Writing Up College Interview

Interview Report: Khalil

Khalil lives in Ramallah and attends the Ramallah Friends school. He grew up in Kufr Neeme and returns weekly to visit his grandparents and other family members living there. For the past three years, Khalil has been a volunteer teacher with his brother at the Children’s Happiness Center. Khalil teaches village students the basics of programming (HTML and CSS) and basic English. His brother assists him with the English lessons and his brother also teaches piano. The schedule can be quite intense. Khalil teaches at the school daily for two weeks straight every year, instructing from early in the morning to 4 or 5 at night. He described the curriculum in great detail. The first year, his students learn basic C programming, in the second year they learn problem solving with C++, and in the third year HTML/CSS.

Khalil emphasized that teaching students how to learn, or basic self-directed study skills, was a critical component of his personal approach to lesson planning. Every group had a different project that they would work on. Often, these applications were very relevant and practical. For example, some students made restaurant websites for their parents. Khalil also described some challenges he experienced overseeing these projects. For example, some computers did not work properly and had hardware issues. Khalil and his brother could only fix four of them, even using the help of some of his mentors from the organization Code for Palestine. Khalil gave a great deal of credit to his mentors in shaping his approach to teaching. They not only gave him advice about the computer issues but also the curriculum as a whole.

Khalil told me how he got involved with Coding for Palestine and about some of his personal coding work. He started a project called Palligo. The idea behind the project was to enable people to connect with each other when they wanted to play a sport together. For example, if three people wanted to play basketball but did not have a fourth player, they could use the app to see if someone was available to play with them. The practicality and creativity of this app, and the way it could foster community and healthy activities, favorably impressed me.

Khalil showed strong evidence of his ability to work as a team on creative scientific projects. He had worked together with some of his closest friends on Palligo. He was at ease working collaboratively since he was already used to teamwork from olive picking with friends and family. He enjoys getting other people’s opinions and sharing responsibilities, because he believes it makes work more efficient.

Outside of academics, Khalil is a dedicated swimmer. He was on the Palestinian swimming team and his specialty was the breaststroke. He swam three times a week, for sessions that lasted up to two hours a day during the school year and six hours a day over the summer.

Khalil identified one of the most challenging moments in his life as one occasion teaching at Kufr Neeme when most of the computers would not work, though he tried to fix them with his cousin. He felt terrible about letting down his students. His proudest moment was when he was selected for a competitive internship at Second Labs, though he was not a college student. He was selected because of the strength of his skills on past projects, as well as the caliber of the online courses he had taken. Khalil has been working on converting Second Labs’ website into a .net framework and preparing the base for other developers.