With their last academic deadlines approaching, Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q)’s Class of 2017 is preparing for a traditional commencement ceremony in which they will be awarded their Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service degrees.
Students Dana al-Anzy, Abdulrahman al-Thani, Israa Wafaa al-Kamali and Mohamed Taimur Ali Ahmad will soon join the ranks of more than 340 GU-Q alumni, involved in industries as diverse as energy, health, law, finance, media and foreign affairs.
Al-Anzy was one of the students who took advantage of Georgetown’s study abroad opportunities, spending a year at Georgetown’s Washington, DC campus in her junior year. She interned for the United Nations Alliance of Civilisations and attended the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York as a youth advocate for Education Above All.
She was also one of the first Qatari women to climb Kilimanjaro as part of a team to raise funds to improve the quality of education in Palestine.
In addition to a BSFS degree majoring in culture and politics, Abdulrahman al-Thani is one of the students who will graduate with an additional Certificate in Arab and Regional Studies for which he submitted a thesis that focused on the historical narrative surrounding the ancient town of Zubarah.
“Zubarah is gaining a lot of acclaim, and it’s getting more known by people, but it felt to me as though it could use a more thorough historical investigation to talk about its roots,” said al-Thani. “I was able to come up with new sources; I managed to introduce oral history to the equation by interviewing local people.”
Al-Thani explained how professors at GU-Q changed his approach to learning and created an environment that encouraged critical thinking. “Nobody here tried to enforce an ideology on me. Nobody ever tried to tell me ‘This is true and this is not’. They just simply gave me tools and gave me things to read, and they told me ‘You get to choose by yourself’.”
Reflecting on her time at GU-Q, Israa Wafaa al-Kamali explained how she confronted questions regarding culture, religion, politics and society as a whole. “It has been an adventure,” she said, while adding “a lot has changed – I’m a completely different person than I was in my freshman year.”
Al-Kamali hopes to work in the education sector in the future and continue with the Student-to-Student Dialogue club as an adviser after graduation, to help the club start online classes for refugees who cannot attend formal lectures.
For Mohamed Taimur Ali Ahmad, GU-Q’s small campus size enabled him to interact closely with faculty members as well as join societies and activities he may not have got involved on a bigger campus. In addition to being the chair of the Honour Society, he co-founded the Georgetown Business Society, and was the chair of the Middle Eastern Studies Student Association (Messa), which organises an annual conference for undergraduate students to present their research on the Middle East.
The students are part of the ninth group of seniors to graduate from GU-Q since the university opened its doors in Doha in 2005. Students graduate with the same internationally recognised BSFS degree as those on Georgetown’s Main Campus in Washington, DC.