USC Valedictorian Thanks AMF In Graduation Speech

AMF is honored to have the opportunity to work with the inspiring students at the University of Southern California. Through an integrated curriculum with the Viterbi School of Engineering, AMF has worked one-on-one with students to create and improve programs throughout Africa. Viterbi Valedictorian, Zeeshan Ahmed, holds working with AMF as one of the highlights of his college experience.

"My most profound educational and life experience actually came from within the Viterbi academic setting, in my engineering writing class. As part of this class, everyone worked in groups on real community service projects. In the spring of 2004, my good friend Morgan Hendry and I took this class and worked on a pilot project in partnership with the African Millennium Foundation. The scope of the problem was to develop a computer lab at an elementary school in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During the course of our initial research, we studied the politics and socio economic conditions, in that region, especially in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide. I think we matured a few years in those couple of weeks. We realized that before we could worry about computer labs, we had to worry about more fundamental problems like providing clean drinking water and power to light homes. Consequently we designed our model to tackle those problems instead.

The experience of working with the African Millennium Foundation brought to light the larger looming problem of a lack of access to education, not only in Africa, but all over the world. We are extremely fortunate to be here today, receiving engineering degrees, but there between three and four billion people who will never have the privilege of an education such as ours. Another couple of billion will not see the impact of our engineering advancements for decades to come."- Zeeshan Ahmed

Read the full speech from Zeeshan Ahmed, USC Viterbi Valedictorian here: http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2005/2005_05_13_valedictorian_speech.htm