I’ve installed two little weather applets on my desktop. The left one shows 34 degrees, sunshine; the right one 5 degrees, rain. Through the window I can see palm trees, the turquoise-colored sea (so why do they call it the Red Sea then?) and an impeccable blue sky, straight off a page in a tourist brochure. Separated by a distance of 2500 km, a difference in temperature of almost 30 degrees and a thick cloud bank, Zurich seems a million miles away. OK, 30 degrees might be exaggerating it a bit: it’s so cold in my air-conditioned office that I’ve got the sniffles and my flip-flop-clad feet are close to freezing. More like a morgue than an office with a high-performance computer, you might say.

In the cradle of Islam

I’ve been a guest graduate student at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST for short, on the west coast of Saudi Arabia for almost six weeks now. I was unfortunate – or fortunate enough, depending on how you look at it – to have my supervisor leave ETH Zurich slap-bang in the middle of my dissertation to set up a new research group as an associate professor here in the cradle of Islam. With a mind towards improving the collaboration, he invited me to join him as a guest at this breathtaking research institute for three months.

The KAUST isn’t just any Arab university; it’s an experiment, dreamed up and funded by King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, whose long-term goal it is to stem the exodus of young, talented students from the kingdom and promote Saudi Arabia as a business hub. Yes, the King is also well aware that the oil reserves beneath his palaces are not unlimited and that innovation is the way to go.

Luxury in the sun

The university campus lies on the coast north of Jeddah like a mirage in no-man’s-land. Unspoilt coral reefs right on your doorstep, schools, sports and shopping centers, beauty salons, golf courses and marinas are supposed to sweeten the lives of the university staff and their loved ones. Everywhere you look, there is luxury gleaming in the sun. Thanks to a generous donation (10 figures, rumor has it), the university can also afford decent salaries, grants, state-of-the-art labs and breathtaking research projects to go with its first-rate infrastructure. This is the only way to draw top researchers and students from abroad. After all, the KAUST needs them to catapult it into the top university rankings as quickly as possible – and the fledgling academy has made no secret of the fact that this is its aim.

After a construction period of only 2(!) years, the brand new university opened its doors last summer and launched its first education cycle. For the time being, the campus only hosts a fraction of the potential number of students and staff members, who – for want of a better word – effectively serve as guinea pigs. The community is set to grow with every year for about five years until the full capacity has been reached.

Still not perfect

However, things are still a far cry from how they are presented in the glossy KAUST prospectuses and a lot of work still needs to be done in everyday life. There was too much of a mad scramble to get everything ready, and a lot was botched up. Responsible for the entire non-academic side of the campus, the national oil giant Saudi Aramco kitted the rooms out with big leather chairs and conference tables instead of chalkboards and projectors, for example. And the wide cultural gap between the orient and the occident generally stands in the way of trouble-free progress. I didn’t realize just how different the values of lifestyle, social behavior and work ethics were in the different cultures.

However, despite its obvious prison or Disneyland character I’ll have an extremely exciting time here in this bizarre hotchpotch of the Arab and western worlds – of that I’m sure. And I’ll make the most of every day, with the weather applet on my desktop showing 34 degrees, sunshine.

About the author

Sabrina Metzger studied interdisciplinary sciences at ETH Zurich. After working on a project at the Swiss Seismological Service for a year, which involved analyzing the micro-earthquake near the Gotthard Basis Tunnel still under construction, she then moved to Spectraseis Technologie AG, a spin-off of Zurich University. In the spring of 2008, she returned to ETH Zurich to embark on a PhD at the Institute for Geophysics.

Metzger is currently in Saudi Arabia, however, working as a guest researcher at the recently founded King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). This is because her supervisor, the Icelandic geophysicist Sigurjón Jónsson, moved to KAUST from ETH Zurich to take up a position as an associate professor.