This summer, three students from the High School Journalism Program in Kuwait and Oman were accepted into a competive journalism program at Northwestern University in Qatar.

The Northwestern Connect: Journey Summer Program is an intensive, two-week summer program that combines aspects of NU-Q’s two schools: The School of Communication and Medill School of Journalism. This exciting program was taught by NU-Q faculty, and gave high school students excellent experience with videos and still cameras, Adobe creative software, and exposure to the theory behind creating the stories so essential to journalism and communication.

This year the theme was “Mobile Cultures,” which reflected the many faces in Qatar’s fast-growing society, and the program gave students a hands-on opportunity to explore and document how a person or place changes over time.

Omani students, Ibtsam Said and Ali Al Kasbi and Kuwaiti student Ali Al Mulla, hope to use the skills they learned in the program in interviewing, writing stories, photography, and shooting and editing videos, to tell stories from their own communities in Kuwait and Oman.

The High School Journalism program is an initiative from the US State Department, with funding support from the Office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative and administration support from iEARN.