In the four months that Stefan Walter, a 22-year-old undergraduate exchange student from Germany, spent at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, his new friends learned that he was always smiling. “He had an amazing smile,” said Daniela Lindner, one of his housemates from Cosmopolitan Club, the house for international students where Walter lived.

“He was full of ideas of how to lead people and how to make things work better,” said Ajay Sikander Singh, another one of Walter’s housemates. “He was always trying to come up with his own theory about the world,” he added.

Walter, who came to the United States for one year, passed away on November 9 at Carle Hospital, because of a severe illness. His body was sent to Hamburg, his hometown in Germany, where the funeral took place. “It all happened so quickly and unexpectedly,” Lindner said.

His housemates remember him as sitting on the porch and reading mathematical textbooks. They remember him cooking pancakes for the entire house and talking about leadership. In his home country, at the University of Kiel, Walter was the head of the local chapter of AIESEC, an international student organization on leadership and business relationships. During Thanksgiving break, Walter was to go to Austin, Texas, for an AIESEC national conference.

“We hope his last minutes were peaceful,” Singh said, “and we are praying for him and his family.”