The only time I ever cried in a professor's office was near the end of a semester-long assignment. My angst had nothing to do with my grades or the approaching deadline.

It was the knowledge from the work that was breaking my heart.

Dr. Sussan Siavoshi, a political science professor at Trinity University, informed my class at the start of the semester that we would be required to subscribe to a newspaper and follow the news of any single foreign country for the entire term. Our research would culminate in a final paper.

I grew up in a household that prized its newspaper subscription, so I had been a casual consumer of news for as long as I could read. But like most Americans, I just skimmed the headlines of stories with international datelines. Many parts of the world only seemed to show up in stories related to war and conflict, and my eyes tended to glaze over the steady stream of bad news.

The former Yugoslavia was crumbling at the time. I chose Bosnia and Herzegovina for the assignment, fascinated by the region's history and the unrest in a multiethnic, multireligious society. I picked the Christian Science Monitor, then a daily paper with robust international coverage, as my news source.

I had a superficial understanding of the crisis unfolding in the Balkans. But once I started following the news vigilantly, I became emotionally entrenched in it. As luck would have it, I had subscribed to a publication that was heavily invested in covering my chosen country: The year I graduated college, David Rohde won the Monitor a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his reporting of the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica genocide.

It was the daily reading about the march toward this genocide, the growing support for ethnic cleansing, that was haunting me as a young college student.

My high school history class had been my introduction to the horrifying scale of human cruelty. I remember holding my head in my hands when I began to grasp the magnitude of the genocides detailed in our textbooks.

How could the world be letting this happen again?

That was the question that led me to my professor's office. I told her that I was having trouble sleeping. I felt helpless, hopeless, complicit and depressed from following this war so closely. She handed me a tissue and reached for one herself.

I don't remember what she said in response to my questions, but I do remember her compassion. I remember feeling like my grief over something unconnected to myself was legitimate. She gave me permission to ask difficult questions to which there were no easy answers.

The assignment was designed to teach us how to take a sustained interest in things outside our circle. The point was to learn to make connections -- global, historical, political and personal. This is how you teach young people to think about the world in an informed and critical way. In a time when universities are caught in a facilities arms race to attract students, they ought to remember that their most valuable assets are people.

For parents worried about which colleges will give their child the best shot in life: Look for the ones with professors who really care about their students. Relationships -- with their professors and their peers -- are transformative for students.

I turned in my term paper, and I added an international studies major after Siavoshi's class.

I recently found myself again in Siavoshi's office, again in a time of political turbulence. We had an unplanned, serendipitous meeting: She was on campus when I was picking up my daughter from a camp. We hadn't spoken since I had been her student, decades earlier.

I told her I was worried about terrorist attacks at home and abroad, and the political opportunism that sought to tear us apart rather than unite us during these uncertain and scary times. I shared my concerns about my own children, who would hopefully be college students one day.

Again, her wisdom and compassion comforted me.

Siavoshi said she reads the news rather than watching it on television. She knows when to disengage from reporting on tragedies and horror stories. She reminds herself of all the other groups who are vulnerable, remembering the power in building alliances. Sticking up for others is a way of sticking up for yourself.

We are not alone, she said, in our worries or our heartache about the pain in the world.

Twenty years later, I needed to hear that again.

One of my school friends met her future husband as a sophomore in high school. He was a senior, serious about his future, and he drove a fast car.

Cindy, a fun-loving and beautiful blonde, was wary of becoming too involved too fast. But they stayed together even when he went away to college. They got married shortly after she graduated from the University of Texas.

Her husband graduated from medical school, just as he had planned, and she taught special education for a few years before they started their own family. They moved across small towns in the southeast as opportunities arose for him.

No one was surprised that Cindy and Peter were the high school sweethearts who made it. One of our mutual friends even correctly predicted in high school that Cindy would end up being a stay-at-home mom with six children.

Among our crowd of misfit, bright students, Cindy seemed to be the one who would follow a well-planned life path.

She and Peter lived in a spacious house on four acres in South Carolina, and took their kids to Disney and on camping trips. Cindy's Facebook posts reminded me of Erma Bombeck books I read as a child. She wrote about her life with a sense of humor and openness. Even though I grew up in a family of six children, she was the only peer I knew who had taken on the challenges of raising a family that size -- from teens to toddlers under the same roof.

She thrived managing that chaos.

Peter worked the demanding hours of an emergency room physician but spent his free time with his family.

He was on a school field trip with his son's middle school class when a blood clot traveled to his lungs. He died before he reached the hospital. He was 43.

I saw the news when Cindy posted it on Facebook and called her soon after. If it seemed unreal to us, this new reality was unimaginable to her.

I saw her a few months after her husband died, when her grief was still raw. There wasn't much I could say. I mostly just listened and offered hugs. I've prayed for her and her children often.

She and her children have spent the past year picking up the pieces and trying to figure how to refit them without Peter.

