I Want My Lab To Be More Sustainable

The pandemic really humbled the physics community! While biologists and chemists were front and center battling COVID-19, developing vaccines and treatments, physicists were suddenly... not the heroes of the scientific narrative. For decades, physicists dominated scientific discourse with their grand unified theories and particle accelerators, often looking down on "softer" sciences. Then COVID hit, and suddenly those biochemistry classes everyone skipped became pretty darn important. Nothing like a global pandemic to make you realize that understanding proteins might be slightly more urgent than string theory. The physicists' collective "perhaps I treated you too harshly" is basically science's version of "sorry I was a jerk in high school, you're actually cool now."

The chemistry gang wars are real! This is the perfect representation of the eternal rivalry between organic and inorganic chemistry students. The "homies drawing hexagons" refers to organic chemistry's obsession with carbon-based compounds, which are typically represented with hexagonal benzene rings. Meanwhile, inorganic chemistry deals with metals, minerals, and coordination compounds that rarely feature those satisfying hexagons. Chemistry students will instantly recognize this divide - spend 8 hours drawing perfect hexagons for your orgo final and you too will develop strong opinions about inorganic chemistry and its weird electron configurations!

The eternal science lab dilemma! That moment of silent panic when you're assigned a lab partner and your entire grade hangs in the balance. Will they be the Einstein who carries the team, or another confused soul who thinks the Bunsen burner is for making s'mores? The desperation is palpable – because we all know a bad partner means YOU'RE suddenly the designated brain cell for the entire experiment. Nothing says "academic anxiety" like quietly praying your random partner understands stoichiometry better than you do!

The chemistry student's version of "hold my beaker!" 🧪 LiAlH4 (lithium aluminum hydride) is that wild party animal of reducing agents that gets SUPER excited when it meets a carbonyl group. It's like watching a toddler on sugar rush - it donates those hydride ions with such enthusiasm that chemists can't help but do a little mad scientist giggle. And just like SpongeBob here, it's ready to perform this nucleophilic attack over and over because REDUCING ALL THE THINGS is its life mission! The reaction is so predictably dramatic that organic chemistry students either have nightmares about it or draw little hearts around it in their notes. No in-between!

Engineering students know true pain. Someone innocently asks for book recommendations that made people cry, and there's always that one person who responds with "Engineering Mechanics: Statics (14th Edition)" by Russell C. Hibbeler. Nothing induces tears quite like calculating the equilibrium of rigid bodies at 3 AM while questioning your life choices. The textbook doesn't just break objects—it breaks spirits.

The eternal struggle of every engineering student summed up in one divine intervention! On the left, we have the exhausted, sleep-deprived engineer begging for mercy from differential equations and impossible deadlines. On the right, Jesus is basically saying, "I gave you the freedom to choose ANY career path, and you picked the one with 3AM problem sets and bridges that need to not collapse?" Nobody forced you to calculate stress tensors or debug code until your eyes bleed. You did this to yourself! The self-inflicted suffering of choosing engineering is truly the modern crown of thorns—except instead of thorns, it's MATLAB errors and thermodynamics finals.