The Trump administration did a pretty evil thing (who would have thought) where they required international students to take at least one in-person class to take their visas even though every university was basically moving online because of COVID.

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On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 6:16 PM Joe Puccio  wrote:
Hi Sumana, 

I'm Joe, one of the co-founders of Coursicle. We help college students plan their class schedule and get into classes by notifying them when seats open up.

I saw the NY Times article referencing the Google Sheet I believe you created and was very glad someone was taking the initiative. If there's some way we can help, please let me know. One of the easiest ways would be to just send you the data we have for how many students are tracking various courses right now so that you could annotate the spreadsheet with the difficulty of getting into each of the in-person classes. We could also give international students free premium access to Coursicle for this semester to increase their chances of getting into classes. 

Let me know. 

Joe Puccio
Co-founder, Coursicle
joe@coursicle.com	



On Jul 8, 2020, 1:54 AM -0400, Sai Sumana Kaluvai , wrote:
Hi Joe,

Thank you so much for reaching out and I would love to talk to you on how to incorporate this into the gsheet and upcoming website. Do you have 10-15 minutes to talk tomorrow (7/8/20)?

Regards,
Sumana



On Jul 8, 2020, 4:25 AM -0400, Joe Puccio , wrote:
Hi Sumana, 

Great. Yes, my schedule is in a bit of flux tomorrow so it'd probably be best for us to coordinate over text. My number is (919) 259-2136. Looks like you have iMessage so I've just kicked off the thread. 

I noticed you have since taken down the links due to profanity. I think you guys have a lot of momentum right now and would be afraid it may be lost while you're trying to get a site up (which may take a while given the nature of the site). One thing you could get setup within an hour or two right now (maybe with the help of a CS major friend) is creating a Google form that populates the Google sheet and then use what are called Regular Expressions to validate the data is 1. of a certain format and 2. does not contain inappropriate language. Here's a guide for using Regular Expressions in Google Forms and here's a widely used list of profanity that you can plug in to those Regular Expressions to filter out that language. 

Best,

Joe Puccio
Co-founder, Coursicle
joe@coursicle.com



Hi Sumana, 

It was great talking with you earlier today. Hopefully you've found the information below about Google Forms helpful. 

As discussed, I've attached information on how many students at each school in this list ('ucla', 'ucsd', 'ucsb', 'berkeley', 'uci', 'tufts', 'jhu', 'sdsu', 'sjsu', 'sfsu', 'csun', 'penn', 'cpp', 'ucsc', 'mills', 'cornell', 'colorado', 'gsu', 'utaustin', 'northwestern', 'uw', 'loyola', 'ou', 'dickinson', 'gatech') are tracking classes on Coursicle. If a class does not exist in that list, it means that no student is tracking that class on Coursicle (and therefore, the class potentially  1) has available seats that international students can enroll in or 2) may be not have available seats but doesn't have high demand, so an international student could likely get into that course easily). As you can see, there are some classes that have more than 50 students tracking them. For those classes, it's very unlikely an international student would be able to enroll because they're competing with so many other students for what is probably very few openings. Even the ones with more than 5 students are probably going to be very competitive. Please feel free to start making this information available immediately on your Google Docs and the new site you're making. You may want to send it to each of the maintainers of the individual school's Google Docs so that they can start integrating it into their Google Docs ASAP. 

Also, before publicly posting anything about Coursicle offering international students free premium this semester, please let me know. We're still discussing internally about how we want to go about this. 

Best,

Joe Puccio
Co-founder, Coursicle
joe@coursicle.com