Crippling Debt and Liver Regret

Ah, college. It’s where we blacked out for the first time, it’s where we made poor sexual choices, and it’s where we developed a healthy disgust for bureaucrats while we bent over backwards to get a meaningless piece of paper that society told us we definitely need, even though our choice of major could have been taught through a series of YouTube videos over four days, let alone four years. Whether you’re a returning college student, or some poor 18-year-old about to get suckered into four years of liver cirrhosis and thousands of dollars of crippling, unrecoverable debt, we here at Rooster only have one question for you: Are you ready to go back to school?

 

Higher Education is a Scam, Unless You Know What You Want

If you’re some kind of freakish specimen from outer space, and you have a life direction straight out of high school, well congratulations. If you’re like the rest of us, you’re not going to know what you really want out of life until you’re halfway through your twenties, and even then it’s going to be major guesswork.Now, this is totally OK, but we can’t necessarily condone going to college with an idea like “I’ll figure out a major later.” Look at our friend Seth, who went to college, eventually picked accounting as his major, and then fell in love with scuba diving the summer after he graduated. Now, Seth sits in a cubicle and plays with an abacus (or whatever the hell it is that accountants do) while wishing he would have majored in marine biology.

 

Kiss Ass to Pass Class

Look, we’re nearly positive the only reason we passed statistics during our senior year was because we shook the professors hand on the first day of class (or a witch cast a spell, either way there’s no way that we passed that class on our own without that handshake or satanic black magic coming into play). Think about it, if you were a teacher stuck in the mindless slog that is higher education, what's the one thing you’d want more than anything? That’s right, for a student to actually give a shit. Luckily, you can feign this interest during your first few classes by approaching the professor and chatting them up. Do you need to actually have a proverbial hard-on for geology? Of course not! Will asking the professor a question about a rock and introducing yourself go a long way for your academic success later in the semester?

You betcha.

 

Make Friends With a Note Taker

One day, halfway through your first semester, you’re going to wake up in a puddle of your own vomit mixed with whiskey that tastes like it was made in a prison and malt liquor that makes your insides corrode. This morning will also be the morning that your physics professor (or whatever the fuck you’re studying, we don’t know) gives their hardest lecture. Fortunately, you’ll have read this guide back in August, and you’ll have befriended a note taker during the first week of class. Now, instead of groveling at the shoes of your professor (which will come later in the semester) you can just text your note-taking buddy.