Imbisi Alwaz, Class of 2023, has spent this entire semester darting from obligation to obligation. As a member of The Gazelle and four arbitrarily chosen SIGs, while working three research assistantships, a part-time job and taking Linear Algebra, there is nary a moment that she cannot spend pretending to work at Blacksmith or within the confines of her room. Throughout all of this business, however, she has failed to answer some fundamental questions. “I’ve come no closer to finding out what I want to do with my life than I was when I boarded the plane [in] freshman year,” she confessed.

When asked if having an average of 14 Zoom meetings every week was getting old, she complained, answering with another question: “What else can I do?”, and launched into an endless tirade about how Abu Dhabi has agonizingly little to offer and how she can’t wait to don her globe-trotting hat come spring break. Being on Saadiyat, chronic work perhaps appears to her as the only remedy for boredom. Aimless walks on the Highline at 2 a.m. on Friday nights got tiring in their own way, so she made sure to join a virtual internship based in San Francisco, hoping the time zone difference would help remedy the existential pangs of loneliness. On the surface, it almost seems like the perfect solution: on some days, she even looks happy.

Alwaz has become a one-woman operation, single-handedly holding the campus together by running every Student Government committee and doing administrators’ jobs for them by writing communications that are finally not word salads. “I don’t even know if my impact will matter when this place doesn’t exist in 10 years, but at least I’m keeping myself busy today,” she remarked. What she doesn’t seem to understand is that for NYUAD administrators, when things go south and they once again fail to provide students with appropriate housing or communicate three contradictory policies at the same time, there couldn’t be a better scapegoat.

Whenever she doesn’t know what to do, there’s always another email she can write, a survey to work on or a problem set to complete. NYU Abu Dhabi has thus graciously taken away from her the task of critical self-reflection, leaving it a problem for a future world without Falcon Dirhams and where the Career Development Center tells her to wash her hands. She doesn’t even have to work on that term paper due in May that looms before her or put consistent effort into understanding proofs for her Imperfect Markets class. There’s always something more urgent to do as she moves like a hamster running on a wheel.

“Quantity over quality” has been her mantra no matter what the university has encouraged her to do. A surface-level understanding of everything beats having to concentrate and sit down to learn something without performing four other tasks at the same time. Her transcript of grades, ranging from B to A- attests to the fact that she can pick up any subject, but lacks the mental energy to actually care about it. Between SIGs, Student Government, numerous assistantships, The Gazelle and the 20-credit-course load that she occasionally forgets all about, she is the Health Center’s poster-child for burn-out — or she would be, if any health professional could find a 15-minute interview slot on her Google Calendar.

Every break from school, however, this veneer begins to crack. This semester, because she accidentally submitted her math homework as her resume for her Handshake applications, her March duties have dropped and she doesn’t know whether she will be able to repair it. What is there to do besides work? There’s going to the gym, swimming, watching shows and even unimaginably cracking open a book that wasn’t assigned for a class. “For the past three years, I’ve been able to conveniently say I’m ‘too busy’ to do anything, whether for myself or with others,” she remarked. But she will be graduating in a year and with that comes the daunting task of finding a new hamster wheel to run on. Eventually, she might even find a life partner and have 2.4 children, who, if the world is not an uninhabitable wasteland by then, will grow up to run along hamster wheels of their own.

Meeting with the CDC, she took the first step of paring her resume down from the 10 pages it was to something more manageable and readable to employers with a similar attention span to hers. “It’s impressive how we see so many people that manage to do everything and nothing at the same time,” said Karir Globel, director of the CDC. “When there’s pressure to do everything without anyone specifying what those things are, no wonder we’re going mad!”