It has been quite a summer for 23 college students who are part of the Iraqi Young Leaders Exchange Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The students arrived a month ago from Iraq to take part in a mass communications course at VCU. They collaborated with 24 VCU-students to develop social media projects for Richmond-based nonprofit-organizations. There was room for fun too—the Iraqi-students visited Washington, DC and Virginia Beach. This Sunday they are heading off to Lancaster, Pa. and New York before returning to Iraq.
"I think the program is fantastic," said Ali Abdul Razzaq Mohammed, one of the Iraqi students. "It makes me look to life in a different angle—an optimistic one."
VCU won a $190,000 grant which was funded by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and offered by the Academy for Educational Development which allowed the School of Mass Communications to host the program. AED is a nonprofit organization that works around the globe to improve education, health, civil society and economic development.
VCU professors Marcus Messner and Jeff South taught the social media class. Both said they tried to not give the students too many guidelines as to how they should work with the nonprofits.
"We realized students knew a lot about this stuff that we did not know," South said. "We didn’t want to preconceive what students should do because they may have had a better solution than Marcus and I may have come up with."
The Iraqi students also had to write a paper that laid out a strategy as to how to implement social media projects when they returned to Iraq.
"We want to plan the seed so they go back and have a project they can realize," Messner said. "They’re going to have a reunion sometime next year in Iraq so we can see whether they implemented (the projects) or not."
The Iraqi-students, some who have never been outside of Iraq, had kind words to say about American culture. Shahd Hamid said participating in the program helped her dismiss the stereotypes of how Americans are portrayed in the media.
"When I came here, I got to see real Americans," Hamid said. "I got to see people who have faith, people who are hard workers and people who like to study and to pursue their future degrees."
The students worked with 10 nonprofit organizations, including ConnectRichmond, CultureWorks and the Dream Academy. The nonprofits’ needs ranged from fully developing social media networks on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to improving already-existing aspects of social media.
When ConnectRichmond wanted to improve its YouTube page, the students created a two-minute mini-documentary that introduced the company. Ryan Smartt, ConnectRichmond’s director, said the marketing aspect of the project was a good challenge for the Iraqi students who were mostly computer science majors and information technology majors.
"It was a little bit of a switch from what they were used to, but they were able to craft the messages to reach out to our users," Smartt said.
The mix of majors was helpful when the students worked together in their teams, said Tyler Callahan, a public relations major.
"A lot of them were IT majors, so a lot of them were good with computers," Callahan said. "We could really put together some really good products."
Alli Atayee, a mass communications major, said that the students also developed a friendship outside of class.
"A lot of the VCU students in the class spent time with the Iraqi students outside the class," Atayee said. "We’ve gone out with some of them to try to show them what we do, how we interact, where we go to eat, which is something that I feel like they really picked up on very quickly."
Messner said the students worked well together despite their different backgrounds.
"It’s not so much Iraqi and American," Messner said. "It’s just about the skills and how that person can contribute to the team."
The students will be presenting their nonprofit-presentations to the Social Media Club of Richmond on Thursday, July 29th at 6 p.m. at VCU’s Student Commons Theater. The event, which is sponsored by Richmond.com, will start off with a networking reception at 5 p.m. Free tickets are available at http://www.vcusocialmedia.eventbrite.com.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement