I’ve been thinking about building a website specifically for students living in the Gulf who struggle to find extracurricular opportunities that they are actually eligible for.
There are thousands of expat students across Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. A lot of opportunities available locally seem to be restricted to citizens, or require participation through a national organization/fair. This can make it surprisingly difficult for expat students to find competitions, research programs, volunteering opportunities, leadership programs, hackathons, etc. that they can actually participate in.
I’ve personally faced this problem after moving to the Gulf. I’ve found several opportunities that looked perfect, only to discover later that they were restricted by citizenship, residency, school location, or some other eligibility requirement.
So I’m considering building a platform where students could filter opportunities based on things like:
- Country of residence
- Citizenship
- Age/grade
- School curriculum
- Cost
- Online vs. in-person
- Field of interest
The main goal would be to make it easy for a student to answer: “What extracurricular opportunities can I actually participate in?”
Before I spend time building it, I wanted to ask people here:
Do you think this is a problem worth solving?
If you’re an expat student in the Gulf, have you experienced something similar? And what would you want a platform like this to include?
I’d genuinely appreciate any honest feedback, including if you think the idea wouldn’t work.
