Overnight Expertise: The Finals Week Superpower

Remember when engineers were bold visionaries ready to conquer the laws of physics? Now they're just whimpering at the sight of a thermodynamics textbook. The left shows the muscular "Engineers then" Doge, full of ambition and delusions of grandeur, while the right displays the pathetic reality of modern engineering students. As someone who's taught thermodynamics for 20 years, I can confirm this transformation happens approximately 3 weeks into the semester when they realize entropy isn't just a fancy word but an actual mathematical concept. The dreams of building iron-man suits quickly dissolve into desperate Google searches for "how to pass thermo without understanding it."

Behold, the epic pronunciation shift we never knew we needed. Imagine walking into a lab and hearing someone dramatically declare "MOLE-eh-KYOO-LEEZ" with the same gravitas as Zeus hurling thunderbolts. Physics seminars would transform into theatrical performances worthy of Dionysus himself. Next week in Chemistry 101: Heroic Hexagons and the Tragic Tale of Electron Transfer. Some of us have been doing this unconsciously for years when trying to sound smart in presentations.

Behold, the terrifying threat of mathematical notation! Someone call Homeland Security—we've got a person wielding derivatives at 30,000 feet! The true terrorist organization isn't what you think... it's Al-Gebra , armed with weapons of math instruction! This poor mathematician was just trying to solve some differential equations (you know, those squiggly symbols with dx/dy that describe how things change) when Karen next to him thought he was plotting in Arabic. Turns out the only thing he was plotting was a function on the coordinate plane. The real crime here? Mathematical profiling.

This flowchart is what happens when career counselors have a mental breakdown. Engineering? Only if you're "good with things." Chemistry? Congratulations on your future as a "fussy pedant." And let's not forget Computer Science, perfect for those who prefer "slow, indirect evil" over the more efficient varieties. The beautiful part is how it nails the existential crisis of every STEM student. "Why do you want to major in a STEM field?" Options include "curiosity" (adorable), "to save the planet" (delusional), or my personal favorite, the dawning realization that STEM was supposed to involve actual plants for Biology majors. After 30 years of teaching, I can confirm this is approximately 87% accurate. The missing 13% is the path where you choose your major based on which department has the least uncomfortable chairs in the lecture hall.

When someone tries to gatekeep the scientific community by claiming psychology and sociology aren't "real sciences," my blood pressure spikes faster than a poorly controlled lab experiment. These fields use empirical research, statistical analysis, and peer review just like the "hard sciences" - they just study the most complex system in the universe: human behavior. Dismissing them as "only social ones" is like saying astronomy isn't science because you can't put a star in a test tube. The scientific method doesn't care what you're studying, it cares how you study it!

Physics students see the world through equations, but show them a bird and suddenly they're lost in a sea of... bird . This diagram perfectly captures the disciplinary divide where biologists meticulously label every feather, while physicists just see an aerodynamic projectile with mass m! The beautiful complexity of taxonomy reduced to "bird" labels everywhere is practically the scientific equivalent of pointing at food and saying "food." Next time your physicist friend tries to simplify quantum mechanics, hand them this bird diagram and watch their brain short-circuit!