As the University prepares to send off its new graduates with all the fitting pomp and circumstance, the community nonetheless recalls a year spotted with tragedy.

Over the course of this academic year, at least four students are believed to have taken their own lives, half of them undergraduates. This year, Harvard lost students Hailei Ge, Annelle Fitzpatrick '00, David L. Okrent '99 and Frank P. Minore.

Hailei Ge

A first-year graduate student studying computer science, Ge died in November after falling four stories from the Gordon McKay Library in Pierce Hall on Oxford Street. He had only been at Harvard for two months.

Ge had traveled thousands of miles from his native Beijing to study at Harvard. But his friend Jian Liu, another first-year graduate student, said his greatest troubles were with academics, not with homesickness.

"He was very sensitive," Liu said. "He cared too much about some of the [academic] things that happened to him... Sometimes he felt very disappointed and discouraged."

His advisor, H.T. Kung, McKay professor of electrical engineering and computer science, recalled how Ge proudly presented a circuit board he had designed in China at their first meeting.

"Computer science faculty and students who knew him were all deeply saddened by the loss," Kung said.

"Everyone is devastated by this," said Paul C. Martin '51, dean of the Division of Applied Sciences.

In the wake of the suicide of Dmitry V. Pophodaev, a graduate student from Moscow who killed himself two summers ago at Harvard, and the murder-suicide committed by Ethiopian Sinedu Tadessi '96, some have concluded that international students are at greater risk for severe depression at Harvard.

But David S. Rosenthal '59, director of University Health Services (UHS) said while some perceive this to be the case, he believes international students often bond together to form strong, supportive communities.

Martin said he hopes to create discussion "to try to understand if there are ways to prevent similar things in the future."

Annelle Fitzpatrick '00

Fitzpatrick, who played on the women's lacrosse team last year, died in New York City over winter break. She was 19.

Police reported that the Leverett House sophomore was struck by a subway train in midtown Manhattan. Fitzpatrick had been on a voluntary leave of absence at the time, and was planningto return to Harvard in the spring, according toLeverett House Senior Tutor JudithMurciano-Goroff.

"It's a tragedy of the first order," said JohnE. Dowling '57, Leverett House master. "She was anextremely talented young woman trying hard to findher way."