From my boss, Ken

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

 

this is so true.

 

Sue had this sent to her this morning, thought you all would enjoy it.

Ken

 

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 bout. 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.

 

Love, Mark