Dina Zahraa
Coming to NYU Abu Dhabi felt a bit like drinking a triple espresso and trying to function on three hours of sleep. I arrived with big ambitions, a packed course load, and absolutely no idea what I was doing. Overloading for three semesters quickly taught me that lesson. But somewhere between the chaos of assignments and late-night questioning of my life choices, things began to settle, and I finally had space to figure out who my people were. Some friendships started immediately.
I met Roudha in the lobby of our residential building during freshman year, and within minutes we were already grabbing snacks together before we even knew each other’s last names.
Others took longer to form. One of my now closest friends, Rawan, drifted into my life through mutual friends, and eventually we discovered we shared the exact same sense of humor.
Now the three of us go on our pre-Taraweeh coffee runs, go to the gym together, and call each other “fashfusha” - weak, in Syrian Arabic - while pretending we’re bodybuilders and then analyzing the most absurd relationship drama around campus.
Other friendships were forged through survival. Foundations of Science was three semesters of some of the toughest classes I’ve taken, and the friends who sat beside me through it all became the kind of people you only bond with that closely after surviving a bit of shared trauma together.
Then there’s Naya, a Syrian biology major, and probably the person most similar to me at NYUAD. After taking many of the same classes together, we now find ourselves attempting the next step of the journey side by side as we both work toward medical school.
Some of my favorite memories happened outside the classroom: celebrating UAE National Day in the palms with Ameena and Arwa, having long conversations about everything and nothing, and standing on a race podium with my track teammates Mariam and Aya after one of the most exhilarating races I’ve run.
By senior year, it felt like all of these moments came together.
One of my favorite photos is a group picture we took right after finishing our senior portraits, standing by the palm trees at the center of campus. It perfectly captured what NYUAD has meant to me, not just the classes or the milestones, but the people who made the experience unforgettable.
