Over Spring Break Northwestern community members visited a city of sun and sand half a world away, without leaving NU’s campus.
Students and administrators ventured to NU’s Qatar Campus about 20 minutes outside of Doha to get a sense of NU life outside Evanston. The group of 16 students embarked on their Middle Eastern trip, which was funded by the Qatar Foundation, on March 20 and returned Friday afternoon.
The primary reason for the trip was so students would be more aware of what’s happening at NU-Q, said Erin Cikanek, a program assistant with the NU-Q support office who went on the trip.
“A lot of people don’t realize academically what’s going on there,” Cikanek said. “These are Northwestern students on the Qatar Campus.”
NU-Q is in Doha’s 2,500-acre Education City, where other U.S. schools have also planted their roots, including Texas A&M University, Georgetown University and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Classes for NU-Q started in 2008 and are taking place in Carnegie Mellon University’s building until NU-Q’s building is constructed. Cikanek said the Qatar Foundation is busy with Georgetown’s building and have not broken ground on the NU-Q building, though she said it will likely be completed in 2013.
The students who went on the trip were evenly split between Medill and the School of Communication, the two schools with Qatar outposts. They toured the campus, sat in on classes and interacted with NU-Q students. They also explored Doha.
“The facilities in Qatar are unbelievable compared to here,” said Elizabeth Schulze, a Medill sophomore. “The resources they have available are pretty crazy,” she said, adding each student receives a 15-inch MacBook Pro and a Nikon digital camera.
NU-Q is funded by the Qatar Foundation, founded in 1995 by Qatari leader Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani with a mission of “education, scientific research and community development,” according to its Web site. The foundation’s main project is Education City.
NU provides the professors, curriculum and brand name, Cikanek said. Though NU-Q students have mostly the same curriculum as Evanston Campus students, she said the approximately 60 NU-Q students take classes at other schools in Education City to fill class distributions.
The school has only journalism and general communication majors. Cikanek said administrators want to focus on the students there now before considering expanding the set of available programs.
Samantha Michaels, a Medill junior, sat in on an enterprise reporting class, which she said is very similar to the equivalent class in Evanston. Students report out of a storefront in Doha. Michaels said she was “blown away” by the students’ work, including a multimedia piece about the stigmatizing of breast cancer in the country.
“Journalism isn’t really a big thing there,” she said. “People aren’t used to seeing reporters out getting footage.”
A majority of students in the class are female, Michaels said.
“I was very impressed because they’re really being kind of trail-blazers,” she said. “It’s not necessarily an accepted thing there.”
NU students and administrators visited NU-Q last Spring Break for the campus’ inauguration, though Cikanek said this most recent trip was the first with an academic purpose.
Gabe Brotman, a Communication sophomore, said anyone skeptical about NU-Q should find a way to take the 7,000-mile trip.
“I wasn’t sold on the idea of NU-Q. I didn’t know what was up,” he said. “After going there and having the experience with students and faculty and deans, I’m convinced it’s going to be successful and adds a global perspective to Northwestern.”[email protected]
