Academic Publishing: The Only Industry Where You Pay To Give Away Your Work

Started with legitimate trig derivatives, ended with existential crisis. That cotangent formula featuring "e to the pi i" multiplied by "computer science" is pure mathematical blasphemy. But the final derivative—"who cares"—is the most mathematically accurate formula on that board. That's calculus hitting the depression phase of the semester. Thirty years of teaching and I still can't decide if this professor is having a breakdown or achieving enlightenment.

Someone innocently asks for tear-jerking book recommendations, and an engineering student responds with "Engineering Mechanics: Statics (14th Edition)" by Russell C. Hibbeler. Nothing says emotional trauma quite like calculating the equilibrium of rigid bodies at 3 AM while questioning your life choices. That textbook doesn't just teach you about force vectors—it teaches you about the crushing weight of regret. Every engineering student knows that statics isn't just a subject; it's an existential crisis bound in hardcover.

The ultimate chemistry betrayal! Just when you think you're surrounded by the usual suspects—organic chemistry with its endless carbon chains, general chemistry with its stoichiometry smugness, and analytical chemistry ready to measure your soul to six significant figures—physical chemistry sneaks up from behind and tackles you with thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. It's that moment when you realize your comfortable world of balancing equations is about to be violently overthrown by partial differential equations and statistical mechanics. Physical chemistry doesn't just enter the chat—it flips the entire table!

The expectations vs. reality of chemistry is brutally accurate here! We all enter thinking we'll be mixing colorful solutions and creating explosions like some mad scientist. Then reality hits—endless calculations, periodic table memorization, and equations that make your brain feel like it's been through a centrifuge. The transition from "I'm going to create something amazing" to "I'm going to fail this exam" happens faster than a combustion reaction. Chemistry: where dreams of making cool compounds are replaced by nightmares about balancing redox equations!

The classic 2x2 matrix of academic despair. Chemistry students exist in four quantum states: understanding the material and passing, understanding but failing anyway, not understanding but somehow passing (pure statistical luck), or the most common state—clueless and failing spectacularly. The title reference to Schrödinger's cat is apt—until you take the exam, you simultaneously exist in all states of chemical comprehension and incomprehension. Trust me, I've occupied that bottom-left quadrant more times than I care to admit during my PhD. Passed without understanding a single reaction mechanism. My advisor still doesn't know.

Mathematicians and their notorious LaTeX obsession. The rest of us use Word like normal humans, but mathematicians will spend four hours debugging a bracket in their equation editor just to produce a single-page document. Then they'll judge you for not formatting your differential equations with the proper kerning. It's not a fetish, it's a "professional standard"... sure, Jan.