
		A Thinking-Man's Approach to College
   			by Dave Barry


    Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going
    to college.  (That is, of course, a lie.  The only things you young
    persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust me:  These
    are closely related to college.)

    College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly 2000
    hours and try to memorize things.  The 2000 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:

    o  Things you will need to know in later life (2 hours).  These include
    how to make collect telephone calls and get  beer-and-crepe-paper
    stains out of your pajamas.

    o  Things you will not need to know in later life (1198 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 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 be 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 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 answers 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 common sense would say.  For example, suppose you are
    studying "Moby Dick."   Anybody with any 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 11,000 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 things 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.

    Studying dreams is fun.  I had one professor who claimed everything we
    dreamed about - tractors, Arizona, baseball, frogs - actually
    represented a sexual organ.  He was very insistent about this.  Nobody
    wanted to sit near him.  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 No. 1 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 observations of the
    sociometrical behavior tendencies of pre-matured isolates indicates
    that a causal relationship exists between ground-ward tropism and
    lachrymatory, or 'crying', behavior forms."  If you can keep this up
    for 50 or 60 pages, you will get a large government grant.
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