I have been trained it drills all my life, all of that practice made me believe that this would be over in 40 minutes. I was wrong.

I stood there at the bake sale table checking our goods, I looked left and out of the windows pulled up 4 police cars. I feel a vibrate in my pocket and I check my phone. It says there is a threat on campus and we are now in a lockdown situation. I look at this message with quite a surprise as this seemed like a normal day. I tell my friend at the table let's put things behind the desk and head into an office. Some people received the message in the hallway and were confused, I addressed them to seek shelter in a room and lock the door. The office I had wanted to go into had a woman come out and tell us to come in. My friend and I went and sat down in chairs as they locked the door. They lowered the shades as we saw police officer after police officer come towards the building.

Slowly the next hours went by as so many emotions and details went by. Instead of focusing exactly on what happened, I am going to just highlight what I learned from a gun shooting threat at my college.

First, this was not a drill. For some reason I thought that this was going to over within an hour and I was going to have to finish my lab for my next class. It didn’t end, I stayed in that room for 4 hours, then stayed in the evacuation point for another 2 hours until I finally got to go home. Then I spent the whole week constantly talking about it and working to help others because so many people were deeply affected by the incident.

Second, this is the world we live in where the threats we thought were impossible are becoming a weekly event that you can be caught in. It’s scary but now is the time that you need to educate yourself about what to do and how to help others who do not. It’s time to become aware of everything going on and how you can be apart of making this world safer.

Third, I am going to say that I will not be the same person I was before this. I already look at the world differently within a short period of time because I know first hand that this world is pretty crazy and I was ignorant to what was going on.