Respected Professors, dear fellow students, friends, ladies, and gentlemen,

Good afternoon!

I am thankful and regards for the permission granted to express my views on behalf of our students and the international community. I am also thankful to the speaker before me who delivered kind statements regarding the community of students.

My name is Mr. Shakeel Ahmad; born in a small village, “Lilowni Shangla,” which is situated in the northern part of Khyber PukhtunKhwa province in Pakistan. The northern areas are full of mountainous, steep valleys and plains with an abundance of vast and green lush meadows with spindling riverines, lakes, and springs flowing downstream in the form of Swat, Siran, Kunhar, Indus, and Kabul Rivers. My village is approximately 6500ft above sea level, so it has heavy snowfall and cold chilling in winter, flowery bloom spring, pleasing summer and a contented cool environment in autumn. Tourists, therefore, come from all over Pakistan in almost every season.

I am the youngest son of my loving parents, who is a medium class farmers of orchid, vegetable, and cereal crops. Thus, I spent a lot of my childhood times in agriculture fields and beautiful fruit gardens that ascent my attention toward climatic and environmental features which are trigging toward worsening conditions due to climate change in the form of long dry spells, heavy unseasonal rainfalls, and variations in temperature as heat waves and chilling cold weather. These factors led me to choose my field of education as environment and climate sciences. I used to think that a professional environmentalist could protect his communities from the adverse effects of climatic transformation and make efforts to reclaim substantial degradation. My elder siblings are highly educated in different fields of applied and social science; thus, they guided me properly to accomplish schooling in the early years of primary, secondary, and higher secondary education.

The global power's war on terrorist in the nearby country affected Pakistan, causing extremism, violence, and political instability. These factors adversely affected the young generation in those days, so my parent decided to send me safer places in the country and were reluctant to stay in the village to continue farming to fulfill our family's needs. Those days were the real test of our nerves, passion, and loyalty to our dearest country Pakistan. As head of our family, my father has high moral values and humility. He trained me to divert my attention to education and select the right path to be a beneficial person to society.

I can never forget those days of my life. I think this is something worse that can happen in a person’s life that you pay the price for the wrong actions of others with whom you concern nothing. Life still goes on and those hard experiences taught us lesson to follow the right path of respecting humanity, to stay brave in front of evil, to work hard for getting education, and stick to moral and ethical values that strengthen the community.

For higher studies, I moved from my village to other city, which is 400km away from my village. Where I completed my intermediate level in pre-medical and begin my bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I continued my education, so took admitted in COMSATS University, a leading university in Pakistan in Environmental Science, for master’s degree Program.

With my thirst for a better understanding of the environment, I applied to Tsinghua University School of Environment. I am really indebted to my professor and Tsinghua University for selecting me as a PhD scholar. Coming to China, means to proceed for bright future, understanding the culture of our Chinese friends and built a lovely relation with all international students. I found everybody here as very kind, loving and cooperative particularly my fellow lab mates. Under the supervision of my loving Professor JIA Haifeng (贾海峰), Director of Center for Urban Runoff Control & Stream Restoration, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, I found myself a considerable improvement to concentrate my coursework and research activities. In Tsinghua, I learned the real pathway toward new approaches of research abilities and expertise.

Pandemic Coronavirus caused to obstruct my PhD journey after spending 20 months in China, but my esteemed passion towards research did not let me to stop there and I continued my research work from home. As I have already passed my coursework with higher grades and published a review paper (Impact factor 14.95) as a main author, two (2) research article as a main author, and ten (10) research article as a co-author at national and international journals.

I warmly welcome all the newly coming students and wish them all the best for their upcoming life in Tsinghua University, one of the most stunning and beautiful campuses around the globe. I would be happy to spare some time for their enquires, assistance and guidance during their studies in the Campus.

I hope we will make the Tsinghua University as the leading institution for the rest of Globe.