On Feb. 3 strong westerly winds shrouded NYU Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat campus in sand. The towers of Reem Island had disappeared by lunch-time, and at 3 p.m. not even the nearest construction sites were visible.

This weather event made apparent what is normally talked about in metaphors. Our campus is a bubble, often removed from the realities of Abu Dhabi. My Saturday, like many others’, was triangulated between A6, C2 and D2. This did not make it a bad day, but more questionably it was not an unusual day.

NYUAD provides almost everything we need on campus, intellectual stimulation, inter-cultural conversation and most things in between. There are multiple Student Interest Group events every day, panel discussions with international scholars and occasionally top-tier sporting teams compete on our athletic facilities.

But just as the towers of downtown come back into view the morning after, sometimes we need to be reminded that we exist in Abu Dhabi. This city, and the UAE as a whole, for all its complexities and contradictions, is our home. While The Gazelle exists primarily to serve the needs of our sand drenched community, it is also a platform to interrogate our relationship with the city and country which we are an indisputable part of.

As some of us embark on the final leg of our academic journey here, others are starting new trajectories — but all of us should not let the small, and at times lonely, space we occupy be the boundaries of our endeavours, sandstorms notwithstanding.