Nov. 13 is the one-year anniversary of the death of Nohemi Gonzalez, the only American among 130 killed in the terrorist attacks in Paris.

Nohemi was on a semester abroad, trading in 15 weeks at California State University, Long Beach, for an experience at Strate School of Design in Sèvres, outside of Paris. She was the first in her family to attend college — a Mexican-American industrial design student on her way to becoming one of just over 15 percent of young Hispanics who hold a bachelor’s degree.

On the night she was killed, she was enjoying the City of Light like a Parisienne, in a lively bistro on Rue de Charonne, perhaps toasting her Cal State design team, which, she had just learned, placed second in a competition for efficient packaging of snack food. The packaging would decompose, leaving no trace behind.

It is hard to truly know this student from public comments. The language of grief exalts and reduces the dead with larger-than-life words. She is described by friends as “always happy,” “beautiful” and “a bright spirit.” Her own Facebook posts give a sense of a more particular Nohemi: “Learning a 3D modeling computer program in a language I don’t know is up there in the top three hardest things I’ve ever had to do.” (The reader can’t help but wonder what the other two hard things were.)

In interviews soon after the attack, Nohemi’s mother sometimes used the present tense to describe her daughter: “She loves school,” she said, adding that “Nohemi wanted a different life from most of our people who just go to work and come home. She wanted a career.”

Reading about Nohemi’s short life reminded me of many of my students at Johnson State College in Vermont, where I recently retired as president. Vermont is as different from California in its demographic makeup, size and economy as two states can be, and yet her story could have been theirs. Some of my students had never held a passport or even left our state; like Nohemi, they took their first plane rides while in college, exiting wide-eyed onto foreign lands.

“I can go anywhere now,” one student told me after returning from Greece, as stunned as she was newly confident. Finding your way home on the metro in another country is one thing; doing so on your first metro ride ever is a triumph.

Like Johnson State, Cal State Long Beach is one of 400 regional colleges and universities educating 40 percent of the nation’s undergraduates. These “middle children” of public higher education — not a community college, not a state flagship — are oft-forgotten (and seldom celebrated) microcosms of their states. Nohemi might have thrived anywhere, but Cal State Long Beach, whose enrollment is 95 percent Californian and more than one-third Hispanic, seems to have fostered a keen awareness and responsibility of place (her place) and given her not only a context in which to flourish, but also the confidence to venture beyond its borders.

Nohemi had only begun her journey, but her sense of adventure might serve as a beacon for young people with limited family resources as they set out to discover worlds apart from their own.

In some ways, she was a typical study-abroad student. According to the Institute for International Education’s Open Doors report, of the 304,500 Americans who studied in another country in 2013-14, 67 percent were women. Approximately 21,000 students, or 7 percent, were focused on fine or applied art.

In other ways she was atypical: Nearly 75 percent of Americans who study overseas are non-Hispanic white, and disproportionately from private schools. Despite the opening up of federal financial aid to support study abroad, international study is still more available to students with greater family resources.

Nohemi would have beaten many odds, and we root for people who defy statistics and set new paths. Will Cal State students follow hers? I asked Dean Jeet Joshee, who oversees international study at the university, if he was seeing any drop in interest in study abroad since her death. He said that students tell him they will not be deterred from their plans.

Of course, study abroad is not without its risks. Foreign students in Rome are frequent targets of robberies, including one last summer that ended in the death of an American student in an exchange program at John Cabot University. But such highly publicized deaths may skew our perceptions.

The president of the Institute for International Education, Allan E. Goodman, has often said that getting to the airport in the United States may be the most dangerous part of studying abroad. Paradoxically, he says, he is asked by parents from other countries if they should keep their children from coming here to avoid the risks inherent in a country in which guns are rampant.

Indeed, students are about twice as likely to die at their home campuses than in another country, according to the Forum on Education Abroad, which established a database of incidents in 2014. That year, 313 incidents were reported, 80 percent of them an illness; gastrointestinal ailments were a major culprit. Four deaths — two accidental, two from pre-existing medical conditions — were also reported by study-abroad insurance providers. The 2015 incidents report will include Nohemi Gonzalez’s death.

As unlikely as Nohemi’s death was, it was not random. Her assassins did not set out to kill a Mexican-American design student in particular, but they did set out to murder what she represents: the freedom of pleasure, choice and agency.

Colleges are brave institutions. They must be part of the forces that shape the lives of young adults during their most alert and seeking years. As parents and educators, it’s our job to ensure that we protect these freedoms for our young people — here, at home — and instill in them the values and responsibilities that such liberties require. Then we can set them free, and hope it’s enough.

Most students who return from a semester or more of international study report greater maturity and a clearer understanding of their own values.

Living and learning in another culture is more important than ever — for the individual students, of course, but also because the empathy such experiences foster is crucial in maintaining a safer, more loving world. No other single experience comes as close to building a new perspective on citizenship and place as study in another country. Nothing.

Nohemi’s brief immersion in that experience made her life, I am convinced, a larger one. This was a woman who refused to be constrained by tradition or circumstance. She chose knowledge instead of ignorance. She chose to imagine a future for herself.

That she did not get to inhabit that future breaks our hearts but not our resolve to leave our homes and expand our notion of citizenship and belonging.