When Smart Kids Procrastinate

Boy, am I feeling smug.

Yesterday I stumbled on a Wall Street Journal story about MIT seniors unable to graduate because they hadn’t yet passed the university’s swim requirement.

Seems some of the eggheads put it off until their senior year. Then, when classes went virtual, they found themselves in hot water.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology swim test—a 100-yard paddle required to graduate—hung over Megan Ochalek for four long years.

“I procrastinated taking it for seven semesters, despite many, many angry texts from my mom,” said Ms. Ochalek, 22 years old, a mechanical engineering major.

She was about to dive in last spring—her last semester before graduating—when the pandemic struck. Other schools with swim requirements such as Cornell, Dartmouth and Columbia waived their tests. MIT took another approach: It decided to go virtual with an online “conceptual swim class” to test student buoyancy.

A conceptual swim class makes about as much sense as a virtual pottery course, nevertheless, MIT concocted one. And the students are griping that, like everything else at MIT, it’s hard. And time consuming.

As it happens, my little college also had a swim requirement and - despite my inferior IQ - I knew I’d better not wait until senior year to deal with it.

I'm not going to tell you how many years it's been since that September day when I realized I'd probably never graduate from college.

It was in the 1970s. That's all you get.

Once my dorm room was set up – bed made, electric typewriter on the desk – I thumbed through the student handbook. There, among the requirements for graduation, was something that terrified me.

A swim test.

Every student had to pass it to receive a degree.

In other words, I could study Machiavelli, read Proust, muddle my way through biology, but if I couldn't swim, I wouldn't graduate.

I wasn't afraid of the water. I'd spent countless days playing in the ocean, but I had no idea how to actually swim.

Our test was simple, if memory serves. A couple of laps and a few minutes treading water.

For a non-swimmer, it might as well have been quantum mechanics.

Like many in the '60s and '70s, I was the product of a chlorine-free childhood. Our small town had no public pool. The development where we lived had one: In the backyard of a family we barely knew.

My mom worked, so she didn't socialize with the other mothers who spent their summers behind that cedar privacy fence, lathered in Coppertone, smoking cigarettes and drinking Tab while their spawn cannonballed off the diving board.

I knew what went on because I was one of the kids completely lacking in self-respect who peered through the wooden slats on hot days, hoping to get an invite.

The woman who owned the pool never allowed kids in without their mothers though, so we’d dejectedly bike home to the stagnant knee-deep wading pools our fathers had assembled in our yards.

Pools that were littered with dead beetles and were hotter than bath water.

No one ever learned to swim in one of those.

So on that first September day of freshman year, I was seriously worried.

"Did you know you have to pass a swim test to graduate?" I casually asked my roommate, a pale music major who looked as if she, too, might not be a swimmer.

"Of course," she shrugged. "No big deal.”

It was a very big deal to me. I could see the future: my parents driving for hours on graduation day only to search fruitlessly for my name in the program. Instead of lining up in cap and gown, I'd be thrashing around in the pool trying to pass one last exam.

I couldn't let that happen. I immediately signed up for a beginner swim class.

If I flunked, I'd have seven more tries. Surely I could learn to swim in eight semesters.

I bought a rubber swim cap – the kind with a chin strap – in the bookstore and borrowed a Speedo-like suit from my much taller roommate. It was a red-and-white striped tank with a modesty panel that came halfway down my thighs and straps that kept sliding off my shoulders.

I looked ridiculous.

The first few classes were a breeze. The aquaphobes learned to put their faces in the water while the rest of us watched. Then the class practiced floating, something I'd mastered in the Atlantic.

Next we worked on strokes, starting with the crawl. I learned the arm movements and breathing, but my kick was pitiful. Finally, I just used my arms and let my legs dangle uselessly. The instructor didn't seem to notice. I still swim that way.

Then came the breast, side and backstrokes. The first two were easy. But I never mastered the last. Instead, I churned diagonally across the pool on my back every time, crashing into classmates.

I had no idea how I was progressing when we suddenly moved on to diving.

In early December, after putting on that peppermint stick suit three times a week for an entire semester, I asked the instructor if I could take the test.

"You already did," she said. "You passed. You're a swimmer.”

Take it from this C student, kids: Don't procrastinate.