A Party to the World

One month ago, I stepped onto Saudi Arabian soil for what I anticipated to be a magical experience coming to KAUST. Well, yes and no.

For our first three weeks here, 350+ students were stowed in a hotel. Granted, the Intercontinental is a nice hotel but they told us that they’d be bringing us here early so that we might get settled – buy the things like blenders and speakers that we needed, and work the kinks out of our newly minted apartments. We did take care of things like applying for iqamas (our residency permits), but outside of that, we were by and large sitting around.

One event they put on for us that I know I enjoyed was they managed to take 100 students into the desert to go four-wheeling. That was actually pretty awesome.

Five days of orientation beginning the last days of August, largely filled with cultural sensitivity issues and massively behind schedule. There seems to be some cultural disagreement about punctuality, but with no exaggeration, one of these mornings the opening presentations scheduled for 8 am did not get under way until 10. And when you tack on an hour-and-a-half commute from the hotel to the campus, you get a bunch of tired students who would much rather be elsewhere. As a final `can’t believe it’s so’ moment, it was all scheduled during Ramadan – so students who were fasting and who would otherwise be sleeping had to be awake and active.

Getting to campus was another ordeal. We were all very excited to move in, and then largely disappointed to find everything from rodents to black mold, leaky pipes to bottled `leavings’ of construction workers. A few days later, ceilings began to collapse in some units.

At this point, school had started, of course. Like many others, for the first few days of class I was sleeping on a friend’s couch. When I and about a dozen other students were scheduled to move in (getting up at 7:30 to come to campus in time), we were told that it would be about an hour until we could be given keys and move in, but ended up waiting 7 hours to be told that there was no way we would be able to move in, and had to go back to Jeddah.

Books for most classes have still not arrived. We haven’t any clusters online for high-performance computing. In some disciplines, labs won’t be online until 2010. The second fastest supercomputer in academia sits dormant in the basement of one of our buildings because the data center is not clean.

I would like to make it clear that I understand that anything this big getting off the ground so quickly is bound to have problems. There were going to be wrinkles (if not kinks) to work out, and I can appreciate that. I hope to not descend into a rant as frankly I’m all ranted out.

There have been perks – the food on campus is free to students for an indeterminate amount of time; our books will be purchased for us this semester; there have been goodies abundant to be had (from t-shirts to thumb-drives). As much as I love a thumb drive, I would have preferred something else – a home.

That said, the students have mobilized. We’ve signed petitions, we’ve organized, and we’ve gotten interim student representation in place. We wanted to convey the idea that we don’t want to perpetually complain but would like to help out if that means us coming into a better situation. And despite some of our expectations, within two days, the administration had contacted us to schedule meetings and put us in contact with the contractors in charge of this and that (IT, housing, etc.). It’s actually been very inspiring to see the actions we take have tangible results. Had to talked to me two days ago, you would have found me a very tired and disenchanted man, but today I’m very hopeful.

In terms of academics, I am really happy with the faculty. I’ve secured a TA position, and I spend a couple hours a day with this prof in a constant stream of geeking out. And I spoke yesterday to a prof for two hours about the research he’s doing and how I might get involved on that front. Depending on how this goes, I’d be willing to consider staying on for a PhD!

I’ve made instant friends with a couple of students here, and three of us have gotten a license to host a local TED event: TEDxKAUST. We’ll replay some of our favorite talks, and those we think would be most inspiring to students here, and we hope to get a couple of professors to present as well. In our budget, we’ve been able to allocate funds to booths and demos and if all goes well (read: gets approved), we’ll have a Ruben’s Tube.