BY EMILY GLAZER
The Daily Northwestern
Haya Al-Noaimi is a Georgetown University student, an international politics major and vice president of her class. Though her life doesn’t sound extraordinary for an American college student, Al-Noaimi is about 7,000 miles away from her peers in Washington, D.C., in the Arab state of Qatar.
She was one of the first students at Georgetown’s foreign policy school in Education City, a complex of campuses located in the Qatari capital of Doha and where Northwestern is finalizing plans to open a journalism and communication school.
NU would join Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Texas A&M and Virginia Commonwealth universities, which are all funded by the Qatar Foundation, a private nonprofit organization founded in 1995. The University of Calgary is set to open a nursing school in Education City in August.
Despite the different continent and culture, Al-Noaimi wrote in an e-mail that a typical day for her includes.”a quick coffee before class,” attending classes and possibly studying in the library at night.
However, Al-Noaimi said the culture clash in the Doha student body is much stronger than at American universities.
“We have to learn to tolerate views that at times might clash with our views and beliefs,” she said. “We are exposed to many cultures and at times we struggle to sustain our own identity.”
Despite the diversity, the class size remains small – about 25 students. Al-Noaimi said this enables her to build a close network of friends, something not possible at another university.
Still, there are negatives, Al-Noaimi said. The school needs to start more clubs, such as an acting or writing group, she said.
Comparatively, Hala Abbas, a senior at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, said she doesn’t know how much U.S. and Qatari campuses differ, since she has not experienced life on an American campus.
In an e-mail, Abbas wrote that the campus environments may be similar because of events including talks, presentations and movies. Both students said classes at their schools are supposed to be almost identical to those on the American campuses.
Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, said the school in Doha has comparable admissions and grading standards to its Washington, D.C., campus.
“We try to keep the Georgetown identity, and we can offer a slice of our curriculum,” he said.
NU President Henry Bienen told The Daily on Tuesday that potential curricula at NU’s school would “mirror” NU’s current curricula as well.
Qatar does not currently have freedom of the press., but Bienen said the issue of any type of censorship was discussed in early conversations about creating a journalism school there.
Bienen said “stylistically and architecturally” the campus will be part of the Middle East.
“It’s not going to mirror our campus for athletic facilities, sororities, fraternities,” he said. “It’s got to fit into the culture of the milieu it’s in.”
He added that NU will bring traditions that can be “easily exported,” such as the school’s fight song and colors.
If the contract is finalized, classes could start as early as Fall Quarter, even though the school’s facilities would not be ready for about two years, Bienen said. In the meantime, NU would temporarily occupy facilities belonging to Texas A&M.
Hannah Fraser-Chanpong, an incoming Medill freshman from Qatar who participated in a journalism program at NU last summer, said she would consider going back to Doha to study for a year. Fraser-Chanpong, a graduating senior at the American School of Doha, said the Qatari people are very “cosmopolitan and interested in advancing Qatar.”
“Qatar is the perfect place for journalism and communication students to experience the transformation of a society normally considered backwards, and to be able to begin to fix the misrepresentation the region suffers,” she said.
Reach Emily Glazer at [email protected].
