Lee, who originally hailed from Bloomingfield Hills, Mich., graduated cum laude from the College and went on to work as a strategy analyst at the Boston marketing firm Digitas after graduation. She was planning to attend business school in fall of 2010, according to her brother, Kenneth Lee '96.
Lee applied to business school even after receiving her initial cancer diagnosis and never gave up hope that she would beat the cancer, Lee's close friend Genny Ngai '07 told The Dartmouth in an e-mail.
"She applied after her initial diagnosis, during her treatments because she was courageous enough to think about the future and because she wanted to keep learning and challenging herself," Ngai wrote.
During her time at the College, Lee was a member of Abaris senior society and served as chair of the Big Brother Big Sister program.
Lee continued her involvement in volunteer work following her graduation from the College through her "quiet" participation in many community-focused events, Kenneth Lee said. Lee volunteered as a mentor to a high school student in the Boston area through the local chapter of Big Brother Big Sister, guiding the student through the college application process, he said.
"She was certainly a very caring person," he said. "She was very loyal and very committed to her friends and her family."
Lee's reputation as a "very great person" earned her many friends at Dartmouth, Ngai said.
"She was easy to talk to always there, dependable, and you could call in a favor any time," Ngai said.
Visiting history professor Ronald Edsforth, who advised Lee for her honors history thesis, recalled her optimism and intellectual curiosity. He remembered Lee as "one of the top two or three" students in his 17-year teaching career.
"[Lee] stands out as a shining star and as a human being. No one could have been nicer," he said.
Lee wrote her thesis on the origins and growth of drive-in restaurants in the United States, Edsforth said.
"She had a very imaginative historical mind, which her project came out of, and she was a very hardworking, imaginative researcher," Edsforth said. "Even though I'm an expert in the impact of the automobile in American life, she opened my eyes up to a lot of things that I didn't know well and that's one of the best experiences a Dartmouth professor can have with a student."
Lee is survived by her mother, Sun Hee Lee, and stepfather John Kim, as well as by her three brothers Stephen, Kenneth and Chris and three sisters-in law Helen, Rebecca and Melinda. She is also survived by her nieces Caroline and Charlotte, her nephew Joshua and her boyfriend Wesley Tjosvold.
Funeral services will be held in Michigan on Jan. 16, and an additional memorial service will take place in Boston in March, according to a death notice published by the Boston Globe. In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to the Massachusetts General Hospital/North Shore Cancer Center or to the Korean United Methodist Church of Metro Detroit.
