High school students visit WCMC-Q with Qatar Career Fair

September, 2014

High school students from across Qatar toured WCMC-Q in a visit coordinated by the college’s Office of Student Recruitment and Outreach in collaboration with Qatar Career Fair.

Students aged 15-17 were shown around the state-of-the-art facilities at WCMC-Q, as well as other colleges in Qatar, to help them make informed choices about where they want to study after they graduate from high school.

The tour of WCMC-Q, led by student recruitment and outreach officer Rammy Salem, included visits to key facilities at the college, including the lecture halls, seminar rooms, the Clinical Skills Center, teaching laboratories and the library.

Salem explained the purpose of the visit.

He said: "Working with Qatar Career Fair is a great way for us to give high school students the opportunity to see the college first-hand so they can get a real sense of what life as a student at WCMC-Q would be like. The aim is not just to inspire the students to want to become doctors, but also to explain that it takes a great deal of commitment and dedication to study medicine so that they can make an accurate judgment about whether this particular career path is right for them."

Abdulrahman Al-Kaabi of Qatar Careers Fair, who supervised the student tour, said: "Our aim is to show each student all of the many paths they can take so that they make a decision about what career they wish to pursue based on as much information as possible. It is great that we can bring the students here to WCMC-Q’s to see what it would be like to study here so that they can decide whether medicine could be the right field for them."

The students were introduced to WCMC-Q’s distributed eLibrary, which has more than 8,000 eJournals, 17,000 eBooks and 345 databases that can be accessed online, in addition to 3,800 print publications that can be viewed in the library. They also learned about the audiovisual technology in the lecture halls that allows students in Doha to view lectures being given at Cornell’s campuses in New York and Ithaca in real time, and were told about the college’s one-year Foundation Program, which provides intensive schooling in the sciences, math and English to help high school students prepare for the rigors of the two-year Pre-medical Program.

Ali Nidal Al-Mughrabi, aged 17, of Musab Bin Omair Independent School, said: "I enjoy biology and I am interested in becoming a physiotherapist, so it has been really interesting for me to visit the college and hear about the opportunities that a medical degree would offer. I really like the building and the facilities seem very good, so it has given me a lot to think about."