DAVE BARRY ON COLLEGE

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DAVE BARRY ON 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:

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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