I was in a college class counting the minutes until I could check the mail to see if the paperwork for a Pentagon intern program had processed. Computer code and math had fascinated me since childhood, and I'd accelerated several years in STEM. Most of my cohort had already interned at various government and academic research centers, and several of my geekier friends had enlisted with the Navy to work on cutting-edge military systems before attending college through the GI Bill.

My class wasn't interrupted that morning when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, but by the time the Pentagon was attacked, I'd found a TV in the school cafeteria. By that point, I knew my internships wouldn't be an academic exercise; they'd be finding real people responsible for this atrocity.

While this was months later, I'll never forgot my first supervisor, who was at her desk in the Pentagon that morning. She never talked about that day directly, but she showed us the access doors to the sublevels and how to find them if the building filled with smoke again. We could hear the construction. Despite hazmat teams cleaning up the building, we could still smell a whiff of fuel and death every now and then.

It was like being in a mausoleum haunted by the ghosts that hadn't quite settled into the afterlife. Empty seats. Hushes beside certain offices. Routes no one took anymore.

Those terrorists took much more than just the lives lost. They altered the life courses of many young people. They took our sense of safety at work. They forced us to inhabit a different world than the one we'd known as children and teens.