"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 roughlytwo
> 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:
>
>     * Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).  These include
> how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and crepe-paper stains out
> of your pajamas.
>
>     * 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 ofadvice: 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.