From left to right, Tanya Santiago and Mizuho Sugibayashi

"Hour after hour, the situation was getting worse," said Sugibayashi, who was staying with a friend at the Tulane University Hospital and Clinic.

After being evacuated by military helicopter, Sugibayashi eventually ended up in New York City on Labor Day weekend. She was poised to return home to Japan when she heard that the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) had arranged with its members, including HSPH, to make openings available for Tulane students who had been displaced by the hurricane.

"I'm very thankful because I was about to give up my education and go back to Japan because there was no place to stay in America," she said.

Sugibayashi is among a group of about 20 students from the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine who have chosen to take advantage of the ASPH initiative by continuing their graduate studies at HSPH for the fall semester.

"You are our students for the next semester--100 percent," said Dean Barry Bloom at an orientation meeting for the Tulane students on September 16. "We are not pleased why you are here, but we are pleased that you are here. Each of you has an individual career path and hopes for the future, and our job is to help you meet those goals."

Megan Dieterich

Tanya Santiago experienced the hurricane from a different perspective. She was interning at the Environmental Protection Agency in Oakland, California, when Hurricane Katrina hit. She said that she was glued to CNN. "I go into work, and I'm thinking, 'What are these people doing here? Don't they know that this devastation has happened? Why are they at work? And I'm walking around, still trying to do my thing, but basically my mind was in Louisiana, and I felt like a zombie," recalled Santiago.

Tulane University is now temporarily operating out of a campus in Houston, Texas. The university's president, Scott Cowen, has been keeping students, their families, and the public apprised of the university's plans through a web site at http://www.tulane.edu/. He also has been holding conference calls with students. Present plans aim to reopen Tulane in January for the spring semester.

While the Tulane students take classes at HSPH, they have the same access to facilities and resources as Harvard students, explained Stan Hudson, Associate Dean for Student Services at HSPH.

"We are glad to be able to assist these students as they continue their academic progress, and we surely wish we had met them under different circumstances," said Dean Hudson.

His group, the Office for Student Services, has been working assiduously to ease the transition of the Tulane students not only to a different school, but also to a different city. Student Services--consisting of the Admissions Office, Career Services Office, Registrar's Office, Student Affairs, and Student Financial Services--has found temporary housing for students who were unable to find housing on their own, identifying hosts among HSPH students, faculty, and administration. They have helped match students' academic interests to courses here and have connected them to advisors. The students said that the professors they have encountered have been supportive in helping them catch up on the coursework.

Student Services has created a listserve for the Tulane students so that they may stay easily in touch with each other, and they have organized HSPH students who want to serve as "buddies" to the newcomers, showing them around Harvard and around Boston.

Harvard University will not charge the students tuition for the semester in which they are here, helping them avoid paying tuition to two schools. In the meantime, the Office of Student Financial Services is helping the students clarify the status of their financial aid packages at Tulane and establish a budget on which to live while in Boston.

"Student Services is just phenomenal," said Santiago. "Just open arms, and making the transition as easy as can be."