Students turned to one another, gathering before television screens on campuses across Connecticut. On the Stamford campus, where nearly every student and professor knew someone who worked at the World Trade Center, an auditorium became UConn's "ground zero" of memory and compassion.

Others brought their compassion to the scene of the crime. Carmine Centrella, acting deputy chief of the UConn Health Center Fire Department, journeyed with seven other members of the emergency services tactical team to New York City. Expecting to put their trauma expertise to work, instead they helped fire fighters retrieve the metal, plastic and digital remains of victims' lives. Their only patients were rescue workers.

Undergraduate and Marine veteran Brendan Nutkus '04, visiting his family in Manhattan, volunteered for the Army Corps bucket brigade, helping sift through the ashes.

On the evening of September 12, the Student Union Mall in Storrs was a constellation of candles, held by campus residents and visitors expressing their unity in light. The Music Department chose Mozart's Requiem as elegy, performed in Storrs, Bloomfield and Stamford it raised more than $30,000 in relief funds.

The common reflex across all campuses was giving -- everything from relief to insight. The women's basketball team collected a relief fund. UConn seniors created a scholarship fund for children of the victims. The Health Center provided free educational programs to the public on trauma and bioterrorism. As it assisted the state in upgrading emergency preparedness, the Health Center also gave the Connecticut media its main source material on traumatic stress, coping, healing and bioterrorism. The Law School held a symposium on liability issues as $80 billion in 9/11 losses quaked Connecticut's insurance industry.