The day of April 15th, 2013 and the week that followed will always be engrained in my mind. Although this date may seem arbitrary to most, those who lived in Boston knew it as Patriots Day or Marathon Monday. For everyone at my school, it had always been a tradition to go down to the finish line to cheer on the racers, many of which were our fellow classmates and professors. Those who were lucky enough (as was the case for my fraternity and I) were selected to hand out water at Mile Marker 23, three miles away from where the bomb went off that day.
Flash forward to the night of Thursday, April 18th, 2013; I am huddled in a corner with three of my friends in our dormitory - Forest. The phone rings leading us to an automated recording, “Police are searching the area in an effort to find the men who caused Monday’s bombing. Shots have been fired… a campus police officer is dead… possible bombs on the T…everyone is on lockdown.” Aside from the Blackhawks overhead, campus was inaudible; on every corner there are men with machine guns and snipers on top of our academic buildings. Eventually police
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Instantaneously, I fell subject to the surprised-by-surprises trap, a psychological trap that results from a failure or unwillingness to give reality its sometimes surprising undue (Hammond, 212). Instead of seeing this coincidence as something that was merely fortuitous, I abandoned the laws of rationality and chance, automatically thinking I was fated to encounter an ordeal similar to the one in Boston. Unfortunately, much to my dismay now, I decided not to attend LSE, thus one can argue that these traps got the best of