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I first met Linda in September of freshman year when she came to join our
volleyball team – little did I know then what a difference she would make in
my life. Perhaps one of Linda’s strongest qualities was her ability to make
others feel completely comfortable around her. As our friend Jaime put it,
Linda was all of our showcase friend – everyone you introduced her to was
guaranteed to like her. Boys, girls, parents, little kids – everyone found
her adorable, sweet, intelligent, endearing. It was as if having Linda as a
friend made you a better person.
Together Linda and I were probably the dorkiest duo to ever make it through
BME. From making jokes about how the L on her shirt didn’t actually stand
for Linda but rather L-type calcium channels, to wanting to get a dog and
name it Matlab, I don’t think that anyone else has ever had more fun studying
for Phys Found. And we had fun celebrating too. Linda had already begun making
plans for Preakness this spring – and would call me in the middle of the night
to tell me about breakthrough ideas like the fact that we should buy plastic
coolers instead of the Styrofoam ones that broke last year. Singing Maroon 5
while driving to Panera will never be the same – though I always had to make
sure to turn up the volume to drown out Linda’s off-key belting. We would always
giggle about working together when we were old and had our own labs, though I
never had the heart to tell her that it wasn’t really co-collaborating that we
would be doing, but rather just collaborating. We were even planning to go to
grad school interviews together to say that we came as a pair and they would
have to take either both of us or neither.
When Linda came back from her Vredenburg scholarship volunteering at an AIDS
hospice in Vietnam this summer, we had one of those ‘what should I do with my
future talks’ where she explained to me that she really wanted to spend her life
making a difference in the world. She continued, however, that she was so
overwhelmed by all of the suffering she had seen that she couldn’t even fathom
where to start.
Well, Linda, I didn’t tell you this at the time, but looking at all of these people
that have come together here today, it is so clear that you already had made a
difference in each and every one of our worlds. So, Linda, thanks for being such
a great friend to me through the years. Thanks for letting me be myself, thanks
for making me smile each day, thanks for dreaming big with me. I wouldn’t be the
person that I am today if it wasn’t for you, and I will miss you now and forever.
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