This semester students may find themselves sitting among reality TV stars in class. VH1’s reality series “Tool Academy” premiered its second season Sunday night with two contestants from the NIU campus.

After two and a half years of listening to compulsive lies, Shannon O’Neill, a senior public health major, decided she’d had enough of her “tool.” O’Neill submitted an application for her boyfriend Dan Jovicevic, a senior communications major, to participate in a 10-week relationship boot camp.

Jovicevic was told he would be competing against eight other ego-obsessed males for the title of international party king, but soon discovered that his imperfections would undergo serious examination.

Each week the tools were schooled on proper boyfriend behavior on topics such as communication, honesty and fidelity. The tool who demonstrated the least amount of progress during the week would be dismissed. Once that tool was given the boot, he plead for his girlfriend to keep him, or the relationship would immediately be terminated.

“We all went into the show trying to be the craziest party animals, which I’m pretty good at and I was shocked when I found out what I was really there for,” Jovicevic said.

Though he was angry at first, Jovicevic said he knew “Tool Academy” would help him to resolve many issues that had developed in his relationship with O’Neill.

“The show helped me to see a lot of things that I was doing wrong in my relationship with Shannon,” Jovicevic said. “I was able to understand why no one would ever want to date me. I was a complete savage.”

On the show, Jovicevic and O’Neill went through a number of therapy sessions to resolve their issues with communication and Jovicevic’s compulsive lying.

“Dan would lie about the smallest things and it was becoming a huge problem in our relationship,” O’Neill said. “Going on the show was a very eye opening experience because it helped me to see the severity of our issues by just putting everything out there. That’s a hard thing to do from inside the relationship; it’s easy to cover up your problems.”

To follow the couple’s reality TV experience, tune into VH1 Sundays at 9:30 p.m. for new episodes of “Tool Academy 2.”

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