But Sujan cashed in on a job offer promised her this summer. Now Sujan will work for Democracy for America, a Democratic group led by former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s brother in Vermont, to help coordinate hurricane relief efforts until she and her parents—both faculty members at Tulane—are allowed to return to their home in the New Orleans neighborhood of Uptown.

But Sujan added that not everyone has the resources to try to find new schools or temporary jobs.

“The ones who the story’s really bad and depressing for are the ones who don’t have the money to go to school in the first place....We didn’t take care of the people who [we] really need to take care of, and who don’t really have any other place to go,” she said.

Some professors are also accepting visiting status or research positions at other schools while they wait for home institutions to reopen. Tulane Professor of History Lawrence Powell will be teaching a class entitled “New Orleans: An American Pompeii?” as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan.

Wandering past LSU’s monumental class halls and pink bougainvillea blossoms, Clark was optimistic about her coming semester at LSU.

And next semester she hopes she’ll return to UNO, a relatively tiny campus just south of Lake Pontchartrain. A few days before evacuation, Clark had taped in her student government office a poster of Rosie the Riveter who offers a tiny motto: “We can do it.”

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer April H.N. Yee can be reachec at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.