It was a Tuesday. I was in Smith Hall, my home for the first year of college where I had arrived just a few weeks earlier. I was getting ready for class and had CNN’s American Morning on to catch up on the news. “A small plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York,” they said. “Might be a problem with air traffic control.” They were working on getting more.

I went to class. Introduction to Broadcasting with Mr. Larry Augustine in Bogar Hall. He came in late. “Another plane has hit the World Trade Center,” he said. We had a short class session talking about who knows what. During a break he went to check on the situation. He came back and said one of the towers had collapsed, and the Pentagon was on fire. “I think we should all go home,” he said, in a voice I never heard from him during the rest of my time there.

I went back to my room, just a short walk across the grass that was the field hockey field. My door was locked and the keys were inside. Across the hall was a guy whose name I have forgotten, but I spent the next 15 minutes in his room staring at the television with him talking about where our families were from and finding out everyone was safe.

I spent the rest of the day down the hall in Mindy’s room. CNN was on in the room, but we caught only bits of it for the first few hours. She was on her cell phone trying to get in touch with her family in New York, but wasn’t having much luck with the overloaded phones there. In between calls she said “this is messed up,” or just “oh my God.” Her family was fine we eventually found out, and in the days to come she learned of so many of those close calls we all heard about in the days and weeks that followed.

That’s what I won’t forget.