Georgetown University: School of Foreign Service in Qatar

Four months after their graduation, the first alumni class of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar is already making waves outside the gates of Education City. Despite the harsh international economic climate and some of the worst unemployment numbers seen in decades the world over, the class of 2009 has made significant postgraduate inroads putting their talents to use in the working world.

 57% of the graduates of the class of 2009 have found full-time employment in fields that range from communications and publishing to business and law, while another 14% have pursued graduate internship programs for local businesses, embassies and think tanks.

“It’s challenging and it’s a departure from academia,” said Khalid Al-Jufairi (SFS ’09) of his job working as a government and community relations analyst for ExxonMobile in Qatar. In his position, Al-Jufairi helps to serve as a link between the local public and ExxonMobile, fostering what he calls the company’s commitment to corporate social responsibility by working to coordinate partnerships with local charitable organizations such as Reach Out to Asia, INJAZ-Qatar, The Social Development Center, and Dhreima, the Qatari Orphan Foundation.

Al-Jufairi first began working for Exxon Mobile last summer in an internship program he applied to through SFS-Q’s Career Development Office and began his fulltime job for the company this June. Like many of his classmates, Al-Jufairi turned down several other offers of employment in favor of his first choice.

 Ahmed Helal (SFS ’09) deferred his graduate school plans the United States in order to pursue his current job at the Qatari Ministry of Environment working for the National Food Security Program, where he serves as Assistant to the Chairman of the enterprise. He is not alone—around a third of the Class of 2009 currently works for government organizations and initiatives, reflecting the distinctly political bent of many of SFS-Q’s young graduates.

The promise of exposure to many of the day’s hot button issues outside the classroom, including those in public health and alternative energy sources, motivated Helal to delay his academic plans for the time being, though he credits one of his Georgetown professors with helping him find his current job.

Helal views the experience as an invaluable opportunity to “see the policy-making process and witness it first-hand,” something he hopes the political science PhD programs to which he plans to apply in the near future will find attractive.

For the time being, however, Helal, like so many other new graduates, is simply working on adjusting to the working world.

“[It’s] definitely a learning process at the moment,” he said.

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