It was a cold afternoon in late February when I first set my eyes on Virginia Tech.
The Model United Nations team from my high school was visiting the school for the second Virginia Tech MUN Conference. Needless to say, we had a great time, and out of the former team myself and another graduate both attend Tech as students now, as we had planned on doing during that frosty weekend on campus.
Thinking about that weekend and how wonderful it was and meeting all the students at Tech who were part of the International Relations Organization is probably a large part of the reason why what happened next was so shocking.
I'll never forget it when, during another mind-numbing day in algebra three with trigonometry, my teacher told the class about what had happened here. When school was over and I had driven back home, my mom was watching the story on the news.
There's no need to recount the details, I'm sure they've been restated enough times and in enough ways to last a lifetime for the majority of us. What was important though was that the co-chair of my committee at VTMUNC, Disarmament and International Security, had died in the events of that day.
I'm not sure whether I'd ever quite felt shock before that point, but I can safely say when I heard about her it was disbelief that struck me first. The pictures of her were still up on Facebook from a couple of weekends ago.
It didn't make sense that someone could be wiped off the face of the planet just like that. Of course, it didn't happen just like that. I saw the police running across the Drillfield through the flurries of snow on the television. Though numbed by the constant buzz of the box, what I was most scared about was the sense that the bubble had somehow been popped.
The basic assumptions of safety and security even in the extremely safe suburb of Stafford, Va., had been thrown out the window. If it wasn't safe at the college I had every intention of attending, where else wasn't safe?
The nature of such an event had immeasurable repercussions across this campus, the state and the nation, and I cannot pretend to imagine what it was like for everyone on campus that day.
But I feel as a current student at Virginia Tech that the least I can do is extend my condolences out to the victims and their relatives and hope that they can pass this coming day in peace.
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