By Kim Bigelow

They call themselves the LifeSavers. They’re students from a health care research class and, with the help of their professor, they are setting out to make students aware of the dangers of smoking.

Douglas Dix, the professor that is helping to put the project together, told STN, “I guess you’d say this project is in a way an experiment to test a hypothesis that would be something like this: If we care enough about the smoker, will the smoker quit?”

The event that the students are putting on will take place in Suisman Lounge in GSU on November 15th. At the event, there will be a petition to sign to make campus smoke-free. There will also be information on how to get help for those who would like to quit smoking, and even a kickball game outside to raise awareness of the event.

Dix said, “We might be able to carve out a unique niche, where we are the place, we are the people, that care enough about the smoker, that when the smoker comes on our campus, it isn’t long before they choose not to smoke anymore.”

With such a drastic change that the LifeSavers are hoping to make, there are sure to be many different opinions.

Siting that the rules may be an issue, Kimberly Zebrowski, a junior at the University said, “I don’t know, people don’t follow the rules anyway and it might just be like a waste of money and kind of disastrous at the same time.”

Another student had a different opinion. Carson Collier, a senior, said, “I think that a smoke-free campus would be a good idea….like that’s the one thing I dislike most about this University…you kind of get caught behind the smokers especially when you make that decision not to. So I think it’s definitely a good idea.”

Dix states, “If we can care enough about people, to intervene and to say what we think is the truth, that, ‘That thing that you’re doing right there, that’s bad for you’, well, who knows where that would stop.”

If you want to get involved with the LifeSavers, contact Douglas Dix at .