My journey to NYUAD started way before Marhaba. Like many other fellow students, I spent my time after candidate weekend excited about the possible opportunities and worried about whether the sleep-deprived me might have messed something up during those two days. This stress was relieved with the letter of acceptance I received on March 31. The excitement started growing with summer readings, the housing application and class selection. Most of this excitement, however, started to fade in the first few days of Marhaba. While meeting new people from all over the world was an amazing experience, having meaningful conversations turned out to be very hard.

With the end of Marhaba, classes started and life became monotonous. While Marhaba passed as fast as a sandstorm, the rest of the semester had different problems and a different pace. The one thing that remained consistent after Marhaba was my First Year Dialogue group. I had an amazing facilitator and great people in my FYD team, and that group turned out to be my reliable friend circle for the first few weeks.

As someone from a small town in the southern part of India, I found NYUAD to be the extreme of many things I had never experienced in my life. It also served as a place where I saw and heard many things for the first time in my life. Being a Tamil from Sri Lanka and South India, I had very little knowledge about any other Indian entertainment industry, let alone the Western world and its numerous industries. This turned out to be the first problem I faced while trying to settle into the NYUAD life. A few days after Marhaba, most conversations revolved around American music and Hollywood movies — navigating that was one of the most awkward phases of freshman year.

While I was constantly trying to navigate awkward conversations and trying to learn more about English music, classes had begun and added their part to making my settling in more awkward. Having gone to a Jesuit school for 7 years, I was used to addressing my professors as Sir and Madam. I found a big discrepancy in the social norms at NYUAD, where most teachers preferred being addressed by their first name. Conforming to these norms used to be one difficult aspect for me. Weird as it can be for someone who is used to the American educational system, I found the professors at NYUAD intimidating — not because they were too strict, but because they seemed too approachable.

While classes had their part in contributing to the stress, doing my laundry, getting used to the food and making friends became bigger issues. As I come from a region with ten months of sunshine, I had never seen a dryer before coming to NYUAD. It was only after my first washing experience that I realized cottons shrink after their first drying. The fact that most first year students didn’t know how to do their laundry in a common laundry room worsened my experience. Finding damp clothes taken out of an uncomplete laundry run or dry clothes strewn all over the floor was a common sight. It took a lot of planning to be there on time to save my clothes.

Most new students have some problems adjusting to the food at the dining hall; being a lacto-vegetarian did not help. Since egg is considered a non-vegetarian food in my community, most food choices labelled vegetarian were off my menu. While being homesick, I also grew sick of the daal, steamed vegetables and rice, the only vegetarian food choice most days. And for a spice-preferring person, eating salad two times a day was not tempting. Cooking was an option, but I couldn’t always find the time. In short, despite being provided everything, living on my own felt like something I was not prepared to do.

Out of every other problem I had with living in NYUAD, one issue I found very hard to navigate was the different habits that came along with the diverse student body. While forcing your guests to eat is a part of my culture, others considered this to be rude and annoying. Having grown in a community where hugging a person of the opposite gender is frowned upon, I met people for whom it was a part of their casual greeting. Jokes weren't jokes anymore; they were offensive statements to someone from the other part of the world.

Apart from all this, one major problem I faced was with making friends outside of my cultural circle as everyone tends to stick with people who speak their language and come from their region. While it was understandable that everyone would prefer hanging out with people like themselves, it became challenging for me to make friends, as few students at NYUAD come from my region or who spoke my language. After Marhaba, joining a random table during lunch or dinner didn’t seem as easy as it used to be. Perhaps people were over diversifying and wanted to feel at home? Elevator rides were even more awkward as people spoke in their native language. Even classes tended to be segregated on the basis of regional cliques. There were a few days when I questioned my choice to study so far away from home, to a place with which I had nothing in common. While other issues faded over time, I constantly worried that I would never make friends.

Having finished my first semester in this fear, I went home for winter break and found that a part of me did not want to return. While I knew this was childish, I started realizing that I wasn’t the only person who felt this way. Soon I saw a handful of my classmates posting about not wanting to leave home and about the beautiful moments of reconnecting with people back home. On my bus ride back to campus, I learned from the rants of my fellow classmates that I wasn’t alone in this process. Even though we were all different people from different parts of the world, I realized that most of us feared one thing: the fear of not belonging to this place.

This concern about not making friends started to fade with randomly assigned group projects and my January Term class Design and Innovation. A class that met six days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a group of people who were just as excited as I was — and in the later days, as exhausted as you are — was a good place to make friends. While the deadlines brought in a lot of stress, they also helped me make many good friends. Working for hours across the table and complaining about your crashed code at 3 a.m allows you to form very good bonds. Upperclassmen had told us about this experience; it was only during my J-Term that I started realizing that NYUAD wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. I also realized that passion for the same topic, in my case engineering, could bring people together and make good friends out of complete strangers.

Months later, moving towards the end of my first year in this place, I have realized that with time, national cliques aren’t that strong. People from your nation will become part of your friend circle, but that will not be your only circle. While you might feel left out in the beginning of the year, with time everyone finds friends, close to home or from other parts of the world, with whom you travel, eat, cook and learn. While lectures might not bring you friends, the deadlines and the forgotten assignments will. Whatever you are passionate about will bring you friends and will keep you together. One thing that I will remember from my first year is that NYUAD is a community with its own flaws and quirks, but it always has something for everyone. Things will fall in place, the dining hall food will improve and you will find friends. Things will get better.