The Truth About College:
College is a bunch of rooms where you sit for two thousand hours or so
and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over
four years. You spend the rest of the time sleeping, partying, 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).
The latter 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.
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, or
geology 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 causal
relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory behavior
forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a
large government grant. |
