Ph.D. Student Organizes Petition to Help Students and Applicants affected by Chennai Floods

​Ph.D. StudentPh.D. in Education student Shafee Mohammed was cited in Scroll.in for his efforts to help current UCI students and applicants from Chennai who were affected by the recent flooding in Tamil Nadu (India).

Mr. Mohammed is a council member of the International and Internal committees of the Associated Graduate Students of UCI (AGS). When he realized that current students from Chennai had lost contact with their parents for almost a week due to heavy rains flooding the city and taking out both power and the Internet, leaving the city in a lock-down, he reached out to Francis Leslie, UCI Graduate Dean, and Chancellor Howard Gillman with a petition to push the deadlines for fee payment for currently enrolled students from Chennai and for submission of admission documents from Chennai applicants. 

Utilizing Facebook, Linkedin, and Whatsapp, I collected data on the students who were affected by either situation. With help from Timothy Ma, AGS President, I initiated a petition. When submitted to UCI administration, the petition was unanimously approved by the Graduate Dean and the Chancellor. 
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Dean Leslie and Chancellor Gillman's offices then forwarded notice of approval to the deans and chairs of all UCI schools and department and to the Registrar, Elizabeth Bennett. Fee payment was extended and the late fee waived for current students, and prospective students from Chennai are being allowed to submit application materials beyond the posted deadline.

Shafee Mohammed is a first year doctoral student, specializing in Learning, Cognition and Development (LCD). Before entering the Ph.D. program, Mr. Mohammed was a practicing optometrist. His research interests include visual perception, working memory, contribution of vision towards working memory in visually “normal” and VI (visually impaired), neural plasticity and cognitive training of the VI and its effects on the academic performance of the VI.