JU Today

i went to Jordan University to check the registration desk for some papers i needed to hand in, when i couldnt finish up before the lunch break i was left with an hour and a half of free time before i got to resume my work and meet my professor

this free time was very eventful that i have to congratulate Dr. Khaled Karaki for the shift that is happening concerning students extracular activities.

between 12:30 and 2:00 pm today there were three very interesting activities running the same time that i was aware of

1. poetry reciting infront of the main library; there is a small roman shaped stage steps that is not used often, im not sure if its the idea of the faculty of arts or the deanship of student affairs/poetry club students but they managed to have outdoors stand, microphones and speakers, students from various faculties recited their poems, it was awesome listening to poems by students about love, beauty, pain, nationalism, Lebanon, some were really good.

2. At the student activities complex, there was a basketball game between the team of the faculty of IT and the faculty of Engineering, that was just amazinng, i swear it was so much fun, they are really talented and students were SO engaged, the complex was booked and the atmosphere was awsome! i left at the begining of the third quarter and the engineering team was leading with 30 points

3. At the faculty of Engineering, IEEE Student Branch was showing a documentary movie called the Robot Race at Saeed Al Muft Auditorium which is the biggest among all halls in the faculty, i just wanted to point out that two and three years ago, if students wanted to use this auditorium they would have to go through lots and lots and signatures to get to do an activity and this auditorium was not open except on special occaisons, now the branch and 3 departments run lecture series in the field of Engineering which is picking a pace on introducing students to whats new, now students are getting more creative in voluntry work and on another note, the faculty finally got to give the branch an office =D that was the biggest obstacle facing this kind of work, if students wanted to do activities in their faculties, faculty Deans had the problem of whether to adopt them or not because all extracular activities have to be autheticated from the deanship of student affairs under clubs and not under faculties so if you want to establish a student club as part of the faculty you have to fight for 6 years to get an office and convince them of your purpose and the mechanism of whom to refer to and who will do the follow ups.

what i hope to see in the future is getting women participating more, somehow in all three activities, women shy to be in the picture, i didnt see any female poets, girls screaming their lungs in the game as much as the guys did, still students sit in separate blocks, mainly guys, mainly girls sections, facing women in engineering challenges and guys mentality that girls shouldnt do this kind of work or that some girls cant compete in certain areas as guys, etc etc..

im happy because students are enjoying these things and are participating more than the previous years, but i hope that Dr Karaki's next step is including more incetives for students to raise the bar on the quality of their work and compete at more professional and higher levels and start considering the importance of interdesciplinary projects between faculties which is something beautiful, for example getting engineering students making applications for problems facing med school students as senior projects, merging IT students with design students, getting philosophy students to sit with religious studies students, PE students with Nutrition students and so on and so forth..