Kirsty Liddon, a freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University, calls herself an athlete.

A native of Yorkshire, England, Liddon is a member of the SU swim club and fencing team, and has been heavily involved in sports all her life. So it was only natural that part of her transition to American culture came on the football field.

‘The guys (on my floor) were teaching me how to throw a football the other day and I kept trying to throw it like a rugby ball and they kept shouting at me,’ she said.

Liddon moved to Lockerbie, Scotland when she was 10 years old. Since she is a competitor in the modern pentathlon, she said she had reservations about studying abroad because it would mean going a year without training in the event. The pentathlon combines running, shooting, swimming, horseback riding and fencing. But when the opportunity to apply for the Syracuse-Lockerbie Scholarship arose, she would not pass on a program she had heard great things about.

‘I had some friends from the year before and previous scholars and they really enjoyed it,’ Liddon said. ‘They kind of coached me.’

The Syracuse-Lockerbie Scholarship program began in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988 over the town of Lockerbie. Two hundred and seventy people died as a result of the terrorist attack, including 35 SU students. Ever since, the university has given annual scholarships for two Lockerbie-area students to study at SU before returning to the United Kingdom to complete their education.

Selected alongside freshman Lauren Flynn out12 applicants, Liddon submitted an essay to a panel of Lockerbie and SU London professors before undergoing a series of interviews for the chance to study abroad.

As part of her application, Liddon had to research Pan Am 103. It was then that the reality of what happened set in for her.

‘I didn’t realize quite how much it affected everything,’ she said. ‘I knew the basics of how many people were killed and everything, but the whole aftermath, I didn’t realize quite how bad it was.’

Liddon was not yet born when Flight 103 crashed, but her home in Lockerbie is only one field away from where the cockpit landed. She gained a more personal connection to the tragedy through her neighbors, who watched the plane crash. She recalled how, upon selling his nearby farm, a local man was very disturbed by the thought of the tragedy nearly two decades later when he spoke to prospective buyers.

‘You could see he was still really upset when he thought about it,’ she said. ‘He woke up in the morning and there was destruction everywhere. It wouldn’t be a nice thing to wake up to, I guess.’

On Friday, as part of SU’s Remembrance Week for the tragedy, she will have the opportunity to meet parents of the Pan Am 103 passengers. She said she looks forward to putting a human face to the stories she has heard about the crash.

‘I want to know the personalities of each victim, like what they were interested in, to relate more to who they were,’ she said. ‘Before, they were just names on a sheet of paper. I want to know more about them.’

dafersh@syr.edu