UAE students have to settle for ‘virtual’ graduations
▶ Coronavirus rules deny graduates the social high point of their university careers
Tomorrow, Hafsa Ahmed will take a short walk around her near-deserted university campus before heading back to her room alone for her graduation.
The 22-year-old Pakistani is one of hundreds of students in the UAE who will be graduating online this year as the country is gripped by coronavirus pandemic precautions.
Ms Ahmed said graduation will be a “bittersweet ending” to four years at New York University Abu Dhabi.
“It is slowly sinking in that we are graduating online,” she said. “Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a stepby-step realisation that it is happening this way, so I’ve got used to the idea. I can’t change it.
“I’ve had friends in the UAE take repatriation flights to their home countries without the chance to say goodbye.
“A graduation ceremony is a type of closure for students. It’s hard to get that in these current times, but I’m grateful for the effort that has been made by our university.”
Ms Ahmed submitted her last thesis and project for her bachelor of arts degree in social research and public policy this month.
Tomorrow afternoon, she will join hundreds of classmates and log on to NYU Abu Dhabi’s commencement ceremony to celebrate the Class of 2020.
The event will include a video tribute to the graduating class, an individual degree conferment where students’ names will be called out, as well as speeches from NYU president Andy Hamilton, vice chancellor Mariet Westermann and Pulitzer Prize winner David Levering Lewis.
“I am looking forward to it, but it will be very different to what we all planned,” Ms Ahmed said.
“My parents were meant to fly in from Pakistan a week before the ceremony so I could introduce them to my friends and professors, so it’s sad to be losing out on that.”
Ms Ahmed said she will have a muted and “socially distanced celebration” with some of her peers at her campus accommodation in Abu Dhabi.
For 22-year-old Khalid Kareem, there will be no ceremony.
The student at the University of Bath in England returned to his family in the UAE in March as virus lockdown rules took effect.
“I was expecting to come back in mid-April but as we saw things getting worse, I brought my flight forward,” he said. “I left my student halls very suddenly and didn’t even get to say goodbye to a lot of my friends.
“Our graduation ceremony has been cancelled and so has our end-of-year ball, which is something I’ve been looking forward to since starting university.”
The student of electrical and electronic engineering said he and his classmates had the choice of attending a joint graduation in November this year or June 2021, but he refused.
“Very few of us can travel back to the university because most of us will be in full-time employment,” he said.
“It’s especially difficult for overseas students like me. I have a job placement in the UAE that I’ll be starting in the summer. I can’t then take time out to travel to the UK for the sake of an hours-long ceremony. Plus, that feeling of being a fresh graduate would have been gone by then.”
Across the world, the Class of 2020 has had to push on without a traditional graduation. With social distancing in place, university communities have come up with creative alternatives to celebrate commencement.
At the Business Breakthrough University in Tokyo, Japan, mobile robots were used to host a graduation ceremony for students in March.
The robots had tablet computers attached, and each student was in “virtual attendance” using Zoom software.
Katarina Holtzapple, a senior at NYU Abu Dhabi, said that at 4.30pm tomorrow, she will be watching her graduation ceremony on her laptop from the comfort of her dorm room.
“I have family in the US and Croatia, so I am co-ordinating, getting everyone together on a video call to watch the ceremony with me – there will be about 15 or 20 of us,” the 22-year-old student said.
“My immediate family should have been with me in person but that just couldn’t happen because of the pandemic.
“When I realised I couldn’t fly back home to the US to do the virtual graduation with my family around me, that was tough.
“It’s very different to how I planned my graduation, but the reality has settled in now.”
The fourth year student of film and social research and public policy, said she will be in her dorm with her three roommates on the day, but she will leave the full-scale celebrations until next month.
“I fly home on Wednesday, so we’ll be having a belated get-together with my family because my cousin in the US is graduating, too.”
UAE universities have adapted to coronavirus restrictions, but the Class of 2020 is missing out on graduation ceremonies