Choosing a College Major
Dave Barry.
Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to college. That is, of course, a lie. The only thing you young persons think about are loud music and partying. Trust me, these are closely related to college. 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: These include how to make collect telephone calls and how to get pizza stains out of your pajamas.
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, -osphy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, write them down in little exam books, and then forget them. If you fail to forget everything, you become a professor and you 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 the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them - but I still remember the other two are Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to do something important, like whether to get tuna packed in oil and or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop into my mind right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.
After you've been in college for a while, you're supposed to pick 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, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in chemistry and you write in your little exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to from oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other scientists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
So, you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, or 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. In writing English papers, remember: 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 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 enjoy spending lots of time staring off into space.
Psychology: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are OBSESSED with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester teaching a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, and then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor. Studying dreams is more fun. If you like rats or dreams, or above all if you dream about rats, you should study 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 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 want to major in sociology, you will have to learn to do the same thing. Here is an example. Suppose you have observed that children tend to cry when they fall down. You should write the following:
"Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavioral tendencies of pre-maturated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying' behavior forms."
If you are talented enough to keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you may be lucky enough to receive a large government grant.
