Many people make the mistake of misinterpreting what a person can learn in college. Yes, you can confirm that you really do want to be an engineer, English teacher or biologist.

Sure, you can learn more valuable skills related to the field of employment you wish to pursue following your schooling.

Of course, you can meet other people your age with similar interests, professors with an intricate knowledge of the field and contacts that could potentially make your job easier down the road.

All these are great advantages, but you have to face the fact that they have little real practical use. The real diamond that can be excavated from the great mines of college is how to be cool.

If you think about it, coolness is the singularly most important factor in any given person. Some would say that kindness is more important, or a sense of compassion, or perhaps a solid base of morality, but all these traits are so deep and pure that they are utterly unimportant.

You can’t gauge a person’s compassion in a matter of seconds, thus its inclusion or exclusion in a person is irrelevant. You don’t win friends with a devotion to the environment, or large donations to charity, or being a YPal.

But if you are cool, everybody likes you. In fact, people who don’t even like you will pretend to like you because they will otherwise be ostracized from the community.

Right?

Having thus discovered the real secret of what I can gain from my years at Iowa State, I set out on the arduous task of being cool (honestly though, as anyone who knows me would attest, it was more a task of becoming cooler. I’ll humor you, nonetheless).

The only secret I had to remember is that coolness is largely superficial, as the superficial traits in any given person are inherently the most important.

So, finding inner peace and trying to reduce my contempt for certain people were two options quickly tossed out the window.

Coolness is all about image.

To learn more about coolness, I decided to observe the Iowa State population at large and determine what separated the cool from those wasting their time trying to improve themselves.

The first thing I noticed is cool people dress expensively. No Goodwill shirts, hand-me-down pants or Kmart shoes. They wear Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie and Fitch and Banana Republic.

So, I went out and bought myself some expensive clothes. I didn’t really like them, nor did they look especially good on my fundamentally misshapen frame, but they were expensive. I thought I would be cool, but I didn’t feel any different.

Then I noticed a lot of cool people have tattoos. Or at least I think tattoos look pretty cool. Tattoos of Greek letters, guitars, barbed wire, cartoon figures and Chinese sayings. Yes, if I got a tattoo, I would definitely look cooler.

But part of the coolness of a tattoo is for it to be unique. I had to have a tattoo that no one else has ever had.

Upon reaching my decision of the perfect tattoo, an elephant perched on a lily (my own idea), I had to decide on the location. Since approximately 98% of my body is littered with these damnable freckles, my possibilities were few.

I finally decided that the pastiness of my thigh would be the perfect contrast for the “Sitting Elephant.” I was in a bit of pain, but definitely not cooler.

And thus I continued on this way. Cool people are ripped, muscles bulging out in places normal people don’t have muscles. I went to the Rec for a couple of weeks, pulled a couple of muscles, maxed out just benching the weight bar. Still not feeling cool.

Cool people are tanned to an unhealthy shade, even in the dead of winter. I went to Heated Boxes of Death, a local tanning joint, purchased a value package and jumped in the booth promising “16 years of roofer tan in an amazing 3.2 seconds.”

I feel slightly charred and I’m fairly certain I will not be able to have children, and yet no coolness.

Cool people dye their hair, often to an absurd color. Some just dye the tips while others go for an entire color transformation. Still others bleach their hair.

As I understood it, one could do a “bleaching” at home. So I filled the sink with Clorox and plunged my head in.

The results were less than expected, though I must admit the intense burning on my skin prevented me from keeping my hair in for long. My skin is still raw and some of the hair is starting to fall out, but I’m still not cool.

Perhaps coolness is not all it is cracked up to be.

My quest has made me poor.

I have an elephant on my thigh.

My chest muscles are still throbbing.

My albino skin is still glowing red.

And, to top it off, I have the hairline of a 50-year-old. Maybe being cool isn’t the most important thing after all.

Perhaps I should just give up this quest and just try to be a better person.

Or maybe writing about coolness will make me cool. I don’t feel anything yet, though.

Dustin Kass is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Dubuque.