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As she entered her final year of high school, Abeer Abuhejleh (MDes + MBA 2025) didn’t really know what she wanted to do after graduation.  

She grew up in United Arab Emirates, where the education system was modeled on the British School System. As students in this system reach higher levels, most of the curriculum focuses on the sciences. So she hadn’t been exposed to much beyond science-driven majors and was unsure of what to study. But one of her friends knew what she wanted to study: design and visual communication, and she told Abuhejleh all about it.

“Design was something that I could see myself doing,” Abuhejleh says. And so she chose to study design and visual communications as an undergraduate student.

Despite a two-year detour in architecture at the behest of her parents, Abuhejleh eventually was able to pursue her preferred program. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Jordan University of Science and Technology in 2019.

But she did more than graduate. She went from barely passing to graduating first in her class and earning a unique opportunity: a scholarship sponsored by Jordan University of Science and Technology that would pay for her graduate studies in design. A requirement of the scholarship was that she would need to come back to teach at the university as a professor after her graduate studies—and she would teach two years for every year of graduate study.

As she searched for graduate design schools around the world, she was drawn to the Institute of Design at 91���� after learning about its distinct curriculum. She eventually decided that the only way she would accept the scholarship was if she could study at ID.

“It was a serious decision on my behalf. It took me years to finalize and make sure this was the right decision,” Abuhejleh says. She chose to accept the scholarship, after considering it for three years while she took on professional roles.  

“The way that ID approaches design, the language that they use—it’s the language I was trying to find myself in my work experiences,” he adds. “The way that ID approaches design matched my critique of how design is being approached back in the Middle East.”

Abuhejleh wanted to be challenged by whatever graduate program she chose, and she has received that, and more, at ID. Her courses have built on top of each other, allowing her to carry ideas from a final project in one course into a new project in another, validating her research and ideas along the way.

Her research is also allowing her to focus on a growing area of focus for ID: design and data.

“A problem that designers often have is that they cannot convince businesses that their designs actually work because [businesses] work with numbers and designers work with time and iteration,” Abuhejleh says. “My research is mixing computation power with design and the projects that we’re creating. How can we prove these design solutions work in a language that is familiar to investors and business owners?”

Before heading back to Jordan, Abuhejleh plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Design at ID. It was part of the plan from the beginning, but it was made much easier because of ID community members, particularly Charles L. Owen Professor of Systems Design Carlos Teixeira.

Teixeira, ID’s Ph.D. program director, has taken time to meet with Abuhejleh regularly since she arrived at ID. Although she was not yet in the Ph.D. program, he has helped her mentally prepare for how PhD researchers need to approach their work.

That type of support, at a school challenging her in the ways she wanted, is how she knows that she has made the right choices—in both accepting the scholarship and in attending ID.  

“The more time passes away, the more aligned I feel with what I’m currently researching,” Abuhejleh says. “Sometimes you outgrow the place that you’re in, but the fact that ID keeps on innovating is making me even more confident that this was the right decision for me.”