Katrina Forces Ghanaian Grad Student To Transfer
[] 9/24/2005
Senanu Agbley is determined not to let the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina delay his graduate studies.
The Ghana native would have started the second year of his doctoral program in environmental sciences at Tulane University in August were it not for the destruction that the hurricane wrought upon New Orleans. Instead, he is spending this semester at Montclair State University, with the hope that he can return to Tulane when it is scheduled to reopen on Jan. 6.
'I'm worried about finishing my program on time,' Agbley, 28, said Wednesday.
Agbley and another graduate student from Tulane's earth and environmental sciences department are two of the eight students that Montclair took in; the other six students are undergraduates originally from New Jersey, said Ann Frechette, a university spokeswoman. The university offered to admit students from Gulf Coast states on Sept. 1 and received about 30 inquiries, she said.
Several other New Jersey colleges also opened their doors to students affected by Hurricane Katrina, including Rutgers. Agbley also contacted Rutgers when he was trying to figure out what to do this semester but found transferring to Montclair was easier. The university offered him a tuition waiver and set him up with a research assistant position to help him pay his room and board.
'These students lost a lot of what they had down there,' said Kim O'Halloran, associate dean of Montclair's Graduate School. 'There was no need to make them jump through administrative hoops here.'
Agbley ended up in New Jersey at the beginning of September because he has family who live in East Orange. He learned of the hurricane's change in direction on Aug. 27, when he was in his laboratory running tests on samples he and his adviser, Mead Allison, had collected in the Atchafalaya River - a distributary of the Mississippi River - with their team of scientists.
At that time, Agbley collected three days of clothing and his important documents out of his apartment in East New Orleans and looked for a way to get out of town. He had no car but was able to hitch a ride with two friends from Ghana who were on their way to Austin. The trio spent 20 hours on I-19 West and stopped in Houston for one night to stay with friends. The next day, they arrived in Austin, where Agbley and Seth Kwaku, the other Tulane student now at Montclair, stayed at a Motel 6 for several days to wait out the storm. But by Tuesday, they knew that they wouldn't be going back.
'When we heard that the levees broke, it was obvious it was going to be a big disaster,' Agbley said.
At the end of that week, he took a $200 flight to Atlanta, where he thought he would hang out for a week before deciding what to do about school. He had seen an advertisement by Georgia Tech for research assistants in a science journal and thought he would try to get into its marine sciences program. But when he arrived in Georgia, he got a call from his uncle in New Jersey telling him to come north. He arrived in Newark on Sept. 4.
'I was confused,' he said. 'I didn't know what to do. It just made sense to go along.'
During the first week of September, Agbley registered for classes, took care of his financial aid and found a place to live in Montclair. He started classes on Sept. 12. He hopes that the nine credits for the three graduate-level courses will transfer back to Tulane when he is able to return.
Returning to Tulane is of paramount importance to him. He already has established a relationship with his adviser and started on a major research project about how the movement of sediment down the Mississippi River affects the evolution of the Louisiana coastline.
'I wouldn't want to start over somewhere else,' he said. 'The project I'm working on is quite interesting.'
-NorthJersey.com
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