Thanksgiving celebration dinner with my extended friend circle.
When I was applying to universities as a high schooler, I wanted to have a liberal arts education that not only complements my passion in robotics, but also forces me to study, have fun, and live together with people from across the globe. I wanted to be part of a diverse intellectual community.
NYUAD gave me exactly that.
What I know about cultures beyond my home countries is no longer based solely on what I google and watch on TV. It’s more about the first-hand observations that my friends and teachers have about their own country, myself included. As one of the few Japanese-Americans on campus, I have come to realize how valuable my experiences were to my friends, and how I should embrace my identity.
I go out to downtown Abu Dhabi with my friends every now and then to enjoy good food.
As I settled myself into the community, I came to increasingly see my friends not in terms of their nationality, ethnicity, economic-status, gender, age, but as fellow human beings. I came to believe that these are just labels that people have made to conveniently classify “the others”. Under the same roof, what matters is how decent of a person we can be and how much we can contribute to other people lives. On a larger scale, we are part of the NYUAD and AD community that strives to promote everyone’s wellbeing.
To sum up, I am proud to say I have kindled such feelings throughout my years at NYUAD. I firmly believe that the resulting cultural competence is one of the most fundamental wisdoms that NYUAD can uniquely impart to its community members.
My engineering capstone teammates are from Ethiopia and Pakistan.
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