<p>My son is also a Freshman at MIT.
Satto probably chose to be in a single room as MacGregor is almost exclusively composed of singles.
He was a friendly kid and did not look depressed (according to my son who knew him).
His absence was noted at least by other students, who were wondering about him not showing up and not replying to emails.
His father was away in Japan when this happened.
I really feel for his family.</p>
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<p>I went to a large, moderately elite university. I never felt in any way “looked after.” I was on my own, and I knew it.</p>
<p>I expected the same for my kids. </p>
<p>One final observation: although we don’t know whether this was true in this instance or whether it had any bearing on what happened, faculty children face special issues. Often, if qualified, they can attend the college where their parent teaches at a very deep discount. This may be very attractive to the family – and it’s probably not a huge problem if the kid is smart and the school is fairly mainstream. But when the school in question is an unusual one like MIT, it could be an issue. I could see how a faculty child who was qualified for MIT but did not want to go there, either because of the intensity or because of the math/science emphasis, could be very unhappy if pressured to do so for financial reasons.</p>
<p>Has it been confirmed this was a suicide?</p>
<p>Interesting: Adults want more supervision. But students don’t.</p>
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<p>[Caltech</a> students protest plan for adult resident advisers - SGVTribune.com](<a href=“http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_17840691]Caltech”>http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_17840691)</p>
<p>I sense a new business proposition – college concierge, who looks in on your kid, knocks on his door, takes him to dinner if senses he is lonely, etc when you cannot due to distance.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl -</p>
<p>College concierge sounds like an awesome job for graduated RA’s who can’t get jobs and don’t want to leave their college towns. Parents can either sign up for a set amount of visits/check-ins (once or twice a week or a month or pick your own schedule) with a follow up report or can sign up as an “as needed” or emergency basis where they contact the concierge who then goes over to check. Maybe retirees could do it, too, as a certain population of kids might prefer to be checked on by a grandparent type who will spoil them.</p>
<p>All joking aside, this is a very serious subject (suicides) and the means of addressing it are numerous.</p>
<p>When an American-born young person dies from a noteworthy and accomplished family, isn’t it considered an <em>even greater</em> tragedy in American culture? John F. Kennedy Jr., Ennis Cosby come to mind. A handful of young people pilot planes that crash. A handful get carjacked-to-death by an L.A. roadside. Because those families (Kennedy, Cosby…) were unique in our culture, very high profile, the American public took <em>even greater</em> notice. </p>
<p>The extra attention doesn’t mean we don’t care about every other family who must endure untimely losses. Sometimes it takes several generations to build up to the level of academician, let alone Nobel prize winner. </p>
<p>There is a certain joy in imagining that those children would have a head-start to achieve even more greatness, coupling the family’s hard-earned achievement with the young one’s innate talent. In THAT sense, although it sounds undemocratic, I can see why someone would deem the untimely loss of a famous or accomplished family’s child as somehow an <em>even greater</em> tragedy than us ordinaries. The pain is equally great for the families’ loss, but there’s an added dimension to see someone cut short who had more than the average possibility for great achievement.</p>
<p>In the last 20 years, most of the suicides at MIT have been outside, typically from jumping from tall buildings. So people knew immediately what happened and there was no issue with a delay.</p>
<p>At Chicago, in addition to RAs, there are Resident Heads, who are generally a graduate couple and live in an apartment in the dorm. In S1’s dorm, the RHs had a dog (VERY therapeutic, I will add) and as of last year, a baby. He said the RHs were great to have around when one wanted to talk to adults but not parents about various issues. I liked that it was a couple who held the position – it felt more cohesive.</p>
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<p>We recently had a young man from our community who was serving in the military killed in a training accident.</p>
<p>Half the community turned out for the funeral. There were people with American flags lining the route when the body was brought into town to the funeral home, and again lining the route from the church to the cemetery. The mayor made a long speech at the city council meeting about how proud the community was of this young man “who died protecting our freedom” and about how his death was a tragedy for the whole town.</p>
<p>I’m the publisher of the community newspaper. We treated this death like we would any other accident that claimed the life of a young person: a story on the front page about the circumstances of the accident, and a standard obituary on the obituary page.</p>
<p>You should have heard the complaints! Why didn’t we have pictures of the funeral procession or the service at the cemetery? Why didn’t we have a reporter at the funeral? Why didn’t we talk to the family and get their reaction? Didn’t we realize this was a monumental tragedy?</p>
<p>The answer, which made me no friends, was that yes, this death was tragic, but no more tragic than any other. Out of respect for the privacy of a grieving family, we don’t call the relatives of people who have died tragically and ask questions (I know that other papers do, and I’m not criticizing them, but that’s not our practice), nor do we report on funerals, funeral processions, or graveside services. We didn’t do it a month earlier when twin sisters and the unborn child of one of them died in a tragic auto accident, so why should we have done it in this case?</p>
<p>No matter, we made some enemies. Sometimes it takes a thick skin to be counter-cultural, I suppose.</p>
<p>At Reed College they had advisors who weren’t students but perhaps recently graduated students. ( If I am remembering this right- I am not going to call D and ask or else she will think I am unduly preoccupied with college life for someone who has never attended! :o)
They were called HAs and were in charge of perhaps a couple small dorms ( it’s a small college- less than 1300). The RAs that were in each dorm were students. They also had housekeepers in some of the dorms ( don’t know how that worked), the housekeeper in the dorm she had for sophomore & junior year, was more like a house mother. She would make them coffee & cookies & she was so friendly she even let me borrow her car when I was there on a visit. :)</p>
<p>( Reed also gives a stipend to all staff every year for the purpose of connecting with students- so the students often attend dinners at profs houses, go with their families to see " Harry Potter" & play paint ball with the admins including the president)</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone is blaming MIT for the death- ( or that is not the way I read it).
