WATERLOO - Deserted New York City streets midweek. Conversation with a co-worker just days before.

Some memories from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and its aftermath will stick with Kevin O'Donaghue for as long as he lives.

O'Donaghue, a Courier business writer in the late 1990s, moved to New York City for a job at an asset management firm. He now works in Des Moines as a securities analyst at Aviva Investors.

He said several work colleagues died on that day, but no close friends or family. Eight years later, he still vividly remembers spending a day with an analyst visiting an insurance company a few weeks before the attacks. They spent much of their down time chatting.

"A couple weeks later she was dead," he said. "There was still a job to do, a stock market to follow and make trades in. We just kind of picked up and went on. But the memories are always painful, even after we moved on."

Phillip Mauceri, a University of Northern Iowa political science professor, was in New York visiting family the day of the attacks. He grew up in the area, and worked summer jobs during college near the World Trade Center towers, which were destroyed in the attacks.

He remembers people crowded around a car listening to the radio and realizing the Pentagon had also been hit. He looked up at the sky when fighter jets passed, fearing another attack.

"The sense of real, almost, doom was very surreal at that point. That's the thing that comes back most - the sense of fear, the sense of panic, of not knowing what's going on," Mauceri said.

He used his experiences for his class "Terrorism," a college course he has taught since 1996.

He has adjusted his curriculum in the eight years since the terrorist strikes. He now spends more team going through the basic facts of who executed the attack, why, where and how.

"When I mentioned Mohammed Atta (one of the terrorists), most students recognized the name. But four or five years after the attack, it's not a name people remember," he said.

Traci Francis, a sophomore at UNI, was in sixth grade when her teacher turned on the TV to watch news coverage the rest of the day. She recognizes the attack's mastermind, Osama bin Laden, but acknowledged al-Qaeda - the name of the terrorist group that organized the strike - and Mohammed Atta mean little to her.

"It made me more aware that stuff could really happen, even where you're at," she said. "I think I had nightmares for awhile about it. Osama bin Laden would come to my house."