CGAs

What are CGAs?

CGA stands for CIRES Graduate Associate, and it indicates a grad student who has an affiliation with CIRES. CGAs have supervisors who are CIRES Fellows or other CIRES employees, but their appointments are often in other departments. In Personnel Management Tool (PMT), “CGA” is both an appointment and a role.

A CGA appointment is an unpaid CIRES Only appointment-type. These are different than the paid graduate-student research appointments, GRAs. Typically GRAs are only a semester long, and they can be paid through CIRES or another department like Chemistry or Geography. Since students may be switching GRA position numbers and departments every few months, it can be difficult to track students using GRAs. A CGA appointment spans a graduate student's entire tenure as a student. This designation allows us to more easily manage who we consider part of the CIRES Community by having an over-arching CGA appointment, instead of a multiple GRA or Fellowships which come and go for graduate students.

Everyone who has a current CGA appointment automatically also gets an active CGA role. 

What benefits do students get from their CGA?

• Membership in the CIRES Early-Career Assembly (CECA)
• Access to award opportunities such as Graduate Student Travel Awards and Graduate Student Research Awards
• Access to professional development opportunities, such as the Dialogic Skills workshop series and the new graduate student networking program
• Invitations to the annual CIRES Rendezvous conference
• Allows for that administration and CECA leaders to manage email lists in a more pro-active data driven manner.

How does PMT assign CGAs?

The CGA appointment is always assigned first, and the role then gets created automatically. CGA appointments can be assigned in several ways:

• Administrators:
  • A user can enter a new grad student with a CGA appointment on the PMT's Add a Person page. 
  • A user can enter a new grad student with the appointment types below on the PMT's Add a Person page. A CGA will automatically be created once the appointment request is approved by all parties.
    • 1505 – Research Assistant (GRA)
    • 3204 - Pre Dr Trainee (Fellowship)
  • A user can add a new CGA appointment to an existing CIRES record. 
  • A user can add a new 1505 - GRA or 3204 - Fellowship appointment request to an existing CIRES record. Once the request is approved, the PMT will automatically create or extend a CGA as necessary. 
• Automated overnight scripts:
  • Extend automatically any CGA appointment nearing its end if any of the following criteria are met:
    • The student has a current GRA (job code 1505) or Fellowship (job code 3204) with CIRES 
    • The student has a pending appointment request for a CIRES-paid GRA (job code 1505) or Fellowship (job code 3204)
    • The student holds a current GRA appointment in another department that is supervised by a CIRES Fellow
  • Curtail automatically any CGA appointment if any of the following criteria are met:
    • The CGA holder now holds a post-doc or regular appointment with CIRES. “Regular appointment” is defined as any appointment that is NOT paid on a contract and is greater than 2.5% FTE (or is exactly 2.5% FTE and has job code 1314).
    • The CU student data indicate the student has graduated with a doctoral degree.

In addition, the overnight scripts also check graduate student data from the CU Central Information Warehouse (CIW). If these data show a student with a CIRES Fellow supervisor and the student's employee ID is not listed in PMT, the PMT includes this information in the daily digest sent to CIRES IT, HR, and Finance. This is another way potential CGAs can be identified.  

Why do we need both CGA appointments and roles?

The advantage of an appointment is that it has a definite end date. When a CGA appointment is coming to a close, it triggers a check to see if the student is still a student. This helps us avoid situations where the student has graduated years ago but we still have them listed in the PMT as a student. 

The advantage of a role is that it allows quick searching. If we want to find all current CGAs, it's much faster to search based on an active CGA role. Searching appointments involves date queries that take much longer.

CIRES Early-Career Assembly (CECA) Appointments

By default, anyone with a CGA appointment automatically becomes part of the CIRES Early Career Assembly (CECA) group.  If students do not want to be part of CECA, they can fill out the CECA form to opt out. A PMT user can then un-assign them from the group on the Edit page. The PMT will remember that a human user removed the student from CECA, and will not re-add them to the group even if they have a current CGA. 

Accessing the Edit Page

Un-assigning the CECA Group

CIRES Post-doc Associate (CPA)s

What are CPAs? 

CPA stands for CIRES Post-doc Associate, and it indicates a post-doc who is supervised by a CIRES Fellow or another CIRES employee. The post-doc appointment can be through CIRES or a different department like Chemistry. In PMT, “CPA” is both an appointment and a role.

The CPA appointment is an unpaid CIRES-only appointment. Paid, official post-doc appointments can have a variety of different job codes at CU. Some of the job code descriptions make it obvious the appointment is a post-doc, but others do not. Professional Research Assistants (PRAs), for instance, can be post-docs. This variability makes it hard to quickly determine who is a post-doc and who is not. In addition, as noted, post-docs affiliated with CIRES may have their post-doc paid through another department. For all these reasons, it's useful to have an unpaid CPA appointment. The CPA can span the same time period as the official post-doc. The holder is then obviously affiliated with CIRES during this time. In addition, if CIRES Communications or another group wants to contact all CIRES-affiliated post-docs, they can use the CPA designation to identify these people.    

Everyone who has a current CPA appointment automatically also gets an active CPA role. 

What benefits do post-docs get from their CPA?

