It has been more than six months since Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people before killing himself on the university’s campus in Blacksburg, Va. In light of the tragedy, schools across the country have initiated new precautions in an attempt to prevent a similar incident from occurring.

The changes universities and colleges have made, including implementing text-message warning systems, manifest problems and holes that existed in security systems before Virginia Tech. Although many students felt safe on their campuses and security procedures did exist, none had an efficient way to notify students of problems.

Jessica Tubbs, the assistant program director at Security on Campus Inc., a national nonprofit group that handles campus and security issues, says schools are extremely easy targets for “acts of terrorism” like the Virginia Tech shooting.

“Schools are easy targets for certain acts like what happened at Virginia Tech because they are wide-open, public spaces, usually highly, densely populated,” she says.

Tubbs says Virginia Tech helped schools realize how unsafe they were and that they needed to do more to prevent a similar tragedy.

“Virginia Tech just as a whole woke schools up to the idea that that sort of tragedy is capable of happening anywhere,” she says. “All schools need to be more vigilant and prepared.”

Erin Fairchild, a sophomore at Cedar Crest College, an all-girls school in Pennsylvania, says she never felt unsafe either before or after the Virginia Tech incident. She says this could probably be attributed to the lack of males on Cedar Crest’s campus because most incidences she has heard of involve males. But her school has so many safety precautions in place, it’s to the point of being overboard, she says.
Among the safety procedures her school had before Virginia Tech was a campus-wide call system in which security comes once a button is hit. She also says students needed special tags to get into dorms and that receptionists monitored entry. Furthermore, visitors in dorms could not be left alone and had to go with students everywhere, including the bathroom and classes.

“It’s very straightforward at orientation at the beginning of the semester that if there’s somebody waiting at the doorway and you’re walking by, do not let them in,” Fairchild says.

She thinks it is a bit overboard to require visitors to follow students everywhere, however.

“As long as you know that they’re signed into the building, you know that they’re in there … and you can find the person,” she says. “It’s a little embarrassing when you have to take them to the bathroom.”

Stephanie Bukowski, a sophomore at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, also felt safe at her school before Virginia Tech because of precautions taken. She says that before Virginia Tech, Shippenburg had a call system, its campus was well-lit, security was always patrolling around, emails were sent out during emergencies and educational buildings made announcements.

Jason Foust, a sophomore at Penn State University, never felt unsafe, even with Penn State’s more than 40,000 students, because of its rural community and lack of an inner city, he says. The only precautions Penn State took before Virginia Tech were a call center, police patrolling and IDs to get into dorms.

“At the time, I never thought of there being a problem, I didn’t worry about it at all,” he says. But after Virginia Tech, he learned of a sniper shooting that had happened at Penn State years ago, and realized that the campus should have been doing more.