MAN, I wish I would have known about some of these schools before choosing Montclair State University (go Redhawks though! LOL). Check out ten crazy schools and majors below!
1. Wizard School (Grey School of Wizardry, California)
He is the real-life wizard headmaster giving Harry Potter’s Dumbledore a run for his money. Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, 68, has dedicated his life to studying the Dark Arts, even doing the shopping in his wizard costume and wand. Now the magic master has opened the world’s only registered wizard academy, the Grey School of Wizardry, as he prepares to make Hogwarts and the world of Harry Potter a reality. Today, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart’s Grey School of Wizardry is the first wizard school to be officially recognized as an academic establishment. Like Hogwarts, the Grey School teaches 16 departments, including Alchemy, Beastmastery, Horse-whispering, wand-making and spell casting. Pupils who attend s unique conclave’ magic schools are split into four ancient houses“ Winds, Undines, Gnomes and Salamanders, and like Potter, students study a defense against the deadly Dark Arts.
2. Medical Marijuana Growing (Med Grow Cannabis College, Michigan)
At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter. But at Med Grow Cannabis College, marijuana is the curriculum: the history, the horticulture and the legal how-to’s of Michigan’s new medical marijuana program.
“This state needs jobs, and we think medical marijuana can stimulate the state economy with hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars,” said Nick Tennant, the 24-year-old founder of the college, which is actually a burgeoning business (no baccalaureates here) operating from a few bare-bones rooms in a Detroit suburb. The six-week, $485 primer on medical marijuana is a cross between an agricultural extension class covering the growing cycle, nutrients and light requirements (It’s harvest time when half the trichomes have turned amber and half are white) and a gathering of serious potheads, sharing stories of their best highs (Smoke that and you are medicated!).
3. The Beatles, Popular Music and Society (Liverpool University, England)
It may be 2013, but Beatlemania is alive and well in the most unlikely and likely of places: academia and Liverpool. Oakvillian Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy, a former Miss Canada finalist, is the first graduate of Liverpool University’s master’s degree program entitled The Beatles, Popular Music and Society. The program has 12 full-time students and aims to analyze the Fab Four’s impact on Western culture by determining the “significance of the music of the Beatles in the construction of identities, audiences, ethnicities and industries, and localities.”
4. Bagpipe Major (Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania)
It’s not unusual for young boys to be spellbound by pirates. But when Nick Hudson would watch the movie version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” as a child, it wasn’t for the sword play or the adventure on the high seas. Rather, he was completely captivated by a bagpipe duel. More than a decade later, Mr. Hudson is a senior at Carnegie Mellon University — and the nation’s only graduating bagpipe major.
In 1990, the school instituted the world’s first bagpipe degree, a major — complete with a designated need-based scholarship — focusing on both studio performance and the history and culture behind bagpiping. Mr. Hudson is just the third bagpipe major to graduate from Carnegie Mellon since the establishment of the program, though there are two other majors now enrolled behind him.
5. Meat Cutting (Eastern Oklahoma State College)
Yeah, you read it correctly. What, you didn’t think that butchers went to school for their craft? If you have a passion for cutting up meat, then you can follow your dreams all the way to Eastern Oklahoma State College or Hinds Community College in Raymond, Mississippi. Making it through college can be difficult. You just have to find a way to stay focused and cut through the tough parts.
