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 But Northern Illinois University was anything but normal Monday, less than two weeks after the rampage that left five students dead and the gunman committing suicide.
So despite his focus on classes, Kozera joined dozens of others in a school courtyard just a few hundred yards from the site of the attack
-- getting hugs from a total stranger.
Members of a church group offered "free hugs" and volunteers offered dogs to pet, among the many signs around campus that little was as it was before Steven Kazmierczak's attack inside Cole Hall.
White crosses remained on a small knoll in honor of those who died. News trucks parked around campus. Red ribbons pinned to the jackets of hundreds of students, faculty and staff, offered a quiet tribute. And yellow crime scene tape remained strung in front of now-closed Cole Hall.
Message boards nearly the size of billboards stood outside, crowded with messages of comfort, faith, anger and condolence while students and others continued to seek out an empty space to add their own thoughts on the events of 11 days previous.
"You've got to move on," said Jonathan Brock, a 25-year-old Chicagoan studying industrial management, who was clearly not quite ready to do so as he looked for a spot to write.
One after another, students expressed the same effort to move forward -- and a reluctance or inability to do so.
Chelsea Edwards, a 23-year-old senior, said that after days of thinking of little else, she was pleased her sociology teacher moved ahead with course work. At the same time, "I also like the counselors there," she said of more than 500 volunteers from around the nation assigned to each classroom.
Students told of finally doing what they were supposed to be doing -- if for no other reason than maybe take their minds off, even briefly, what Kazmierczak had done.
"It was something to do other than sit around and think about it," Lee Scott, a 21-year-old from nearby Sycamore, said after getting out of his sociological inquiry class.
In many classes, students used silence to turn down teachers' offers to talk about the shooting, relieved to talk computer science or economics.
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 "Just to get it our of your head for a while," said 18-year-old freshman Amanda Serpico, explaining why nobody in her biology class took the teacher up on an offer to talk to one of hundreds of counselors stationed in classes around campus.
One of students most seriously wounded in the attack, Maria Ruiz-Santana, was released Monday from a hospital. More than 20 pellets from a single shotgun blast hit her in the chest, head and neck, and she underwent five hours of surgery.
The 20-year-old, a criminology major, is more resolved than ever to go into law enforcement and isn't angry at her shooter, her father said at a hospital news conference.
"She feels sorry for this guy," Alfredo Ruiz said.
On the quiet, rural campus in DeKalb, students seemed to feel that maybe they aren't as removed from the big city, or its perceived problems, as they once believed. And students said they'll move on feeling differently not only about their school, but also themselves.
"I used to not feel close to other college students. We were doing the same thing but we had nothing in common," Scott said after his sociology class. "Now I feel close to my classmates even though I don't even know who they are."
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On the Net:
Northern Illinois University: http://www.niu.edu/
[Associated
Press; By DON BABWIN]
Associated Press writer Carla K. Johnson contributed to this report from Downers Grove.
Copyright 2008 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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