This week a student at Penn State went missing.
He was last seen leaving a fraternity house located right beside one of the residence halls in my area, to return to his dorm room in the freshman area across campus. Then he was gone.
Students do a lot of things during college. They play video games with their friends in the residence hall. They get together and roam campus and fraternity row looking for parties. What they don’t generally do is disappear without a trace. But this one did.
I won’t say that students don’t go missing. They do, but in this electronic age, it’s easier to trace their comings and goings, and we use available technology to track students when they do go missing. In most cases I’ve dealt with in the last few years, a “missing” student is usually just dodging his parents, turning off the phone to limit distractions while studying, or charging it after running down the battery.
But this was different and the community responded with a lot of concern. Facebook posts and a group sprung up almost immediately. His family and friends passed out flyers in the HUB (our student union). Police on foot, in cars and in helicopters searched for any sign of him.
The story ended sadly when a maintenance crew, called to check on a broken pipe, found his body at the bottom of a stairwell between two campus buildings, just across the street from the fraternity house where he was last seen. Facebook and Twitter comments spread quickly, and some students held a candlelight vigil on the road nearest these buildings last night.
I’ve seen this sort of thing happen several times before during my career in Student Affairs, so I know that there will be much talk in the coming year about underage drinking, fraternity parties, and what his friends and hosts should or should not have done that evening. There will be time enough later for lessons and discussion, and parsing over the details to draw some lessons from what happened. It’s a natural, but often very painful, period that follows tragedies like this one. For now, though, I can only dwell on the sadness his family, friends and our community feel that a promising young man’s life has ended.
There was a time during college when I very well could have found myself in a similar situation. I liked to go to parties and I drank with the same reckless abandon that many college students do. There were times when my family wasn’t sure I was going to make it through college. I came to grips with this fact, and learned to make better decisions with the help of people in Residence Life at my college, and the examples set for me by those professionals very much shaped me into the person I am today.
Whenever I meet with a student who is struggling with drinking or drug use, or other similar decisions, I talk about how laws, policies and rules are beside the point, with one notable exception. I call it my First Rule of College: Live through College. Most people who break this rule never set out to do so, and there are countless ways to break it. So I advise my students to make all decisions in this context: Live your own life, but make choices that will help you live through your college life.
If you don’t make it out alive, it doesn’t matter what else you learn here. Hopefully, if you don’t, people will learn something from your departure that helps them make good choices and sense of the world around them. One can only hope….
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- Developing Physical Competence
- Student Issues Explorer: What will determine your happiness in college?
- Chickering’s 7 Vectors of Development
- A Different Kind of Freshman 15, Volume 2
Sean Cook has 15 years of experience working in Higher Education, as a Student Affairs Professional. He is a Certified Life and Career Coach through the Life Purpose Institute, a program accredited by the International Coach Federation. Sean also writes about career issues in higher education for our companion site, HigherEdCareerCoach.com and is a periodic contributor to the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog.
