Hellobee Boards

I was in college living in the dorms. My mom called and told me to turn on the news. I was shocked and rattled. I went to class and most everyone had zero idea that anything was occurring. It's why I have watched the news every morning since then - I don't want to be a dummy unaware of the day's major events. My morning class was cancelled half way through and the entire campus shut down.

I was in college and it seemed to take people so long to realize what was going on. My professor must have seen the news right before class but no one else had. He was a weird guy and spent about 10 minutes rambling incoherently about planes and stupid accidents and maybe terrorists. It was so incoherent no one really paid attention or asked any q about what he was talking about, he ends class early. I went with a friend to a computer lab to look up the news afterwards and it was clear at that point something scary / strange was going on - but people's reactions were mainly like hmmm, that's weird. I took a short bus trip then to the other side of campus and heard about the third plane into the pentagon on the bus radio, a few people reacted but most weren't listening to the news. I felt like I was in some weird twilight zone where the world was ending but somehow no one cared. After that I went to a cafe before my next class, it wasn't even playing on the tv there. But it quickly started playing realtime footage of the towers. I couldn't help but have a few tears roll down, it was obvious it was only the beginning of a big disaster. Only me and one other person were even watching but slowly people came over and most thought it had originally been just some disaster movie advert. The tower collapses and at this point people around are realizing what's going on and it's just so sad and sickening - so many people gone in that instant.

I was in university, and I remember coming out into the living room of the house I shared with a friend and he had the tv on and I said "what are you watching?!?!" thinking it was too early for action movies and he said "The news." I had to go to class because I needed to get into a class that I needed to graduate so I had to pull myself away from the tv even though it felt like the kind of thing you had to witness, and I ran into a friend sitting outside the building with his phone - his mom had been in Washington and he thought she was taking a tour of the Pentagon that morning and he couldn't contact her.

It's funny - I remember always wondering what our generation's Kennedy assassination was - the thing that everybody always remembered where they were and what they were doing when it happened. For a while I thought it was the OJ trial, then I thought it would be Columbine, and then 9/11 happened.

It was the first week of classes, 3rd year university, I lived off campus with a bunch of friends. I had just gotten MSN messenger and had it on all the time to keep in touch with friends in the States and overseas...had about 40 messages waiting for me when I woke up, including the one I read first "THERE ARE PEOPLE JUMPING OUT OF BUILDINGS" - I went upstairs and my roommates were watching the news in horror. We went to another friends house to keep watching because no one wanted to be anywhere close to alone. We got sleeping bags and camped out overnight in their living room, just watching the news, crying, talking, worrying. I still feel so close to those people, like that was such a singular experience that none of us will ever go through with anyone else.
Classes were cancelled for a couple of days, and then university life went kind of back to normal, but not really.

It happened while I was in physics lecture freshmen year of college. We all walked to our next lecture, which had computers and people were browsing the internet and pulled up articles. Then our professor walked in and told us what had happened. People were really freaked out by Flight 93, which went down a little over an hour from school.

It was weird... today I saw someone that was in that second lecture at church today. She is not from the area and it is a rural/non-touristy location, so it was really bizarre.

I was in gym class the second week of my freshman year of high school. We were outside running on the track; it was a beautiful day. Someone got to our class late from a dentist appointment, and she told us a plane had hit the WTC. We spent the rest of the day watching the news. I was really worried because both of my parents worked in federal buildings in DC, and there were rumors a plane would be going there. My dad ended up having to start walking home because he couldn't get to his car. A bus driver saw him, stopped, and told him to get on, despite not having any change for the fare. Lots of small kindnesses that day. One of my classmate's dad was on the plane that hit the pentagon. My school bus drove past the pentagon every day, and it was so sad to see the destruction. My MIL was working there that day, but she was ok. I didn't know her then.

I was in high school (in Canada) and one of the teachers ran into the cafeteria at lunch saying the USA was at war and under attack. No one knew what he was talking about until they brought in some tvs to our next classes and we watched the news. It was my high school boyfriends birthday that day as well and I remember really not feeling like celebrating in any way. Him and his stupid football friends were joking about how it ruined his birthday...high school immaturity. By the time we found out, both towers had fallen, which is so strange to think about nowadays. No one had smart phones or constant news feeds like Twitter back then to notify everyone immediately.

@yellowbeach: Thank you for starting this thread. The responses are compelling and profound. These perspectives are remarkable. Thank you for helping promote some healing and consideration today.

I was a freshman at Columbia university, uptown in Manhattan. I was living in the dorms and was taking a shower that morning, when a floormate burst in screaming about a plane hitting one of the towers. I thought she was crazy, but when I got out, everyone was circled around a television and we learned it was true. I ran up to my new friend's dorm, she lived on the top floor, and we watched the news while witnessing the massive cloud of smoke visible from her window. It was surreal. The university went into lockdown and we were told not to leave. My older brother was on campus (a sophomore) and I was feeling so scared and really wanted to find him, but couldn't. None of the phones worked, the whole system was jammed. All there was at that time was AIM (aol instant messenger), and I was at least able to speak to my brother through that and he calmed me down. My dad worked at columbia's uptown campus and walked down to the campus where my brother and I were at and spent hours searching for us. He was worried maybe we were downtown that morning for some reason. We all finally reunited early that evening. My dad left and used a whole variety of transportation methods (mostly walking and hitchhiking since virtually all modes of public transportation in and out of the city were closed by that point) to get home to my mom on Long Island. I will never forget how intimate and unified the city was in the aftermath of the attacks.

