In 1974 an article was published in The Philosophical Review by Thomas Nagel (another NYU philosopher) entitled 'What is it like to be a Bat?' Since it was published it has become one of the most cited works dealing with the nature of consciousness (if you wish to read it reprints can be found through simple web search). Nagel at that time was defending the position that physical reductionism cannot adequately explain what it is to be a biological being.
Not being a practicing philosopher I will generalize (comments are welcome)--reductionism in Nagel's case implies that any theory of consciousness or mental phenomena is reducible to physical phenomena. Nagel rejects the reductionist view because the state of being a biological entity is entirely a subjective state that has no foundational physicalist theory of what constitutes that state. Yes, functional and intentional states can be mimicked by robots, but that isn't consciousness or being. Using Nagel's example, bats have significantly different sensory experiences than humans which manifest as some level of consciousness to be a bat. How physicalism can explain the subjective character of bat-ness or any other conscious creature's subjective state seems impossible.
Now you may or may not believe the reductionist viewpoint. There's plenty of philosophical material available to dive deeper into this particular topic to find the arguments for and against Nagel (see Daniel Dennett) or how theories of consciousness have been refined since 1974 (e.g., Neander 2017, Lau & Brown 2019, etc.). My particular point is that in my opinion, there is a high probability we will encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life with unknown philosophical consequences. How an extraterrestrial's consciousness will externalize in terms of philosophical issues touching morality, knowledge, beauty, religion, science, etc. may disrupt how we approach the philosophical enterprise.
If we do encounter intelligent life in the universe with some form of technological advancement, we can probably assume that the extraterrestrial evolution led to some biological morphology that had the ability to manipulate their environment much like we can. But, how much we anthropomorphize that possibility does not imply any common consciousness.
The goal here is not to prove or disprove reductionism in relation to the problem of consciousness, but to point out that the subjective experience of what it might be like to be an extraterrestrial will probably be more foreign than what we think we perceive or imagine in any intelligent animal on earth. How that alien subjective experience might manifest in relation to humans is such a significant unknown that will demand reassessing philosophical issues of consciousness.
Final Note - If you want to be a philosopher at the forefront of modern, fundamental philosophical issues related to philosophy of mind, NYU is the place to go--it is the top rated department in the country.
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