The Truth About College

June 27, 2008, 9:32 AM

The Truth About College
(originally a Dave Barry Column)

College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time sleeping and trying to get dates.

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).

These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in –ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little blue books, then you forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life. If you memorize them and add some fancy Latin words, some institutions will award you with a doctorate.

It’s very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize- don’t ask me why- the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I’m trying to remember something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket.

After you’ve been in college for a year or so, you’re supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: be sure to choose a major that does not involve known Facts and Right Answers. This means you do not major in mathematics, physics, biology or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If for example, you major in mathematics, you’re going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: “Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices.” If you don’t come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail.

The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology and sociology- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I’ll give you a quick overview of each:

ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before classes. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby Dick. Anybody with common sense would say that Moby Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland, Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

PSYCHOLOGY. This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and above all you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.

SOCIOLOGY. For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology course, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you’ll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down, you should write:

“Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematured isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrymatory forms”

If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.

You can have this publish in a scientific peered journal and earn your masters degree in the process. You are now a scientist and professor.

June 27, 2008, 9:41 AM

lol

What he's saying is somewhat true. I'm trying my best to just take courses that I'm personally interested in, though.

June 27, 2008, 10:13 AM

Tl;dr
summry

June 27, 2008, 11:38 AM

Guess this means I'll be majoring in English.

June 27, 2008, 11:42 AM

Current English major here, who has to admit that the description is at least partially true.

June 27, 2008, 12:52 PM

Haha. Good thing I'm going to study Business Administration and History Dual Honours.

History is basically looking at other people's books and rephrasing stuff, and business administration involves coming up with cryptic plans written entirely in business jargon. [/lie]

June 27, 2008, 2:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Placebo

Tl;dr
summry

After reading a paragraph, I think it's about some guy making satirical jokes about modern college/university life.

June 27, 2008, 7:04 PM

You really have to experience college to truly understand how pants it is.

June 27, 2008, 8:26 PM

I lol'd