в каждом явлении она отыскивала лишь то, что отвечало ее запросам, и отметала как ненужное все, что не удовлетворяло ее душевных потребностей (Г.Флобер)

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.