Five friends at a Swiss boarding school could have gone their separate ways. Instead, they came to Northeastern, together.
Gaby’s from Mustique, a small Caribbean island. Bandar and Khalid are from Saudi Arabia. Saaj, who’s ethnically Indian, was born and raised in Dubai. Otto is from Paris.
They met and bonded in Switzerland in their early teens, as students at a boarding school called Aiglon College, nestled high up in the Alps.
As graduation neared and it came time to pick a university, they weren’t quite ready to break up the gang.
So they all enrolled at Northeastern.
“I always wanted to come here,” says Saaj Shewakramani, whose older brother Sagar, BA’08, majored in marketing at Northeastern.
“I got the idea from him,” says Khalid Al Dabal, pointing at Bandar Al Saud.
Bandar looks at Saaj and says, “I knew Saaj’s brother came here, so when a representative from Northeastern visited our school, I thought, I’ll check it out.”
Today, Otto Kern says, he realizes that Northeastern “is the best thing that’s happened to me.” Academically, the university has met all his expectations: “My professors have been great. The classes are so interesting.”
When the five students first started thinking seriously about Northeastern, they were immediately drawn by the fact that the university is so internationally focused. Like them.
Besides hailing from various parts of the world, the friends—currently third-year students except for Khalid, who’s a sophomore—are all pursuing some form of international study.
Gaby Mitchell is an international affairs and political science major. Saaj is an international affairs major. Otto studies both international affairs and economics. Bandar majors in international affairs and modern languages. And Khalid studies finance and international business.
As it happens, they’re just several of the twenty Aiglon graduates who have attended Northeastern since 1990, most of them in the past seven years.
David Hautanen, associate dean and director of admission, has recruited at Aiglon since 2003. At Aiglon this year, Hautanen says, “sixteen students applied out of a graduating class of just over a hundred.”
Hautanen attributes this interest to the fact that “Northeastern offers so much, both academically and through experiential education. And we have a great campus.”
He adds, “Students who attend international boarding schools have the benefit of a strong educational program, great extracurricular activities, and a school that provides a lot of care. So they’re looking for the same thing when they choose a college—and Northeastern can provide it.”
Like Northeastern, Aiglon places a strong emphasis on international study, travel, and service. As teens, Otto and Gaby took a school trip to Vietnam, and Bandar and Saaj took one to China. Khalid did a service project in Peru after that country’s 2007 earthquake.
The students appreciate that Northeastern offers them so many opportunities to study and work abroad. Even the campus itself is a crossroads.
“It would be hard to find a class where there aren’t at least three different nationalities represented,” says Gaby. “And, honestly, that’s what we crave.”
Asked to describe Aiglon, which enrolls 350 students ages nine to eighteen, Gaby calls it “Heidi, in the mountains.” Sure enough, images on the school’s website feature snow-capped mountains, classroom buildings that look like Swiss chalets, and a crystal-blue sky. (Boston winters are a lot easier than Alpine winters, the five friends agree. They’re accustomed to navigating several feet of snow to get to class.)
At Aiglon, the friends were together almost all the time, either in classes, at meals, or in their residential “houses” (a living arrangement not unlike Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, says Gaby). They played sports together. They went on overnight hiking expeditions.
Now, at Northeastern, their schedules are busier than ever, and their paths don’t cross as often. But they’re determined to keep their ties strong, meeting weekly for lunch or dinner, or just to hang out.
Along with the international focus, what do they most like about Northeastern?
For Bandar, it’s co-op. “When I heard about co-op, that’s when I knew for sure I wanted to go here and nowhere else,” he says. “I’ve seen the difficulty my older brother and cousins have had in getting a job. Most jobs require experience—and if you’ve been in school, you don’t have experience. But at Northeastern, that’s not the case.”
Otto points to the curriculum, which he finds invigorating. Also, he says, “the campus is amazing. It’s very convenient with
my wheelchair.”
For Gaby, it’s that Northeastern wants its students to be three-dimensional human beings.
“Northeastern looks at what you can bring to the university—not just the SAT, but the whole picture,” she says. “When I learned this, I thought, Yes! A school that understands.”
Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.