OK, all these new students with their upbeat attitudes make me a little ashamed to admit that once in a while, I get tired of Iowa State. I’m not saying this because I come the thriving cultural center of Iowa City, where it’s acceptable to have a nose ring large enough to leash your poodle to. My feelings of Iowa State’s inadequacy began when I started to read college guides.

The guides are thick books filled with vital information, like “Top 20 Schools That Will Change your Life and Clear Your Skin” and other useful statistics designed to get parents to fork over twenty bucks a copy.

The methods used to compile this information vary from guide to guide. Sometimes the authors visit campuses and interview students. Sometimes they put out surveys for anyone to fill out who feels they think everyone has or should have the same college experience as they did. This method is probably as effective as asking someone who has eaten a breakfast croissant at Burger King about his knowledge of France, but can still be thought-provoking.

A quoted student might say something profoundly bland like, “This school was a good challenge” and you are left to decide what “challenge” means. Maybe the person was challenged by rigorous coursework.

Or maybe the “challenge” is finding a roommate courteous enough to flush the toilet after vomiting into it what appears to be half a pizza, three of your goldfish and several shots of Everclear, but there just isn’t room for this kind of detail in these guides.

My favorite method of fact-collecting comes from Kaplan’s “Unofficial, Unbiased Insider’s Guide to the 320 Most Interesting Colleges.” They decided to ask high school counselors about the best colleges. How a counselor who probably hasn’t been on campus since the Truman administration would possibly count as an “insider” is beyond me.

I sometimes wondered if guidance counselors know anything about their own high school, never mind what would be the best school to film a remake of “Animal House” (it’s a tie between Chico State and San Jose State). I think my own counselor’s knowledge amounted to knowing how to pronounce my last name and remembering the time that I drew diagrams of the lower human anatomy on a state-wide standardized English test because I didn’t want to take it.

If I asked her to write a recommendation to a college for me, she would say something like, “I sure hope there’s a shortage of people who can draw a fallopian tube at Yale.”

Let’s see what the guides said about Iowa State: Well, in many cases, nothing. Kaplan apparently didn’t think we were good enough to be among the 320 most interesting colleges, although the University of Iowa made it despite having set on fire neither a student nor a historical landmark for months now.

We did, however, make the Princeton Review’s “Best 345 Colleges Rankings.” The article pointed out several positive things about Iowa State, including its beautiful campus, its peaceful small-town atmosphere, and that the words “Science and Technology” are part of the official name of the university.

My favorite part of our profile is the information that school officials apparently provided. In the section labeled, “What Iowa State Says,” one of the three “revolutionary” inventions that they thought to point out (the others being the digital computer and something about fax machines) is – hold on to your beans -“LowSatSoy, a new cooking oil low in saturated fat.” Wowwee!

I bet that selling point is just drawing in all sorts of neat folks.

Many of the students who took the guide’s survey apparently didn’t consider all the benefits of a soy-based cooking oil, and thus gave Iowa State less-than-stellar marks. According to their responses, Iowa State ranked fifth in “Professors [who] suck all life from materials” and fourteenth in “Professors make themselves scarce.” There were also complaints about the lack of under-21 bars and that the average student’s idea of being culturally aware is knowing more than three letters of the Greek alphabet.

I’ve mostly grown out of my Iowa State disliking phase, thanks to the good friends I’ve made and a number of payoffs in the form of scholarships. But I think everyone should give a positive review of our school so that future students can come to Iowa State with a happy mindset. And I recommend doing this early, like before you have a lecture hall class, pay for books, eat at a dining hall or set foot in Ames. Or else you just might become yet another negative Nancy for these guides to capitalize on

Dan Nguyen

is a senior in computer engineering and political science from Iowa City.