Dear fellow graduate students at ISE: This is the letter that we as graduate students are planning to send to President Maidique. Please sign it to support our petition. Regards. -------------------------- Dear Dr. Maidique: As graduate students we are writing to express our profound concerns regarding the recent proposal forwarded to you by the interim engineering Dean for closing the Industrial & Systems Engineering Department. The purpose of this letter is to strongly urge you to kindly consider other possible alternatives for budget reduction different than closing our department. In our opinion, among all possible ways of action, closing the ISE department is the one that inflicts the most damage to the college of engineering, the university and the community in general. The Industrial & Systems Engineering Department has strong and well established undergraduate and graduate programs. The undergraduate program is ABET accredited and the department on the whole has awarded 600+ degrees in a span of 20+ years. Currently there are 220 students registered in the program, including 89 master and 20 Ph.D students that represent 7.5% of the total count of students at the College of Engineering. We, the graduate students, have joined this department with a vision and a dream of pursuing high quality education at FIU. Many of us have made great personal sacrifices in order to achieve this goal and were fortunate to have an excellent faculty to help us in this endeavor. But the current proposal has cut short this dream. It is worth noting the efforts and hard work of the faculty to establish a doctoral program that we as graduate students are actively helping to sustain and strengthen by doing highâ