Pages

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Wait, Why Don't Colleges Offer These Kinds of Courses?

Had I known what postgrad life would really be like (emotionally, relationally, professionally...just everythingly) I would've gotten a degree that covers the following crucial, real life preparatory subjects instead of slaving away at law, statistics, urban policy, comparative literature, and the like:

Health & Lifestyle
  • Responsible Partying: You're Not a Sorority Girl Anymore
  • Feigning Disinterest in Costume Parties
  • Overcoming Your Red Solo® Cup Dependency Once and For All
  • Surviving Your Twenties Without Doing Irreparable Damage to Your Body or Your Dignity (Whatever Comes First)
  • How to Dance at Weddings
  • Ridding Your Body of the 10 Alcohol- and Desktop Snack-Laden Pounds It Put On During Your First-Ever Year of Employment 
  • Intro to Gerontology: When Memorization of Popular Song Lyrics, Boy Band Star Names and Other Such Inanities Stops Coming Naturally

Relationships
  • How Not to Be The Low-Hanging Fruit OR How Not to Be The Destination at the End of the Path to Least Resistance (Depending on Your Metaphorical Wording Preferences)
  • Making New Friends, Non-Creeper Style
  • Identifying the Greenness of the Grass on Your Side
  • Game Theory: #Winning Despite Your Hatred of Having to Play In The First Place
  • How It's Done (Although No One Really Knows What They're Doing): Pre-DTR, Gray Area Casual Dating
  • Intro to Urban Planning: Erecting Airtight Friend Zones and Circles of Trust

Career
  • Reading Between the (Email) Lines
  • Advancement 101: Delegating Work to Underlings Despite Still Feeling Like One Yourself
  • Effective Pain Management Techniques: Networking & Mixers
  • Outwitting Passive-Aggressive Coworkers With -- You Guessed It -- Even More Passive-Aggression
  • The Art of Powering Through 1,497 Unread Emails After Getting Back From That Vacation You Took Precisely to Avoid the Cesspool That Is Your Inbox
  • $3 Sake Bombs and Other Happy Hour Fundamentals 

Culture
  • Cultivating a Political Backbone Without Irritating Your Loved Ones/Facebook Friends With Your Newly Minted Opinions
  • 50 Non-Reddit-Sourced Ways to Exude Coolness Given Your Dwindling Pop Culture Prowess
  • Coping Skills: When Reality TV Is The Closest To Reality You Get
  • Emerging Household Trends: Repopulating the Empty Nest
  • Intro to Civic Participation: Perennial Under-informed Voting (If You Even Make It to the Polls) and Jury Duty Avoidance Tactics

Technology & Social Media

  • Zen Basics: Teaching Your Parents How to Use Technology Without Imploding
  • Proper, Adultlike News Consumption When All You Want to Do is Read BarStoolSports, ThoughtCatalog, or PerezHilton
  • The Art Of Wasting Precious Time On The Interwebz
  • Self-Rescue Techniques: When You Find Yourself in the "Weird" Parts Of YouTube
  • Post-Limewire Age Music Acquisition for Dummies
  • Explaining AOL, MySpace, GeoCities, Friendster, and Xanga to Today's Youth

Everything Else
  • Acclimation 101: When Nothing Surprises You Anymore
  • Suppressing Shame and Schadenfreude So No One Notices It (Or So You Think)
  • Data Skills: Managing the Unnecessary Overabundance of Choice in Practically Every Aspect of Modern Life
  • Personal Finance Fluency By Way Of Cheesy Self-Help Blogs & Books 
  • Advanced List-making: When You've Lost the Ability to Form Cohesive Paragraphs of Interconnected Thoughts

Who's with me?