How a Jordanian Engineer Traded Early Mornings in Amman for an MBA in California

As Moh’d AlFateh Mahmoud crossed the commencement stage in Costa Mesa, Calif., his family watched every moment on Westcliff University’s official livestream from their home in Jordan. When his young son saw him on the screen, he noticed something and brought it up the moment they reconnected: his father looked taller. Mahmoud smiled and told him that when you come to the United States and pursue your education, you grow. Coming from a father who had just earned his Master of Business Administration (MBA), it was hard to argue with.

That moment captured the journey behind the degree. A biomedical engineer turned business leader, Mahmoud crossed an ocean and several time zones to earn his MBA with a concentration in financial management at Westcliff. He attended classes online from Amman at 4 and 5 in the morning, balanced a full-time career and family life, and walked across the stage at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall on June 27 as the only graduate from Jordan in his class. Inspired by the experience, he is already planning to return for his Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) in 2027.

“Westcliff was a very great opportunity,” he said. “With work, life balance is difficult these days. So with a full schedule, the online course from Jordan was a game changer to me.”

His story is one of a professional who knew exactly what he wanted, found an institution that made it possible and discovered along the way that the community he was entering felt surprisingly familiar.

The Career Pivot That Led Him Across the World

Mahmoud spent years as a biomedical engineer before shifting into sales management and eventually into business leadership, following a path that many technically trained professionals recognize: the deeper you go into running a company, the more you realize that technical expertise alone is not enough.

“As an engineer, we know the technicality,” he said. “But in the business, we need to go deep into the financial terms, business terms and more to have advanced knowledge and skills and how to manage the business. Especially since we are currently in a world where financial knowledge is very important for companies and for businesses.”

The decision to pursue an MBA was a deliberate one, shaped by both where he was in his career and where he wanted to take it. Mahmoud works in healthcare business management, a field where the intersection of clinical knowledge and financial acumen is increasingly essential. He wanted to bridge that gap, and he wanted to do it at a level that would be recognized back home.

He also had a broader vision in mind. In Jordan and across the Middle East, he said, entrepreneurship is still developing compared to what exists in the United States. The funding ecosystems, the networks, the culture of sharing business knowledge openly — these are things the region is still building. Mahmoud wanted to bring what he learned at Westcliff back with him.

“We are looking to gain this knowledge from you guys, to reflect this into our lifestyle, to have more entrepreneurs, to have more creative ideas, to have new businesses from scratch,” he said. “Here you have multiple experiences, rich information about financials, about stock markets, about new businesses. They have multiple funding resources. We don’t have it there. But it is good to have the knowledge of it, to transfer it to the Middle East.”

The Part of Westcliff That Felt Like Home

Mahmoud describes his home with the kind of pride that makes you want to book a flight. Jordan, he says, is a country most people do not know nearly well enough.

Jordan is a multicultural country, he says, where people from different races, different origins and different backgrounds have lived alongside one another for thousands of years. It is home to Petra, one of the seven wonders of the world. It sits near Jerusalem, a city sacred to multiple faiths, and has long served as a place of welcome for people passing through from every direction. The culture is warm and the hospitality is genuine — if you visit Amman as a tourist, he says, strangers will welcome you in the street.

That cultural texture is what made Westcliff feel immediately familiar when Mahmoud enrolled.

“The culture was similar to ours,” he said. “We didn’t have that difficulty getting into the culture. The timing, the culture, the flexibility of the faculties, because they know that we have families, we have holidays, our own holidays, we have our own professional life. So they were very flexible, but at the same time they were fair, direct to the point, especially when it came to assignments and deadlines. This is something professional and they kept it that way.”

Westcliff’s international student community, which spans more than 130 countries, created an environment that reflected the same diversity Mahmoud had grown up navigating at home. The transition to a new academic culture was not the friction he had braced for. It was a continuation of something he already understood.

Learning Across Time Zones

Studying in California from Amman is not as simple as it sounds. Classes that run in the evening in Orange County land in the early hours of the morning in Jordan. Mahmoud attended online sessions at 4 and 5 a.m., fitting his coursework around a full professional schedule and a family that included two sons, one of whom was in second grade while his father was finishing a master’s degree.

What struck him was not the difficulty of the schedule but the response of his faculty when they realized what their international students were doing to show up.

“Sometimes I attended online courses here and it was five, sometimes four in the morning,” he said. “They were very appreciative that we were attending the California classes, because the aim of our enrollment in Westcliff is to enrich our information and our education and upskill ourselves. The faculty, the administration team, the global education department, they were very supportive and very understanding of our culture and our holidays. I would like to extend my thanks to them all.”

His son, watching his father study at home while working through his own second-grade homework, drew his own conclusion about what education meant. Mahmoud noticed the shift. His son was not just observing. He was being shaped by what he saw.

The Recommendation He Keeps Giving Everyone Back Home

Mahmoud does not hesitate when asked what he would say to prospective students from Jordan or the broader Middle East who are considering Westcliff but have not yet committed.

“I highly recommend Westcliff,” he said. “Westcliff is also a university that was verified by the Ministry of Higher Education in Jordan. So it is also a huge step in their presence in the Middle East and in Jordan. They show the importance of being recognized by our Ministry of Higher Education. All the students in the Middle East, especially in Jordan, who are looking for part-time education or online education while maintaining their career life and their personal life, which is very difficult these days, I highly recommend this, with recognized certification and very high quality education and very high quality faculties and administration.”

The Ministry of Higher Education recognition is not a small thing. In Jordan and across the region, institutional credibility is evaluated carefully, and a university that has gone through the process of earning recognition from a national ministry sends a clear signal about the seriousness of its academic standards. Mahmoud sees Westcliff’s investment in that recognition as evidence of a genuine commitment to the students it serves in the Middle East, not just the ones on its California campuses.

His message to anyone still on the fence is straightforward: apply.

What Westcliff Offers International Students

Westcliff University serves students from more than 130 countries across nine global campuses, and its programs are built around the reality that many of its students are balancing careers, families and time zones alongside their coursework. The university’s global education team works directly with international students throughout the enrollment and academic process, and its recognition by Jordan’s Ministry of Higher Education reflects the kind of institutional investment that matters to students and employers in the region.

Moh’d AlFateh Mahmoud came to Westcliff from Amman looking for a degree that would bridge his engineering background with the financial and business acumen his career demanded. He found that, and he found a community that felt like home. He will be back in 2027.

Learn more about studying at Westcliff University as an international student.