By Amna Al-Noaimi
CMUQ’s Student Lounge (or recreation room) was built for students to hang out during their breaks or after their classes’ time. It is equipped with many entertainment facilities like table tennis, foosball, video games, vending machines, a computer cluster (that includes a printer as well!), and a couple of couches for the students to relax or do their homework on.
However, if you’ve been there, you will notice that a wide range of students uses the recreation room except for Qatari girls! You can barely see them spending time there!
In a response to a question I asked, Ghaya Al-Sulaiti and Sara Al-Sulaiti, two Qatari Female students at CMUQ, expressed that the places they like to hangout at in CMU are the atrium (The Majlis Area) and the library.
‘I had to go to the recreation room once for a book club meeting that was hosted there, and that was it,’ said Sara. On the other hand, Akhmed Sungorov and Khalid Allouba, two other students that go to the recreation room everyday, think that the place is ‘fun and convenient’, as Allouba likes to describe it. ‘We sometimes see some Qatari girls in the recreation room. They come only for either the vending machine or for the computer cluster,’ added Sungorov.
Khalid thinks that the reasons Qatari girls don’t come to the Students Lounge is because it is loud and full of guys. He also pointed out that he he’d heard from some of the girls that the smell of the rec room is bad but he doesn’t think it is. To this day, there seems to be no proper and explicit answer for why do Qatari girls don’t go to the Students Lounge.
All Around CMU-Q 
I, for a Qataria, spent my freshmen year playing Mortal Combat. But then I kind of lost the passion for it! 😛
I don’t think it explicitly excludes Qatari girls I just think that girls in general don’t go there because it’s really noisy and sometimes smelly. I haven’t been in there for probably around a year but the last time I was I didn’t feel like it was a clean environment, so I’d rather spend my time somewhere else. I feel like it’s become a men’s hangout place rather than a place for all students to go to.
I think it excludes most girls due to the smell and noise. I personally never go there.
It is excluding everyone with the bad smell !!!
It’s a men’s hangout place, I think it excludes all girls really. I demand a girls rec room!
Personally, When i was a freshmen I spend a lot of time there, een my sophomore year. I dont think its a question of girl or boy. its just whether the room is a place you and your friends enjoy
It smells fine..And you choose whether to go or not, so it is unfair to say it is “excluding” Qatari girls.
Yeah….. The girl in the second picture is a Qatari girl, just fyi…..
oh yeah the one who’s hiding in the shadows….i almost missed her
As a Qatari girl that frequents the the rec room (and by frequents…I mean spends eternities there on a daily basis), I really think it comes down to a matter of choice… i’ve seen girls in there several times, they may not linger as long as other people but they’re there nonetheless.
The rec room is a place that groups of friends have simply become comfortable establishing as a meeting place, similar to the food court.