When I first talked to my wife about spending time in the Middle East as part of a Fulbright program, Qatar was not the first name that came to our minds. We did not know much about the country. We started looking at our options and researching countries in the region. To our surprise, the name of Qatar was coming once and time again as associated with interesting developments. We started hearing about prestigious US universities opening branches in Qatar, the Asian Games being hosted in Qatar, Qatar aiming to be the Gas Capital of the world and we decided Qatar should be high on our list of choices. Qatar made it as our first choice when I started contacting different universities in the region and the first to respond was the Dean of Engineering in Qatar University at the time, Dr. Nabil Al-Salim. The letter of invitation was very personal and encouraging and I started to feel this would be a place where not only I could make a difference, but I will be welcomed as well.
After the regular proposal writing and screening, I was selected as a Fulbright scholar to the State of Qatar. I made it to Qatar at the beginning of January with a lecturing/research assignment. My plan was to focus on multidisciplinary education and research. My research was to focus on the gas industry being the most important industry in Qatar. I would like to write few thoughts about only those things that invoked extreme feelings in myself and my family. Some of these are listed hereafter,
1. What impressed me the most in Qatar are Qatari women as represented by those I dealt with directly like Dr. Sheikha Al-Misnad and Dr. Sheikha Bint Jabor and those that I did not deal with directly, but whose actions influence the whole country like Her Highness Sheikha Moza. It was a great experience to show my daughter that women in the Arab world are leaders and that modesty and following Islamic traditions does not impede their ability to be effective leaders and innovators. To add to these fine role models, I was happily surprised by the percentage of women choosing engineering as a career in QU. I compared this to the struggle that we have in the US to recruit women into engineering. This is a phenomenon that I hope social scientists in the region will study and it sure is something that Qatar and probably other countries in the Middle East can teach the west.
2. What made me most optimistic are the abundance of opportunities created by the wealth generated from the natural resources in Qatar. Opportunities created by the availability of research dollars for faculty and students seem to be abundant. Programs such as UREP, and NPRP funded by Qatar foundation are new and promising. Companies are sponsoring chair positions as other venues to encourage research and development in Qatar. QU is a melting pot for faculty and staff from many nationalities and educational backgrounds. This makes it in a great position to offer education that is unparalleled in the region. Moreover, if well utilized, these opportunities could create a great culture of research. However, these programs are still new and it will take time for things to fall in place. The lack of graduate school in QU is a big hindrance to establishing a rooted culture in the university and the country. Although QU is mainly a teaching institute, research needs to become an integral part of each faculty’s performance evaluation.
3. The most enjoyable part of my Fulbright experience has been the teaching component. One of the two courses I taught was the automatic control course. As defined in the catalog, the course contents seemed too packed for a one semester course, so it was a challenge to keep the students interested. Balancing a hands-on component with the theoretical component has also been a nice challenge. The students have been respective and enthusiastic. Many have impressed me with their dedication and hard work. The second course, electric circuits, had a different flavor. It is a college requirement and is taught to all majors within the college. The section I taught had mostly chemical and civil engineering students. Electric circuits are usually a tough sell for students from a non electrical engineering major. Motivating the students through examples from everyday life and explaining circuits’ concepts through analogies from other fields such as fluid mechanics seemed to help. As with the first course, students have been interested, enthusiastic and hardworking. I believe that this has been one of the most enriching teaching experiences for me.
4. What surprised me the most was the speed at which things change in Qatar and QU. Most of the changes I have seen were positive, but a process for affecting changes seems more of a choice rather than a must. This was a bit different from what I was used to back in the US where circumventing the process is not usually an option.
5. What disappointed me the most was the accommodation? This seems to be the issue every Fulbright has complained about. I have a long list of issues that would make this article a lot longer than I planned. I have seen the signs of wealth in Qatar in many places, but not in the housing for visiting professors. Bureaucracy is what I have seen the most of when it comes to accommodation.
6. What agitated me the most was driving in Qatar. Although, growing up, I was trained on driving in the busy streets of Cairo; the danger level was always limited in Cairo. Speedy drivers roam the streets of Doha in huge SUVs and cameras and speed tickets do not seem like a big deterrence. My son spent a little time on the internet investigating cars with tickets in Doha. One of the cars he investigated had 7500 QR of traffic tickets in one week. The three Fulbright scholars that visited Doha this year have all had one or more accidents; mine ended up in a broken finger and a run-away driver. This is one of the issues the government of Qatar needs to address.
7. What my family and I wished for was a chance to get to know a Qatari family up close. Although the Qatari colleagues that I have dealt with have been extremely polite and generous, we did not have the chance to visit a Qatari home during our stay in Qatar.
To sum it up, Qatar is not a perfect country, but it sure has the ingredients and momentum to be one of the best countries in the region if not the world. It offers interesting challenges and opportunities. We will miss Doha as we go back to our home in the USA. I will follow up with a series of more detailed articles about our experience in Qatar.
I will continue to write about our experience in Qatar in more details in this blog hoping it will benefit someone as they venture into this area of the world.
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