After three years at Northwestern, Weinberg junior Tamu Christ and SESP junior Allie Bream needed another campus tour. This time, they were at NU’s Qatar campus.
Christ and Bream were studying abroad in the Middle East in Oman during Fall Quarter, about 500 miles away from Qatar. They had an excursion to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the fall and visited NU’s newest campus while in Doha, Qatar’s capital city.
There are 38 students in the inaugural class at NU Qatar, 21 of whom are in the School of Communication. The other 17 students are enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism.
Out of 30 males and eight females, the students come from 16 different countries, including Brazil, France and Canada.
Visiting the Doha campus opened Christ’s eyes to seeing the college experience elsewhere in the world, he said.
“To see something like NU in Doha … it makes us realize how unique the American college experience is and how we put a lot of value on these things,” Christ said.
Christ and Bream did not have a chance to speak with students, but they did meet with a student activities coordinator and learned more about NU’s program.
The administration is working to help students come up with their own ideas for student groups, Christ said.
“They have a dynamic environment because they want people to get involved, especially because that’s what American schools are known for a lot of the time,” he said. “At the same time, there were lots of challenges, especially with things like student activities because they were trying to replicate an American school. They had to respect Qatari customs which are obviously more conservative.”
Richard Roth, dean of Medill in Doha, wrote in an e-mail that there will probably be no Greek life or Dance Marathon, “in part because girls in this culture cannot dance with boys nor can they even dance with each other if boys are around.”
Bream said she couldn’t imagine fraternities or sororities in Doha because of cultural differences and the emphasis that is placed on family life.
“They want to be involved but at the same time realizing that students don’t have the same rights that we do in Evanston,” she said.
Bream said the main difference she noticed between the Evanston and Doha campuses is how people looked. Many of the female students in Doha wore hijabs, or head scarves, or Abbayases, which are long, black robes.
But other students looked less traditional.
“A lot of the girls seemed westernized because their parents were liberal enough to send them to an American university,” she said.
Some of these students have embraced other aspects of Western traditions as well, including cheering on the NU football team.
Even though there’s a nine-hour time difference between Evanston and Doha, John Lavine, dean of the Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, said some students may check scores in the middle of the night to keep up with Wildcat games.
Lavine said he’s heard that students in Qatar come to class after Wildcat football games saying, “We won, we won!”
