Herzlich Willkommen beim AStA der Universität Göttingen

A registered university group has various advantages, most importantly you can reserve rooms at the university more easily (see below). First things first, though: How can you register your HSG?
You can apply for registration at the Central Office for Room Allocation. You can find all the information and contact details here.
An HSG is officially an unregistered association. As such, it needs a constitution. A sample statute adapted to your group with the relevant register data is sufficient. You can find a template here, for example.
You then need to appoint a board of directors according to these statutes and send their contact details with matriculation certificates together with an application for registration of your HSG and the statutes to the Central Accommodation Office. Either by mail, by post or in person (see above for all contact details). The persons registered as board members are reported to the Central Room Allocation Office with the submission of the statutes, so that it is ensured that actual persons are active in the newly registered HSG.
Both are mere formalities; no one is forcing you to implement what is written in the statutes or to grant actual competences to the board you have elected. The basis of your self-organisation should be your ideas of your group structure.
If your HSG is registered, from now on you will have to send a verification form to the Central Space Allocation Office every three years, confirming that your HSG still exists. In this form you must also always indicate 5 currently active members of your HSG. If you do not do this, the HSG will be deleted from the register. If you change your constitution or have less than 5 (official) members, you must report this using the same form. You can find the form here.

Permanent

The easiest way to reserve a room for regular meetings of your HSG is to contact the AStA: The two seminar rooms in the AStA building (Goßlerstr. 16a) are available for such meetings and can be blocked for longer periods of time for weekly meetings. Such a room can be reserved at the AStA secretariat.

There is also a room in the AStA basement where HSGen can store materials. For access to this room please write an email to hochschule@asta.uni-goettingen.de.

For Events

If you want to organise an event, you will of course need a place where the whole thing can take place. On the one hand, the seminar rooms in the AStA are available for this purpose. On the other hand, as a university group you can also register rooms at the university. How this is done depends on where the rooms are. In any case, you have to submit a room application, which you can download here.

Room application for university groups

Only the 5 members of your HSG who are officially registered with the Central Room Allocation Office can apply for rooms, so one of these people must sign the room application as the applicant. Rooms on the Z-Campus are registered via the Infrastructural Building Management. You can submit your room application directly in the office (Heinrich-Düker-Weg 5) or by email to raumvergabe@zvw.uni-goettingen.de or by phone to 0551 39 23333.

At the University Hospital, rooms are allocated via the Lecture Hall Service (office on level 0 D2 room 466), whose contact details you can find on the UMG website.

There is no central allocation office for rooms on the North Campus and in the Maths Department. Here you have to contact the dean’s offices of the faculties that own the respective buildings. You can find their contact details on the faculty websites.

Almost all types of events incur a wide range of costs: Fees and travel expenses for speakers, material for workshops, printing costs for advertising posters and so on. But that shouldn’t stop you: You have several possibilities to raise the necessary money for all this.

The most important source of funds for self-organised projects are the Study Quality Funds (SQM). The university as a whole as well as the individual faculties have access to a certain amount of money each semester, which all university members can apply for. There are different application deadlines for central (university-wide) and decentralised (faculty-specific) SQM; these deadlines are generally set well in advance, so research them accordingly early. Applications can only be submitted from the university computers (e.g. in the libraries) and from computers with access to the university network (via VPN client). In the application form, in addition to the specific cost items, you must also enter a justification of the importance of the requested measure, divided into the points initial situation, description of the measure and expected benefit. Decisions on the applications are made in committees that are half student-run: The Central Study Quality Commission (ZSQK) and the study commissions at the faculties.

However, there are a few restrictions with SQM: Hospitality costs may not be financed from it (but hotel costs may be, even if meals are included in the price), and some faculties have regulations regarding the maximum amount financed for printing costs and fees. The current guidelines for the SQM award can be found here.

If you are unsure whether all items in your application are eligible, you can ask your dean’s office. However, applications can also be approved in part, so an inadmissible item is no guarantee of rejection.

For student projects in particular, it also makes sense to contact the Student Representative Council (FSR) of your faculty, the Student Representative Council Assembly (FSRV) or the AStA directly. The student councils, the FSRV and the AStA have their own budgets, which usually include an item for funding such projects. You can find the contact details of the student councils here.

For larger events (panel discussions, student congresses, excursions, etc.) you can ask the Unibund for funding. However, this cannot be used to finance hospitality costs, daily allowances, fees or printing costs. You can find the current deadline for applications on the Unibund website.

For such events, you should not be afraid to contact supra-regional institutions that award funding for events in the academic field of your subject.

If you are planning a really large-scale event, you should make a financial plan from the beginning and see what can be applied for and where. For example, for the organisation of a conference: Fees, hotel costs and poster printing costs via SQM; flight and travel costs via the Unibund; hospitality costs via the FSR.

If you have organised an event on a topic that interests you, it would of course be good if it were attended. It is therefore important to advertise it. One way to do this is to put up posters in central locations. In almost every university building, there are specially designated poster boards where you can almost always find some space. It’s best to think about which subjects your event might be interesting for and then hang the posters directly in the corresponding department rooms. There are fewer fixed locations for flyers, but it can be worthwhile to display them more in the vicinity of the refectories.

In addition to print-based advertising, the digital level is of course also important. The relevant social media offer extensive possibilities here. Events on political topics can also be publicised very effectively via the city-wide email distribution list ‘Schöner Leben’. You can subscribe to this mailing list (free of charge) at: https://listi.jpberlin.de/mailman/listinfo/schoener-leben.

If you have printed a large number of posters, you can distribute them via the university’s poster distribution list. Make an appointment with the Public Relations Department (Wilhelmsplatz 1, contact: thomas.richter@zvw.uni-goettingen.de) and then go there with up to 113 posters and a package of rubber bands to get the posters ready to be sent to all faculties, seminars and institutions of the university. In addition, you can have up to 65 posters sent to various cultural institutions by the City of Göttingen’s Department of Culture. To do so, you must hand them in folded on DIN A4 (motif facing inwards) in the foyer of the New Town Hall, with the address: City of Göttingen Department of Culture Hiroshimaplatz 1.

 

 

You’re rarely alone at university: chances are that there are other university groups working on similar issues to yours, or even that there used to be an HSG on exactly the same topic. It can be very useful for your activities to get in touch with the people who provide or have provided these groups; besides exchanging experiences, you will often gain access to additional resources and contacts. You can find an overview of which HSGs currently exist on the AStA website.

To be included on this list, send an email with a short description of your activity and a file with your logo (in as high a resolution as possible; JPEG) to the Public Relations Office.

If you don’t know whether there have been previous university groups in your area, it’s best to ask at the Central Space Allocation Office, which, as mentioned above, is responsible for the official registration of HSGen.

The AStA also organises regular initiative evenings where university groups and other student initiatives can present their work and network with each other. If you are interested in taking part, simply write an email to hochschule@asta.uni-goettingen.de.