Sophomore year had not been an easy time for Danial Tajwer, Class of 2024. His grades hit rock bottom and his relationship with his family had become very estranged. Coupled with mental health issues and the impending pressure of junior year, the former Class of 2023 student began thinking about taking a leave of absence.

A Pakistani-American, Tajwer comes from a relatively conservative and traditional household, where at times he found it difficult to express himself freely: “The summer of 2020 I was back home and, like a lot of us, I spent a lot of time cooped up at home, trying to avoid the virus… As a product of a lot of those pressures of being back at home… It started a long cycle of family drama.”

Living in Indiana at the time, he decided to return to campus during the Fall 2020 semester due to the time difference and a complicated situation back home. Even though he was able to get some respite from the family drama, he was still weighed down by anxiety and other negative emotions, which seriously affected his academic performance.

When he received his grades, he was utterly shocked: “I think it was basically enough that it was a serious wake-up call that I couldn't keep on going on like this… I kind of decided that it just wouldn’t make sense for me to come back to campus with the amount of academic anxiety that I was facing and that I needed to spend time just figuring things out.”

Tajwer suggested that, like others, his self-worth had been tied to his academic performance. “I personally felt adrift because I [was] falling apart [in my] sophomore year [and] I wasn't really performing at the level expected of NYUAD students at that time. It kind of just felt like I didn't even belong on campus sometimes anymore, like a lot of the bureaucracy, a lot of the other things just felt really faceless to me,” he lamented.

Tajwer’s academic mentor had been an immense source of support for him both before and during his LOA. They expedited the administrative process for him and stayed in touch with him throughout his time off campus.

“My mentor did a really good job of actually introducing a lot of the resources that were available to me. Especially for a person like me, who couldn't really count on parental support and that kind of stuff to necessarily be there, it was just really nice to have a person,” he shared.

After discussing with his mentor, he decided to take two semesters, or the full academic year off of university in order to have ample time to heal and reconcile with his family: “I ended up trying to grow into my part as an elder son [and] as an older brother, trying to figure out what sort of relationship I wanted to have with my family long term.”

Although he hasn’t been able to do as many academic-related activities as he had hoped to, such as figuring out his graduate school plans or career trajectory, he is confident that this leave helped rejuvenate him and better equip him for campus life when he returns in the fall.

“The one thing that I can concretely say [is that] I was right for having taken this time off because it just gave me the distance to slow down and take things at a relatively more manageable pace. And now, when I think about going back to campus, I [am] full of excitement again,” he shared. “I'm just excited to start a new page.”