Nicholas Glagola brought a turkey leg to his engineering exam last year.

‘It was his good luck charm,’ said Mussadiq Akram Arain, a junior chemical engineering and international relations major. ‘He walked out into his backyard that morning and shot it himself. A lot of people would say that’s really weird, but if you knew the guy, you would just kind of laugh.’

Glagola, a junior chemical engineering major at Syracuse University, died Saturday afternoon after being struck by a branch while cutting down a tree in Cicero, N.Y.

The 25-year-old was cutting down a tree with two other people when a branch fell and struck him, entangling him in the tree. He was suspended in the air for 30 minutes before firefighters could get him down, said South Bay Fire Chief Kevin Purdy. He was then taken to University Hospital, where he died that evening.

Akram Arain met Glagola during their time at L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science in fall of 2007. They became good friends the first day.

But Glagola was different than many of the other students. He was a few years older than everyone else, and sometimes the other students jokingly called him ‘grandpa.’ He was exceptionally bright, Akram Arain said. He’d already operated a koi fish pond business in Hawaii, where he attended Hawaii Pacific University for a few years. And he’d done so much traveling – Fiji, Africa, Kuwait – that he had to get a new passport. He’d run out of pages.

‘He always had a big smile. You could hear his laugh from a mile away. You always knew whose laugh it was,’ Akram Arain said. ‘I couldn’t eat a snack without learning four things from him.’

Glagola had just secured a summer internship in Utah with Halliburton, friends said, and the company was finalizing an employment offer to him for when he graduated college. He had all the merchandise, and loved to show off his Halliburton hats and T-shirts, Akram Arain said.

Though extremely bright, fellow students admitted he often was often late for class. Sometimes when he entered class late, the other students would cheer. Professors would ask, ‘What is this guy, some kind of celebrity?’

‘We’d say, ‘Alright, Nick’s here. We can start,” Akram Arain said.

Ashok Sangani, an engineering professor at SU, taught Glagola for three semesters. Glagola was currently in his chemical engineering class.

‘He was a great student. I’ll miss him dearly,’ Sangani said. ‘He came usually about a minute late in the class, but he would lighten up the class always. Always asking questions. He really contributed very well to the discussion.’

When Glagola didn’t perform as well as he would have liked on his fall semester final exam, he sent Sangani an e-mail to apologize. He had been thinking about a friend who had an accident the night before. But Sangani didn’t mind, and told him that regardless of his score, he still had a great future.

‘He taught me one important lesson: Life looks too short sometimes,’ Sangani said.

‘Anything happens.’

Donny Inglis, another friend of Glagola’s, had known him for a year and a half. He said the chemical engineering program only has 15 students, so they bond quickly.

‘He just knew everything about everything,’ Inglis said. ‘From fishing to hunting, he knew everything about it. He could answer all the questions in class. Nick always had the answer.’

Inglis said his friend’s attitude toward life will stay with him always.

‘His future looked great. He was going places. He didn’t even need to be an engineer. He was so talented, he could have done anything he wanted.’

He was looking forward to his Spring Break trip to Outer Banks, N.C., said friend Bill Auxier.

‘We saw each other on the weekends,’ Auxier said. ‘We partied together, got dinner together, played poker together. He would always lighten the mood.’

Auxier said they went out to lunch with friends last Friday, and the group ended up sitting at the table for three full hours, listening to Glagola tell stories.

‘He made the most out of every day he had,’ Auxier said. ‘It’s hard to say that he’s gone.’

shmelike@syr.edu

Published on February 16, 2009 at 12:00 pm