As current seniors count down the days to graduation, several alumni weigh in on the important lessons we should all take away with us after four years at NYUAD.

Today I walked past the performance gym as it was being transformed into the NYU Abu Dhabi 2018 Commencement venue. I imagined how it will feel to walk across that stage when I graduate in a week’s time, meeting the end of the most formative chapter of my life. It still feels unreal. My daily routine — one that revolves entirely around this campus — makes it hard to imagine a future post-graduation outside of Saadiyat. And yet, I am so familiar with departures and goodbyes every 14 weeks that I can hardly wrap my mind around the fact that this time, I will leave without a return ticket to Abu Dhabi. I am genuinely excited to relocate and start my job, but that excitement is not without an unsettling gut feeling that warns me of the impending pain of goodbyes.

As I begin this mental transition, talking to NYUAD alumni has been both comforting and insightful. As part of the Alumni Relations Office’s new initiative, I interviewed a few of our alumni about where they are now. From creating art, to teaching, to running startups, our 560 alumni — soon to be 800 — have set out on so many exciting paths. They have pursued very different career trajectories, but they still share several common insights about how their time at NYUAD brought them to each distinct destination. While the individual stories will be shared through the office’s publication, I wanted to reflect on what the stories from alumni have taught me about the future that lies ahead after NYUAD.

One unique element of this undergraduate experience that deeply affected us is travel. The extensive international travel NYUAD students engage in during their four years is an invaluable experience, but hearing about how study away opportunities and holiday trips fundamentally changed some of the alumni was refreshing. Some alumni have even integrated travel directly into their careers. Fah is a producer and host of Passion TV, a TV show that reports on unique destinations and interviews travelers. She also founded Tuk Tuk Pass, a travel services startup, after hearing about various difficulties of organizing travel. Shintaro works in hotel development, managing the conceptualization of luxury resorts and youth hostels around Europe, South and Southeast Asia. Joey, on the other hand, uses her study away and travel experiences as an inspiration for her creative writing topics, like the formation of rock music in Buenos Aires in the 1970s.

In retrospect, the plans included in our study away essay may have turned out to be fictions, but the global education offered at NYUAD has nonetheless changed us in integral ways. We learned how to relate to communities different from our own, and we have also been given the opportunity to create a career path that includes our passion for travel. The other day, when I told a visitor that I was moving to Singapore because it was “closer” to home, she was shocked at how my relative sense of distance was different to hers. We may have yet to realize how J-terms abroad shaped us, but once we do — whether it is months or years down the line — hopefully we will express it so that underclassmen can also grow from such experiences.

What scares me the most about graduating is that much of this community will no longer be next door, but rather ten-hour flights and three vacation days away. The community that has taught me new bounds of compassion and friendship is now about to scatter widely for the very same reasons that brought us together. I first blamed cosmopolitanism for the fear of separation, but talking to alumni taught me that mobility and commitment to travel remains, and often grows, after graduation. Many of our alumni are concentrated in large, economically powerful cities like New York, London and Dubai, which helps in the formation of lasting, organic communities. In popular tourist destinations like Tokyo, it is easy to contact local alumni and meet up with them. All of the alumni commented on how easy it is to pick up with NYUAD friends, even after months or years of lost contact. We may not have an established, formal alumni network, but we seem to have successfully maintained organic links that span continents. This gives me hope in venturing out and leaving this small campus that houses the people I have grown so close to.

One alumnus noted that a unique intimacy develops between NYUAD students due to the physical proximity of our community. That makes the graduation transition even more challenging, as it is virtually impossible to replicate the same proximity in other contexts. The question that arises is how we can achieve a similarly close community with other people around the world in our post-grad lives. The alumnus advised that before leaving, we consider the people around us that made us who we are, and more seriously address who we will stay close to moving forward. Rather than keeping to the exclusivity of our college experience, we can learn from how this institution has helped with meaningful community building, and we can bring that to our future communities.

When asked if they had any advice for underclassmen, alumni told us to do things that excite us, because we have no excuse not to. We are surrounded by so many intelligent and competent people with a lot of resources. We have a lot of room to experiment without consequence, like going to Buenos Aires and disliking it or taking an anthropology class without having to major in it. They believe that one of the most, if not the most, significant privilege of ours is the freedom to explore and decide that the future holds ample opportunity to continue with our dreams, even if we decide to take ample time to figure them out.

Finally, all the alumni missed Foodlands and the fish market. As we face the many uncertainties of the future, we can now at least predict one of them: we will miss the availability of good shawarma and waterfront shisha cafes. Hopefully, we can take advantage of these simple pleasures in the next two weeks, surrounded by the people we will miss the most.