When Tasha Cengel ’26 turned six years old, she learned of people’s struggles in Haiti following a destructive earthquake. Instead of wanting birthday gifts, she collected spare change around her house and asked friends and family to donate to a disaster relief charity supporting Haiti.

“She didn’t do anything half-assed,” said Keith Cengel, her father. “She did everything with two feet.”

Tasha Cengel passed away on March 25 at 20 years old at home in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. She was remembered by family and friends as welcoming, generous, adventurous and creative.

“She never wanted to be the center of attention,” said Maria Cengel, her mother. “She actually wanted to be that person who was kind of on the line, at the circumference of the circle, bringing people in.”

“She strived to have the most people in the circle with her,” she continued. “So that they felt comfortable.”

One friend of Tasha Cengel, Athena Wagner ’26, described her as having an “endlessly giving heart.”

“So many things in my room were things that she gave me and things that she no longer needed and felt like I could use,” Wagner said. “She was no longer going to be staying at Lafayette, and she was like, ‘Well, you don’t have a mattress topper. I got a mattress topper.’”

Vanessa Manning ’26, a friend, recalled Cengel being extremely interested in her friends’ interests and tastes. She remembered a time when the two of them were at a grocery store and Manning recommended that she try a specific tomato sauce.

“I turn back around, and she’s holding, like, 12 cans of the sauce,” Manning said. “That’s how much she trusted you.”

She is remembered as being self-assured and ready for adventure.

“More than anything else, she just was herself,” said Michael Haines ‘26, her boyfriend. “She didn’t let other people get in the way of who she was.”

“She was always down for whatever side quest we had in mind,” Wagner said. “Sometimes we had to convince her out of the side quest, she was definitely the more ambitious and adventurous one.”

An electrical and computer engineering major, Cengel was creative and solution-oriented.

“I liked to joke that what she was doing was kind of wizardry because she really loved what she was doing when it came to electrical engineering,” Haines said. “She would light up when she figured stuff out with coding.”

Wagner admired how Cengel was always inventing things, saying her “engineering brain was always moving and working and aspiring to build something new.”

“If someone looked at something and thought it was broken, Tasha just saw it as needing a sprucing up,” Wagner said. “You know, she never saw things as ugly or as bad.”

Cengel, who was born on Earth Day, had a deep admiration for the outdoors. She was an Eagle Scout, an avid rock climber and loved spending time on Lafayette’s swings.

A scout tradition is to pass down a “challenge coin” to future Eagle Scouts, typically given to members who are sure to progress. Cengel gave hers to a struggling scout.

“I think that is quintessential Tasha,” Maria Cengel said. “She didn’t choose somebody who was a year or two from getting Eagle, she looked around for the person who needed it, and knew that it would help build them up to continue down the path to Eagle.”

Tasha Cengel also loved spending time with her family. Manning described her family as being “full of care and love and respect and happiness and support.”

On campus, Cengel was a Lavender Lane resident from the fall of 2023 until she took a leave of absence in the fall of 2024. A note that she left her roommates is now taped on their fridge.

“Even though she wasn’t physically in the house anymore, she would still text in our group chat all the time and would just kind of be a fun presence,” said Jess Heske ‘25, the co-president of Lavender Lane and a friend of Cengel.

Cengel even had her own unofficial “Vinyl Club” on campus, where she would invite friends to cram into her room and listen to records.

“I think she craved a space where she was able to talk about her interests a lot and share them with people, because she was always bursting at the seams with excitement about things,” Manning said.

Cengel had a love for Pokémon, collecting and painting on cards and traversing campus playing Pokémon Go! with friends.

“She would be like, ‘Come on, there’s a raid,’ and then we go across campus — it was raining or whatever — to go do it,” Haines said.

She was known to be playfully mischievous and “goofy.”

“She was so goofy that we made her name a verb; instead of goofing around, we would say she was ‘Tash’-ing around,” Wagner said.

Her parents and loved ones hope her legacy inspires others to bridge divides and accept one another.

“We want Tasha’s memory to help people say in their mind, ‘God made her exactly as she was when she was such a beautiful person,’” Maria Cengel said. “That it’s not possible that she wasn’t perfect who she was.”

Her funeral was held on Monday, with a gathering in her honor on the Lafayette College campus being scheduled for this month. The Montgomery County coroner’s office did not provide a cause or manner of death.

Contribution in Tasha Cengel’s honor can be made to the Trevor Project.