The Adham Center's Annual Awards Dinner is by now a major broadcasting industry event in Cairo, where industry VIPs join American University in Cairo faculty and leading administrators, alumni of the Adham Center (many of them now outstanding broadcasters and/or journalists), and parents to honor the graduates who have completed the two-year MA program in television journalism.

Among the VIPs greeting the graduates at this past June's dinner was Rashid Murooshid, managing director of Dubai's digital satellite Business Channel. As guest of honor Murooshid, in his brief remarks, shared his vision of an Arab world capable of competing in television news production with the best international broadcasters.

In recognition of Murooshid's accomplishment in launching an ambitious business channel that attempts to cover news at international standards from within the structure of state-owned television, Murooshid was appointed Associate of the Adham Center by AUC Provost Tim Sullivan upon the recommendation of the Center's director, S. Abdallah Schleifer. This is an honor Murooshid now shares with such luminaries as Ted Turner; Sheikh Saleh Kamel, chairman of ART; Peter Einstein, CEO of Showtime; and Stephen Claypole, who headed up both Visnews (now Reuters TV) and APTN.

Another of the Adham Center Associates honored in past years is Hassan Hamid, who had recently been named head of Egypt's national radio and TV network, ERTU. Hamid was seated on the dais along with Murooshid, AUC President John Gerhart, Provost Sullivan, and Hala Sirhan, the former ART superstar talk show host who is now head of programming and deputy chairman of Egypt's first privately owned TV channel, the Dream Channel. Working closely with Sirhan on this project is Muhammed Gohar, CEO of Video Cairo, who was seated alongside Tariq Kashef, Orbit's Executive Director in Cairo, as well as the heads of several of the ERTU channels. Kashef, another Associate of the Adham Center, created a field production unit composed of Adham Center graduates that has been generating field reports about cultural events and the world of entertainment for his three-hour daily show for Orbit, "Al Qahira Al Youm." Because the Adham Center worked closely with Orbit to develop this unit, Orbit has been posting, night after night for the past year and a half, a final credit in Arabic at the end of "Al Qahira Al Youm" thanking the Adham Center.

Indeed, Adham Center students are grabbed up by the industry as soon as they graduate, and this year's class is no exception. Two of the graduates who were honored at the dinner as recipients of the Sheikh Kamal Adham Award for Outstanding Performance, Nermine Alireza and Marwa Raga'a El Motafi, are now respectively Cairo correspondent for the new CNBC weekly program "Middle East Business News" and producer-reporter at ERTU's all-news channel Nile News. A third outstanding graduate, Amira Hassan Enanie, was awarded a Showtime internship, which meant two months in London, all expenses paid, working at Showtime's Oxford Street headquarters this past summer.

Seven graduates were presented by Provost Sullivan with a professional certificate for successfully completing the Adham Center workshops in television journalism that support the MA degree. The graduates--Amira Hassan Enanie, Dina Farouk Abu Zeid, Iman Adel Mesharafa, Lina Adel Sadek, Marwa el Mut'afy, Mahitab Ezz El Din, and Nermine Alireza-were each presented with a luxurious Mark Cross special edition pen by Showtime's Executive Director of Sales in the Middle East Magnus Simons, who flew to Cairo from Showtime headquarters in Dubai for the occasion.

In his review of the year of Adham Center accomplishments, Center Director Abdallah Schleifer announced that the Center would be digitalizing its studio in the near future thanks to a matching gift of $80,000 worth of equipment from Sony Broadcast and Professional. This Sony gift matches the equivalent amount of funds provided by the late Sheikh Kamal Adham and by the university for this purpose. The digital studio will be installed during the mid-year break in January 2002 and will maintain the Adham Center reputation for providing its students with training on state-of-the-art equipment.