NYC Study Abroad Application

I never wanted to go to New York. It seemed crowded, feverish, overdone and underlaid with the unfulfilled dreams of thousands of people. I figured it was overrated, so I avoided it and moved to a young and spacious city in the middle of the Middle East instead. I fell in love with everything about it—the diversity, the contrasts, the lights, the sunsets, the way anything is possible.

But while there, I met people. People who talked to me, who taught me, who inspired and awed me and still actually listened to me. And most of these people had come from New York. The city had shaped them and their research and thinking in countless ways, and they spoke of it with the fondness of home. 

So I went. Only for a month, not much time at all, but enough to begin seeing what the poets and professors do. I remember walking around SoHo on an assignment to analyze retail architecture, and realizing suddenly as I sat on a cold curb looking at Chanel’s flagship store just how much everything connects: design, money, identity, power, life. The city acts like an organism in the way that the systems holding it together are chaotically ordered, endlessly complex and infinitely interesting. 

I discovered that New York is, above all else, a city of connections, and I want to study there for a semester to make my own.

As a student of both the sciences and the arts, enormous disparity exists by definition in my academic work, so I constantly seek out the places where the two meet. New York is a city where both coexist, and I have to believe that they also must combine. I want to take classes in graphic design that NYUAD does not offer right now, I want to advance my studies in biology, and I want to learn (through academics and experience) about how those two polar opposites actually can overlap. The city of connections offers experimental art schools, museums full of brilliant design, companies that advertise research, and labs that study art. As I endeavor to learn about the visual communication of science, New York seeps opportunity.

I also want to maintain and build my connections with people, further developing the friendships that will come with me, and forming new ones too. In New York, I will also have invaluable chances to pursue professional links. This matrix of relationships and experiences will provide an incredible foundation for my future work.

And as a student pioneering this Global Network University, I want to not only make connections, but be a connection. I want my studies to be another one of the threads that tie New York together with Abu Dhabi, another strand in the network of education that we are creating.

Ultimately, I want to learn from New York, and then come back to my home, Abu Dhabi. The foundational classes that I can take at NYUNY will give me the tools I need to pursue my interdisciplinary studies in a much more project- and research-oriented way when I return. Studying in a fully instituted university for a semester will help me understand how to be a part of establishing one here. Being in New York City will help me understand what the city of Abu Dhabi aspires to be: a cultural capital, a place of progress. After spending a semester in New York, I will return more equipped to make my home university a true community of learning.