Dave Barry

Dave Barry on College

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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