Due to unforeseen growth in the student population, dozens of courses in various departments still have essential textbooks out of stock at the NYU Abu Dhabi bookstore. Fortunately, an NYUAD bookstore insider has tipped The Gazelle that students will get all necessary course materials within two weeks. Unfortunately, that was three weeks ago.

While NYUAD students are nearing the middle of the first quarter, there are still students who are missing books for their 7-week courses.

The problem, according to the latest statement by the bookstore, is that “books are ordered from various publishers and thus the shipping times can vary wildly.”

One core curriculum course “What is Love: Baby Don’t Hurt Me and Other Hypotheses” reportedly has books shipped from eight different countries — two of which have seen military coups since the beginning of the semester.

Representatives from the bookstore assured The Gazelle that “all books will arrive before the end of the semester.” They were also heard muttering “Insha’Allah” under their breath.

When students who studied away during Spring 2017 returned to Saadiyat, they found that they struggled to enter buildings, newly equipped with automatic doors, that are supposedly designed to increase accessibility. Student response was automatic — outrage at “what the… the …. [administration] was thinking,” as was overheard by an unnamed student at a recent dinner conversation.

While many students agree about the need to make campus more accessible to those with physical disabilities, the implementation is raising eyebrows.

Interestingly, The Gazelle has uncovered that the new doors are actually part of an initiative by the office of First Year Programming that is intended to foster relationships between upperclassmen and first year students.

“Whenever someone encounters one of the doors, they automatically look around to see if anybody else is around with whom they might commiserate about how impractical they are. This reduction in social inhibition leads to new relationships being established between staff and students, faculty and students and of course students of various year groups,” Damien ‘Dam’ Dore, Head of Incompetence at First Year Programming, told The Gazelle.

Whether administration is planning on actually increasing the accessibility of campus in the future is unclear, as doors leading to elevators have not been automatized.

According to recent reports, the J-term application is now live and functioning. This comes as a great relief to Global Education, which has been exploring more novel ways of allocating J-terms due to persisting technical difficulties. After the first time the application website crashed, Chuck Grim jokingly responded that maybe students would “just draw straws this year.”

After the third time the website crashed, Grimmer was observed buying up all the straws at the convenience store, with heavy bags underneath his eyes. However, when the application returned for an entire day, the straws were reportedly thrown out, much to the protest of Ecoherence members. Anonymous sources additionally report that Residential Education has retrieved the straws. They will be used in this year’s room selection raffle.

The Gazelle’s reporters were also at a briefing about how the J-term application would be handled in lieu of seemingly insurmountable technical difficulties. “We are going to perform a huge ritual to make the choices. We already bought 100 turtles that will choose one of the student’s eight choices by crawling towards a piece of lettuce on top of each course title,” an exasperated Grimmest explained, wildly pointing at dozens of turtles also at the briefing.

“Doing it with turtles will probably be faster than the damn tech team,” he said, yawning loudly for the fourth time in two minutes.

Shortly after speaking to Grimmest, a junior member of the Global Ed web development team rushed into the office with news of having found the missing semicolon needed to fix the application. The fate of the turtles remains unclear.

(The Gazelle does not take responsibility if between the time of Press and Publication the service has crashed again.)