For Nadia Zahran, a rising senior at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., a summer Arabic program in Beirut provided one of the most frightening moments in her life.

“The reason I picked Lebanon is that it was the safest place, I thought, in the Middle East,” she said during an interview Thursday, just two days after the U.S. Army evacuated her and three others on a Seahawk helicopter. After a stay in Cyprus and a layover in Athens, she returned to New York City late Wednesday night.

“Two of the bombs that went off one night sounded like they were right outside my window,” she said. “It’s enough to shake you up pretty bad.”

Ms. Zahran, 22, is staying in the city for the rest of the summer, pushing forward an internship at ABC that was originally planned for late July.

Although Lebanon is not a popular site for college students to study abroad, there are several language programs through private companies and two American-associated universities in Beirut: the Lebanese American University and the American University of Beirut. What seemed like a quiet, Westernized place for language training and study, students said, quickly became a lesson in blackouts, air raids, and angry mobs filling the streets.

“People cannot sleep,” a Columbia University graduate student, Paul Moawad, 30, said in an interview from a town north of Beirut, where he has fled with his family. “The air strikes are very loud.”

His thesis is on the real estate market in Beirut. With bombs devastating the city’s infrastructure “it will change everything drastically,” he said.

“It’s a totally unfair equation,” he said. “Hezbollah takes its orders from Syria and Iran, not Lebanon. We pay the dear price.”

One native New Yorker, Nick Greenough, 19, a sophomore at Georgetown University, was at the airport in Amman, Jordan, for a layover before a flight to Beirut when the airport in Beirut was bombed. His flight was canceled and an internship at a translation company, Mideastwire.com, seemed to slip through his grasp.

“I toyed with the idea of going by car, but they had blown up all the roads,” he said. “It was suggested to me that I could fly to Cyprus and then take a ship, but there was a naval blockade. This was all before things looked really bad.”

“They came for an experience. They got an experience,” the provost and acting president of the American University of Beirut, Peter Heath, said from the university campus, less than two miles from the bombing. “Two bombs just went off.”

“Some take this very well, with a kind of coolness,” he said. “Others respond very differently.”

By Thursday, nearly all of the American students studying at the university for the summer had been evacuated, he said. Most of them left by boat to Cyprus, where they caught or were in the process of catching flights back to Europe and America. A group of 72 international students, mostly from other countries in the Middle East, were waiting to be evacuated Friday. The school has cancelled the summer language sessions.

A message on the Web site of the Lebanese American University posted Thursday said classes were suspended and most of the students had been evacuated.

“We all hope and pray that this nightmare we are all experiencing will come to an end soon,” the message read.

Ms. Zahran, who was taking an Arabic language program at the Lebanese American University, was on an early morning run when the first bombs hit the airport.

“You could see black clouds coming up,” she said. “The sound of large booms.”

On the night the bombings were expected to start no one in her program could sleep, she said. They waited up past midnight, and then at about 3:15 a.m. the mosques in the city rang with calls to prayer and the air roared with F16s. Bombs fell and the sky lit up with anti-aircraft fire, she said.

During the next few days, she was able to see the destruction first-hand after she met up with an ABC news crew — the first day of her summer internship was in a war zone.

“I saw everything from angered citizens, someone’s store blown up, to anti-American and anti-Israeli protesters on the street, chanting stuff that even I didn’t want to understand,” she said.