Friday, April 04, 2008

School Pride

From: Corey O'Hara [mailto:corey.ohara@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 1:21 PM

Dear President Bacow,

I want to thank you again for your support over the past week.

Yesterday's bone marrow drive was extraordinarily successful. The
national marrow registry representative, Betty, was particularly
impressed... a "good turn out" for a university drive is 70 people,
and she'd never seen anything like this. We registered 389 on the
spot, plus an extra 20 or so who will have to mail it in because we
ran out of the testing kits she had brought with her.

I guess no one had told Betty that Tufts is not your average
university. I think she figured it out soon enough, though. The
turnout and dedication she saw was so inspiring that on behalf of the
National Marrow Donor Program, she offered to cover all the costs of
testing, which would have been thousands of dollars. (The test costs
$52 per person.) We raised some money through individual donations,
but not nearly enough... Now the money we raised can go to Erica to
help her cover medical bills. (It won't go very far, but at least
it's something.) A lot of people deserve a lot of thanks!

THANK YOU.

I don't know what percentage of donors was non-Caucasian, but I have
to say, I was pleasantly surprised by how much support we had from
minority groups on campus, from the undergraduate student body, and
by the Asian community at Tufts in general. Students and faculty
came from all over. I recognized a lot of students from Friedman,
and I heard we even had a couple of veterinary students come in from
Grafton!

Erica was thrilled to hear of the support, and now we are all keeping
our fingers crossed that one of us is a good match. Thank you again,
and thank you to all of Tufts.

Yours,
Corey




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