North by Northwestern

Full disclosure: The Qatar Foundation funded Blake’s trip to Doha.

While most college students went to Cancun or Miami for spring break, I went to Doha, Qatar. On the surface, it’s not such an unusual destination. The weather is warm, the city sits on the water and there are plenty of fancy hotels and beachfront resorts. But sunbathing is tricky due to the modest culture and drunken carousing is nearly impossible (not to mention illegal). There’s also the 16-hour flight to consider.

Of course, I wasn’t planning on partying every night in Doha. Along with 15 other Medill and Communication students, I was there as an ambassador of sorts, expected to bridge Northwestern’s Evanston and Doha campuses. If you thought Northwestern’s only other campus was in downtown Chicago, get with the times. Your fellow Wildcats halfway across the world would be disappointed in you.

NU-Q is based in Education City, where five other top-tier American universities have also moved in. In funding EC, the Qatar Foundation is attempting to make Doha the intellectual hub of the Middle East. The project is ambitious, but the Qataris seem to believe that with enough money, anything is possible.

And in Qatar, there’s enough money. The rapidly growing nation boasts the world’s second-highest per-capita income (next to Luxembourg) and one of the world’s lowest unemployment rates (0.5 percent). Its vast oil and gas reserves, at current rates of consumption, aren’t expected to run out until 2080 or later. It’s a running joke that the Qatari national bird is the construction crane. Some worry that Doha may follow Dubai’s footsteps and overdevelop, but there is more oil and natural gas money in Qatar to fall back on if the real estate bubble bursts.

For now, construction continues, and EC is no exception. The sprawling new student center, the largest in the world, is set to open in August and Northwestern’s own building should be ready by 2013. NU-Q students, faculty and administration currently use the third floor of Carnegie Mellon’s building, a massive behemoth that would have cost some $500 million to construct in the U.S. NU-Q’s proposed structure will be no less extravagant, sporting the world’s biggest projection screen and nine times the space of the McCormick Tribune Center.

At this point, NU-Q is less than half-full, with 76 students from 20 different nationalities and a student to faculty ratio of about 2 to 1. The first graduates won’t emerge until 2012. Degrees in journalism, communication and radio/T.V./film are identical to their Evanston counterparts, and the students who pursue them would fit right in at Evanston as well. They’re funny, outgoing and a bit nerdy. They may speak a few more languages, but they know the fight song, they’re quick to wear purple and they carry on many of the same traditions. There was even a Dance Marathon at NU-Q last year, although it was three hours instead of thirty and couldn’t include boys for cultural reasons.

Expect to hear more from the Northwesterners in Qatar soon. A group of NU-Q students will visit Evanston in mid-May for a tour of the parent campus. A new study abroad program will let Doha Wildcats come to the States for a semester in the fall. And the groundbreaking students  coming out of Qatar will not be contained within the Middle East.