With nearly all UVA students living at home during the pandemic, many have had to adjust their college studying habits to a home environment. Pets are, of course, a typical part of home life for plenty of students, but many may not be aware of how the marriage of home and creature can provide bountiful results for their GPAs as well as their hearts and souls. Here are the Top 6 pets that I think would probably be able to help you with your homework during COVID-19 season.
6 – Horse
For all you STEM majors out there, horses are well-known for their math abilities. (Look up Clever Hans [and ignore all the parts about the observer-expectancy effect that’s not the fun part]). Replace your calculators with a horse who can do addition and subtraction for added levels of animal social interaction in place of human time! Also, if you’re not only able to afford a horse, but you also have access to it right now even if you’re stuck at home, you probably have few distractions anyways, so what do you have to lose?
5 – Sloth
Sloths are of course known for being incredibly slow, but because of cosmic law all creatures must be balanced in abilities in some way. Therefore, sloths are probably really smart also. They will teach you how to have patience in these slower times and I’m betting would be willing to edit your papers before you submit them, you’ll just need to give it to them a day before the deadline.
4 – Dog
A dog is likely the creature that the most amount of people have access to at home. I’ve never had a dog, but when you search ‘dog doing homework’ on Google images, you get a ton of results, and balancing that against the ‘my dog ate my homework’ trope I’m assuming that canines are probably good to average at doing schoolwork. Professors are probably going to be very lenient at any spelling errors and other small mistakes because everyone loves doggies.
3 – Kitty
Cats love to sit on paper, so they’re like at least 1/3rd of the way to fully doing work for you, in my eyes. This cat has a ton of little post-it markers in his textbook so he seems very organized, and with how particular cats are about their environments I bet yours would be just as precise. Cats are also carnivores, meaning they won’t eat your homework for sure, unless it’s made of plastic bags (shoutout to my idiot cats at home for nearly choking at least once a week).
2 – Chinchilla
Looks like an Echols scholar to me, tbh.
1 – Leopard Gecko
You cannot tell me this gecko would not be A. intelligent, B. competent, and C. Dean’s List material. In a way, he might make you do a bit more work, actually, because with a tutor like this gecko you’ll have to go into SIS and manually change all your classes from Credit/No Credit to Graded so that your GPA is boosted to astronomical levels by the high A’s he will help you achieve. This gecko will push you to your limits and beyond, but only because he believes in you so much – give him a chance. Plus, he’ll sit on your walls and eat bugs with his funny tongue.
