COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Texas A&M University will darken its campus in College Station on Tuesday night, Nov. 3, for Silver Taps, the solemn monthly tribute to students who die while enrolled. This month the ceremony remembers one student.
The student came from Angleton and was enrolled in the university studies program on a track that pairs architecture with design, construction, planning and the global arts, the Division of Student Affairs said in its Oct. 30 notice.
Here is how the night unfolds. Building and street lights on campus go out at 10:20 p.m. Mourners, including classmates and relatives, walk quietly to the space outside the Academic Building and wait there with no talking. Ten minutes later an honor guard drawn from the Ross Volunteer Company arrives at a slow march, and its members shoot three volleys from their rifles.
The ritual ranks among the oldest at the school. It is scheduled for the first Tuesday of a month, September through April, only when a student has died, and it serves as one of the last tributes for any undergraduate, graduate or professional student lost during the year.
The university asks people to keep the plaza tranquil. Residents of campus housing are encouraged to cover their windows and hold noise down, and anyone attending should make the walk in and out without conversation.
Notes of sympathy can be emailed to [email protected], and handwritten letters are being collected in four memorial boxes, which sit at Academic Plaza, on the Quad, outside the West Campus Dining Facility and inside the Memorial Student Center 12th Man Hall.
Filed under: College Station TX Education News