• Membership in the CIRES Early-Career Assembly (CECA)
• Access to award opportunities such as the Innovative Research Proposal (IRP) program 
• Access to professional development opportunities, such as the Dialogic Skills workshop series and community networking events
• Invitations to the annual CIRES Rendezvous conference
• Allows for that administration manage email lists in a more pro-active data driven manner.

How does PMT assign CPAs?

The CPA appointment is always assigned first, and the role then gets created automatically. CPA appointments can be assigned in several ways:

• Administrative users:
  • A user can enter a new post-doc with a CPA appointment on the PMT's Add a Person page. 
  • A user can enter a new post-doc with a Visiting Fellow-Post-doc appointment request on the PMT's Add a Person page. A CPA will automatically be created. 
  • A user can add a new CPA appointment to an existing CIRES record. 
  • A user can add a new Visiting Fellow-Post-doc appointment request to an existing CIRES record. The PMT will automatically create or extend a CPA as necessary. 
• Overnight scripts:
  • Create or Extend automatically a CPA appointment if the person has a current official appointment with CIRES with one of the job codes below. New CPA appointments are created for three years from their start date. Existing appointments that have expired are extended by one year. 
    • 1312 - POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATE
    • 1438 - POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW
    • 3201 - POST - DOC TRAINEE
  • Create or Extend automatically a CPA appointment if the person has a Visiting-Fellow Post-doc appointment and didn't already have a corresponding CPA. New CPA appointments are created for three years from their start date. Existing appointments that have expired are extended by one year. 

CPA appointments are not currently generated automatically for post-docs paid by other departments. In addition, they are not currently curtailed automatically.

Why do we need both CPA appointments and roles?

The advantage of an appointment is that it has a definite end date. The end date serves as a trigger, so that we can check whether the person has moved on to a regular appointment within CIRES or has left the organization.  

The advantage of a role is that it allows quick searching. If we want to find all current post-docs, it's much faster to search based on an active CPA role. Searching CPA appointments involves date queries that take much longer. 

You can search on CPAs several ways. The Post-Docs email list available on the InsideCIRES home page uses the CPA role to identify and download emails for all current CIRES Post-docs:

If you want more extensive information on people with CPA appointments, you can also use the PMT All-Employee page. There is a Roles & Groups filter on this page that allows you to select the CPA role:

Make sure to select the Roles & Groups filter rather than the CIRES Role one. You can check the Include Past Roles & Groups checkbox if you'd like to see past CPAs. For more information on the PMT All-Employee page and how to save filters, click here. 

Anything Else to Know?

CPAs differ from CGAs in that CPAs usually coincide with the official post-doc appointment. (Since the official graduate research (GRA) appointments change every semester, CGAs are usually much longer than any individual GRA.)

By default, anyone with a CPA appointment automatically becomes part of the CECA group. CECA stands for “CIRES Early Career Assembly.” If post-docs do not want to be part of CECA, they can fill out the CECA form to opt out. A PMT user can then un-assign them from the group on the Edit page. The PMT will remember that a human user removed the student from CECA, and will not re-add them to the group even if they have a current CPA. 

Post-docs are considered constituents of the CIRES Members' Council (CMC) if their post-doc is paid through CIRES. 

CIRES Early-Career Assembly (CECA)

What is CECA?

CECA is a professional organization for early-career researchers at CIRES. You can find out more here: https://cires.colorado.edu/institutional-programs/cires-early-career-assembly-ceca.

How Do I Get a CECA Mailing List?

The CECA Chairs and anyone with PMT access on InsideCIRES can download a CECA mailing list. On the InsideCIRES home page, scroll down to PMT Email Lists and click on Active CECA:

How Does InsideCIRES Assign Someone to CECA?

InsideCIRES will automatically assign people with certain appointment types to CECA as long as these appointments are active. These appointment types include CGAs and CPAs and also paid appointment types like Research Assistants (GRA) or Post-Doc Associates. Once these appointments expire, InsideCIRES will automatically remove these people from CECA. 

How Do I Assign Someone To CECA?

It is possible to assign someone to the CECA group directly by clicking Edit on their PMT record and entering CECA as a group. However, by far the best way to assign someone to CECA is to create a CGA or CPA appointment for them. If the employee is already in InsideCIRES, the user can do this by selecting Create New Appointment from the person's record: 

A short form will appear in which the user can then enter the appointment. Typically CGA appointments last three years for Master's students and five years for PhDs. Post-docs are two-three years. Once the appointment is created, the person will automatically be added to CECA.

If the employee is not in InsideCIRES yet, they can be added using the PMT's Add a Person page. The user can select either a CGA or CPA to appointment.

Appointments work better than adding the person to CECA directly because they expire. If a user manually adds the CECA group, the employee may move on to a longer term appointment with CIRES, but the system does not know that they are no longer in CECA. So InsideCIRES may still list them as belonging to the group decades later.

What if Someone Doesn't Want to Be in CECA?

Occasionally grad students or post-docs will have appointments that allow them to join CECA but they don't want to join. If this is the case, they should fill out the CECA form to opt out. A PMT user can then un-assign them from the group on the Edit page. The PMT will remember that a human user removed the student from CECA, and it will not re-add them to the group even if they have a grad student or post doc appointment.