“I Told My Father That the Technion Is My Place”

Hiba Mallak, 23, grew up in Daliyat al-Karmel and studied at Al-Ishraq Al-Tawhidi School. She is the eldest of four siblings and the first in her family to reach the Technion.In high school, she completed an expanded matriculation program in a wide range of subjects, including computer science, chemistry, mathematics, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and history. She also took the psychometric exam twice while still in high school.

After graduating, Hiba came with her father to the Technion’s Registration and Admissions Office and fell in love. “I told my father that this was my place.” Despite her high matriculation average of 119, she needed to improve her psychometric score, and she devoted the following year to exam preparation and to national service at her school. “I accompanied students academically and emotionally and felt that I was contributing a great deal to them. Druze tradition nurtures values of helping others and love for one’s fellow human beings. When someone is in distress, the entire village rallies. That’s why community volunteering is very natural and very important to me.”

During that year, she retook the psychometric exam, improved her score by nearly thirty points, and was accepted to the Technion. In 2021, she began studying in the software engineering track in the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science. “The beginning was very difficult, and I didn’t give up my volunteer activity in my village. I finished my first semester with an unsatisfactory academic standing, but I didn’t lose heart. From semester to semester, I improved, my grades rose from 60 to 80 and even higher, and last year I made the Dean’s List.”

She has no doubt that part of her improvement is connected to her parents’ support and to the community surrounding her in the Faculty. “On my first day at the Technion, I didn’t know anyone, but gradually I made friends and study partners, and that gives you tremendous strength. I’m very happy that I chose the Technion; it truly is my place, just as I felt on my very first visit to campus. There aren’t many students at the Technion from my school, and I hope that my success will encourage more students to come to the Technion.”

This semester, alongside her degree studies, she began working toward a teaching certificate in the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology. “Maybe I’ll become a teacher in the distant future, but in the coming years, I want to develop the learning center in my village. It’s a center I previously established on a volunteer basis as part of the ‘Nur’ Center, which supports girls aged 16 and up, and I want to expand it so it can provide support to as many high school students as possible.”

Recently, she received an excellence scholarship as part of a collaboration between the Technion, the Portland Foundation, the Israeli high-tech company Nova, and the Lotus Association, and she also addressed the audience on behalf of the award recipients. “I remember my first day at the Technion gates,” she told the audience. “I remember the combination of awe in the face of this immense institution alongside a deep sense of mission. I didn’t arrive here alone; I came with the support of my family, the values of my village, and the dreams of the girls who see in us today a breakthrough. This scholarship is a vote of confidence in our ability to be those who shape the face of the future, and in our vital and meaningful voice as Druze women who chose a path that is challenging, fascinating, and profoundly important.”