Columbia’s Core Curriculum has been widely lauded by many famous alumni and pretentious supplementary applications, but freshman Mia Gradis (CC ’25) discovered the dangers of classic literature on Monday in her LitHum class when a fellow student attempted to elucidate his ideas about the Odyssey.
“He just kept saying random words,” Gradis confided in The Fed. “He went from ‘thematic’ to ‘anaphora,’ and I barely had time to google ‘dictionary.com’ before he launched into ‘colloquial’ and ‘euphemistic.'” Gradis’s browser history consisted of SparkNotes summaries, Merriam-Webster searches, and Google Docs full of sporadic bullet point notes, such as ‘odysseus = lion??’ and ‘major theme: gods always horny.’ “I can’t do this any longer,” Gradis confessed tearfully. “I have to pretend I understand what’s happening in this class for the whole semester? Are you kidding? I’m an Econ major.”
After further investigation, her fellow student’s browser history was revealed to consist mostly of searches on synonym.com.
