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<p>Just don’t open the hood of your car, because there may not be a “long hair” warning near the fans or belts (although mechanics’ service manuals may mention that).</p>
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<p>Shame, shame on you, POIH. The death of anyone in an accident of this nature is unfortunate. This may be news to you, but the 20-year-old at Nowheresville Community College is just as much someone’s daughter, sister, girlfriend, niece and just as much of a worthwhile human being, as the 20-year-old at Yale. Their lives are equally valuable and it is disgusting to suggest that it is somehow more of a tragedy because it happened to have happened at Yale. </p>
<p>You also seem to have a very odd view that everyone at Yale is brilliant in every aspect and that everyone at a community college is barely able to tell the difference between the Enter and Exit signs on the doors. They are all just people, you know. People. They make mistakes, they do dumb things, they take shortcuts, they think they’re immune, they get careless.</p>
<p>It seriously has never occurred to you that there are smart people who are in comm college because of factors outside their control – money, familly obligations requiring them to stay at home, a culture around them that doesn’t encourage going away to school? </p>
<p>And to the extent there are standards that should be followed in chemistry labs to keep participants / students safe, Nowheresville CC is just as obligated to put them in place as is Yale. Their students aren’t somehow more expendable, POIH.</p>
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<p>No I feel it’s the user ID POIH that seem to trigger some posters. If I’ve posted the same under some other user ID the reaction won’t be the same.</p>
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<p>Did I indicate otherwise but what I said I won’t have jumped on to the community colleges because I don’t hold those at the same level of HMSPY so won’t have expected much of safeties to be placed to begin with.</p>
<p>But I do expect these stupid incidents to not happen at an institute like Yale and do believe that the institute should be held responsible.</p>
<p>This story reminded me of something that happened 30 years ago. My boyfriend was working in a lab and, I don’t remember the circumstances, but he received a monstrous electric shock. The only thing that saved his life was that he was wearing tennis shoes and they stopped the electric current from just running through him. It never even occurred to him to blame the institution running the lab. He had been careless, it was his fault and he knew better.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to sound insensitive, I really feel for the parents in this story. I think this can best be described as a freak accident which can happen to anyone.</p>
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<p>ParentOfIvyHope, I’m sorry, it isn’t your moniker, your reputation precedes you.</p>
<p>Do you think the risk-management department at Nowheresville CC is any less risk-averse than the risk-management department at Yale? Neither of them wish to be responsible for not having the appropriate safety precautions in their chemistry labs (or anywhere else on campus). </p>
<p>Let’s say this had happened at Nowheresville CC, and it came out that they hadn’t put the proper safety precautions / training in place. Why wouldn’t you jump on them just as equally? Would it be acceptable, IYO, for Nowheresville CC to ignore whatever the generally accepted safety protocols are because, after all, their students aren’t the brightest in the nation?</p>
<p>Or, to put it another way – let’s say Yale didn’t put the appropriate safety protocols in place. (I don’t know, of course - I’m just hypothesizing.) Why is that more of a tragedy than Nowheresville CC not putting the appropriate safety protocols in place? Is the loss of a Yale student a greater tragedy than the loss of a NCC student?</p>
<p>But I do expect these stupid incidents to not happen at an institute like Yale and do believe that the institute should be held responsible.</p>
<p>That is human nature.
We want to place blame on the people or the circumstances surrounding the accident because we want to believe that we can protect our loved ones from fate.</p>
<p>That if we only are vigilant enough, eat the right things, drive the right car or live in the right neighborhood- then our life will be long & untainted by tragedy.</p>
<p>But we might do " everything" right, and our spouses will still leave us, our children won’t call & the name of our alma mater will elicit only quizzical looks.
;)</p>
<p>The student in this case, was an adult & knew what precautions * should* have been taken. Accidents can happen even when superhuman measures have been taken to prevent accidents.
That’s life. Not fair remember?</p>
<p>I read the article in the Yale’s link. The 911 call was made at 2:30 am, so I assume the tragedy had happened shortly prior to that. There is a good chance she was in that lab (or section of the lab) late at night, working alone. My D told me that she often stayed late in her undergrad research lab alone at night doing experiments for her reseach project. Granted, those were biology experiments, but accidents could happen anywhere, so I worried for her. This would not be acceptable in industrial research lab settings. The practice of “all nighter” research work is pretty common in academia and is encouraged.</p>
<p>It’s comments like this that get you in trouble:</p>
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<p>Basic safety procedures are understandable by both community college students and Yale students. The idea that a community college student would be less able to understand safety procedures than a Yale student is ridiculous. </p>
<p>Here, you blame the victim when it’s an accident at a community college–that somehow the victim must be responsible (not smart enough, not good enough, etc) but not at the Ivy League school. </p>
<p>Your posts are filled with this kind of elitism–that students at Ivy and comparable institutions are superior in every way. Posters on CC are reacting to this kind of elitism. </p>
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<p>At a minimum, every institution has to assure a safe environment for its students, faculty and staff. It shouldn’t be ‘you get what you pay for’ type of attitude when it comes to safety.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t have jumped on that because there will be tons of people who would have jumped on it.
