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, 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.
http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/choosing-a-major.text
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