This week, an Iraqi veteran who served two tours of duty in Tal Afar and a former homecoming queen whose life was uprooted by Hurricane Katrina opened new chapters in their lives by purchasing college textbooks. A blind teenager who moved to Astoria from Poland in an attempt to regain his eyesight, an immigrant who put off college for five years while applying for American citizenship, and a student who is building an orphanage in Uganda are also enrolled in first-semester courses at colleges across the city.

Many freshmen thumbing through course guides this week said they always assumed they would go straight to college from high school. Some first-year students, however, said they feel like pinching themselves to make sure that the college quads, syllabuses, and reading assignments are not the details of daydreams.

Haley Moon, an 18-year-old from Biloxi, Miss., brings a cherubic face and a heavy Southern drawl to New York. Last year’s homecoming queen at St. John High School in Gulfport, Miss., said she has always dreamed of moving to the city to be close to the thriving theater scene.

Striding across quads in a hot-pink T-shirt that reads “Strong, Beautiful, Barnard Woman,” Ms. Moon, who suffered from severe depression, suicidal thoughts, and post-traumatic stress syndrome after losing her home and almost all of her possessions in Hurricane Katrina two years ago, does not look like a portrait of grief. “We lost everything,” Ms. Moon said. Her house was flooded by 5 feet of water, and her school and dance studio were also destroyed. “It feels so surreal to actually be here,” she said.

Earlier this week, Ms. Moon shared a copy of her self-published book, “Katrina Tears,” with her hallmates at a Barnard College dorm. The book documents her struggle with depression after the hurricane, and tells the stories of other teenagers who suffered from similar traumas.

“My problems sound greater than others’, and they gave me a better sense of self, but any other teenager’s problem can be as hard as what I went through,” she said.

Ms. Moon, who plans to double major in biochemistry and dance, said she wants to pursue a career either as a trauma doctor or a Broadway performer.

Sean Kim, 24, attended his first class at Queens College on Monday, and said he tried not to let it bother him that he was about five years older than most of his classmates. Mr. Kim, who moved to College Point in Queens from South Korea when he was 15, went to Iraq in 2003. He was stationed in Al Asad and then in Tal Afar, working as an aviation electrician.

Mr. Kim said his most frightening moment in Iraq was witnessing a roadside bomb blow up a friend’s vehicle. His friend, and the horrifying image of his near-death, have both survived.

“The funny thing is, I’m as nervous about being here as I was being out there,” Mr. Kim, who still maintains his Army-fit physique and buzz-cut hair, said. “This is more positive stress, rather than negative stress, but I’m still nervous.”

He said he would like to pursue a career in teaching, or work as a physician’s assistant. As for returning to Iraq, Mr. Kim said it’s a possibility he prefers not to think about. “It’s a late start, but it makes me try harder,” Mr. Kim said. His course load includes classes in art, anthropology, English, biology, and Korean. “Streetsmartwise, I feel ahead, but maybe not bookwise,” Mr. Kim said. “You need both.”

When Kate Skoczypiec, 19, was growing up in Sanok, Poland, she pictured her life unfolding there among her friends and relatives. She dreamed of being a doctor. When her older brother, Bart, fell off of his bicycle and hit his head on the pavement, it changed her plans. “I never thought I would end up in the United States,” Ms. Skoczypiec said.

Bart Skoczypiec, 23, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2001 that left him completely blind while not affecting his mental sharpness. The family soon after moved to Astoria, Queens, to get him a series of optical surgeries that were unavailable in their small town.

Now Kate, a first-year nursing student at Hunter College, is helping her brother attend New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn.

“My typical day is like two classes at Hunter, then I go home, then I take Bart to school and back, and then I go back to Hunter,” Ms. Skoczypiec said. She escorts her brother to his doctor’s appointments and also takes care of the family’s finances and pays the household bills as her parents struggle to learn English.

“Sometimes people ask me why I seem so tired, but I don’t get to sleep usually until 3 a.m.,” Ms. Skoczypiec said. “What do you not do for your own brother?” Bart Skoczypiec spoke no English when he moved to America, and had to learn the language without being able to read the foreign alphabet.

Today he is almost fluent, with only a slight accent. Mr. Skoczypiec said he is starting to see shadows again, and slowly losing the weight he put on due to the steroids he was prescribed for his eyesight.

“It’s pretty complicated to go anywhere, not only school,” he said. He studies with audio books, and his sister has been attending his first classes with him.

“It’s a new place, with new stuff — it’s exciting,” Mr. Skoczypiec said. “Since I started elementary school in Poland, I’ve been a technical guy.” He said he plans to major in microcomputer business systems.

Raheem Shivji, 18, who already looks at home relaxing in Union Square near his new New York University dorm room on Third Avenue, spent most of his free time growing up visiting his father’s hometown in Tanzania. While visiting Kampala, Uganda, last summer, Mr. Shivji stumbled upon a three-shack orphanage where 63 children were subsisting only on sugar cane. Ten of them were HIV-positive, but had no access to medicine, he said. “I was moved by it,” Mr. Shivji said. He lobbied the Uganda Businessmen’s Club to start donating food to the orphans, and convinced a Ugandan rose farmer to allow his off-season workers to help build a large dormitory for the orphans.

He turned his personal efforts to help suffering children into a non-profit called “Operation Uganda Hope,” which he plans to run while attending classes at New York University. “Right now we’re looking at trying to get them a chicken coop, a garden, and a cow,” Mr. Shivji said. “The goal is to make the place self-sufficient so someday they won’t need us anymore.”

He hasn’t decided his major, but feels he’s already a step ahead of some of his fellow students. “The majority of 18 year old freshman haven’t been overseas,” he said. “If they have, they’ve stayed in resorts. It’s different when you get a first-hand experience of it.”

A single mother who lives in Inwood, Cinthya Perez this week started attending classes at Baruch College — a moment she has been eagerly anticipating for five years.

“I tried to go to college, but I was illegal,” Ms. Perez, 21, who moved to New York from the Dominican Republic when she was 14, said.
Ms. Perez graduated from high school when she was 16, but because she was not a citizen and couldn’t afford to pay for college, she took a job at a bakery and hoped to slowly save up for school.

“For years, they said since my mother didn’t have papers, I had to go to court and ask for someone in my family with papers to come if I wanted to go to college,” Ms. Perez said. She waited to get citizenship on her own. With five years separating her from her last math class, Ms. Perez had forgotten how to solve even the most basic math functions. She enrolled in a summer immersion program, and this month earned the highest grade in her intermediate algebra class, a spokeswoman for Baruch College said.

Ms. Perez said she plans to major in accounting and minor in business. She said one challenge she’s figuring out is how to organize her studies around her 3-year-old son’s schedule. “I wait until he falls asleep and then I start doing my homework,” Ms. Perez said. “I try not to look at it as an obstacle.”