Khawaja Zain-ul-abdin - Fulbright Student from Pakistan
Host Institution: Florida State University
Field: Communications & Journalism
Dates: August 2007 - August 2010
Khawaja (second from right) with other Fulbrighters
Lessons about and through Media
People often ask me about my experience in the United States: people at home looking to see if the media manufactured narrative about the U.S is correct, and people in the U.S looking to see how my experience has affected my personal perception of that media narrative. I usually reply with zeal, as my experience has been transformative, and I wish to share it with those who have not yet had the same opportunity.
Having had the good fortune of being born with parents who spent well beyond their means on my education, prioritizing it above any possible comforts for themselves, I was schooled in some of the best institutions in Pakistan, learning modern western curricula. Add to that my insatiable appetite for international news and media content as well as written fare, and the result was a person who presumed to know exactly how the U.S society worked. I am glad to report that I was completely wrong!
Having been a student of media, I bore a caveat against media depictions of society, recognizing them to be exaggerated and elevated accounts of desires rather than realities, but I did not expect the reality to be that far apart from what I knew. Needless to say, I faced a culture shock when I went to the United States, not because of the hedonistic excesses shown in entertainment media, but because of the absolute and total absence of this phenomenon altogether. The Americans I met over my four years all over the United States, barring none, were hard working, straightforward, simple and honest people. The students worked hard to support their education, sometimes keeping up to three jobs to be able to pay the fees, working and studying almost 16 hours a day, every day. The sheer ethic of the hard work and professionalism of most common folk is a sobering reality for those who choose to base their views of the American people on a media narrative alone.
It is this impressive display by the American people that has helped shape the direction of my research at Florida State University. The Pakistani people work just as hard, desire better times just as much as their American counterparts, but unfortunately do not value or do not have access to education like that of those in the U.S. I have chosen to concentrate on this singular aspect as my contribution to the alleviation of the current tumultuous state of my people. Through the help of some erudite professors, challenging curricula and stellar facilities, I have over the years been able to work on a technical communication-based framework for the implementation of distance education in Pakistan and other developing countries. The one glaring shortcoming of distance education is the absence of interpersonal interaction between students and instructors. I am looking for technological solutions to overcome this shortcoming, using the advanced interactive possibilities that modern technologies like Microsoft's Kinect hardware provide.
Last year, in 2010, Pakistan's situation took a turn for the worse, as floods ravaged through its most populous areas and destroyed over 10,000 schools in the process. Such a dire gap in educational infrastructure opens the way for further radicalization of the masses as they are exposed to extreme ideologies in the absence of learned alternatives. It was then that I and a few professional partners and personal friends decided to take the problem head on through the implementation of an educational television channel in the populous Punjab province. Though still very much at an infant stage, the project has generated a lot of interest amongst government and academic circles alike. The idea is to use indirect learning, using people's capacity to learn through observation as the main instructional vehicle, with the instruction itself lodged within entertainment media.
I am proud to say that apart from the invaluable opportunity to learn, the Fulbright program has provided me with a worldwide access to resources in the form of other Fulbrighters, allowing me to benefit from the experiences and expertise of people in countries ranging from Brazil to Bangladesh. It is this community of Fulbrighters, my academic peers at my U.S university, scholars, scientists and entrepreneurs from which I hope to benefit in terms of guidance as I navigate the formidable challenges in the way of realizing my current project and others in time. I have recently co-authored a series of papers with an Estonian Fulbright alumna, Mariliis Vahe, that concentrate on using the distance education architecture to disseminate health education in developing countries, and look to build on this research direction over the coming years.
As parting words I must say that I remain exceptionally impressed with the American people and the American society. It is fascinating to see the indiscriminate acceptance of all who end up at its shores. It seems that being an American is more than just a nationalistic brand; it is a feeling that overcomes all individual differences. Italians, Australians, Japanese, Guyanese and every other nationality under the sun all stand shoulder to shoulder with the same opportunities, all unique and common at the same time. I suppose that phenomenon is what truly makes it the "United" States of America.
To the U.S.-Pakistan Fulbright Program