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Maxine Turner

Maxine TurnerLast week, Virginia Tech senior Maxine Turner, 22, was leading young female engineering students around Roanoke, showing them the potential and opportunities for women in engineering. Today, her friends, family, boyfriend and sorority sisters are mourning her death.

Turner, a chemical- engineering student from Vienna, had three weeks left before she graduated and began a new job.

"She already had a job lined up. I don’t know where she was going to work, or what she was going to be doing, but she was ready to go after she graduated in three weeks," said Tory Boivin, a Danville resident, a mechanical-engineering major and a freshman at Virginia Tech.

"We were just inducted into the [engineering] sorority [Alpha Omega Epsilon] this weekend," Boivin said. "We saw her on Sunday. She was up in front telling us about the rules of the sorority. Now she’s gone."

More than just one of the few women in engineering, Turner took time to make sure young women, such as Boivin and the other 60 members of the sorority, would have the support they needed to succeed as female engineers.

"She was a chemical engineer and an Alpha," Boivin said. "Our sorority is really new, it’s an engineering sorority. All the Alphas, the people who founded it, are still there and she was one of them. She’s one of the very few female chemical engineers. Engineering, being female is different. We know what each other is going through. It’s different than what other majors go through. All our classes are [mostly] male."

On Sunday night, Turner inducted the young women who would follow in her footsteps into a male-dominated world, but with the support of other women like them. In three weeks, she would start her own career. But by Monday night, the dream was over.

"We don’t know any details yet," fellow engineering student Erin Burdick said. "We don’t know how or where she died, just that she's gone."

— Rebecca Blanton, Media General News Service

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