scuba do or scuba don’t? by Taylor L. '29

Every Thursday at 6:45pm for about two months, I trudged fifteen minutes across campus to the Alumni Wang Fitness Center ⁠01 the lesser-known younger brother of the Zesiger Fitness Center  in my Crocs, pool towel in hand, for my PE class. The locker rooms of Wang are like the backrooms, and after taking a few turns, you end up at the pool. The first time I went, I thought I got lost and ended up at the boiler room instead, but it was just the dedicated scuba closet. 

As part of our graduation requirements, we have to earn eight “PE points,” which can be fulfilled by taking four PE classes. Each class is worth two points, and it’s a slightly convoluted system. 

However, there’s a special subset of PE classes that are “Extreme,” and that give double the amount of PE points (4 points! I’m halfway done). Included among these are things like kayaking, backpacking, rockclimbing, and parkour. 

Scuba has been five weeks in the making, since I passed the swim and boat test (100 yard swim and five minutes treading water, respectively) during the first weekend of orientation. Little did I know that the first day of scuba class, they would make us swim double of the boat test (200 yard swim and 10 minutes treading water). 

What I also didn’t realize going into this was that scuba-ing itself is pretty easy so long as you can swim. There’s really only one rule, which is that bad things happen if you start breathing through your nose, so you inhale and exhale exclusively through that little mouthpiece,⁠02 mouthbreathing final boss which is called the regulator. 

As a result, the classes are basically simulating every single possible thing that could go wrong and learning how to address them. The scenarios we looked at include losing your goggles, losing your snorkel, losing your regulator, losing your air tank and gear entirely, basically losing anything that’s attached to you that keeps you alive, dragging your diving buddy to safety, and disconnecting the air flow so that you can’t breathe for a few seconds. 

There were also some lighter, less perilous activities, like underwater agility courses, passing around torpedoes (which reminded me of playing at the neighborhood pool as a kid), swimming upside down, and underwater Scrabble. 

Afterwards, there’s classroom sessions where you’re basically told all of the horrible things that can happen if you dive irresponsibly. 

Ironically, it’s a great mood booster because of unfortunate scheduling on my part. 8.01 ⁠03 Classical Mechanics problem sets are due every Thursday at 11pm, but the earliest I have ever submitted an 8.01 pset is at 10:42 pm,⁠04 I set a new record since writing this, at 10:30pm!! I'm so cooked and they are due at 11:00. Procrastination is a lifestyle, and I take it seriously. 

I always found that the impending deadline completely vacated my mind when I was diving because it was just fun to be twelve feet underwater on a random Thursday evening. However, it did come at a cost, because scuba ends at 10pm, giving me only an hour to finish the pset afterwards. I’m usually scrambling for the entire morning Thursday trying to chip away at that mountain of rotational motion problems. I even had to skip scuba once to finish the pset (and I did finish it, somehow still within twenty minutes of the deadline, even with three extra hours).

All of this is a good example of an issue I’ve run into a bit while I’ve been here: prioritization. 

It’s not groundbreaking to point out that college is a time of extreme freedom, but it’s definitely become apparent that having to pick and choose really forces you to examine what you want to allot your time to. My three hour scuba diving class is interesting, and I want to learn new and interesting things, but I also need to learn old and boring things like physics, ⁠05 just kidding! i love physics 🫣 and also pass my classes, and there’s only so much time in the day for all of that, and there’s even less time on Thursday. 

As a side note, in order to address my homework, I’ve developed something I like to call the Poor Man’s Pomodoro Technique. Maybe you’re familiar with the traditional Pomodoro Technique, where you set a timer for a specific amount of time (typically 25 or 50 minutes), and then take five or ten minute breaks between work sessions. 

My variation doesn’t even require you to have a separate timer. You start a work session, you work until your computer dies, and then you get to go home. It works better the older and worse your computer is, too, because the battery will give out sooner. It has been a game changer for my productivity, especially after I realized that I really had to lock in for 8.01. 

At the end of the class, after seven sessions, I had the option to do a scuba certification dive so that I could dive anywhere in the world, but I honestly just forgot to schedule it, so that’s on pause until the spring. But luckily there isn’t a due date on that one.