Why You Shouldn’t Pick Your Major Based on Food
When I was in college, I had a voracious appetite. Still do. The way I ate, if I took my three squares a day at the dining hall, my meal plan—which was meant to last a student from the end of August to mid-December—would have been depleted of funds well before Thanksgiving.
To keep weight, at the end of every second week, when meal-plan points were set to expire, I finagled with the girls on my floor to take me to the sumptuous buffet. I also kept track of everyone’s scheduled Sunday return to campus, panhandling for the cookies or rice biryani that their mothers had made for them. But I soon discovered that the best time of year for conserving dining hall cash was the beginning of each semester.
There were of course fraternity rush events, which excited potential brothers for the obvious reasons, but for me it was all about the free wings and pizzas. Those didn’t last long: After a while, I think I got blackballed. However, that’s when I found the goldmine. At the beginning of every year, the clubs would host a campus fair on the mall. They all had food to entice future members. I went around, scribbled down my name and email on every sheet, took whatever they were serving, and nodded a few times as I feigned interest in things like the Maryland Knitters Association. I became a Young Democrat because I liked pepperoni and I colluded with the Young Republicans because the pepperoni made me thirsty. I joined up with the Free Tibet club for some dish that I could not pronounce and then printed my name on the Chinese Culture Club’s sheet because they had good sauce for drizzling on the Tibetan dish. I even joined the American Marketing Association, which promised pizza at every meeting. I think that’s why I majored in marketing.
When I graduated, my father asked me, “What’s marketing all about?”
I recited the four P’s, which would be like the four Noble Truths to a Buddhist or the four questions to a young Jewish male readying for the Seder for the first time:
“Price, product, placement.”
“That’s three.”
“Oh.”
It might as well have been pizza.
