Sitting here reading all the news about the shooting that happened at VT, I can not help but think of the shooting that happened at Penn State in 1996. While most current students have only heard of shooting on the HUB lawn, it is very scary to know it happened once at University Park.

As tragic as the shooting was taking the life Melanie Spalla, there is something I learned on Sept. 17, 1996. You never know how close you can be to death. You should live life to its fullest every day. To tell you how close I was to experience the shooting, I was sitting in the third floor of EE West that morning. I looked down at my watch and noticed it was about 9:30 a.m. and we were one measurement away from being finished with the lab. It didn't work out, so we spent the next hour and a half figuring out what went wrong. We traced it back to a piece of test equipment that failed, which almost would never happen. During this time, our professor came in and said he had heard a report that there was a shooting at the HUB. This is in the age just before everyone had cell phones. I remember that we all laughed it off like it was a false report. If that last measurement worked out, I know I was going to take a four-minute walk to the HUB. The shooting occurred at 9:34 a.m. I don't know what would have happened if the measurement had come out correctly, but I know there was something that kept me from being in the area of the shooting.

I was that close to being caught in random gunfire. I didn't realize how big of a story it was until I started getting calls from friends and all the media that started coming. For me, it was also a good thing that Penn State did not cancel classes that day. I am not sure what I would have been like emotionally if we were off for the afternoon. It is amazing since that day how nothing seems as important as I am alive and I have wonderful family and friends that I am always around. If you don't think this can happen close to home, I recommend you check out some of the stories in the Collegian archives. It may give you one of the biggest lessons that you learn in college.