Breaking New Ground

When I first entered the American University of Sharjah, I arrived undeclared. My compass pointed in more than one direction: International Relations, Public Administration and, later, Mass Communication.

Each discipline lived in its own orbit: business, arts and sciences, media. Each building had a distinct gravity, a different constellation of conversations. I felt called to travel between them - macro-level work informed by micro-level consequence.

I set out to study both IR and PBA, adding MCM to understand how narratives move publics - drawing dark lessons from propaganda (Goebbels’ ‘ministry of lies,’ studied not to imitate but to inoculate) and from the Stanford prison experiment on the power of apathy - and the apathy of power. 💭

AUS, in those years, was a young star - founded only a few years before 2002. There was no precedent for completing a double major across schools. The registrar didn’t have an answer. The policy didn’t yet exist.

So I decided: if the architecture wasn’t built, I would walk the scaffolding myself. I mapped requirements, stacked six courses a semester for four years, and made the case in the language institutions recognize best - credits completed, competencies earned, no room for denial.

Halfway through what felt like a kafkaesque journey, a senior administrator paused me in the hallway and offered what became a mantra for me: “Breaking new ground is never easy. If this is what you want, don’t give in.”

Her words became a benchmark I would return to again and again. We may be scoffed at. Doubted. Persecuted in the court of public opinion - even if we never choose to step into that courtroom in the first place. And the truth remains: breaking new ground is never easy.

In the end, there was a compromise. The university would not issue two degrees. I had to choose between the College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Business Management.

I didn’t identify intensely with either label, but I skewed CAS. It felt like home base: the life-size pendulum sweeping the rotunda, the echoes of philosophy, foreign policy, and social psychology - rooms where ideas sparked and kept sparking. My diploma would carry one name, but my transcript would carry the proof: the full ledger of work across both degrees, a formal acknowledgment of the labor it took to build a bridge that didn’t yet exist.

This is what breaking new ground looks like inside systems: you adapt like water until the stone remembers your shape. You refuse to collapse your vision to fit a form that was never designed for you.

Carl Sagan taught us that the cosmos doesn’t expand by repetition. It expands through pressure and fusion, by forging new light where none existed.

Breaking new ground is never easy. But if we do it well, it becomes easier for the next traveler.



sincerely,
amber eltaieb