Thursday, April 19, 2007
Minal Panchal: Student from India loved mint chocolate ice cream
Minal Hiralal Panchal
- Age: 26
- Class: Graduate student
- Major: Architecture
- Hometown: Mumbai, India
- High school: Our Lady of Remedy (Kandivali, India)
- Blacksburg residence: Terrace View Apartments
Related
Asheem Deshpande didn’t know Minal Panchal very well, but he was part of a welcoming committee that greeted the architecture student when she arrived at Virginia Tech last fall.
Panchal was one of two Indians who were killed in Monday’s shooting.
While a student at the University of Mumbai, she attended Rizvi College of Architecture where, in 2003, she presented her thesis, “Children’s Museum: An Environment for Development of Children at Borivli.”
According to dnaindia.com, she is survived by her mother, who is visiting the United States, and by an elder sister in New Jersey and an aunt in Maryland.
Panchal’s father, an architect, died in 2005.
“She was a very sweet girl,” said Deshpande, a master’s degree student in computer science. Over the Christmas holiday, he gave Panchal and some friends of hers a ride to Washington.
“We saw some museums, had dinner, had some fun,” he explained. “We wanted to go ice skating but decided not to because it was too cold.”
Panchal had another destination she wanted to reach while they were in Maryland.
“She wanted to see the waterfront,” Deshpande recalled. “I couldn’t understand why, but she did. There were six, seven friends that night and we went out there and saw that.”
Internet message boards indicate that Panchal was a fan of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright and mint chocolate ice cream.
— Neil Harvey
