T.J. Bukowski sits at a table in the Holmes Student Center across from Subway. While there for about an hour, he talks to multiple people who walk by.

The bespectacled Bukowski’s outgoing, friendly nature will come in handy as he works on a project that calls for him to interview NIU students about a touchy subject. He is conducting a study to find out how the Feb. 14 shootings affected freshmen students’ decisions to attend NIU.

“I am absolutely not interested in talking to students about why Feb. 14 happened. I’m purely interested in how this affects their opinions on safety,” said Bukowski, who is a teaching assistant in the Department of Communication.

“What I’m trying to study is how students, when they made their decisions to come to NIU, whether the events of Feb. 14 played a role in their decisions. Before the events, did you think about safety? After the events, did you think about safety?”

As a COMS 100 TA for Spring 2008, Bukowski saw the effects the shootings had on NIU first-hand. After the event, he noticed that students were more likely to turn to their teachers or TAs than to seek professional help.

“I was very close to the student population at that time,” he said. Then, when the Fall 2008 semester began, he observed that the incoming class wasn’t talking much about Feb. 14. “I don’t see that same level of communication,” he said. That’s when he got the idea for the study.

After getting permission from the Institutional Review Board because of the sensitivity of the topic, he started the interviewing process this semester. He hasn’t received as strong of a response as he anticipated thus far, but he’s looking forward to talking to students for the remainder of the semester.

Besides the safety aspect, Bukowski also wants to find out if the shootings played a role in the enrollment decline at NIU, as well as to which media outlets students turned on Feb. 14.

“I think it’s a good study to see where people are coming from,” said Preston Barr, a junior elementary education major. “I do think it has an effect on some people coming here. I don’t think it has a big effect. All of us are educated in what happened.”

Bukowski hopes his findings will assist universities in the future to determine how they should assist different groups of students in the event of a tragedy. It will be a way to gauge “the reaction of the incoming class. How can we help them? If they need any help?” he said.