The friendship between Oh Saem and Lin Qiao started with a cold. Both Syracuse University students became sick a few weeks before Thanksgiving break. The Flint Hall floormates motivated each other to go to their classes.

‘I guess that’s when life brought us together, when I offered her a cough drop,’ said Lin, a freshman architecture major, in an e-mail.

Oh, a freshman architecture major, died in a one-car crash Nov. 24. She was on her way to the New York City-area for Thanksgiving break with Wang Young, Chang Hyunsung, and Shin Chaewan, all freshmen in the School of Architecture. Wang died in the crash. Chang and Shin survived with non-life-threatening injuries.

After Lin read an e-mail Chancellor Nancy Cantor sent, alerting the SU community about the accident, she found that one of her friends from high school also knew Oh from church, Lin said.

Oh had worked for an entire year so she could pay for her tuition, her high school friend told Lin.

‘This, to me, is heartbreaking,’ Lin said. ‘Why is it that she worked so hard to get to Syracuse and that we’ve finally pulled enough all-nighters to reach a break, this happens?’

Oh’s hard-working nature carried into her first semester at SU. Pascale Baladi, a freshman architecture major, was in Oh’s studio design class. Oh kept working long after her peers went home to sleep, Baladi said.

‘She would be very slow to get her stuff done because she thought about it so thoroughly,’ she said. ‘I would leave early in the morning and I would come back to class. Saem would still be working. She was an extremely, extremely hard worker.’

Daniel de Riva, Oh and Wang’s studio design professor, said he couldn’t help but get to know the two students personally.

‘They were always very loyal; very polite as well. They were always very respectful and very eager and came to learn. They made the class laugh,’ he said.

Oh was designing a workspace for a professional chess player, deRiva said. Though the task may have been difficult, Oh met the challenge with originality and elegance, deRiva said, something that was always present in her work.

Oh would find fun in just about anything, said Baladi, a classmate of Oh’s. One time, the two walked past Kimmel dining center and Oh brightened up at the chance to go play the Wii game console in the building. The game, Baladi said, goes largely unnoticed, but Oh was quick to take advantage of it.

Oh and Wang, the other student killed in the car crash, were good friends. Friendship was very important to the two of them, and as architecture students, Baladi said, relationships happen naturally.

‘Being in the same studio in architecture is a really strong bond,’ she said. ‘You spend day or night together. You do things together even if you didn’t hang out together. They didn’t care if they worked all the time, they were with their friends and they were together.’

For Lin Qiao, people can sometimes take for granted the opportunities to get to know one another.

‘Since studio is 24/7, we see each other all the time,’ Lin said. ‘We will regret not knowing them better.’

smtracey@syr.edu

Published on November 30, 2009 at 12:00 pm