For those of you who aren’t Stony Brook students, there are A LOT of resident geese scattered across the campus. If you walk onto campus grounds. I swear they’re like the third largest group on campus next to Whites and Asians. It doesn’t matter where I go on campus, I find them everywhere, just doing their thing.
But I have a problem with them.
Because I genuinely think they would make better university students than me.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m about to present five reasons why the Stony Brook geese would make better students than me.
1. They walk faster than me.
Ever since classes started, I feel like I’ve been caring less about being late to class. Back in high school, teachers would heckle you for being late, and if you cut class, administrators would call your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, your friends, your ex, your dog, the police, etc.
It didn’t matter who it was, the teacher would throw the entire school in a frenzy to let them know you were missing and boom: a panic has started. Obviously, in college, it’s different; you can skip class and your professor wouldn’t come hunting you down.
There have been several times where I’m walking to class and I know I’ll probably be five minutes late. But instead of speed walking or running, I just keep walking at the same slow snail speed pace to the lecture hall.
One day, as I’m walking to calculus, I see another pack of frantic students walking toward me, and right in the middle: a single goose.
I am not exaggerating when I say that one singular goose started in the back of the pack and somehow waddled to the front of the group. Half a minute later, that goose was way past the group. That goose had nowhere important to be and it was walking faster than all the students in the academic mall combined. Then there was me, the late student who had someplace to be but just didn’t have the same level of urgency.
2. They get more sleep than me.
For some reason, it doesn’t matter how little or how much work I have, I go to sleep at some unreasonable hour. Meanwhile, all these geese are just huddled together in little clusters taking naps and getting comfortable.
3. They're more squad ready.
One of the most difficult things about college is balancing your social life with school work. You could go out with some friends to a mixer and then get back to your dorm with suddenly 50 assignments you forgot to do. As a result, a lot of times when I'm super busy, I don't really see my friends for a week.
But you know what I've noticed?
I almost never see the geese alone. They travel together as one singular flock when they eat, sleep, pick at their feathers, etc. They literally have their squad more put together than I do.
Don’t believe me? I decided that I would make Halloween goodie bags for my friends because, in the spirit of the holiday, I thought it would be a nice little gesture.
At a Red Cross club meeting I asked one of my friends if they could stop by my dorm so I could give him his goodie bag. This is how the conversation went:
Him: “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”
Me: “Yeah I know, I’m sorry, I’ve been busy. Oh, by the way, I made all my friends a Halloween goodie bag; I’ll probably give yours to you sometime later this week.”
Him: “Wait, I’m your friend?”
Me: “.......what do you think you are to me?”
Him: “I don’t know... a colleague...?”
Me: “..........”
Straight up, these geese have a stable group to follow them around wherever they go, all day, every day, while my friends don’t even know they’re my friends.
The geese are literally more squad-ready then I have ever been my entire life.
4. They have a better sense of direction.
I feel like I’ve seen the same flock of geese wherever I go on campus. I’ll see one particular flock in one spot and then suddenly find them across campus in a completely different location.
I couldn’t even find the Humanities Building and I was literally just circling around it for like 20 minutes.
5. They can actually walk.
I’ve seen the geese walk these ridiculous distances through crowds, streets, trees, bikes, skateboards, hills, unicycles, cars, buses, and the suspicious forests here without a single problem. I can’t even walk on a regular sidewalk without tripping on basically nothing.
