In 1977, it was the winter of my sophomore year in college and I was living on Townsend 3-North, which was the third floor in the Undergraduate dormitory at the University of Illinois. Across the street were the Graduate student dorms.
One morning we heard the news that a graduate student had killed himself the night before. He chained himself to his bed, doused himself with a flammable liquid, and lit himself on fire. What a horrible and agonizing way to die -- alone in your dorm room! The memory of the event makes me sad to this day more than 40 years later, and I never knew who the student was.
At the time, we were all impressed with how difficult Graduate school must be for anyone to be driven to those extreme and dramatic measures. Almost half of our own group on floor 3-North would never complete enough college to get an Undergraduate degree from University of Illinois. They all "failed" and got "flunked out." Little did anyone of us suspect that fact, even though it was plainly obvious and we were told that would happen by the Engineering School Deans during Freshman orientation class.
copyright (c) 2018
William Schaeffer
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