Story by Neha Rashid
BOO, Education City’s annual Halloween event will not be held this year.
Sponsored jointly by Texas A&M at Qatar and Northwestern University in Qatar, BOO was one of the biggest annual events held in Education City, attracting up to 500 students and staff from Education City every year.
But this year, the event was canceled just a few weeks before it was to be held — a move that disappointed students in Education City.
Anzish Mirza, a journalism sophomore at NU-Q, said she hates the fact that it was canceled. “I had a costume planned out and it was the one thing I was excited about,” she added.
“I gained a great respect for the effort that goes into making BOO so enjoyable, and I’ll definitely miss it,” added Basel Hindi, a sophomore at TAMUQ.
According to Ruba Shaath, a senior at NU-Q and a member of the BOO committee, the cancelation of the event was caused when TAMUQ’s Student Engineering Council did not get enough money in time for the event.
“Every year Texas would be the in charge of the maze, the main attraction of the event. So, when they didn’t get funding for that, we couldn’t do it by ourselves,” Shaath explained. She also added that poor planning by TAMUQ and Northwestern could also have contributed to the cancelation.
“I wasn’t surprised when they told me it wasn’t going to happen anymore,” she added.
But Lokesh Loganathan, President of TAMUQ’S Student Engineering Council, said that the previous BOO coordinators were at fault. He explained that once the previous coordinators graduated, they did not leave any information on how to handle the event.
“We believe that it isn’t possible for us to build a maze in 28 days because usually we plan it out from August onwards,” he explained of building the events’ main attraction.
But Loganathan said that this was not a permanent cancelation of the event. “We’ll definitely bring it back next year,” he said.