There would have been an outcry regarding under funding of community colleges, misusing of the funds etc… </p>
<p>But in this case everyone holds back while I think it is actually more important that an institute like Yale should be held responsible for such stupid accidents.</p>
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<p>No, I don’t think that would have been any less a tragedy but the response to similar tragic news is not same from each person.</p>
<p>A murder in a city 100 miles away from my place might not jolt me same as one happend in my neighborhood.
Are the two incident similarly tragic? Yes.
Are they impact me similarly? No.</p>
<p>I might not have reacted to a community college tragedy the same way I did because I could relate to an incident at Yale.</p>
<p>I suppose this will come as a shock to some but just because someone is “book smart” doesn’t mean they have any more common-sense than the average Joe. In fact, very often the high-scoring students can be fairly clueless about practical matters because they rarely spend any time learning life skills (ie, auto repair, household tasks) given the amount of time many spend on high flying ecs.</p>
<p>This girl’s death is truly tragic and would not be any less so if she were a cc student with a 2.2 gpa. We don’t know enough about it to affix any blame but I don’t know why anyone would expect that Ivy students are less likely to have bad things happen to them because they “may” have higher SAT scores that students at other (NOT lesser) schools.</p>
<p>This wouldn’t happen at a community college as community colleges don’t do the kind of research work done in universities (at least in my experience).</p>
<p>Do Ivy students walk on water?
- What percentage of Ivy students have changed the oil in their cars?
- Are there admissions criteria for common sense?
- It’s not hard to find examples of Ivy disasters - the recent financial crisis is a good example</p>
<p>People that attend ivies are screened for certain characteristics to a degree that the general public isn’t. But they are still quite human.</p>
<p>what a tragic event!!! </p>
<p>not to seem heartless but it is also a good time to remind people that may have decided to take out loans, either student or parent or cosigned …buy a term life policy on your student to cover the amount of debt…any cosigned loan will still be the responsibility of these poor parents. I remember reading horror stories of people having to cover these debts after their student died.</p>
<p>Joblue#48: It’s not the question of bad things happening to high stats students but bad things happening to students at high flying institutes.</p>
<p>“But in this case everyone holds back while I think it is actually more important that an institute like Yale should be held responsible for such stupid accidents.”</p>
<p>Actually, POIH, by your logic, Yale should be held less responsible for this accident than other institutions of higher learning. After all, Yale students are smarter than 90% of their peers, right? Surely they shouldn’t need to be told to keep their hair out of the way of dangerous machines.</p>
<p><<if i’ve=“” posted=“” the=“” same=“” under=“” some=“” other=“” user=“” id=“” reaction=“” won’t=“” be=“” same.=“”>></if></p>
<p>POIH, if you masqueraded under the unlikely moniker “Parent of Dumb Undeserving Nitwit Kid” (PODUNK, get it?), we’d all still know who you were by your…er…world view.</p>
<p>(Okay, that was snarky, which I generally don’t endorse, but I’m more-than-usually bewildered by your world view today…)</p>
<p>I just talked to my college student and reminded her to *be safe *in the lab. If you have a science major kid, please send him/her a link to the Yale story and tell them to pay attention to safety!</p>
<p>^^^ did that too bunsen as soon as i saw the article</p>
<p>Bad things happening to any student is a tragedy. What difference does it make if it was at a tier 1 or tier 3 school? Is the student’s life any less valuable? It was an accident. A tragic accident. My sympathies to the family.</p>
<p>My s was asleep in a house that was the victim of one of several random arson attacks at 5 am a few weekends ago. Fortunately some students driving by stopped and put out the fire on the porch and got the occupants out. But it could have been a horrible tragedy. Would it have been any more tragic if it was at a top 10 school rather than a top 50 school? Good grief.</p>
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<p>So if neither Yale nor Nowheresville CC put the appropriate safety protocols in place, and each of them had a student die as a result, why would it be more appropriate to hold Yale responsible than to hold Nowheresville CC responsible?</p>
<p>Here’s a concept - any institution that provides chemistry labs (etc) to its students is responsible for ensuring the appropriate safety protocols are put in place. Doesn’t matter if tuition is $2,000 a year or $50,000 a year. </p>
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<p>This is where you get into trouble, POIH. Because many of us think the accidental death of a young woman in a lab in this situation is sad, and it really is rather irrelevant to us whether it was at Yale, Other Good-But-Not-Quite-HYPSM School, State Flagship, Directional State Flagship, or community college.</p>
<p>Do you remember the Virginia Tech shootings? And then the Northern Illinois University shootings? Many people sympathized and felt bad about those events, and they really didn’t have anything to do with the relative rankings or selectivity of those universities. If, heaven forbid, there were a shooting at an Ivy League school, I would hate to think that it would sadden you more than the shootings at VA Tech / NIU. </p>
<p>Sometimes it’s time to take off the USNWR glasses and just look at people as people. This young woman’s family is obviously devastated by the news, and their devastation is no greater than it would have been if this young woman had “only” gone to a CC.</p>