Archive for April 24th, 2007
“Virginia Tech Struggles to Return to Normal”
I personally can not imagine what the community is going through, what they are feeling, and how they are coping with all this; but my heart and prayers go out to all the families and anyone who has been effected by this tragedy.
Virginia Tech Struggles to Return to Normal
For one thing, only three-quarters of the student body had returned to classrooms. The others remained reluctant to come back or had taken advantage of the university’s offer to take the rest of the semester off. Many of those who returned refused to talk to the remaining reporters, hoping to give the university a chance to escape the echoes of the killings.
In addition, some departments simply could not open their doors and begin teaching again. Norris Hall, the engineering building that was the site of 30 of the 32 killings, has been taped off by the police, and Ishwar K. Puri, chairman of the department of engineering, science and mechanics, said he was trying to find out whether it would be demolished and what could be salvaged.
“In many cases, our faculty and students do not have access to their scientific data, their notes, their personal libraries, their experimental equipment or a lifetime worth of results,” Professor Puri said of Norris Hall, which holds the laboratories where many of his 80 doctoral students and 25 master’s students work. “Imagine going to work and finding no workplace and no records.”
The students whose teachers were among the five engineering and language faculty members killed were reassigned to other classes Monday.
Dr. Puri said that since his students were blocked from their research and lacked some of the professors they needed, some of them might have to delay finishing their dissertations. That, in turn, could mean an end to their grant money.
The police have pulled from the university’s servers all of the e-mail of the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, as well as that of Emily J. Hilscher, a police spokeswoman confirmed Monday. Ms. Hilscher was one of the first two students killed, in the West Ambler Johnston dormitory.
The spokeswoman, Corinne N. Geller, said the police were still analyzing that information as well as cellphone records and computers. “We have not been able to make a definite link between Cho and Ms. Hilscher,” Ms. Geller said, “but we are still processing all that information.”
Another law enforcement official said it appeared that Mr. Cho had not attended any classes in the month since his parents dropped him off on campus after Easter break. The official said Mr. Cho appeared to have used that time to buy supplies and make other preparations for the shootings.
The authorities also confirmed Monday that Mr. Cho had fired all the shots, officially ruling out the possibility of a second gunman.
The burden of finding alternative locations for the classes that had been held at Norris Hall fell largely on the registrar’s office, which tried to match students and classes with available space in other buildings.
“They had to pull up all the data,” said Mark Owczarski, the university’s director of news and information. “You’re dealing with several dozen faculty offices in Norris Hall and several hundred students. They identified all the affected individuals, contacted them all and found new locations for all the classes.”
Rooms in the more than 100 campus buildings appropriate for lectures were used for the relocated classes. In addition, Mr. Owczarski said, several classes were moved to a nearby corporate research park used by start-up companies.
During meetings last week, professors questioned whether a week was enough time to allow students to stay away. University officials decided that canceling the rest of the academic year was an extreme step and that many students might find returning to campus therapeutic. In the end, Virginia Tech officials asked professors to set aside time to discuss the violent events before moving on to regular course work.
In one freshman chemistry class, which had attendance above 80 percent, a university T-shirt and a bouquet of flowers were placed on a seat to signify a member of the class who had been killed, said Joe Merola, the chemistry department chairman.
“I lost it halfway through class,” Dr. Merola said. “I burst into tears and had to turn it over to the counselors.”
After a lengthy discussion of the shootings and the victims, and how to finish out the semester, the class was eventually able to move on to chemistry, he said.
The campus paused momentarily at 9:45 a.m. on the drillfield, the center of campus life, as a single bell tolled exactly a week after the shootings. A minute later, the bell rang 32 more times as a white balloon was released with each toll.
Some students carried bouquets to lay at the impromptu memorials scattered across campus. Three police officers stood, hands on their gun belts, in front of Norris Hall.
Akash Patel, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering, who was back on campus after spending the weekend with friends in Northern Virginia, said the university had been very accommodating. “But I’m stuck here, actually,” he said.
Mr. Patel explained that he had decided to finish his classes largely because he had already bought a nonrefundable plane ticket back home to Fremont, Calif., in May.
Other students said they were still figuring out whether to stay.
Xiaomo Liu, a graduate student in computer science from China, said that since he was working with two other students on a research project, he would have to come to a shared decision about stopping the project now or forging ahead with the research.
“If it is anything like last week, we will not be able to focus,” he said. “We will meet and decide whether to take the grade or not. But I am not even sure if we will be able to do that. One group member went to New Hampshire.”
Karan Grewal, 21, a former suitemate of Mr. Cho, said he had decided to finish classes to avoid ending his college career on such a grim note. But Mr. Grewal said he still did not feel comfortable being near Norris Hall.
“It’s just too sad,” he said.
Nikolas Macko, who joined other students in barricading a door to prevent Mr. Cho from entering their Norris Hall classroom during his killing spree, said he was not apprehensive about returning to the building.
“It was a random event, and I’m hopeful that it was independent and isolated,” Mr. Macko said. “For me, that’s the only way we can move forward.”
1 comment April 24, 2007
How to Improve
Personally speaking I continue to get more and more disappointed in myself as I think about life, the actions that I am taking in life, what I should be doing with my life, what I am not, all of these things I find myself thinking about and trying to figure out how to improve myself. It makes me wonder, is it just human nature to try to brush it off and try to live by the “lets enjoy life” motto and just have a good time all the time and then have those sluggish moments in life when we sit and think about serious things because we are forced to because of the hurtful events that are taking place around us. Not that having a good time, or enjoying life is a bad thing, but too much of it doesn’t do us all any good does it? I mean when do we sit down and think “hm How is this going to benefit my Akhirah?” I mean if you do then SubhanAllah please teach me your ways and help me out. I mean personally I try to every now and then think about what I am doing to help my Akhirah, and then sometimes I try to forget about it.
But I guess since lately I’ve been trying to teach my self to try to control my emotions and I ahve been trying ot get in the habit of remember that everything that I do has an effect, good or bad, will impact my future, and remembering that everything really does happen for a reason. (Even though at times we may not know what that reason may be but we have to learn how to wait it out.) I think by keeping that little fact tucked away in the back of my head all the time helps me go on, helps prevent me from having those breakdowns, and with help from my parents and older brother giving me a slap on the face with the correct use of words-this all helps me get through each day. It was the other day that my brother told me that I shouldn’t get upset when things are going bad, or if it seems that “life is being unfair” because it seems that everything is going wrong; we should think about the Ambiya and what they have gone through and our Rabb puts the ones he loves through difficulty. After putting some thought into this statement, it really just put a smile on my face and a little tear in my eye because of how I was being so stupid and how much sense it made. I was sitting and getting upset over colleges and silly little things in life because they weren’t working out the way I wanted them to. I’ve learned that at times like these we must try to gain control of our emotions and look at how fortunate we are because no matter what there’s always someone who lacks something that you have and we all just have to learn how to be thankful for what has been placed before us and say Hamdulillah 
Of course, no one is perfect and we all have place for improvement, the important part is that we actually do take that chance and try to improve ourselves. I am trying to change myself for the better and make du’a that whatever changes I have made has beautified my characteristics in a way that resembles the characteristics that my Rabb would be happy with me.
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