Six Georgetown students and one professor spent spring break in Doha, Qatar, as part of a special Comparative Political Systems class that meets in both D.C. and SFS-Qatar.
The class, taught by Professor Charles King, meets in D.C., as 24 students in Qatar participate via live telecast.
The six D.C. students, three from the College and three from the School of Foreign Service, applied to the class and were personally selected by King, who wrote in an e-mail that he chose people, who “were genuinely excited about being part of a new educational format.”
The trip to Qatar “really wasn’t much of a break for the students,” King said. Throughout the semester, students have been working in long-distance groups of five, with one student from D.C. and four from Qatar, to draft a constitution for SFS-Qatar’s student government. During the trip, groups got together to prepare and give presentations of their work.
“They did a wonderful job across the board, and all of the proposals made really creative use of the things we had learned in class about electoral systems, institutional design,” King said.
Electoral systems weren’t the only item on the agenda, though. Students were given a tour of Doha, rode camels, spent time at the beach, took a tour of al-Jazeera headquarters, located in Doha, and met the host of the television show “Inside Iraq.”
According to Matt Smith (COL ’09), SFS-Q paid for everything.
“They took us out to dinner, paid for our flights, rented villas for us, and gave us transportation cards,” he said.
Jeff Durkin (SFS ‘09) was struck by the ready hospitality of his Qatari classmates.
“They were really quick to invite us to stuff, like ice cream and dinner, and to bring us into the group,” he said.
The Qatari students also enjoyed meeting their classmates.
“When the D.C. people came, it was great because we just loved the feeling that those ‘people’ on the screen became real,” Assma Al-Adawi (SFS-Q ’09) wrote in an e-mail.
Given the opportunity to take the class again, though, Al-Adawi said that he would prefer a local professor who might have a better understanding of Qatari culture.
Smith said that he would definitely take the class again, and not just because of the free trip.
“The whole cross-cultural experience was neat and the trip was the icing on the cake,” he said.
