THE GAZELLE: WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO START THE PAGE?

We were mainly inspired by NYU Secrets, a Facebook page that, as you probably already know, posts secrets from members of the NYU community. Although we are of course part of that community, we felt that something more NYUAD-specific was needed. And that’s how, on 26 October 2013, NYUAD Confessions was born.

YOU’VE BEEN REFERRING TO YOURSELF IN THE PLURAL. IS THERE ONE ADMIN OR ARE THERE SEVERAL OF YOU?

There are several of us.

IS THERE ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DIFFERENT FROM NYU SECRETS?

If you’ve ever sent something to NYU Secrets, you know that there’s no way of doing that anonymously. You have to send it through their Facebook page, which means that the admin can see who sent it. Given the size of our student body, we thought that doing this would limit the number of confessions sent, because everybody pretty much knows everybody else on this campus, and anybody could be the admin of this page.

HOW MANY CONFESSIONS ON AVERAGE DO YOU GET A DAY?

During a regular week, around three or four are sent per day. This number usually increases before midterms or finals, probably due to students’ love for procrastinating. So far we’ve received around 1600 confessions, out of which 1400 were posted.

WHAT DETERMINES WHETHER OR NOT YOU POST SOMETHING?

We have several rules. We don’t post things that target specific people by referring to them by name or having so many details that it's obvious who the post is referring to. We also don’t post confessions that actually belong on the NYUAD Crushes page. We do sometimes break these rules, but when we do, we make sure that the person who the post is targeting will not be offended in any way.

HAS ANYONE EVER CRITICIZED YOUR PAGE?

We've received several messages in which students expressed their thoughts about our page being toxic, their reason being that, given we are such a young institution, we have a reputation that is yet to be established and our page is somehow tarnishing it.

ARE THERE ANY INTERESTING STATISTICS YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE ABOUT THE CONFESSIONS?

There seem to be a lot of confessions with sexual content. A quick search through our confession database returns 105 such confessions. It’s also interesting to note the trend of the confessions. They tend to get darker in the weeks right before midterms or finals.

WHY DO YOU THINK PEOPLE FOLLOW YOUR PAGE?

People here generally have limited groups of friends that they spend time with, so we suppose that having a page where they can see what other members of our community think is helpful. Then there are the students who are studying abroad who can use this page to get a sense of what’s going on back in Abu Dhabi.

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOUR FOLLOWERS?

Keep on confessing!