A little background

It's about time I genuinely start posting here. So, for anyone just now reading this who's not sure exactly what it is I'll be doing for the next year, this is a good time to give some background on all of that and lay the foundation for entries to come.

Starting in mid-August, I'm going to be teaching for a year in Qatar, a small peninsular nation jutting out of the larger Arabian Peninsula (zoom out to see the surrounding region):


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By the way, so far I've heard it pronounced as "KAY-ter," "CAT-er," "kuh-TAR," and "CUT-er," none of which are right, I've learned, but the last of which is closest. Anyway, in land area, the country is only about the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut, but it's built a thriving economy around oil and natural gas exports. With the resulting wealth, Qatar has been investing heavily in social and economic development projects, and it's probably fair to say that it's one of the most rapidly transforming countries in the world today.

Education City is one of these ventures: working together with the Qatar Foundation, several American universities have, over the past decade or so, opened up campuses in the capital city of Doha. The one I'll be at is the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q). For the curious, the other branch campuses there belong to: Virginia Commonwealth University, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Northwestern. WCMC-Q runs a two-year premed program and then a regular four-year med program, teaching from essentially the same curriculum as Cornell does in its U.S. campuses.

So that's the short-version backstory for why I'm teaching there. Specifically, though, my tiny part in all of this is to be a physics teaching assistant -- one of two -- for the premed physics course. There are other TAs for other classes, of course, but the only other physics TA will be Jakob, one of my friends from Cornell who was incidentally in the same major and class year as I was.

As for how I even got into this to begin with, I first became really interested in doing this after hearing about it from Professor Robert Thorne, the guy in charge of recruiting physics TAs for WCMC-Q. I've had experience before in teaching physics and math, so I sent out my application for the job at the same time as I was applying to physics grad schools. As it turned out, I got the job, and so after some long and hard thinking, I decided to defer grad enrollment for a year to take up this opportunity. Which is great for me, because as much as I'm set on grad school, I probably won't get this kind of chance again for years. Plus, I love teaching, and now, for the coming year, I get to focus on doing just that -- to say nothing of the experience of simply living abroad and seeing a part of the world I haven't yet.

Two more weeks stateside. Can't wait.