The Truth About College

College is a bunch of rooms where you sit for two
thousand hours or so
and try to memorize things. The two thousand 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,
or 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 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 causal
relationship exists between groundward tropism and
lachrimatory behavior
forms.” If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty
pages, you will get a
large government grant.