As some of you may be aware, I'm graduating in about a week or so from four years of college. This means my societal value is now measurably higher than yours. Of course, once I go to law school this value will drop to nothing, but there will that brief period where I can criticize everyone below me.

Some of you may wonder how you too can have a sense of pride and self worth. In most countries this involves hardwork and deep moral character. Luckily in America you can just enroll at a four year university and supplant these emotions with a sense of superiority.

But there is that great question: what degree do I choose at college? It's a difficult question, but one I'm here to help you answer. So come along!

Engineering



You will never meet an engineer who does not secretly think they are better than most other majors. Part of this is because the average engineering course is still taught like it was in high school, with homework due every day, so anything other than constant menial labor is perplexing to the average engineering student. More importantly, engineers believe that their four years just has more work involved than any other degree. They have to believe this, because engineers will never ever have sex. There are exactly three women in every engineering college and one of them is forty and the other two are engaged and they are also very very unattractive. Thanks to a recent boom in students, engineers slave away their entire college careers for the opportunity to eventually have a job at a cubicle where they will be paid well below what they deserve doing the job function of a paperclip. Engineers also believe they learned all they needed to from other disciplines before joining engineering, and that they could easily major in anything else. Here are three examples of how untrue this is.

-One of my engineering roommates had to take a 200 level English class that he was struggling with. His essays were full of grammar errors and he couldn't structure a sentence for his life. Worst of all was an assignment he had to write on Sappho. I was dating an English major who loved Sappho and so she told him that the poem was about sapphic, lesbian, love. He wrinkled his nose and said he didn't want to write about “no homosexual fag shit”.

-As a graduate student of nuclear engineering once proudly told me, almost every nuclear engineer voted for Bush in 2000 and in 2004. Not because they were right wing. Bush wants to open up Yucca Mountain, a facility for nuclear waste removal, before waiting for any more tests to make sure it's safe. In other news the death toll in Iraq is approximated to be as high as 90,782 Iraqi civilians and 4,063 US soldiers.

-Another engineering student I roomed with asked me to take a look at his paper, a comparison of the film Blade Runner to the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Not only was it poorly formulated and realized, it was in first person tense. And he used the word 'our' a lot. And he spelled 'our', 'are'.

Engineers are extremely bitter, deprived of sex, and surrounded by Indians who keep whispering and laughing while they sneak looks at them. They have long hours, negligible social skills, and poor health. Thus the average GW member will fit in perfectly.

English



Somehow the English major still acts as the “example” of the useless degree, despite far worse degrees being out there. Regardless, there are only two types of English majors.

The first type is the more common. They appear to have almost no critical thinking skills at all and worst still, aren't actually very good in their degree. That previously mentioned English major I dated did an entire senior project on Euripedes's Medea, and got offended when I was shocked that she didn't know what a deus ex machina was. Not knowing a deus ex machina after spending four years in a major and doing a project on Euripedes is essentially like wondering what Atticus Finch's job was after reading To Kill a Mockingbird. They tend to act very friendly and committed, and seem like they will be there during your problems. In reality, the average English major (who tends to be a white middle class liberal girl) wishes they had your problems. Hell, they want worse than your problems. I've had English majors confess to me that they wish they had been molested, were mentally ill (THAT ONE turned into a fuckarow), or had been born a minority. The English major does not actually enjoy reading good books and prefers to flip through Harry Potter while forming some ridiculous thesis about what the series means to religion and the church. English majors tend to also try and express big heavy ideas with big heavy words and end up squashing themselves under the weight of their own sui generis argot. Their job prospects are also about as healthy as a geriatric fighting Mike Tyson.

The other English major is the kind that actually did learn something from a book and as a result tends to drink or smoke heavily. They tend to frighten you when they go on a creative tear, cackling madly as they churn out two pages only to scream and knock the monitor to the ground. These people are excellent to be around but will probably be hazardous to your health. They also have insights and comprehensions so quick and fast that you have to wonder how they don't have groupies lined up around them. Of course, they also tend to hate people, so that probably answers that. All of these majors are named Hundley.

Math



No one has ever successfully understood a math major. No one. Math majors are people who decided they were good with numbers, but didn't want to apply it to accounting, economics, or engineering. They just wanted to play with numbers. It's hard to even tell if a math major is difficult because math gets to be so unbelievably boring for such a long time unless you pursue it at the graduate level and run computer simulations of growth and all sorts of weird stat shit. Math majors have such a boring fucking degree that no one ever will want to talk with them about what they are doing in class, and they have nothing to say about it because it's so fucking boring, even to other math majors.

