A Georgetown Education Opens Doors for Student

Bilal Shakir is an International Economics major at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q). He’s only been a University student for two years but he’s packed a lot of learning and living into that period of time. His experiences have culminated into a passion for education advocacy.

“It is through education that I have been able to transition from a country like Pakistan to one of the richest countries in the world,” Bilal explains. “This transition hasn’t been a seamless one but it has become possible because of education.”

One way Bilal has promoted education is as a Learners Voice Program member of the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE).

“Because of my passion for education I became involved with the Learners Voice Program,” Bilal explains. “As a Learners Voice member one becomes an ambassador for WISE and represents it at various platforms, such as the WISE conference itself, which was started by Dr. Abdullah Al Thani in 2008.” Dr. Al Thani is president of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU), the umbrella institution for Georgetown and its sister campuses at Education City.

Even though the acronym WISE stands for the World Innovation Summit for Education, it’s actually a year-long program that involves student ambassadors attending and representing WISE at different international conferences, speaking to the press, writing in the press, blogging and tweeting about education.

“Being a WISE learner gives you a voice, hence a Learners Voice,” Bilal adds. “It gives you the opportunity to sit at the table and interact with actual policymakers, educators, academics and people who run education NGOs.”

In fact, Bilal recently traveled to Manchester in the UK to attend a WISE conference and to participate in a WISE/British Council discussion on Future Models of Learning: Student and Teacher Perspectives.

The discussion gave him the opportunity to sharpen his critical thinking skills as he represented Georgetown and WISE in the Cambridge-style debate, arguing against the motion of future technologies making the teaching profession obsolete.

Bilal says that the Learners Voice Program is striving to empower youth, to empower students. “It’s ironic how little input students and learners actually have in deciding educational policy. At the end of the day it is the youth with the most at stake and for whom these educational policies are targeted.”

“As both a Georgetown student and a WISE Learner, I am becoming a global citizen and absorbing the ethos of social responsibility,” he says.

All of this is possible through educational opportunities, Bilal explains. “Before coming to Georgetown I think one of the mistakes I made was letting my experiences in Pakistan inform my beliefs way too much. There is a point where you must draw the line. It doesn’t take a lot for the tables to turn. Empowerment is good and sometimes all it takes is an education.”