The temperatures ferociously dropped over the weekend, and many people stayed out of the cold and didn’t do much. It was a weekend that flew under the radar of many. But lost in the throng of colder temperatures and the beginning of week eight is that a student of Drexel’s College of Computing and Informatics died over the weekend.
As the “arctic blast” hit Drexel this week, a quiet and dreary mood has taken over the semi-frozen campus. As many students find themselves privy to the early-setting sun and the bone-chilling winds, there hasn’t been much room for bright spirits. However, this fact is especially true for all of the students in the College of Computing and Informatics. They’ve had to carry information that sits heavy like a weight on their minds.
The student’s death is nowhere on any Philadelphia news sites. There are no reports on any Drexel-affiliated websites or news updates. This is as puzzling a story as it is disheartening.
This will be the first legitimate article written about the death of this student. Out of respect for the student’s family, their friends and all of those who cared about them, there will be no names shared nor any more information besides the fact that they were a student in the College of Computing and Informatics.
While the students in their peer’s college know their name, we feel as an organization that it isn’t our job to share personal information with anyone. Our job as an organization — especially for a news article — is to report the facts and to give out the information we deem necessary. Personal information, in our eyes, is unnecessary to this article.
The only piece of information that has been filtered out by anyone has been an email sent by Yi Deng — the dean of the College of Computing and Informatics — to all of the college’s students. The email sent at noon on Tuesday informed them that a fellow student had passed, and that they were “found deceased” at their “off-campus apartment this weekend.”
The resulting paragraphs went into a little detail about the student, saying how they were a “promising” student within the College of Computing and Informatics. It explained that Drexel University officials had reached out to the student’s family to “express sincere condolences on behalf of the Drexel community.”
Deng also stated in his email the importance of continued support for the student’s family, stating that “[Drexel and the College of Computing and Informatics] will continue to provide whatever comfort and service we can to them during this period of grief and mourning.”
The College of Computing and Informatics is a rapidly-growing school, garnering over 15 percent increase in enrollment in the last two years. According to DrexelNow, the college now has “close to 2,000 students across 16 academic programs at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels.”
In fact, the College of Computing and Informatics has even moved to a new home in an off-campus building, taking their own community to 3675 Market Street instead of near the other colleges here at Drexel.
It is worth noting that each college and school within Drexel is different and comprised of hundreds and thousands of different students. Each school and college has a separate community and a unique identity. But when it comes to the overall Drexel community as a whole, when a student passes away, people from all majors are affected. Friends, colleagues, faculty, administrators, deans and just about everyone at Drexel is affected by this loss to the university.
That could have been a friend, a classmate, a colleague or just someone who smiled at you on the way to class one day.
We are a university, as a whole. Please, take the necessary time for yourselves. Physical health, mental health, emotional health — they are all even more important to focus on during the winter. Look after one another, now more than ever.