Long-form features on the people the school has graduated. Reported, written and edited in-house by the alumni office.
From a physics classroom in Al Qusais to leading powertrain integration at Tesla — a fifteen-year journey of innovation and impact.
A full scholarship took her from a Dubai Scholars classroom to one of the world's most selective universities. She arrived determined not to be the last.
Read →From a culinary institute in Pennsylvania to the kitchens and floors of Madinat Jumeirah — a career built, he says, on a skill he first learned in a Dubai Scholars classroom.
Read →From a physics classroom in Al Qusais to leading powertrain integration at Tesla — a fifteen-year journey of innovation and impact.
On a Tuesday morning in Austin, Mehak Chawla is standing on the floor of Giga Texas — a factory the size of a hundred and fifty football pitches — watching a powertrain being lowered into the chassis of a Cybertruck. There is, she says, a particular satisfaction in seeing something you helped specify in CAD twelve months ago become a thing a customer will drive home.
Mehak is thirty years old. She is the technical lead for powertrain integration on one of Tesla's vehicle programmes — the engineer responsible for the handshake between the motor, the inverter, the battery pack, the cooling loop, and the dozens of other systems that have to behave like a single product. When something does not fit, or runs five degrees too hot, or trips a fault during validation, the call goes up the chain and lands on her desk.
It is, in other words, a job that did not exist when she was sitting in Mr. Ravi's physics classroom in Al Qusais. She is quick to point this out.
Mehak joined Dubai Scholars in 2002, in Year Three. Her father was an engineer at DEWA; her mother taught primary school. The household ran on the principle that homework was finished before dinner and that questions were never stupid. By the time she reached secondary school she had developed what her form tutor at the time, Mrs. Sharma, remembers as "a slight inability to let a problem go."
The first turning point arrived in Year Ten. The physics department, then led by Mr. Ravi Subramanian, ran a Saturday-morning robotics club out of a converted store-room behind the science block. The brief was modest: build something that solves a problem you can see in the school. Mehak's team built a line-following cart that delivered exam papers from the office to the staffroom. It worked, mostly. "It was a stupid little machine," she says now. "But it was the first time I understood that engineering is just the discipline of making the world cooperate. I have been hooked since."
Mr. Ravi, who is now retired, remembers her as the student who would not leave at the end of the session. "She would stay back to ask why a thing failed, not just how to fix it. That is the difference between somebody who can build and somebody who will build."
Mehak graduated in 2014 and went to Imperial College London to read Mechanical Engineering. She arrived in South Kensington in October with the wrong coat and a vague plan to specialise in aerospace. She left, four years later, with a first-class degree and a much more specific plan: electric vehicles.
The pivot happened in her third year, during a six-month industrial placement at Jaguar Land Rover's powertrain group in Coventry. She had expected to spend the months drawing brackets. Instead, she was put on a team trying to coax a marginal half-percent of efficiency out of the cooling architecture of a hybrid SUV. "Nobody outside the room would ever notice that half a percent," she says. "But it was real engineering on a thing real people would drive. I liked it more than I expected to."
She graduated into a market that was, suddenly, paying attention to electric vehicles. Rivian was scaling. Lucid was hiring. Tesla had just brought the Model 3 line up to volume in Fremont and was beginning to talk publicly about Texas. She applied to all three. Tesla called first.
Mehak joined Tesla in Fremont in 2019 as a junior powertrain integration engineer. The team she joined was twelve people. It is now closer to a hundred. "Integration" is one of those words that engineers use to mean a great many things; in Mehak's case, it means owning the system-level performance of the drivetrain — what comes out of the wall, what arrives at the wheels, and every conversion in between.
Her first project was unglamorous: the secondary cooling loop on the Model Y, the loop that keeps the inverter from overheating in stop-start traffic in Phoenix in August. She spent eighteen months on it. The loop she helped specify is now in more than two million vehicles.
In 2022 she moved with the team to Austin and began working on the Cybertruck programme. The brief was harder. The truck is heavier; the duty cycle is more brutal; customers will tow with it and off-road it and ask it to do things a passenger sedan was never asked to do. She and her team rewrote a great deal of the thermal model from first principles. "We spent six months arguing about a single coolant fitting," she says. "We were right to."
A day at Giga Texas does not look like the inside of a tech start-up. Mehak is in steel-toed boots by 7:30am. The first hour is the integration stand-up: the previous shift's faults, the current shift's blockers, anything that has come back from the validation fleet running in Mojave. She walks the line at least twice a day — "You cannot integrate a thing you have not stood next to." The afternoons are model reviews, supplier calls, and the long, patient work of writing the requirements documents the next vehicle will be built against.
