The Daily Orange

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?"

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