A coworker woke me up super early in the morning. She knew I was planning to go to NY in a few weeks and she said something about planes but it wouldn't compute. Finally, she gave up and said, Just turn on the tv. They are replaying it.
It was horrible. In the days that followed, my students discussed it. A particularly insightful student mentioned the racism that would follow against the ethnic group of the people who did this. Just speechless at his perspective.

I ended up rescheduling my NYtrip a year later. I was moved by all the work the rescue workers and people did to bring light to such a dark situation. I remember taking a non-digital pic of Ground Zero in the rain. When I developed the photo somehow enlarged the drops of rain so it just looked like huge teardrops with an unfocused desolate background.

I went to high school in downtown Manhattan, and 2001 was my senior year and freshman year of college. A couple of weeks before 9/11, I remember sitting at the plaza looking up at the twin towers, thinking I have to say goodbye to them because I'm going away. So weird to think of that afterwards...

On 9/11, I was going to lecture in college and the class was just milling around in the hallway. Someone said that class was cancelled because a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I'd heard of an accident years back where a small plane hit the Empire State Building, so I figured it was something like that and the professor is just a real sensitive soul. Until they wheeled the TV out, that is. We still didn't realize how bad it was until one of the towers went down, right there on TV. And then the other one. I knew someone up there and was sure they'd died (luckily not, but they lost several coworkers). My mom and brother were several blocks from the WTC, but it didn't occur to me at the time to worry about them, I figured they're probably terrified but safe indoors, and only later found out how people were running from the giant dust cloud, walking over bridges, just trying to get out of there as fast as they could...

It took a long time for the human toll to really sink in. I just couldn't wrap my mind around it for months. I'm grateful that more people hadn't died (the WTC held some 50,000 workers, I think), but as our mayor said in the days just after, no matter how many, the number is more than we could bear...

It was my senior year of high school and I was running late (as usual) to school (it was just after 7 am where I lived) and the DJs on the radio were talking about a plane crashing into a building in NYC. They were discussing whether they thought it was an accident or on purpose. I got to class and the TV was on, and I walked in right as the 2nd plane hit. I thought they were showing what had happened before but soon realized I was wrong and this was most definitely NOT an accident. We were all glued to the TV. It was all we talked about all day, and all we watched on TV for days. Luckily we had no family or friends living or working near any of the disasters so that was a blessing, but I felt for those who did.

Little did I know my future husband, inspired by the heroes of 9/11, went and started volunteering at his local fire department as soon as he was old enough in October of 2001. 9/11 means more to me now knowing how those wives and families of the 343 firefighters who died must've felt. And I've since heard first hand accounts from FDNY Firefighterss who were there and survived. Scary and emotional stuff!

I was driving to my part time job I worked at during college, next to the Atlanta airport. I was listening to the radio and the DJs were saying an aircraft had hit one of the Towers but at that point nobody suspected terrorism. And then the 2nd Tower was hit and they started screaming on the radio and I about drove off the road in shock. I went on to work and we gathered at a local restaurant and watched the news. It was a weird day because there were no aircraft in sight, which is something eerie to see in Atlanta.

I'll never forget sitting there when the Towers fell. People screamed, some sobbed, some were yelling in anger. I remember feeling like it wasn't true, that this couldn't be happening.

@Anagram: Gah, that had to be a terrible feeling. I didn't know my husband then, but he told me how on 9/11 he spent all day frantically calling friends and colleagues.

It was already mid afternoon when the first tower was struck for us (in Europe), so it had been an uneventful day at school. I had a dentist appointment in the early afternoon and as I was coming back home heard on the radio that according to first reports a plane had struck the WTC. We got home and immediately turned the TV on and actually saw the second plane crashing into the second tower. We didn't leave the TV after that. We were all totally shocked and I remember saying that I really hope that this wasn't the beginning of WW3.

Really love reading all these stories... It's like we were all different ages living in different places doing different things but this one event really units us all together.

I was I think a junior in high school... We watched it on TV in class and then got sent home. Thankfully no one in my family were in NYC, and cellphones weren't a huge thing yet so it took a few days to find out whether friends and other people we knew were safe or not. I remember just feeling very surreal, like it was so close yet so far away (I lived in the suburbs, about 50 min from NYC).

I had just started my sophomore year of college and was about 90 miles north of NYC. I just happened to be up early that morning because I had a court appearance for a traffic ticket. On my 5 minute drive back to my apartment I heard the dj mentioning terrorism and saying not to jump to conclusions and I had no idea what he was talking about. I turned on the tv just after the second plane hit and stayed in front of the tv all morning. My dad and cousin worked in the city but both got out pretty early on. I later learned that the planes that hit the buildings must have flown directly overhead of where I was.

I still went to class and work later that day, I really don't think the magnitude of the events that day even hit me until the next day.