Not U of M or MIT; Anoka High senior is heading for UAE

Some kids like to stay near home when they go to college. Others go farther afield.

Take Connor McMahon. The Anoka High School senior has chosen to further his education in Abu Dhabi. That's about 7,200 air miles from his home in Andover.

To offer a little global perspective, Abu Dhabi is on the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula, and is the largest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. It is located on the Persian Gulf. Connor will be attending New York University's new international campus there.

"I had to look on a map to see where it was when I heard about it," McMahon said.

He heard about it was last fall, when he began getting literature about the campus mixed in with all the other brochures college-bound students often get.

"They had these bright yellow [information] packets," the 18-year-old McMahon said. "That was the first time I had ever heard of that school or any other U.S. school in another country. I started looking into more information about it. I found out it was a really great school."

With that in mind, and intrigued at the thought of going to college in a setting a world away from the United States -- not only physically but culturally -- McMahon applied to NYU's Abu Dhabi branch. That was mixed in with more conventional applications, to schools such as Princeton, M.I.T., St. Olaf, Carleton, Claremont McKenna in California and the U of M.

"We were surrounded by total desert and sand dunes," said McMahon, who is ranked second in his senior class. The campus, he said, is small: just two modern buildings in the center of the city. Before his return to Minnesota, he was informed that he was accepted to NYU-Abu Dhabi. He also was accepted at several other schools, but said his decision to opt for Abu Dhabi wasn't a difficult one. A key factor was tuition and room and board; it's all paid for by the university for four years. So is a trip home over Christmas and New Year's.

"It's really in an international setting, being in another country," McMahon said. "It's so far away from the U.S. and so different. That really appealed to me. Less than one-third of the students who go there are from the U.S. That's another huge factor that I really loved." During his March visit, he roomed with an applicant from Egypt.

"That was the first time I had met someone from Egypt," he said.

Both parents and friends have been in favor of the move.

"Almost everyone is really excited about it," he said. "My parents are really supportive of it, [though] they say they'll miss me because I'm so far away."

"I'm kind of thinking about Italy or Germany," he said.

There may be some cultural differences to bridge.

"I know they're trying to modernize and be more appealing to Western countries," he said. "We did visit a mosque, and the women had to wear veils there, but there aren't a lot of restrictions on what women can or can't do. ... They kind of discourage us from taking pictures of people. ... "

There's a bit of a climate acclimation too.

"I'm going to be kind of happy to be in such a warm place," he said. "I know the coldest they said it gets in winter is in the 80s, but in the summer, it's in the 110-degree range."

"In and of itself, this is a rare thing," she said. "Even students going to an Ivy League school is a rare thing. Having a student selected to go to a completely different country and have the tuition paid for is probably unheard of. ... I've never even heard of this campus."