When The Cure, a rock band from an earlier era in my life, announced its tour schedule last year, I texted my high school friends, now scattered around the country. Using a concert as an excuse for a reunion, we all traveled to a city away from our homes this summer.

When I had asked Cindy if she wanted to go, she wasn't sure if she would be ready to leave her kids for a weekend. But her family told her they would take care of things, so she came. It was her first trip without them, without Peter.

It had been nearly a year and a half since Peter's death.

He had taken her to her first big concert. It had been The Cure in the summer of 1992, when we had graduated high school.

This summer, we danced to songs that took us back decades to a time when most of us couldn't have imagined what paths lay ahead. The one that seemed the most steady and certain took the most significant sideways turn.

We talked about how Peter had been as a teenager, and we laughed as she told us stories about how he was a father and husband. She's shared moments when she's felt his presence and heard his voice so clearly. She wears her wedding band.

She looks for moments of joy amid the grief.

Cindy is one of those people who sends a long, entertaining Christmas letter every year that I love reading. She addressed the life-changing loss near the end of last year's note.

"I have had to learn and grow in so many ways," she wrote, and quoted Ecclesiastes 7:3: "Sorrow is better than laughter; it may sadden your face, but it sharpens your understanding."

"And I know so much now," she wrote. "I really know."

She reflected on the 24 years she and Peter spent together.

"We had a great love story. It's a story because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although his chapter has ended, ours will continue."

Julie Williams and her daughters had enjoyed a casual lunch and were strolling along a historic street in the St. Louis area when she heard a startling comment.

"You need ISIS," a street preacher called out to her.

She had heard the group of three young men spewing slurs against homosexuals when they had passed by them. It was ugly stuff, but she figured it was their prerogative and kept walking.

But when one of them invoked ISIS, it stopped her cold.

Not today. It was less than three days since the mass shooting in a gay club in Orlando killed 49 people. Not here. This was a diverse and welcoming street -- a popular tourist attraction that always felt safe to her transgender daughter, Alice.

She told her daughters to keep walking and wait for her further down the street. They moved further ahead, but not as far as she would have liked.

"Excuse me? What did you say?" Williams asked the man on the street, who had been recording the two preachers next to him with a cellphone. "Are you referring to the Islamic State?"

"You will be blown off the face of the Earth," she says he told her.

He and the two other men with him kept referring to the Bible, citing passages from Leviticus. Williams, 52, of Creve Coeur, Missouri, asked them if they were affiliated with the terrorist group, which they denied. But they seemed to share some common ideology, and the harassment terrified her.

The men didn't appear to fit the stereotype of potential terrorists in America.

"I had no sense that they were foreign-born. No real sense that they were Muslims, because they were citing the Bible," Williams said. "They had so much hate, they were finding validation in a religious sort of teaching."

She called 911. The local police showed up; Williams gave a statement and filed a report.

Capt. Larry Hampton with the University City (Missouri) Police Department said the group is well-known in the neighborhood. They have been showing up every week for years to speak on street corners.

"This is a group that calls themselves a religion. They were just reading off a paper they call 'Scriptures,'" he said. "I don't think she was targeted."

Williams wonders if the men were tipped off to Alice's transgender status because Alice, 20, is over 6 feet tall. She doesn't know for sure what provoked their hateful commentary.

Hampton said the department enforces local ordinances against trespassing, street blockages or peace disturbances, but this group was within its rights to speak its views.

"The freedom of speech does apply to everyone," he said, adding that the department would share the information with the federal authorities. He does not believe the men have any connection to ISIS, and none of them has a felony record.

The incident shook Williams, who volunteers at St. Louis' Holocaust Museum. She contacted the Anti-Defamation League, which advised her to report the incident to the FBI. She realized that the men who called her an abomination and said her family should be "blown off the face of the earth" could legally purchase an assault weapon in Missouri. That thought scares her.

"It was not just upsetting to me and my children, but an issue of public safety," she said.

When Alice transitioned a few years ago, her family became her posse. They didn't let her go into public alone because they feared for her safety.

Her daughter had never faced any overt discrimination before, Julie said.

The incident raises questions about when free speech crosses the line into punishable hate speech. It illustrates the potential lure of ISIS by those who may only share an extremist ideology across so-called religious or ethnic backgrounds. It suggests the ability of hatemongers to exert greater intimidation or power by invoking the horror of ISIS.

For Williams, it made the debate about better gun regulations feel even more personal.

Most of us would back off a confrontation with a stranger acting like an unhinged extremist -- especially in a state with some of the loosest gun laws in the country. It's just too risky.

Their mother's actions made an impression on her daughters.

"Even now, I think about how brave she was," Alice said. "Her strong sense of justice was amazing."

Her mother admitted that she was scared, and said she would have ignored the hecklers if they had simply insulted her.

"I felt like they were threatening my child, and I wasn't going to stand for it," she said. "I didn't use to be brave until I had these kids."