Features

Snow sparkles on the mountaintops outside of the city. Further down the road, wolves, bears, and other creatures graze on ground covered by a thick white blanket. Dwarves roam the land inside and out of this place they call home. Walk through a large entryway, and the scene changes. There are no mountains, no snow. People buzz about inside a torch-lit city where shops and mini-villages line a great, molten forge.

Last night, over 2,100 students took a break from studying and made a late-night trek to the Stony Brook Union for the twice-annual Midnight Breakfast, an all-you-can-eat extravaganza provided free to all students by the Faculty Student Association.

In the span of its almost 50-year tenure, Stony Brook University has taught hundreds of thousands of students in classes led by thousands of professors. With so many people coming and going, it’s no wonder that the campus community has formed its own sets of legends.

Stony Brook University has an illuminated campus. These days, it’s difficult to find a path that isn’t lit. Streetlights shine from sundown to sunup, and even some of the worst problem spots on campus have been lit up, shadows chased away and leaving only a faint impression of the danger that these locations once held.

Stony Brook University likes to call itself “Seawolves Country” in honor of its mascot, an over-sized wolf adorned in a red uniform. But most students have a story to tell about a different animal that calls the campus home: the Canada geese.

Matt McAllester's job never really ends, and it's by no means safe. He travels to faraway places and plants himself in the middle of danger - not as a soldier, but as a wartime journalist.

Sprinkles of flurries tumble to the ground one afternoon just as classes let out and students shuffle between buildings past the east side of the library. Even in their haste, many take the time to look up at the scrolling text ticker or the flat screen panels playing cable news that adorn the windows of the School of Journalism's “Newsroom of the Future.”

She puts down her Newsday crossword puzzle and swings her feet off the black milk crate that prevents her arthritic knees from aching too much. After grabbing a package of grapes, she ambles over to a little girl watching her mother work at Sandella’s, an Italian eatery in the Benedict College dining facility.

Most people who begin their workday by showing up at 10:30 in the morning only to plop their feet up on their desk while they surf around the internet and watch television are generally not the most productive workers. Such a morning routine is enough to get you fired - or, at the very least, merit a stern lecture from their boss. Unless you're Walt Handelsman.

Imagine a research university where classes are small and intimate. A place where researchers' time in front of the classroom is as valuable as their time in the lab, and undergraduate education is based on active inquiry rather than passive note-taking. Imagine a university where quality undergraduates - rather than faculty-published papers - are the school's main commodity.

Stony Brook Southampton is an anomaly among universities with its student body of about 200 undergraduate and graduate students. This east end campus of Stony Brook University offers a unique college experience for those who would rather know the names of all the students in their program, than have a plethora of weekly events to choose from.

In a sunlit room with murals of seascapes decorating the earth-toned walls, men and women work on their laptops or flip through channels on individual flat screen televisions from reclining chairs. They make coffee and help themselves to snacks stocked in a small kitchen. Except for the I.V. drips injecting doses of chemotherapy into their arms during sessions that can last as long as 10 hours, the cancer patients here go about their day much as they might at home.

A woman is rushed to the operating room after giving birth. The baby is fine, but the mother is hemorrhaging, losing blood at a rate of about one cup per minute. In eight minutes, she could lose her total blood volume. Hospital staff pages a response team whose responsibility it is to stop the bleeding -- and fast. Stepping into a 24-hour emergency service elevator, they are rushed to the patient, bags of blood in hand.

I wait to be buzzed into my grandfather’s unit at the Long Island State Veterans Home. “Welcome to Reflections” the banner above the two double doors says. My grandfather, 79-year-old Joseph Abel, was admitted to the Stony Brook nursing home in April. He is now in the dementia unit, but no one knows what he thinks or how he feels about his new home.

THE “NEW” ROME 2007 A.D. – The sweat wafts in the air. Young and seasoned gladiators sit on creaking wooden benches dribbling basketballs between their legs...