I’m writing this while waiting for the tram from Carnegie Mellon to Northwestern — a three-minute ride instead of the three-hour flight it would take between their campuses in the United States. That’s Education City in Doha, Qatar: six American universities connected by one looping track and shared Wi-Fi.
It looks like a single campus, but it’s really multiple American universities sharing one patch of desert. The Qatar campuses of NU, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and Weill Cornell Medicine sit side by side, making an unlikely neighborhood of universities in the Qatari capital. Right in the middle sits Hamad Bin Khalifa University, the only local one.
It’s easy to forget these are separate universities, each one with its own rules, culture and sense of seriousness. Georgetown’s sandstone halls feel diplomatic and orderly, VCUarts is creative and chaotic, while Cornell’s medical building feels almost poetic in its austerity with no direct light and long hallways — a space designed to mirror the intensity of medicine and the prison-like atmosphere that comes with it. Northwestern sits somewhere in between — glass, bright and a little too put together.
When I first came to Evanston, I was amazed by the size of it — It was all one Northwestern. Education City is the opposite. Each university has a single building and only a few majors, making the place feel more like a neighborhood than a campus. Walking from NU-Q to Georgetown is similar to going from Annenberg Hall to the Technological Institute in Evanston — same muscle memory, different humidity.
It’s hot here — the kind of heat that humbles you quickly. You notice how the city and the campus start to blur together: a skyline in the distance, a classroom in the foreground and the sun as a constant reminder that you’re studying in the Gulf — not the Midwest.
Though it is larger, Education City feels smaller than the Evanston campus. It’s compact, contained and almost walkable. Almost. You can cross it on foot in fifteen minutes, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you enjoy slow-roasting. Doha heat doesn’t negotiate. That’s why everyone lives by the tram.
What makes this place worth the sweat isn’t its architecture or novelty. It’s the mobility. You can take classes across universities or even declare a minor outside your school.
I’m pursuing a Film and Design minor, a joint program between VCUarts Qatar and NU-Q. An NU-Q media student can study economics at Georgetown, art at VCUarts or biology at Carnegie Mellon.
And the best part? Cross-registered classes don’t affect your GPA, which is probably why my French professor sees me so rarely. That’s the hidden charm of Education City: the safety to explore your academic interests without penalty. You can take something out of pure interest and not spiral if it doesn’t come naturally.
It’s also fun to play a quiet guessing game: Which university does that person go to? You think you can tell by their NU hoodie or Georgetown tote, but don’t be fooled. Most events here are open to everyone, so half the people wearing NU-Q merch might actually be engineers, artists or med students just here for the snacks.
Another big thing I love about Education City are the gyms. There are more than five mixed-gender gyms across campus and female-only ones too. This means if you’re a woman, you get double the options. They’re different from the Henry Crown Sports Pavilion in Evanston, where no matter when you go — whether it’s 6 a.m. when you’ve managed to wake up early, or 10 p.m. when your performance anxiety is exacerbated by everyone else’s perfect form — it’s always full.
Here, you can actually choose where to work out, depending on your mood or your courage level. It’s oddly liberating to walk into a gym that isn’t bursting at the seams and know you can exist without competing for space.
In the end, the smallness works in your favor. You recognize faces across universities. Professors learn your name sooner. You step out of one classroom and into another that is technically part of a different university. It’s strange at first, like being part of one big institution with multiple accents.
Education City, Qatar, is compact, but it stretches your sense of scale. It’s American and local, imported and homegrown, glass and sand, and the real learning happens in the small space between them.
Aizere Yessenkul is a NU-Q Communications senior and author of “Yes-sentials.” She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
