Two years later, there are still vacant stretches of land in New Orleans, hundreds of acres with nothing except a few dozen rebuilt homes and trailers, say students who studied in New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast region on Aug. 29, 2005, devastating parts of the Mississippi and Alabama coasts and Louisiana, shutting down universities and forcing students to seek other places to study. Brown University hosted 59 undergraduate students and 27 graduate students from the Gulf Coast in the fall of 2005 as part of the University’s hurricane response efforts.

Though many of the students who later returned to Tulane University, Dillard University and Xavier University have since graduated or transferred to other schools, they all recall a fragmented college experience transformed by Katrina.

THINGS LEFT BEHIND

Providence native Cori Oliver, who graduated from Tulane this spring, said she felt removed from Brown’s student body as a visiting student. Oliver was entering her junior year at Tulane and had moved into a new apartment when she was told to evacuate. Her house was boarded up, and her then-boyfriend had to break in to retrieve some of her belongings for her. She returned to Providence, where she first spent a semester at Brown and then some time at the University of Rhode Island before returning to Tulane.

Meredith Evans, now a junior at the University of Rochester, was a rising freshman at Tulane in the fall of 2005. The week before Katrina hit, she had driven down with her father from her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. After Evans had finished moving into her dorm room, Tulane issued an evacuation warning, canceling orientation and classes. Students were told to either go home with their parents or take school shuttles to Alabama to wait out the hurricane.

Evans had been given a substantial financial aid package at Tulane and was worried that she would not be able to get a similar education with her financial constraints. Because she had applied to Brown the year before, the University still had all her financial records on file. She was told she could start right away.

“Basically within a week, after driving back home, I was moving all my things to a second university,” Evans said. “All my stuff was in Tulane — I had evacuated with the idea that we were going to go back. All I had was my computer and a backpack.”

RETURNING TO A CHANGED CITY

“Going back to Tulane — that was kind of an emotional rollercoaster,” said Kunal Verma, who graduated from Tulane in 2006 after spending a semester at Brown. …