On September 11, 2001, the Class of 2005 had been on campus for our first year for less than two weeks. We were still meeting each other and getting used to campus life and class schedules. That morning I was sitting on my dorm room floor (still organizing my CDs and DVDs) when my roommate, Josh Cameron ’05, returned from breakfast and said, “Have you heard?” A plane had flown into a building in New York. “Turn on the TV,” he said.

As we watched, at first I felt comforted that I was at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota — the smallest town I had ever lived in. I knew that whatever was happening at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania wasn’t going to reach me here. We were not in any immediate, physical danger.

And then the buildings fell. Watching them implode on TV in real time changed everything about the world as we knew it. I wanted to keep watching; information was the only thing to counteract the shock.

St. Olaf College made the decision to continue classes as scheduled on September 11, 2001 — a decision that denied us the ability to find comfort in our newfound community. Because professors themselves were unprepared to talk about the attacks as they were still happening, many chose simply to conduct their class as planned. It was jarring to pretend that nothing was happening outside the lecture halls. To me it had the effect of downplaying the tragedy, and how important that day would become.

“We were isolated in Northfield, Minnesota, but did that insulate us from the world at large? If you just put your head down and go to class, will everything be alright?”

My (now) spouse, Britt Oraskovich ’05, first heard as she entered her first-year religion class when a classmate announced it. The professor, hearing about it for the first time, attempted a paper assignment on the events, only to send a frantic email later that day amending the assignment as she learned more information.

We were isolated in Northfield, Minnesota, but did that insulate us from the world at large? If you just put your head down and go to class, will everything be alright?

How did the Class of 2005 have our college experience defined by the attacks of 9/11, and the administration’s response? We only had two weeks of campus life before it, so with nothing to compare it to, we can only speculate. This was the dawning of the rest of our lives.