coordinate our LAD efforts this year, by doing extensive research on our advocacy topics, supplying all attendees with the research findings well ahead of the event, and even partnering with professional lobbyists to provide high-quality advocacy training to attendees.

We feel that the future of NAGPS is very bright, and we hope you will join us in our efforts.

Contact

For further information or if you have any questions, please contact the NAGPS Director of Outreach at outreach@nagps.org.