The work is not, she will tell you, mostly invention. It is mostly the rigorous specification of constraints. "The interesting question is rarely 'how do I make this faster.' It is 'what is the worst case I have not thought of, and what happens then.'" She credits the habit to her Year Eleven physics teacher, who would not let a homework answer pass without a sentence explaining what assumptions had been made.
Mehak comes back to Dubai roughly once a year. Last December, in town for her brother's wedding, she gave an afternoon to the robotics club — now relocated to a proper lab on the first floor of the new science block. She watched a Year Nine team take a wheeled chassis around a course of taped-down obstacles and felt, she says, an unsettlingly precise déjà vu.
She has stayed in touch with three of her old teachers — Mr. Ravi, Mrs. Sharma, and the head of sixth form, Mr. Bose, who wrote her UCAS reference. She is, she admits, more sentimental about the school than she expected to be. "It is the only institution outside my family that has been continuous in my life for any length of time. I am thirty. I have been around Dubai Scholars in some form for twenty-three years."
Asked what she would tell a sixteen-year-old at the school who thinks they might want to do what she does, she takes longer than expected to answer. "Two things," she says, eventually. "One: pick the harder physics problem in front of you, not the more interesting one in your head. The interesting one will still be there in five years. Two: stay close to people who finish things. Everybody can start a thing. The engineers I admire are the ones who close them out."
It has, by Mehak's own arithmetic, been about fifteen years from the Saturday-morning store-room to the floor at Giga Texas. The robotics cart never did make it back from the second pilot. The line-following sensor proved unreliable on the polished floor outside the headmaster's office, and the team — having argued about it for three weeks — gave up and replaced it with a length of black gaffer tape.
She tells the story now as a kind of origin myth. "The engineering education that mattered most," she says, "was learning that a system fails for a reason, and the reason is almost never the one you assumed." Then she puts her hard hat back on and walks out onto the line.
A full scholarship took her from a Dubai Scholars classroom to one of the world's most selective universities. She arrived determined not to be the last.
The colonnade of Stanford's Main Quad runs in long, sand-coloured arches, and on a bright Californian afternoon Lamya Butt walks it the way people walk a place they have decided to belong to — unhurried, looking up. Three years ago she had never seen it except in a browser tab left open on a laptop in Al Qusais. "I used to keep the photo on my screen," she says. "Not as a fantasy. As a plan."
Lamya is twenty-one. She is a full-scholarship undergraduate at Stanford University, reading a double concentration that she is still, in her own words, "negotiating with the registrar about." She is also, by the count of the three societies she helps run, one of the more visible South-Asian women in her cohort — a position she did not seek and has decided to use.
"SIG was the launchpad that made this journey possible," she says, early in the conversation, before being asked. "That experience didn't just prepare me for Stanford; it prepared me to lead, to serve, and to open doors for others."
Lamya joined Dubai Scholars in the primary years and stayed through to her final examinations in 2022. Her family had come to the Emirates the way a great many families do — for work, for the schools, for the particular kind of stability the Gulf offers people willing to begin again. Money was careful. University abroad was, for a long time, a sentence that ended in a question mark.
What changed the grammar of that sentence was a full scholarship. It arrived after two years of the kind of work that does not photograph well: the early mornings, the supervised study periods, the standardised tests sat twice to move a score by forty points. "People see the acceptance letter," she says. "They don't see the eleven o'clock nights in Year Twelve, or my mother sitting up with me because she wouldn't let me sit up alone."
Her form tutors remember a student who treated every opportunity as non-refundable. "She did not waste things," one of them says. "Not time, not advice, not a single chance she was given. You meet that maybe a few times in a career."
Lamya is precise about where her instinct for leadership was formed, and it was not at Stanford. It was in the corridors and committee rooms of a school that, she says, kept handing her responsibility slightly before she felt ready for it — the debating fixtures, the student council, the long unglamorous work of organising other sixteen-year-olds. "Nobody is ready," she says. "You learn that being ready is something you do, not something you wait for."
That lesson travelled. In her first year at Stanford she joined, and then helped restructure, a mentoring programme that pairs first-generation and scholarship students with those who arrived a year ahead of them. "I knew what the first month feels like when you don't have a map," she says. "I had a very specific kind of fear, and it turned out a lot of people had the same one. So we built the map."
Being among the first from a family — or a school, or a city — to walk into a place like Stanford carries a particular cost, and Lamya is unsentimental about it. "There's a tax on it," she says. "You're a student, and you're also a proof of concept. Every email home is read as evidence. I had to learn to separate my own day from everyone's hopes for it."
