Dr. Alan Weber, Assistant professor of English at WCMC-Q, has been named runner-up in the prestigious 2007 James F. Slevin Award sponsored by Cornell University's John S. Knight Writing Institute.

The award is given to a member of Cornell's writing faculty who has developed an innovative sequence of writing assignments in their First Year Writing Seminars. The first year writing seminars, required at all Cornell campuses, are designed to help students develop professional writing, reading and critical and analytical thinking skills in all disciplines.

Dr. Weber developed a series of six essays for his WCMC-Q English 185 course entitled The Story Medicine, which surveyed the development of medical practice and philosophy from the time of the Egyptians to the modern day.

The Prize Selection Committee praised Dr. Weber for his "creative development of a series of assignments especially suited to pre-medical students".

One of the essay assignments asked students to analyze the traditional Hippocratic Oath, and to compare it to Cornell's revised version of the Oath, as well as to several other medical codes, such as the Islamic Oath of Physicians, the Declaration of Geneva, the Oath of Maimonides, and the Stanford Affirmation.

Students then wrote their own oath based on their own view of the best professional standards and practices of the modern physician. Muslim students were encouraged to write their oath from the perspective of a health care practitioner practicing according to Islamic principles.

Another assignment asked students to analyze and present to the class an historical medical textbook. The WCMC-Q library houses an extensive collection of classic medical textbooks called the Classics of Medicine series. These books were donated to the library by WCMC-Q's associate director of evaluation, Dr. Elizabeth Alger. Books in the collection range from the Edwin Smith Papyrus, a 3000-year-old book of surgery from Egypt, to seminal 19th century texts on bacteriology and physiology by Louis Pasteur, Claude Bernard and Rudolf Virchow.

Last year, Dr. Weber's student Peter Sullivan, an undergraduate Engineering major, won first place in the prestigious and highly competitive James E. Rice, Jr. Writing Prize, also awarded by the Knight Institute. Sullivan's paper, "The Failure of Risk Management in the 1996 Everest Disaster," was written for Dr. Weber's writing course entitled Mountains and Literature. His paper analyzed all of the written accounts of the deadly 1996 mountaineering accident immortalized by Jon Krakauer's best-selling book Into Thin Air. He concluded that improper risk management protocols directly contributed to the deaths of eight climbers during a fierce storm on May 10, 1996, on Mount Everest, including Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, the lead guides of the two main expeditions on the mountain at the time.

Sullivan's contribution was subsequently published in Discoveries, a journal of student essays edited and distributed by the Knight Institute.

"Discoveries is not only a great honor and achievement for Cornell student writers, it is also a valuable teaching tool," Dr. Weber said. "We use the journal in class as a paradigm of good student writing."  "We can point to an essay in Discoveries and say to the student: 'here is an award-winning essay written by one of your peers in a class just like this'," he added. "It gives them confidence in their own writing abilities."

WCMC-Q writing faculty members regularly submit student writing from Qatar to the Knight Institute prize contests. Dr. Weber believes that it is just a matter of time before a WCMC-Q student will win one of the Knight Institute prizes.

"We have some very fluid and graceful writers among the pre-medical students. Discoveries will be particularly interested in publishing student work coming from an Islamic and Qatari perspective," he said. "It helps other students in the Cornell campus system develop a more global and diverse view of the world."