Dana Atrach, Assistant Professor in Residence, at Northwestern University in Qatar.
Doha: The Qatar Foundation alumni community plays crucial roles in their organisations and communities in Qatar and across the world. Some have returned back as faculty to QF’s partner universities and making a huge contribution to the community.
Dana Atrach is an Assistant Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q), a QF partner university. She teaches screenwriting, mentors filmmakers, and is a graduate of NU-Q herself.
After receiving her Bachelor of Science in Communication from NU-Q, she worked at Teach For Qatar, an education initiative focused on the challenges Qatar’s students face briefly, before going to the US to study a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from University of California, Los Angeles. She joined NU-Q as a full-time faculty in 2017.
As QF’s Class of 2019 graduated recently, Atrach reflects on her days as a student and now, as a faculty member at Education City, and sends her own message to a new wave of QF graduates as they move into the next stage of their lives. “I joined the faculty at NU-Q in 2017. I don’t know if there are words to describe the effect that QF has had on my life. I guess if I had to answer the question in the simplest form, I would say that QF has become my home, and its community has become my family. It is the place where I discovered who I am and what I am capable of,” said Atrach. “QF is where I learned to accept myself as a human being with all my strengths and weaknesses; where I learned to take risks. It is a community unlike anywhere else; a place where I discovered the importance of education; the effect of being nurtured, and the value and the impact of others believing in me,” she added.
As the student Atrach, saw instructors consistently believed in the capabilities of each of these students. It inspired her to come back to NU-Q and change lives of students.
“It dawned on me that if I could do for other students what my professors at QF did for me, then I could trigger change in the lives of the students I come into contact with. That’s why I chose to teach, and that’s why I chose to join the faculty at NU-Q,” she said. Another factor impressed Atrach was that one of QF’s unique aspects- the diverse student body is and it’s not something that a student studying elsewhere would get. At Education City, students and faculty are from over 90 countries.
“Students are by default exposed to the knowledge and experiences that people from these countries bring with them. And that’s what each and every student at QF benefits from – of being immersed in a potpourri of cultures, language, and experiences. As a faculty member, I feel privileged to interact and study with such a group of people because I learn as much from them, as they do from me,” she said.
“As a faculty member who has spent the better part of my adult life in Education City, I always remind my students, that they will never experience what they are experiencing here in QF, anywhere else in the world; so please make the most of it; and make sure to carry the values they learned here, with the,” she added.
