 This video is for all the Indian students who are currently enrolled with colleges and universities in the US. We are going to talk in depth about the recent visa changes, understand who is impacted by this and most importantly the next steps that you can take right now keep on watching. Hi guys my name is Shachi and I am a travel and visa coach. Now if you have clicked on this video you would be aware of the recent changes in the F1 and M1 visa regulations. Both F1 and M1 are visas which allows students from other countries to pursue their education in the US. So on 7 July 2020 the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security issued new guidelines which brings about a lot of changes from the next semester that is the fall semester which begins in September 2020 and this new visa guideline basically states that if your course has gone completely online that is your college or university has decided to completely convert the next semester into an online course then you are no longer eligible to stay within the United States and your student visa is no longer valid. Their logic being that if you do not have to physically attend the classes or physically meet your professor there is no need for you to stay within the US and you should leave immediately. Now this is obviously just the gist of it. To get a complete understanding of the situation let us go in depth of the guidelines issued by the SEVP. The SEVP is the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. This falls under the Department of Homeland Security and they basically regulate all issues related to student visas. So the SEVP has issued three new guidelines which will be effective from the fall semester. So the first guideline states that if you are on F1 M1 visa and your university or your course has gone completely online then your visa is no longer valid. You will have to leave the country effective immediately or you will have to transfer to another course or university which will require you to attend the classes physically. Moreover it also states that no new visas will be issued to students who are enrolled with universities or colleges which have gone completely online and also if these visas were issued to them earlier they will not be allowed to enter the US. Basically they will be stopped at the border by the immigration control. The second guideline states that if you are on F1 visa and your school is doing in-person classes then you are fine. You are allowed to stay within the United States and you can continue your education here. You can also take online classes but you can take a maximum of just one online class and this has to be maintained throughout the next semester. That means that throughout the entire fall semester you will have to continue to do in-person classes and take just a maximum of one online class to make sure that your visa remains valid. Then we have the third guideline which I thought was quite interesting. So if your school decides to go with a hybrid model that is basically they decide that okay we are going to do a mix of online classes and in-person classes then again you're fine. Your visa remains valid and you can stay within the United States. However you need to take a minimum number of classes online which again should be maintained throughout the next semester and also your school needs to issue a new I-20 to you which basically informs the SEVP that okay the course structure has been changed. It is not completely online and it's a mix of both online and offline classes. So now that we've understood these changes let us look at who are the students who are going to be impacted by these new regulations. This is obviously going to impact all the F1 students who are currently within the US and whose course has gone completely online. Understandably it's a big blow for them. Just a few days before these regulations came out Howard had announced that it is going to take the entire fall semester that is the September 2020 semester online and a lot of other colleges and universities had also decided to do the same. Now obviously now this will need to be reworked and in fact according to the new guideline all the colleges and universities just have 10 days effective from 7th of July to inform the SEVP about how they're structuring the next semester and what they plan to do with the classes. Next it might also impact the students who decide to start the next semester on a hybrid model. So let's say that you start the fall semester on a hybrid model with a mix of online and offline classes but somewhere along the semester your classes get converted to completely online. Now this could happen if the pandemic situation that is the COVID-19 situation flares up in your college and universities if there are a lot of cases and they are forced to shut down the classes and take it completely online. This might leave you in a tricky situation because then as per the new guidelines you will no longer be eligible to stay within the United States. And lastly it impacts all those students who left US sometime in March just before the international borders closed. So if you are now back in India and your course has completely gone online you will not be allowed to enter back into the US. But given the current situation where international travel is anywhere not happening and the borders are still shut if you find yourself in this place I wouldn't worry too much about it. Now all of this is a very stressful situation and I can completely understand if you are in a panic mode and feeling frustrated. However it is very important to keep your head clear right now and focus on the next steps that you can take so let's talk about that. During the US stay very close touch with your colleges your universities and your professors because a lot of changes are going to happen in the next few days. I know that most of the universities are planning to move to a hybrid model where they do a mix of online and offline classes so that their students are not affected by these new visa regulations. Right now these schools and colleges are basically figuring out how do they conduct classes while maintaining the safety of both the students as well as the faculty. So they will probably divide the class into smaller batches and rotate them on different days of the week or they might do all the classes online but keep the lab work the presentations and the research work offline. So all of these changes are going to come up real soon probably in the next one week so be proactive be attentive so that you don't miss out on any of these opportunities. If you're outside the US that is your back in your home country and your course has gone completely online I think it makes sense to stay back home and finish your semester online. I know that for a lot of you this might not be ideal because your course might require some amount of physical interaction or it might require lab and research work but if you can work it out with your university and you can finish the next semester online this would be the best thing to do right now. So this way you can continue your education without any break and also get over this period of uncertainty and hopefully by the time you finish this semester things will be much more clear about visa regulations and also the pandemic situation will be better so overall you will just be in a better place to decide the next steps to take. The third thing which I would recommend to each and every one of you is to just wait and watch and this is because so much is happening every single day right after these visa regulations were introduced Harvard and MIT filed a lawsuit against the government saying that it was just not done and they should be allowed to conduct classes online and I know that a lot of other prestigious schools and universities are not really happy with these new guidelines and they are fighting hard to maintain the online status of the courses simply because it is safer for both the students and the faculty. At a country and a diplomatic level also India has raised this issue with the US and those talks are also still in progress and more importantly US is due for elections this November and the results of that will have a major major impact on what are the next steps which are going to be taken. So I would highly highly recommend you to sit tight for the rest of 2020 do not make any rash or hasty decisions just do with whatever you have whatever you can manage make the best out of it and finish this semester and hopefully by the time your next semester starts that is in 2021 we'll all be in a better place. I hope this video has helped you I'm of course going to be tracking all these developments really closely and bringing the updates to you right here on this channel so make sure that you don't miss out on any of these by subscribing and hitting the bell icon I know these are uncertain times and getting stressed is inevitable but try and maintain your cool like I said earlier just wait and watch do not take any hasty decision thank you so much for watching if you're interested do check out my other videos on the US visa process signing off for now I'll see you in the next one bye