Dave Barry on College
by Dave Barry
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Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going
to college. (That is, of course, a lie.) 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:
1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
2. 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 exam books, then forget
them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to
stay in college for the rest of your life.
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. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.
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 must 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 class. 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 any 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 can
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 if 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 courses, 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 prematurated
isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between
groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." If
you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large
government grant.
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