The swim test is, undoubtedly, the most useful part of the Core.

      Legend has it that the swim test prepares CC students for the day that Manhattan breaks off into the ocean, is attacked (and everyone swims away from battle or nuclear devastation), or is suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a swimming pool. Engineers can build rafts and float away, and GS and Barnard students can fight over the extra raft space or the floating remains of Alma’s pedestal. Engineers who can’t build rafts might be screwed, but no Columbia College graduate will be caught unprepared. 

      With the tool of swimming under their belts, Columbia graduates were obviously totally prepared for this pandemic. I mean, once you can swim three lengths of the pool you can totally survive anything (don’t even get me started on the swim team). 

      However, undergrads who have yet to take the swim test or will never take it because they’re not in CC or because they’re graduating this semester have also been training for these crazy times via the swim test, and this is how:

• Procrastinating on taking the swim test year after year prepared us for the intense Zoom school procrastination levels.
• Fear of entering the pool is like the current fear of entering a space where too many other bodies have been.
• The general idea that the swim test is disaster preparation may have led us to consider the “completely hypothetical” scenario of a global pandemic.
• Why the swim test is a graduation requirement doesn’t make much sense, so maybe that reality prepared us for Donald Drumpf’s nonsensical blabbering and tweeting about coronavirus… oh wait. It didn’t. Never mind.

Not Uris Pool But Whatever via Bwog Archives