With 1:20 left in the championship game, we are losing by one point. The basketball is in my hands. I am on the free-throw line. My six anxious teammates tell me there is no pressure.
No pressure? Yeah, right.
It is Thanksgiving weekend, but I’m not home with my family in Middletown, R.I. Instead, I am in the small Middle Eastern country of Bahrain playing in an intercollegiate basketball tournament with my teammates, who represent six different countries and have varying skill levels. We are the first women’s athletic team at Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus. On the free-throw line, I can lock up our fifth win in a row and make us champions.
Right, no pressure at all.
I miss both shots. As the opposing team takes possession of the ball, I am angry at myself. But with less than a minute left, they shoot and miss, and I get the rebound. Surrounded by defenders and engulfed in jeers from the opposing team’s fans, I drive toward the basket. I miss again.
Just two days before this commotion, I was eating a quesadilla for Thanksgiving dinner. If you had asked me then why I chose to study at Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus, I would have said the answer was simple.
I had yet to ride a camel.
Halfway through my four-month exchange-student semester in the Middle East, I still hadn’t trekked on a camel, but I had made a hasty conclusion: There was nothing to love about Qatar. India has the Taj Mahal. Egypt has the Great Pyramids. Jordan has Petra. And Qatar, well, Qatar has Doha, a developing metropolis surrounded by 4,412 square miles of sand dunes, camels, speed bumps, construction sites, and liquid natural gas.
Sometime between the quesadilla and the missed shots, I realized I was wrong. There was much to love about being part of a Carnegie Mellon community 6,930 miles from Pittsburgh. Because the campus is only four years old, the opportunity to be a leader, a friend, a learner, a teacher—a pioneer—is rampant. Just as I was a member of the first women’s athletic team, I experienced the thrill of many other firsts. I ate kumquats. I learned about relationships in Islam. I watched a cricket game. I taught local elementary students about business. I sat atop a sand dune.
I rode a camel.
But I achieved something greater than riding a camel. I contributed to and experienced the creation of a legacy. The first environmental initiative. The first full-fledged freshman-through-senior student body. The first direct student exchange between the Pittsburgh and Doha campuses. The value of being the first is undeniable—even in basketball.
The opposing crowd goes wild as my shot bounces out of the basket, but I get my own rebound. Surrounded by defenders, I shoot again. It goes in! My teammates are ecstatic! The game ends seconds later. Seven young women, with disparate capabilities and backgrounds, are a championship team.
—Megan Larcom (TPR’10)
