Wednesday, February 16, 2005

It's Safe to Study in America Again

I've seen several pointers to this nice article on origami and Erik Demaine in the Science Times section of yesterday's New York Times but also check out today's editorial page.
Thanks to pressure from prestigious academic and scientific organizations and leaders of high-tech industries, the administration added staff and streamlined the [student visa] process so clearance now takes less than two weeks, on average.

The capstone was a policy change announced last week that made a clearance valid for four years for students and two years for working scientists, making it easier for them to stay in the country for the duration of their study or research. America's reputation for welcoming scholars from around the world can only benefit.

We should always treat such news cautiously but hopefully these new policies will encourage more foreign students to come study in the states.

Update: Also in today's Times, an article announcing the ACM Turing Award that went to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf for their early work on the internet. The Turing Award is the closest computer science has to the Nobel Prize and its nice to see the New York Times taking it as such.

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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:31 AM, February 16, 2005

    On the subject "It is safe....", I just have to post the following conversation from a movie. You infer who the characters are in the present context.

    Olivier: "Is it safe?"
    Hoffman: "Yes it is safe, very very safe"

    Olivier: "Is it safe?"
    Hoffman: "No it is not safe, It is very dangerous"
    ...

    Hoffman: "aaahhhhhh........"

    :)Amar

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2:01 PM, February 16, 2005

    Thank you for the pointers, but as a non-USA
    national I learned not to believe in things said
    in the NYT (especially the editorial). I hope
    however that this is confirmed by more reliable
    sources...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Suresh Venkatasubramanian3:08 PM, February 16, 2005

    Just to add to the data, green card processing (which is another indicator of the general load the USCIS is under) has been accelerating. It appears that the USCIS is now almost fully recovered from the post 9/11 delays that caused processing times to skyrocket.

    This affects all visa seekers, since all of the processing times tend to get affected by large bottlenecks. A lessening of the load in GC paperwork means that people can be shunted off to process other paperwork, and that is encouraging...

    ReplyDelete

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