<p>Terribly sad.</p>
<p>We have the technology, so why cannot we put kids entering college under surveillance 24/7? For privacy, there should be no saved records longer than a day. The sole purpose of the surveillance is safety, and no human observers are necessary.</p>
<p>^ First off, I don’t want to be monitored. </p>
<p>Secondly, how exactly would you “monitor” students?</p>
<p>ETA: I do find it tragic that this young man could have been gone a week without anyone noticing. My roommate is an art student who literally disappears for days at a time and even when she had a single, people would always worry if they hadn’t seen her for more than a day. I just can’t imagine not having people wonder where you are. </p>
<p>I hope this young man died of natural causes and didn’t take his own life. I really, really do. Either way, rest in peace.</p>
<p>…but surprisingly, MIT actually has an excellent music program." - True. I was surprised too. When my son was applying, I found that there is a special website with instructions for MIT music supplements (one or more instruments). Also instructions for composer submissions. </p>
<p>My heart breaks for this family. I wish I could hug my college kids tonight and remind them how much we care.</p>
<p>i feel so bad for all of those affected :(</p>
<p>I feel awful for this young man and his family…and again…I think speculating on why he died…or assuming he was a loner and didn’t have friends is totally inappropriate.</p>
<p>For the record, according to news reports, his father was in Japan when the young man’s body was discovered. So, it’s not at all surprising that his dad hadn’t seen him. According to the Mainichi Daily News:</p>
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<p>If one person individually has not seen him for a week, s/he may not assume that anything is wrong. However, if several people somehow find out that all of them have not seen him for a week and did not hear of any reason why he would be away, they are more likely to get suspicious.</p>
<p>Also, it should not be that much of a surprise that MIT has a strong music program, as well as other humanities and social studies programs strong enough to major in. People think of MIT as a narrowly focused STEM school, but MIT does more to ensure that its graduates have a well rounded liberal arts education than most other highly selective schools, including “liberal arts colleges”.</p>
<p>People are not idly speculating suicide because they are thoughtless gossips. The cited article clearly implies that this was suicide by discussing the young man’s death and then going on to mention the MIT suicide earlier in the year. If past situations of this nature are any indication, the reporter got enough information from the police to know how to slant the article. They can’t state the cause of death until the coroner’s report comes out, but I’ll bet they do have enough information to have safely made this editorial judgment.</p>
<p>And I hope the RA’s at the school we choose for my youngest child are like Joan52’s D. Our D is not someone who makes close friends easily nor really wants to, and could definitely fly under the radar.</p>
<p>I think it does not matter. You will find that students die of some cause on many campuses, including the wellknown ones. It’s a matter of time. It cannot be predicted and it’s a pain for any community. If you google you can find those sad news during this year and the last couple years right away.</p>
<p>Furthermore, I don’t think it matters much if a student is found dead early or one week later. Can his life be saved? Is death or the time to discover death the scary part?</p>
<p>I guess we are trying to piece together the circumstance that lead to the tragedy. And it is not to convince ourselves that it couldn’t happen to us as someone suggested earlier. I don’t know if suicide is really that much more preventable than accidental drug overdose. I certainly got the impression from the article it was a suicide. It is rather clever of people to jump on a reasonable deduction coloring it idle gossip while inventing themselves above it all. If the young man was depressed prior to the incident, it would make sense that he was under the radar and not discovered for sometime.</p>
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<p>Because it’s intrusive – and it wouldn’t prevent unfortunate things from happening anyway. It would just record them.</p>
<p>Gosh, this is so sad. And it makes you think about this happening to your family or to someone you know.</p>
<p>I once teased my daughter about using a GPS tracker on her cell phone to see what time she was walking home from fraternity parties freshman year. (She thought it was funny, too. I’m sometimes a bit of a helicopter mom but we have friends who are over the top helicopter moms.) If you did this for real, you’d see that the cell phone hadn’t moved for a few days…</p>
<p>I can see easily a freshman caught up in college and not calling home or texting parents for a week. I guess if it were my kid, I suppose I would have seen that they hadn’t done anything on facebook for a few days. Yes, I check my kids’ facebook pages often when they are not here in town.</p>
<p>This is a kind and positive comment worth repeating.</p>
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<p>I would just like to note that, in my view, there may not be much distinction between suicide and death due to an undiagnosed medical condition. In the case of suicide, most likely depression is the undiagnosed (or inadequately treated) medical condition. Stigmatizing mental illnesses can prevent people from getting help.</p>
<p>It is hard for me to imagine a freshman not to be noticed by friends when missing for a week. They are usually very close knit and nosy. I remember having meals, especially dinners, with my dormmates almost everyday. If one of us was missing, we would have asked. Back then, we didn´t have cell phones, we just knocked on each others door.</p>
<p>When D1 was looking at schools, there was one small LAC which said they would contact a student if a student didn´t show up for classes, the advisor would be notified. D1 thought it was too intrusive and decided to go to a large university. Not to say anything or anyone could have prevented this tragedy, but I am wondering if schools could provide mentoring (upperclassman to freshman) or some sort of “monitoring” system of freshmen.</p>
<p>^ MIT does have what you mention but it’s probably not up to the level you want to have.</p>
<p>[About</a> MedLinks](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/medlinks/www/about_us.html]About”>http://web.mit.edu/medlinks/www/about_us.html)</p>
<p>Did MIT ever revisit/change their in loco parentis policy after the suicide of Elizabeth Shin in 2000? [In</a> loco parentis - The Michigan Daily](<a href=“http://www.michigandaily.com/content/loco-parentis]In”>In loco parentis) ? If so, perhaps they have a stronger network of resources in place for those students that do reach out for help.</p>
<p>While I understand Hunt’s comparison to undiagnosed illnesses, and I TOTALLY agree that the stigma of mental illness is tragic, I am not sure I completely agree that a self inflicted death, even if secondarily due to an undiagnosed mental health issue, is the same as an undiagnosed congenital anomaly. A person typically doesn’t know if they have, for example, an aneurism or a heart defect, whereas a person with a mental health or mood disorder has some signs/symptoms. Therein lies the tragedy, if they are symptomatic and do not feel comfortable reaching out for help.</p>
<p>Regarding monitoring students: while I would not be in favor of anything intrusive, I did have one thought. Don’t many college buildings and all dorms require a card swipe to get in? Also, in the case of a freshman and other students on a meal plan, so would dining hall access. Couldn’t some campus-wide system by programmed to make note if a student had not swiped his card anywhere in a 72-hour period?</p>
<p>And then just think of the many wasted resources expended in tracking down “innocent” students who went home over the weekend, decided to eat all their meals in town instead of on a meal plan, etc. I spent a lot of weekends at my boyfriend (now husband’s) apartment off campus; my girlfriends did know where I was (though in those days, they couldn’t have gotten a hold of me easily the way you could today with cell phones) but that wasn’t the college’s job to track me. Nor was it something my parents needed to fully know, if you know what I mean.</p>
<p>This situation is profoundly sad for this family and for the entire MIT community. </p>
<p>How much scrutiny, oversight etc do you think a campus needs to institute so that a once every 20-30 year logistical event can be detected. Remember, you are not talking about avoiding a problem, only detecting it and even then, there was no solution. </p>
<p>If there is any money to be spent on detecting a problem, then it should be spent on doing mental health screening of every incoming Freshman at every university and college in the US. In this way you detect a problem you might have some ability to do something about it. I am not concluding this young man had a mental health problem, I am only saying that if money is to be spent on ‘detection’- then it should not be wasted on detecting movement in and out of a dorm room.</p>