Boston University sophomore Vanessa Voas’s newest piece of jewelry seems a little out of place in the Warren Towers dining hall; the ring that has been catching campuswide attention since Friday night’s men’s hockey game was given to her by Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences senior Peter Colleran, who asked Voas to marry him in front of thousands of Terrier fans.
Since the Agganis Arena proposal, Colleran and Voas, a School of Education sophomore, have become a celebrity couple on campus, receiving hugs and congratulations from family, friends and even complete strangers on the street.
During the first intermission of the game against the University of Maine, Colleran and Voas were “randomly” called onto the ice for a shoot-out competition, a red carpet was laid out and Colleran took the microphone.
After thanking both families for coming — a surprise to Voas -Colleran went down on one knee and asked his girlfriend of more than a year to marry him. Crying, she accepted the first marriage proposal ever to occur at Agganis Arena.
“Everyone lined up like a conveyor belt: hug, hug, hug,” Colleran said. “I didn’t know half the people I shook hands with.”
He said the hardest part of the entire secret was not planning the event at Agganis, but keeping it from his girlfriend. He bought the ring the day after Thanksgiving and had been planning the proposal for months, he said.
“They are a unique couple because they are together all the time and are not sick of each other,” Colleran’s roommate Brian Fryburg, a College of Arts and Sciences sophomore, said.
Fryburg said his contribution to the secret was hiding the ring until the big day arrived.
Colleran’s best friend, School of Management senior Roy Amin said he does not think getting engaged at Agganis will become a trend, but said maybe “some people will follow in their footsteps.”
In the dining hall with Colleran on Saturday, Voas, from Oxford, Mass., said she was “still in a daze” and had had no idea Colleran, an East Boston native, was planning to propose, although they had talked of marriage many times before.
Even though Voas is still a sophomore, Colleran said the two families “were all for it, and it’s a two year engagement.”
Voas said her parents married young, which made her young engagement easily accepted by her family.
The couple, who met on their floor in Warren Towers last year, intends to marry after Voas graduates, and are moving into an apartment together in the meantime.
“Some of my friends wanted to make sure that I was ready,” Colleran said. “It’s not a question of, have I found the right girl?”
Amin said he talked Colleran out of proposing to Voas at Disney World because he thought it would be too commercial. He helped his buddy plan the proposal at Agganis because a hockey game proposal was something that had never been done before.
“This was a better proposal than I could have come up with myself,” Voas said.
She added she has one new concern on hand.
“I’m gonna have to get a manicure because everyone is looking at my hand!”