She has decided, mostly, to carry the weight rather than resent it. The opening line of the conversation — about leading, serving, and opening doors — is not a line she rehearsed for the alumni office. It is the operating thesis of how she has chosen to spend her four years. "If the door opened for me," she says, "the least interesting thing I can do is walk through it and let it close."
Asked what she would say to a student at Dubai Scholars right now who is looking at a browser tab the way she once did, Lamya does not reach for inspiration. She reaches for logistics. "Treat the application like a project, not a prayer," she says. "Break it into pieces. Find the one adult who will read your drafts honestly. And apply for the money out loud — don't be ashamed of needing the scholarship. The scholarship is the point."
She is, she admits, already thinking past graduation — toward the kind of work that would let her keep opening doors at scale rather than one mentee at a time. She is deliberately vague about the specifics. "I've learned not to announce things I haven't finished," she says, and then, walking back out into the colonnade she once kept open on a screen, she adds: "But the direction is not a secret. The direction is back toward the people who are where I was."
From a culinary institute in Pennsylvania to the kitchens and floors of Madinat Jumeirah — a career built, he says, on a skill he first learned in a Dubai Scholars classroom.
It is the quiet hour at Madinat Jumeirah — that narrow window between the lunch service winding down and the dinner brigade clocking in — and Arjun Khanna is doing the one thing he says no culinary school ever taught him to do. He is walking the floor, learning names. A returning guest, a waiter's first week, a supplier dropping off the evening's fish: he greets each the same way, with the unhurried attention of a man who has decided that hospitality is mostly a matter of paying attention.
"People think this business is about food," he says. "Food is the easy part. You can teach knife skills in a term. What you cannot teach quickly is how to make a stranger feel, within thirty seconds, that they are in good hands. That part took me my whole life."
Arjun left Dubai Scholars in 2001 with, by his own cheerful admission, no clear idea of what came next. What he had instead was an appetite — for cooking, for restaurants, for the particular theatre of a busy dining room. The decision to train formally took him a long way from home, to the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute, where he spent his first American winter learning stocks and sauces and the brutal arithmetic of a professional kitchen.
"I was very far from Dubai and very cold," he says, laughing. "And I was surrounded, for the first time, by people who took this seriously as a craft and not a hobby. That changed how I saw it. I stopped thinking I wanted to cook, and started understanding I wanted to run rooms where people are looked after."
The training was rigorous and, he says, occasionally humbling. He plated the same dish three hundred times. He learned that a kitchen runs on discipline rather than inspiration, and that the inspiration, when it comes, only matters if the discipline is already there to carry it.
Ask Arjun where his career actually began and he will not point to the institute, or to his first job, or to any kitchen at all. He points, somewhat to his own surprise, backwards — to the ordinary social life of a Dubai Scholars classroom.
"My years at Dubai Scholars will always hold a special place in my heart," he says, and the line lands without performance, the way true things often do. "It shaped my social skills — something I never imagined would become one of the most important tools in the real world."
He means it precisely. The school he remembers was crowded, plural, and noisy in the best way — children from a dozen countries learning, before they had a word for it, how to read a room. "I sat next to people whose homes, whose languages, whose festivals were nothing like mine," he says. "You learn to find the common thing fast. You learn to make someone comfortable who is not like you. I do that for a living now. I just didn't know that's what I was practising."
Today Arjun works at Madinat Jumeirah, the sprawling resort that fronts the Gulf in the shadow of the Burj Al Arab — a place built almost entirely around the proposition he now leads on, which is that a guest should feel known. His days are long and split: the kitchen in the morning, the floor in the evening, and in between the thousand small decisions that decide whether a service feels effortless or merely survives.
He is, colleagues say, the rare hospitality professional equally at home expediting a pass and calming a nervous junior waiter. "He remembers everyone," one says. "Guests, staff, the man who delivers the bread. That is not a technique with him. That is just who he decided to be."
Arjun mentors younger staff with the same instinct he brings to guests, and his advice to anyone considering hospitality is shorter than you might expect. "Learn the craft — really learn it, no shortcuts," he says. "But know that the craft is the price of entry, not the job. The job is people. If you don't love people, this work will exhaust you. If you do, it will never feel like work at all."
He comes back to the school in his thinking more often than he visits it in person, and says he would like to change that. "I owe it something I can't quite repay," he says. "It taught me, without ever putting it on a timetable, the one thing my whole career runs on. You can build a life on a kindness like that. I think I have."
