With bank accounts running dry after one too many coffees at Blacksmith, Tuesday dinners at Abd El Wahab and trips to Spinneys, students have found themselves flocking to paid experiments at NYU Abu Dhabi’s social science and psychology laboratories.

As Ginny Pigler, Class of 2018, was participating in her fifth decision making group experiment, she began questioning the past four years of her life on Saadiyat. She ended up breaking down halfway through, running out in tears and locking herself in her room for the next two days. Thankfully, one of The Gazelle’s reporters happens to be her roommate, so we were able to get an exclusive interview with her through the door.

“For four years, our lives have revolved around a tiny campus in the middle of a desert island and the same two hundred fifty people in our class,” Pigler shared. “And a bunch of cats. Isn’t it obvious this is all just a huge psychology experiment?”

“Plus we’re surrounded by cameras,” she continued. “All the time. What if this is actually some sort of reality show? Like a real Real AD show?”

Pigler’s thoughts were echoed by Rod Ender, also Class of 2018, who developed similar suspicions after spending the past year working on a capstone study involving relationships between lab rats. He has recently noticed a frightening number of similarities between himself and his test subjects.

“Cramped shared living quarters, leftover morsels of pizza for dinner, mornings spent on a treadmill, fights consisting of annoying squeaks that never result in anything,” Ender detailed the setting of his experiment. “I’ve actually named the rats after my roommates. And ex-girlfriends. Speaking of exes, do you know how crazy it is to bump into almost all of them on a weekly basis? And only being able to take a break from all this by flying to a campus on a different continent? This environment is just completely unnatural.”

Underclassmen have also recently been feeling as if they are part of an experiment, especially after the university’s recent failed attempt to assign housing for the Fall semester using a new system.

“I’m starting to think that the whole reason this university was founded was so the New York campus could have a place to pilot test things,” shared one sophomore.

NYUAD leadership, meanwhile, completely denies that any of the activity happening on the university campus is in any way experimental.

“We all really want what’s best for our subjects, uh, I mean students,” shared Viceroy Alfre H. Blooom.