But still it is quite shocking to think that someone could be gone for a week & the pieces didn’t fall into place to check on him earlier.</p>
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^ Not to my knowledge, annasdad.</p>
<p>MIT has graduate students (sometimes married couples) in residence on each floor, not undergraduate RAs. MIT also has a faculty member, or whole family, living in each dorm.</p>
<p>Dogs are very therapeutic!</p>
<p>The cause of death of this young man still unknown, the prevailing concern of this thread of us parents is what can be done to prevent the tragedy before it happens. Again, all efforts of parents should be before it ever happens. Once the tragic incident happens, everything is of secondary importance such as how the community responded how long it took for the community to discover … because all attention should be on things and sign before it happens. As parents, we shouldn’t be arguing who is more responsible for the safety of my child, but learn to see things before it ever gets out of control and do all the necessary steps proactively, as a parent. Because that four year college life is the biggest growing pain that any kid would ever experience in their life – the biggest and discontinuous JUMP in nearly everything that matters to them … academic challenge, exams labs homeworks , a completely 100% new life and social setting, eating, sleeping, etc. etc. Whatever they have experienced heretofore is nothing in comparison, such as going to school for the first time ever, or moving up from middle school to highschool, etc, and parents should realize what a stressful situation the kids are going into, even if they landed in their ‘dream’ school.
[College</a> Suicide Statistics - Statistics on College and Teen Suicides](<a href=“http://youngadults.about.com/od/healthandsafety/qt/suicide.htm]College”>College Suicide Rates and Statistics)
Now, annasdad can come and say that it is a bogus stat all the while what he says in most anything is more useless, so please, annasdad, go and check the validity of the numbers quoted in this report for us.</p>
<p>What a tragedy.
This is 2011, I can’t imagine <em>someone</em> not checking up when the young student failed to text or respond to texts and other contact. Techie types text and fb all the time.
By the way, we are familiar with semi-anonymous high-tech, stressful, busy universities. That’s NO excuse.
Every student has some form(s) of accountability – appointments, jobs, tutoring or community service obligations, family contacts, class attendance (taken in some classes at some universities - I don’t know the specifics of this kid’s courses at MIT), failing to see someone in class and checking up out of interest to see if s/he dropped; classmate study groups, music ensembles (they DEFINITELY have accountability/followup if he was indeed a member of one at present), close friends from home, close friends from the university, neighbors in the dorm, casual friends, etc.
Not hearing for ONE WEEK - yes, a reason to follow up and find out what’s happening.
I feel it is inexcusable for an RA to not notice lack of contact/visual of any kind with a student on his/her hallway for one week. This has NOTHING to do with “over-mothering” or “over-monitoring” or other preposterous pretend ideas/nonsense mentioned here and then mocked.</p>
<p>It’s just so terrible to imagine how utterly miserable this poor boy must have been.</p>
<p>O M G</p>
<p>It disturbs me greatly to read so many comments about monitoring college students. Your kids have the opportunity to learn how to take care of themselves in a protected environment, unlike kids who do not attend college and are making their own way in the world after high school. I haven’t read the whole thread, but has anyone brought up the tragedies of high school kids who have committed suicide while living at home? And, it has not been determined that this death was a suicide. So please stop saying how miserable he must have been.</p>
<p>For a group of parent’s who are as knowledgable as the cc posters seem to be, you don’t know how to let your children go and grow. Most premature deaths are tragic. But stuff happens, and if a young adult is constantly sheltered and made to “report in” how will they learn to become self sufficient? And, in a few short years, raise children of their own?</p>
<p>Let them go. One of the signals that you are sending is your fear that they won’t need you anymore. They still will, but in other ways. Another is that you fear loss of control over their lives and “advise” them about what you see as the right way to do things. You should not be in control at this stage of their lives. Get over it.</p>
<p>gusaspara, I do not require my 20 and 24 year old sons to “report in” but I would certainly be concerned if they did not respond to contact from me for days at a time. I would hope anyone would check on someone who was just not responding to messages. That is what I do find puzzling, that there were other students, RA’s, house parents (?),parents, sibling,professors,friends,etc. in this young persons life and yet it took an odor coming from his room for him to be discovered. Very sad. I doubt that anybody in hindsight looking back on this will just “get over it.”</p>
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<p>Yet most people here are assuming suicide.</p>
<p>[Statistics</a> Top 10-Causes of Death College Age Adults](<a href=“http://www.statisticstop10.com/Causes_of_Death_College_Age_Adults.html]Statistics”>http://www.statisticstop10.com/Causes_of_Death_College_Age_Adults.html) suggests that college age deaths are 43% accidental injury (of which 30% is due to motor vehicle crashes), 17% is homicide, 13% is suicide, and the rest (total 17%) is a list of medical conditions and “All Others”.</p>
<p>If motor vehicle crashes, other land transport crashes, bicycle crashes, and homicide (total 47%) are eliminated, then the possible causes break down to 13% accident not involving a vehicle, other land transport, or a bicycle, 13% suicide, and 17% medical and “All Others”.</p>