Mia Tretta, a junior at Brown University, was hit with a wave of disbelief when her phone buzzed with an emergency alert during finals week. She desperately hoped it wasn’t happening again.

Back in 2019, Tretta had survived a harrowing mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, where two students lost their lives, and she, along with two others, was injured. She was just 15 then.

On Saturday, as she studied with a friend in her dorm room, the first alert came in, signaling an emergency at the university’s engineering building. Initially, Tretta thought perhaps it was a different kind of incident—not another shooting.

However, as alerts continued to flood in, urging students to lock down and stay away from windows, the grim reality settled in. By the day’s end, the tragic news was confirmed: a shooting at the Providence, Rhode Island campus had left two dead and nine injured, plunging another school into chaos.

“Experiencing one shooting is already too much for anyone, but to endure two is unimaginable,” Tretta shared in a phone interview on Sunday. “Having been shot at my high school when I was just 15, I never imagined facing such a nightmare again.”

Tretta’s experience captures a grim reality for a generation now in college: students who grew up rehearsing lockdowns and active-shooter drills, only to encounter the same violence again years later on campuses that once seemed like an escape from it.

In recent years, small groups of students have endured multiple mass shootings at different stages of their education, including survivors of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who later experienced a deadly shooting at Florida State University in April.

Another Brown student, Zoe Weissman, reflected on social media about attending middle school next door to the Parkland high school during the mass killing there. She said she was outside the middle school when the shooting happened, and heard gunshots and screams, saw first responders and then watched videos of what happened.

Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Craig Greenberg said on Facebook that his son Ben, a junior at Brown, is safe after using furniture to barricade himself and his roommates inside their room. Greenberg survived an assassination attempt during his mayoral campaign in 2022.

After Tretta was shot in high school, she pushed for tighter gun restrictions and rose to a leadership role with the group Students Demand Action. Her advocacy took her to the White House under former President Joe Biden, and she also met with his former Attorney General Merrick Garland.

She has particularly focused on “ghost guns,” such as the one used at her high school, that can be built from parts and make it difficult to track or regulate owners.

And at Brown, Tretta had been working on a paper about the educational journeys of students who have lived through school shootings, a subject shaped by her own experience. The paper was due in a few days.

Tretta, who studies international and public affairs and education, said Saturday was the first time she’d gotten such an active shooter alert at Brown.

“I chose Brown, a place that I love, because it felt like somewhere I could finally be safe and finally, you know, be normal in this new normal that I live of a school shooting survivor,” she said. “And it’s happened again. And it didn’t have to.”