The day before New York University film student Joanne Michelle Leavy died in an apparent suicidal jump from a campus building, she met with her best friend to tell her she was stressed, discouraged, and thinking about leaving NYU.

At around 3 p.m. at a McDonald’s near the Tisch School of the Arts, where Leavy was a second-year graduate student, Leavy, 23, told her longtime friend, Alisha Outridge, 22, her self-confidence as an artist was shot and she was losing her bearings.

The next morning, witnesses saw her running out of her parents’ apartment on Waverly Place and into the 12-story Tisch School of the Arts building, where she apparently jumped from an upper level. She was NYU’s fifth student suicide in a year.

“She was very stressed out about school and what she was going to do with her life,” Ms. Outridge, 22, told The New York Sun in an interview yesterday.

As an NYU film student and an undergraduate at Brown University, Leavy made short, experimental films in which she often acted. Ms. Outridge, a student at Hunter College, called the films “dark” and “existential.”

Leavy had come to the conclusion that her films would never be appreciated at Tisch either by her teachers or her fellow students, according to Ms. Outridge, who has known Leavy since they were freshmen at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan.

She said Leavy felt burdened by an environment of fierce competition among aspiring filmmakers and frustrated that she wasn’t receiving more encouragement from her instructors. One teacher, Ms. Outridge said, “singled her out. He didn’t understand her.”

Ms. Outridge said, “She’s an artist. Her goal is to do art, and she felt she couldn’t do that at NYU.”

Ms. Outridge said she never suspected Leavy would kill herself.

“She’s a woman in her early 20s. Everything is a crisis,” said Ms. Outridge, who said Leavy was diabetic and speculated she may have been experiencing a sugar low the morning of her death.

The superintended at the building in which Leavy lived said he had often heard her arguing with her parents and described Leavy racing out of her building yesterday saying, “Don’t tell my father.”

Ms. Outridge said Leavy had a close relationship with her father, Lee Leavy, who was seen sobbing outside his building moments after he heard the news. “Her dad was very supportive of her,” she said. “He knew her better than anybody.”

At campus yesterday, the first day of classes, students poured into the sidewalks around Washington Square, hustling to get to class, waiting in long lines to buy books, and congregating with friends on street corners. Few could be heard speaking about Leavy or Spenser Kimbrough, a sophomore who died of mysterious causes on Wednesday.

“It’s kind of hard to feel anything because we didn’t know the person,” said freshman Alicia Tyree, 18, standing outside the Goddard residence hall during a fire alarm.

Some older students said they have become inured to news of student deaths at NYU.

“Because it happened already last year, I think it’s less shocking,” said Tim, a 20-year-old junior who did not want his last name published. “Suicides are going to cause concern, but because it’s the fourth or fifth, it’s not as intriguing.”