Thoughts on the ASU Suicide
Yesterday was a bit of a drama for me. I just graduated from ASU only a few months ago with a masters degree in architecture.
Today, my friend Chris gave me a heads up that a “male graduate student” committed suicide by shooting himself in front of one of his professor in the Architecture building at ASU. I was a bit concerned about it all, wondering if I knew the man or the professor. The police were not releasing the names of either. My mind was racing as I envisioned various people that I know being driven to the point of suicide.
A few minutes ago, I discovered the names of both the student and the professor. I did not know either of them. But the story still hits very close to home for me. I must have walked down that hallway hundreds of times during my two years at ASU. It’s haunting to think that someone killed themselves in that same hallway.
I don’t know what happened between the student and the professor, but I can only imagine that it must have been a horrible thing for the professor to witness.
I wonder what drove that man to kill himself, and in front of his professor, no less. Architecture is a very challenging discipline and students often pour over projects for many sleepless nights. When we receive poor reviews of our very personal work, it sometimes feels like the world is crumbling in on us. I can only hope that this isn’t what happened. I hope that the man had more to live for than architecture. And that would be an enormous burden for any professor to have to carry.
Please, no matter how bleak life may seem or how lost you may feel, always try to look for a reason to keep going. Even if it’s something as simple as the sound of birds at sunrise or watching a plant slowly grow as you water it over the months. There are always little bits of happiness in our lives. Sometimes we lose track of them when we get caught up in our problems and all we need is to take a moment and reconnect with them.
To anyone at ASU that might happen to stumble across this, my heart goes out to you.
And to David, I hope you are finally at peace.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:46 am
Clayton,
I don’t follow the news much (too much bad news,) so this is the first I’m hearing of this. You offer good advice. Look for any reason to keep going. Find the small bits of happiness and focus on them. I hate to sound cliche, but I find it useful to count my blessings. I try to do this from time to time, just so I realize how good life is, even if times are tough.
My condolences to the family and friends of the student, and my sympothy to professor.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:25 am
@Eric,
I don’t really know how much media coverage this got/is getting either because I don’t watch TV. I only know about this because all of my friends were freaking out the other day that an unnamed graduate student killed himself in the architecture building. It really hit close to home for me as a graduate of the ASU architecture program. Architecture is probably one of the harder disciplines to study at college, and sometimes the deadlines and insulting “feedback” from faculty can really start to weigh on you. Like I said before, I did not know either the student or the professor involved, so I don’t know if this was the motivation behind the incident.