FARGO (AP) - Overnight, Nana Sajaia's supposedly obscure thesis topic became front-page news across the world.

The North Dakota State University exchange student doesn't relish the newfound timeliness. Her master's thesis deals with news coverage of her home country of Georgia - the subject of extensive coverage since an armed standoff with Russia began earlier this month.

Sajaia was putting the finishing touches to her paper as Russian tanks rolled into her hometown of Zugdidi, Georgia.

Sajaia, 24, presented her thesis to faculty members Thursday. Public speaking jitters gave way to much more intense anxieties. She's returning to Georgia next week, and she worries about dodging checkpoints and roadblocks on her way to Zugdidi. She also wonders what will happen to her dream of bringing objective, hard-hitting reporting back to her troubled land.

"When the country is all about bombing and occupation, it's hard to focus on freedom of speech," she said.

A year ago, Sajaia came to NDSU on a Muskie Fellowship, a State Department program for graduate students from Russia and former Soviet republics. She completed the school's two-year master's program in mass communication in a year. Last December, she decided to compare U.S. and Georgian newspaper coverage of Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili for her thesis.

"When I started, nobody knew about Saakashvili, and nobody knew much about Georgia," she said. "I had to make long introductions."

Sajaia is glad she wrapped up the writing before Aug. 8, when fighting between Georgia and Russia broke out over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. She was proofreading her paper and finishing an internship at Fargo's TV station KVLY at the time.

Suddenly, "Everything else became minor compared to the safety of my family," she recalled. "And I had worked on this paper for six months."

Twice a day, she would call home to make sure her parents were still safe and her 18-year-old brother had not been drafted. She took her laptop to the campus library, vowing to focus on her paper. But in minutes, she would find herself browsing news sites and weeping.

Sajaia put up two new Muskie fellows from Georgia who arrived in Fargo the day the fighting started. They rallied to make sense of the news in a way supportive American friends couldn't understand. As one of the new arrivals, David Chaganava, put it, "For them, it was news. For me, it was life."