Boston University graduate student Lu Lingzi (GRS’13) lost her life in the bombings at the Boston Marathon in April 2013. Her teacher and mentor, Eric Kolaczyk, spoke at Lingzi’s memorial service at Marsh Chapel a week later. As director of the statistics program in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, he had recruited her to the program, helped her plan her course of study, advised her, and taught her in the classroom. BU awarded Lingzi a master's degree posthumously in May. An excerpt of Kolaczyk’s remembrances follows.
Lingzi’s application spoke of great promise, which she more than fulfilled during her time here. She came to us with an undergraduate degree in economics from the highly regarded Beijing Institute of Technology. During that period she had also done several internships with major financial firms in China. From this combined experience, she had gained a clear realization of the importance of statistics in financial analysis. She wished to lay a solid foundation in statistics with us here at BU. Her goal, ultimately, was to become a financial analyst.
Her life here was a tapestry rich with the detail of all the choices she made—courses to take, people to befriend, opportunities to pursue.
She was doing very well in all aspects of her courses and had finished taking her qualifying exams just two days before she died. In fact, she passed those exams with flying colors, although she did not live long enough to hear the final results.
All of that is merely a recounting of what she did. Let me tell you something of who she was—at least, as I was able to see it. She was a lovely girl with a smile that could look both amused and serious at the same time. Absolutely charming. She had a bubbly personality, evident even in her emails, which were often liberally punctuated by exclamation marks. She was someone who had many friends across a wide range of programs here at BU.
Finally, she was a student, like so many international students at BU, who struggled with—but ultimately overcame—the considerable challenge of living a new life here, far from home, conducted nearly 24/7 in her second language, a challenge that you really can only appreciate if you have tried it yourself.
Teachers have a unique sort of relationship with their students. Our role shares aspects of being a parent, but, of course, we were not Lingzi’s parents. Similarly, our role includes elements of friendship, but, again, it is a friendship different from that of, say, a roommate, an office mate, or a classmate. When best executed, our role involves a delicate combination of challenging and encouraging, admonishing and supporting, querying and answering, pushing and pulling.
To a teacher, with the loss of a student like Lingzi—particularly in such a tragic manner—there comes an indescribable sense of emptiness, thinking about what she could have done with the future for which she worked so hard to prepare, but now will not have. I hope, with the scholarship established in her name, that Lingzi’s potential will instead be fulfilled by many others for years to come.
Make a gift in her memory to the Lu Lingzi Scholarship Fund.
Read more about Lu Lingzi’s life on BU Today.