Classes at Carnegie Mellon are much harder than the incoming freshman expected. So is finding enough time to get everything done—studying, football practice, working a part-time job in the library. Benjamin Neenan wonders how he can keep up. He even considers transferring to another school. In this dejected state, he schedules an appointment with his biology professor, William Brown, to get help on a class assignment.
Brown quickly realizes that his student has more than biology on his mind. "Let's not talk about bio right now," he suggests to Neenan. "Let's talk about life." Brown can empathize with the rigors of being a student athlete. He had been a college football player himself. The professor reminds Neenan that everyone comes to Carnegie Mellon expecting to get straight A's, but that it's okay to get some B's, and that the real focus should be on learning, not on GPAs.
Neenan takes the professor's advice and changes his attitude. Sure enough, without such self-imposed pressure, he suddenly seems to have more time to get things done, and the biological sciences and psychology major starts to excel in the classroom again. Thoughts of transferring vanish. "William Brown was one of the only reasons I stayed at Carnegie Mellon," says Neenan, who earned his BS last spring.
Brown never saw Neenan graduate. In the summer of 2007, Brown, an avid cyclist, was injured in a biking accident. When he was given a CAT scan, doctors discovered a brain tumor. Several weeks later he died. Neenan heard the news while working during an internship in Ireland. He was devastated.
Brown wasn't the first person in Neenan's life who died—his grandmother, cousins, and friend's father had all succumbed to cancer. The mourning by Neenan, now pursuing a master's degree in healthcare policy and management at Heinz College, helped prompt him to take action. He and Paige Williamson, a junior decision science major who has also lost loved ones to cancer, have started a student organization called the iLive Alliance. Through the alliance, they hope to raise cancer awareness on campus and in the community by helping charitable organizations such as the John Challis Courage for Life Foundation, which fulfills sports-related wishes of youngsters with cancer. iLive recently raised several thousand dollars for the foundation by selling yellow T-shirts that simply read: iLive.
—Rob Cullen(HS'02)
