Presidential leadership headline

Kristin Dietz isn’t your typical 20-year-old college student. Though she was an enthusiastic cheerleader in high school and almost always wears a coordinated outfit, Dietz has had a college experience that is nothing like most sweater set-wearing sorority girls’. During her college years, she has had to deal with more than most adults have ever faced in their entire lives. Just after almost losing her mother to cancer, her father was brutally murdered.

With her Texas-style blonde hair and infectious smile, Dietz makes friends easily. People seem to be drawn to her down-to-earth personality and raspy voice. One friend said that Dietz “is just one of those girls who you can’t help but like. She just fills the room with genuine happiness.” By talking to Dietz, you would never know all the hardship she has experienced in her three years at Virginia Tech. Even when her mother was in the grips of chemotherapy, she didn’t want people to see that she was having a hard time. “I wanted people to just think I was going through my normal day,” Dietz said.

But the truth was, Dietz wasn’t just going through a normal day, or even a normal semester. In March of Dietz’s freshman year, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Sadly, she was diagnosed on Kristin’s birthday, but did not tell her because she didn’t want to ruin her day. “She didn’t tell me about it, and I found out two weeks later on a phone call with my aunt. … It was really hard for me to figure out why it happened to my mom, when all she does is give to other people.”

As emotionally distressed as Dietz was about her mother’s illness, she didn’t ever stop her life. She says that’s the way her mother raised her. “Growing up at my house, you just worked through things—I guess that’s what I do,” Dietz said about dealing with her sadness. The most challenging part of dealing with her mother’s bout with chemotherapy and a mastectomy was that her mother wouldn’t let her come home to take care of her. She didn’t want to ruin her daughter’s college life. She always taught her two daughters that no matter what the circumstances, they should stay strong. Dietz credits her success in handling life’s challenges to this attitude. “I never make excuses for myself. We didn’t use divorce or money as an excuse in my house.” It’s Dietz’s strong character that enabled her to cope with the stress of her mother’s cancer and her father’s murder that would soon follow.

After her mother’s complete recovery from cancer, Dietz was relieved and thought that she had seen the worst. She was wrong. Once again, she received another fateful phone call with bad news from her aunt. Her biological father, who she had never met, was dead. In a drunken rage, one of the tenants of his townhouse murdered him.

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