The only benefit to being a math major is you can get the jokes to XKCD. However, because XKCD is incredibly unfunny 90% of the time and the math jokes are funny none of the time, this means absolutely nothing. I was going to make a math joke about means and how XKCD is below averages but a math major might accidentally stumble on it and get a hernia from laughing too hard because they live such soulless lives.

Christ I am getting bored writing about math majors. I'm not even going to pretend it's a worthwhile degree. Don't major in math. What the fuck can you do with a major in math that you can't do anywhere else? Also everyone who majors in math that I've met has been fundamentally broken. Like, crucify squirrels and watch them bleed without letting in any emotion, or being insanely Christian and whipping themselves.

Communication



This is it. This is the worst possible major. Even the goal of the major is horrible; to get a career in fucking TV. The lowest denominator of entertainment. Christ. Every major, every single one, even the fucking Women's Studies, laugh at communication majors. It is because the major is seriously about some shit about “how people talk”. Four years of speech classes. It's not even in any other language, it's English communication, the motherfuckers don't learn semaphore or sign language, let alone foreign languages. To be fair, you have to pity the comm. majors.  Imagine if you paid for four years of college learning how to fucking talk to people. Your greatest ambition is to hold cue cards for a more attractive person to read from. And even this pathetic field has almost no job opportunities.

The only communication major I knew was this incredibly creepy guy. He used to jerk off into socks and leave them around the dorm room that he shared with my friend. Once my friend was going to sleep and his roommate came in, stared at him, and then quietly tucked him in. This guy also gave me a sealed up box of magazines and told me to throw them out. I sliced them open before doing so, and somehow it was much worse to find they were full of EGMs instead of crusty Playboys. Who seals up EGMs, man? That is so much nastier than anything.

Most of you will take one communications class ever, a basic speech delivery class. If that interests you and you think it's a good career path, go be a politician or become passionate about something that matters, don't get a communication degree. Also the class is admittedly very necessary because I have discovered only one in ten people knows how to have fun in front of a crowd and the rest burst into tears or stare at notecards. Hey, sidenote are you one of these people? Do you really just lock up or something? Like, not to boast but I got in front of a crowd of like two hundred people and told a dickweed homophobe that he had to suck my dick for money and I generally have a lot of fun on stage (always the attention whore heh), but the idea of suddenly freezing and stammering out confused shit has never happened to me. Someone tell me what that's like, you're all RM programmers, there's got to be some of you that are cripplingly shy.

Design



People often gripe about my griping on GW. “Steel,” they say “how do you know post-rock/indie/backpacker/anglophiles are that bad? I go to concerts and I never see these people!” These complainers are liars, members of the group I'm making fun of, or they have never seen a design kid (possibly because they are blind). Have you ever wondered what the combination of an albino and a bird of paradise would look like? If you've ever seen a design kid, you don't need to wonder any more. Design kids apply to usually fairly exclusive and difficult design programs that can be fashion, graphics, sculpture, whatever. As an artsy kid they tend to enjoy being iconoclastic horrible little sons of bitches, carrying their copies of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius while sipping chai tea and wearing open toed shoes with fucking socks. They all have to be darling unique snowflakes, and so have one “ironic” like, whether it be knitting or Lil Jon. They believe in Che Guevara but only as a stencil.

What's weirdest about design kids is how often they complain about the work they do. Do you know what I'd do if I was offered a practical final? Like, instead of a test, the teacher said, “here, post in this mock trial topic as the defense and make an argument”? I'd be fucking thrilled. If it was a creative enterprise, like rapping, and they said, “you got two weeks, give me a beat and two verses about politics”, I'd say thank you sir how high sir. Somehow, though, design kids moan about all the hard work they have to do in studio, ugh, a painting in two weeks? I'll just DIE. Sure I'm given classtime to do it and we spent most of the two weeks drinking in studio (this is seriously allowed) and claim we're waiting for creativity to hit but you can't fucking rush art!

The schadenfreude of watching these design kids “break their backs” only to achieve menial level jobs redesigning the pizza logo at the local Stuckeys almost makes up for their horrible attitudes and inability to not piss and moan about every fucking thing they have to do, but it doesn't. They're annoying, snotty, and yeah at this point I'm just sublimating my hatred of design kids in a GW article but fuckkkkk those people. One of the design kids I knew was actually all about typography. Fonts. She designed fucking fonts. She works for Redhat now, movie division. Those of you who know about Redhat know they don't do shit with movies. She puts the opening graphic on their promotional materials.

Next time, we cover the remaining majors, including that one favorite, Game Design.