Sarah Channick had a smile that could light up a room.

If you ask the people who knew her, they talk about Sarah’s personality, her work ethic and her love of dancing. But they always come back to her smile.

“I’ll remember her smile most of all,” said George Blum, a longtime friend of Channick’s and a freshman at Indiana University. “Whenever I picture her, all I remember is her smiling and laughing.”

Sarah spent only 42 days at the University before she was killed in a bus accident last Thursday, but her vigil attracted more than 500 people to the Quad Tuesday night.

Sarah’s father, Bob Channick, said she was thriving at the University.

“We got a lot of phone calls home, and you could see how she was just excited to be there,” he said. “She loved meeting new friends … She told me after just talking to her roommates one time that she felt like they were best friends. Socially, everything about the school was working the way she hoped.”

Sarah had just joined the Gamma Phi Beta sorority and was thinking of changing her area of study from ACES to Communications, said Lisa Stoler, freshman at Indiana University and longtime friend.

Channick’s father said her future was wide open.

“Every day she thought of a new thing she might do,” Bob Channick said. “She would call us up and say ‘I might look into this, I might look into that.’ She would get excited about each one and think that might be the thing that ended up lighting her fire.”

Sarah Channick dreamed of being a CEO of a major company, Blum said.

“She joked that she would support us when she got older if we didn’t get jobs,” Blum said. “We always thought she’d be the wealthy, rich person out of all of us.”

Growing up, Channick took years of dance classes and was a member of the inaugural drill team at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Ill. Stoler said that in high school, she became best friends with Channick and Blum, forming a group that classmates called “The Tempting Trio.”

Channick was also close with her 15-year-old sister, Melissa, and her dog, Maisy, a 4-year-old Norwich terrier, her father said. But Channick’s list of friends was always growing.

“She was an extremely friendly, loving, outgoing person,” Bob Channick said. “She was a leader and would get kids going on different activities. She just tended to draw kids to her. We’ve been getting condolences from people who had play dates with her when they were four.”

Throughout high school, Channick was always working one or two jobs, ranging from clothing sales clerk to camp counselor to pharmacy assistant. She loved to shop and spent her money on clothing and gifts for her friends, her father said.

Channick loved all kinds of music and movies, and enjoyed working out almost every day. She loved to travel and was thinking about studying abroad before she graduated. Most of all, she just liked spending time with her friends and family, her father said.

“She was an amazing person and I think the outpouring of love gives you an inkling of who she was,” Bob Channick said. “We’re really pleased that she touched so many lives. She was an outgoing, energetic, radiant person, and she had just a gorgeous smile. She smiled all the time.”