The Truth About College

Larry Wun

 College is a bunch of rooms where you sit for 2,000 hours or so and try to  memorize things. The 2,000 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, 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 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 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 50 or 60 pages,  you will get a large government grant.