Right after the Class of 2021 acceptance letters were sent out a few weeks ago, I got a message from my friend, a high school senior in South Korea. “I got in!” she wrote. She was very excited about the acceptance, but at the same time having a hard time choosing between NYU Abu Dhabi and the most prestigious university in Korea. In contrast to certain careers and connections the Korean university promised, NYUAD held a much shorter legacy and a much less predictable future. “What do you think about the uncertainty or little reputation of NYU Abu Dhabi?” she asked me. I told her that most of us were also still figuring it out but that we see this uncertainty as a learning opportunity and not an impediment; that we all welcome, not fear, new challenges.

As sincerely as I meant these words, I would be lying if I said I never worry about my or the university’s future. The recent student forum debate on what it means to build the #mynyuad brand reflects the questions and doubts many of us have: what and where are we? All of us decided to take a leap of faith to commit our education to a brand new institution that was nothing more than a vision ten years ago. Candidate Weekends and John Sexton’s Charlie story brought us together, but what are we and where do we go when the Saadiyat bubble pops?

Transience permeates all aspects of our college lives in the same way that finite visa expiry dates, long distance friendships and changing study away policies do. What ultimately remains through this transience is the legacy and network that we build. Legacy is not built by the Office of Public Affairs alone; nor is it disassembled by a social media account or a newspaper article. Legacy is a reservoir that our community collectively adds to with every mark and impression we leave on the world beyond Saadiyat. It is not a task but a result of all our cumulative actions as part of one entity. With a larger reservoir of acknowledgement, trust and connections, comes a more solid foundation on which our future can grow.

We, as current students, are already benefitting from the legacy that three — soon to be four— graduating classes have worked so hard to create from scratch. We have alumni working in various industries and making NYUAD known — well-known. We can talk to the alumni that have already taken their unique experiences from NYUAD into the next phases of their lives to envision how we will too. I think that we, the Class of 2018, should take an important position in growing this legacy as the link between Sama and Saadiyat campuses. For a new institution like NYUAD to succeed, we need more alumni in leadership positions to pull more students in, who will then grow and pull others in too. We have upperclassmen and alumni who can be reached out to for advice and connections. We have our classmates to suffer through classes together and become each other’s support systems. We have underclassmen who may have less study away or financial support, for which we must help advocate for by actively sharing how it shaped our years at NYUAD.

So how do we grow this legacy? Yesterday at an alumni-students event in New York, John Sexton told us a story — not the Charlie story — that reminded us of why we all came here in the first place. He told a story about how we don’t get a second chance in making NYUAD happen and that we should be a network that is more than an alumni association. We share such a unique narrative of four years in Abu Dhabi that makes 2,200 of us a community regardless of where and when we meet. It is important to know our shared stories so that we can utilize our shared knowledge and shared truths to get to where we’d like to be. The 250 classmates that we see everyday — at each other’s best and worst — are already doing amazing things this summer. Some will work at large tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and SpaceX. Some will work in finance and consulting at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Allianz, AIG, PHA, KPMG and AlphaSights. Some, myself included, will contribute to the growth of tech startups working with computer vision, AI, data engineering and blockchain. Some will conduct research on economics at Columbia and Dartmouth, marine biology at NYU, glacier melting in Greenland, immigration in Hungary, economic development in Ghana and work on various capstone projects back in Abu Dhabi. This is in no way a comprehensive reflection of our class’ achievements, but it is hopefully a starting point for sophomores and freshmen to reach out to whomever they shares similar goals with so that they too can benefit from us the way we did from the four classes ahead of us.

In a community of 1,050 students of 110 different nationalities and 22 different majors, we will end up in different parts of the world working toward different goals. It might be hard to reconcile and attribute all individual achievements to the single NYUAD brand now, but the accumulated reservoir over 10 or 20 years will. We are the ones who ultimately benefit from a large and positive reservoir of the NYUAD legacy. We should therefore be the largest advocates for each of the 2,200 who are part of our success, whether it is through demanding clear policies from administration, continuing constructive criticism, giving referrals or simply listening to each other’s stories.