Instead of spending their Spring Break at home, six Medill students and several faculty members traveled to Northwestern in Qatar to build a closer relationship between the two campuses.
NU’s sister campus, known as NU-Q, was created in 2008 and is about to graduate its first class. However, many students and faculty from both campuses said there is a distinct lack of awareness about NU-Q in Evanston.
“We were over there to start the conversation of how we could resolve this problem,” said Medill junior Sam Wagreich, one of the students chosen to visit Qatar this year. “I would imagine that the average student is aware that the Qatar campus exists in some capacity, but I think they would be really amazed by the facilities that they have over there and the caliber of students.”
Wagreich said students were selected to visit Qatar because they exhibited leadership as Medill students in both extracurricular activities and academics.
He also said both the volume of multimedia technology at NU-Q and the intensity of their journalism classes surprised him. NU-Q students report in diverse neighborhoods in Qatar’s capital, Doha, for their enterprise reporting classes, Wagreich said.
The Evanston group stayed for six days in Doha, where they visited NU-Q classes, met with students and professors and toured the city.
The two campuses have coordinated these visits each year since NU-Q’s founding. The Qatar students have made similar visits to Evanston and some have even studied abroad for quarters on the main campus.
Richard Roth, who heads Medill at NU-Q, said he hopes to see even more interaction between the schools in the future. Roth helped coordinate an event at the NU campus this summer, when. almost all of the 36 graduating seniors will travel to Evanston for graduation with the main campus.
NU-Q Medill senior Zainab Sultan said the plans are a great way for the Evanston community to learn about NU-Q.
“NU-Q will march as a school, and I’m super excited,” Sultan said. “At the end of the day, NU-Q is a part of Northwestern and we want it to be represented there.”
Roth said in addition to more cross-campus trips, the school is working on having main campus students study at NU-Q for a semester and developing joint classes between the two campuses via Skype.
After NU-Q’s fourth year, Roth said he is proud of all that the NU-Q community has accomplished. He said the students are able to compete “toe to toe” with their Evanston counterparts.
“Some people worried that this was going to be an inferior program out here. It is not,” he said. “These are Northwestern students. They just happen to be 7,000 miles away.”
