A year ago this week, Vice Chancellor Mariët Westerman sent an email to the NYU Abu Dhabi community announcing that from March 8 through April 4, NYUAD will be closing all instructional, athletic and public art spaces and move to a temporary online instructional model.

Since the end of January 2020, students started receiving regular emails with updates on NYUAD’s response to the Novel Coronavirus, which at that time was only an epidemic. At that point, no one could have foreseen that just a little over a month later, our lives would be drastically altered. The email on March 4 and the sudden shift to online classes caused a state of uncertainty amongst the student body.

“First when we found out that classes would be transitioning online it was very difficult for all of us. I mean most of us were in a state of shock and… not a lot of us expected that it would last so long, so a lot of people were expecting that we would have online classes for just a few weeks and then we’d go back to normal,” commented Njomza Selmani, Class of 2022.

Joelle Bohringer, Class of 2023, shared similar sentiments: “My reaction … was both a state of panic and a state of uncertainty. I don’t remember feeling so terrible at first but I think it became more negative as time went on.”

What was initially supposed to be a temporary model was later extended until the end of the spring 2020 semester and then to the semesters that followed as the Covid-19 situation failed to improve.

Even before the pandemic forced study aways to be cut short and NYU campuses to shut, the first glimpses of the incoming pandemic were seen by the students who had spent their 2020 January Term at NYU Shanghai. It was her last week of J-term at NYUSH when Salma Soliman, Class of 2021, saw the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the country and tried to avoid public transport. Her flight from Shanghai was initially cancelled and she worried that the borders would close before she managed to leave. As Soliman started her study away semester in New York, she thought, or at least hoped, that Covid-19 was behind her.

Just a few weeks before NYUAD’s announcement, NYU announced that it would suspend operations at its NYU Florence site from Feb. 27 to at least March 29, hoping to resume if the Covid-19 situation in the country came under control. The seven NYUAD students who were studying in Florence at the time were advised to leave Italy but were also unable to return to NYUAD.

“NYUAD was super supportive but also they had to comply with NYUNY policy, which meant that they had to provide us with tickets to go back to our home countries,” commented Toby Le, Class of 2022, who was studying away in Florence during spring 2020. “They also couldn’t let us return to our home campuses because that would break the [Global Network] precedent. Basically, they told us that they would fly us home now and fly us back when Florence would have us back.”

When NYU Florence shut its doors, Yusril Nur Hidayat, Class of 2022, was studying away at NYU Berlin and serving as NYU Berlin’s site ambassador.

“We had approximately three weeks in Berlin before all the students were to be sent back,” explained Nur Hidayat, whose role gave him early insight that his site was soon to follow in the footsteps of Florence. “Within those three weeks I was so busy handling the logistics of all the students returning back home and also taking care of their well being. But personally during the three weeks … I took time for myself exploring the city and spent time with some of the friends I had made in study away. Because it was such a short time, it was tragic [yet] sweet for me.”

Soon after, the NYU sites at Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris and Prague were closed, and New York also announced the closure of its students residencies on March 16, directing students to leave their residencies by March 22 and return home for the remainder of the semester.

“I thought I was going to spend spring break in New York City, then go home because things will close,” added Soliman. “[My friends] told me, if there’s a flight leaving tonight, take it…. We got back to our room and I booked a flight for the next day. When we reached Egypt, NYU emailed us that the dorms were closed, so for sure, I was glad I made that decision. Also, the day I arrived in Egypt, Egypt closed its borders.”

Aasna Sijapati, Class of 2021, who was also studying away at New York in spring 2020, initially left New York City to stay with her relatives in Minnesota. She planned to return home to Nepal in a couple of weeks but due to border closures it took her over three months to arrange a repatriation flight.

“The process was not only extremely anxiety inducing but also very heartbreaking as I never got to say a proper goodbye to the city or my friends,” commented Sijapati.

The shift to online classes, which was initially not supposed to last for longer than a month, has now been extended to over a year. Nur Hidayat saw the increase in Covid-19 cases and had somewhat predicted that classes will remain online for a while, which helped him plan in advance.

Others, did not think that the pandemic would have such an impact on their years at NYUAD. “I had never expected the pandemic to have such a long lasting effect on my senior year as well,” commented Sijapati, heartbroken. “I had never imagined the pandemic to cause such an abrupt end to not just my semester in NYC but also my time at NYUAD and on campus.”