You should major in English, philosophy, psychology and sociology — subjects in which no one really understands what someone else is talking about.

College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours trying to memorise things.

The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; so 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 life later (two hours). These include how to make collect telephone calls, get root-beer and crepe-paper stains out of your pajamas.

• Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). This is stuff you learn in classes with names that end in sology, — osophy, — istry, — ics, and so on.

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 memorise and forget most things about. An important piece of advice is to 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 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 the exact answer that 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 that he and all the other chemists agree on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology and sociology — subjects in which no one really understands what someone else is talking about, and involves 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.

Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. Let us take the example of 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, deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going off to lunch. You could also 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 by far the number one subject.

I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, but 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. If you have observed that children cry when they fall down.

You should write: “Methodological observation of the sociometrical behaviour tendencies of premature isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behaviour forms.”

Keep this up for fifty or sixty pages and soon a large government grant will come your way.