Everything I Learned in College So Far (In Under 600 Words!)

For my first two semesters of college, I posted these lists of “everything I learned this semester” on Facebook. Now that I’m halfway through my college experience, I’m reposting them here, complete with new entries from my second year of college.

Everything I learned in my first semester:

Spanish History: The only surefire way to kill a Spaniard is to lure him into a canyon and drop boulders on him.

Psychology: The best way to craft an innovative experiment is to ignore every ethical guideline in existence.

Literary Analysis: Poetry is the purest, and also confusingest, kind of writing.

Cinematic Identity: Nothing is real, we are slaves to ideology, time is an imperialist construct, and something about wide angle shots.

Everything I learned in my second semester:

Religious Studies: Apparently going to church every week for nearly two decades does not prepare you for college level religious studies. Also, capitalism is bad.

American Studies: In a sense, "What does it mean to be an American?" is the most important question in American Studies. In another sense, it's the least important question because you're never going to get a straight answer on it. Also, capitalism is bad.

Anthropology: Anthropology is the study of human society (news to me, since when I signed up for the class all I knew about it was a friend's description that "It's about people and thinking and stuff"). Also, capitalism is bad.

Stats: Contrary to my high school calculus teacher's claim, college level stats does not make you a better gambler. Also, aspects of capitalism can be used as questions on stats tests. Capitalism is very bad.

Everything I learned in my third semester:

Global Christianities: Wow, that Jesus guy is getting sorta popular now, huh?

Cross-Cultural Psychology: How to write almost legibly with my left hand (not an actual part of the class curriculum, just a note-taking strategy that turned out to have no benefit whatsoever).

American Literary Traditions: Playing “find the racism, sexism, and incest in Early American Literature” is fun at first, but gets easy, boring, and really disturbing quickly.

Life of the Qur’an: Huh, that Jesus guy even made it into Islam. He’s really blowing up these days, I wonder what his deal is.

What I learned in my fourth semester

British Literary Traditions: Playing “find the racism, sexism, and incest in early British literature” is considerable more fun because they’ve got quirky new ways of describing all those things across the pond! Still pretty disturbing, though.

Intro to Education: After a couple years of psychology classes, which are all about thinking about thinking, and English classes, which are about writing about writing, taking an education class that was learning about learning has finally convinced me that the only thing academia is interested in studying is itself.

Psychological Research Methods: Standard deviation is really, extremely, critically, unequivocally important (though I still have no clue what it is or how to calculate it).

Developmental Psychology: Kohlberg had three main stages of moral development: pre-conventional (in which morality is governed by basic desires), conventional (in which morality is defined by rules and social convention), post-conventional (in which morality is based on universal moral principles), and transcendent (in which morality is whatever the hell you want it to be because, screw it, you got to level four, you cant to whatever you damn well please!)