Pivotal Adham Center staff
person Soheir Fouad receives her Masters in TAFL.
Anyone who knows the
Adham Center knows Soheir Fouad, assistant to director Abdallah Schleifer. Fouad
joined the Center in January 1987 before its official inauguration a year later.
It was a time when, as she remembers, "Everything was in boxes. Only the equipment
and studio were up" - and all she had to work with was a manual typewriter.
Warning: fopen(/home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/cache/c4b5d39cd42245a8e6e7245227a36fc6) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 128
Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 129
Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 130
Warning: fopen(/home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/cache/08cb6b41c72b35d6e232f2733439b3d7) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 128
Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 129
Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 130
Warning: fopen(/home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/cache/c3cd6a5d4c12cc9e2d126107b91ead9b) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 128
Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 129
Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/noelense/public_html/kpd-online.info/exchange/ex_func.php on line 130
Since that time she has
watched the center grow from a one-year undergraduate to the present
Masters program, and has seen its graduates move into all the
major international broadcasting channels; she notes with pride
that whenever she turns on the television these days she comes
across a familiar face. She also remembers Dr.
Hussein Amin's arrival at the Center as a young faculty member,
and is delighted to see him now chairing the Journalism and Mass
Communications department. And she has been involved in every
aspect of the Center's rapid growth, from helping students to
choose the right courses, to purchasing supplies, to persuading
funders to increase their support. Fouad says, "I consider it
my home. I am committed to the place. We put it together."
At the same time as she
was helping to build the Adham Center, Fouad was slowly but surely adding to her
educational qualifications. "I've lived my life backwards," she says, explaining
that she married at age 16, had her first child at age 18, and that it was only
in 1986, when her two sons were married and settled, that she thought of working
for a higher degree. After taking her GED in Denver, Colorado where her son (who
drove her to the examination center) was then living, she was admitted to AUC
as an undergraduate in 1986, the same year she joined the Adham Center. Always
careful to give her work priority, she took classes only in the early morning
or at the end of the day. Her persistence paid off when, in 1995, she completed
her BA in journalism, a dream she had cherished since she was 9 years old. Her
achievement is the more remarkable for coming in the immediate wake of tragedy,
the loss of her husband in an accident in 1994.
Fouad did not stop at
the BA, however, immediately registering in the Masters program at AUC. Partly
out of a love for the language, and partly because of the special challenge that
she felt it presented for someone who, like herself, had spent many years of her
early life outside the Arab world, Fouad chose Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language
(TAFL). She was also influenced, she says, by the contrast with journalism: "I
felt I needed something that would keep me very busy studying but be quieter than
journalism. I needed the time to recover, but at the same time a challenge for
my new life."
Fouad was awarded her
Masters last June at a ceremony attended by her two sons and their families (including
four grandchildren), who came from the United States. TAFL Department head El-Said
Badawi says, "I admire her guts in entering into an altogether new field. She
persisted until she made it." Fouad is now tutoring students out of her working
hours, and feeling once again the pride of fostering achievement.
|
Tassel
time! Soheir Fouad receives her Masters in TAFL from President John Gerhart.