The Postdoc Purgatory

The physics hierarchy as determined by some grad student who should be writing their dissertation instead. S-tier features the untouchables: Einstein (relativity guy), Newton (apple enthusiast), and Archimedes (bath time eureka man). A-tier has Dirac (equation hermit), Juan Maldacena (holographic principle wizard), and Steven Weinberg (electroweak unification architect). Meanwhile, B-tier holds Feynman (bongo-playing diagram inventor) and Schrödinger (cat murderer by thought experiment). The empty C and D tiers are where the rest of us apparently belong. Just waiting for the comments section to erupt into theoretical warfare.

Engineering students know the truth - intelligence and engineering degree aren't necessarily correlated! The brutal self-awareness hits when you're calculating the load-bearing capacity of a beam at 2AM while simultaneously forgetting how to operate a microwave. The cognitive dissonance between society's perception of engineers as geniuses versus the reality of frantically Googling "how to convert meters to feet" for the fifth time today is the purest form of academic humility. The impostor syndrome is strong with this one!

That existential crisis when the professor finishes a 90-minute lecture on quantum chromodynamics and asks, "Any questions?" Meanwhile, your brain has been processing exactly zero information since minute two. The confused cat perfectly embodies that moment of academic despair where you're too lost to even formulate a question. It's like trying to solve a differential equation when someone replaced all your variables with hieroglyphics. Even the cat's "man idk" response is the universal language of students everywhere silently thinking, "I should probably change my major."

Behold the glorious evolution of π approximation through academic suffering! 🧠 Geometry students: "Let's draw pretty shapes around circles!" *pats self on back* Calculus students: "Feast your eyes upon my terrifying infinite series with numbers I pulled from the mathematical abyss!" Probability students: "Sticks go YEET! Count 'em and divide! SCIENCE!" The Buffon's Needle problem is pure chaotic genius - toss sticks on parallel lines and BOOM! π appears like magic from the mathematical void. Who needs fancy formulas when you can just make a mess?

The ultimate scientific double standard! TV shows like Breaking Bad have to censor their chemistry to avoid teaching viewers how to synthesize methamphetamine, but flip through any organic chemistry journal and you'll find detailed reaction mechanisms with full reagents and conditions. Nothing says "academic freedom" quite like publishing the Leuckart Method and Reductive Amination pathways to racemic methamphetamine in peer-reviewed literature while Walter White has to be all mysterious about his blue crystals. Scientists really be publishing illicit drug syntheses with the casual disclaimer "for educational purposes only" and calling it a day. Publication committees be like: "Hmm yes, very scholarly. Approved!"

The ultimate scientific power move: deriving equations from first principles because you can't remember if it's sin²θ + cos²θ = 1 or sin²θ - cos²θ = 1. That desperate moment when you're staring at your screen, calculator in one hand, scribbled notes in the other, thinking "I could Google this... but what if it's one of those trick sites that deliberately gives wrong answers to catch cheaters?" So you channel your inner Thanos, snap your fingers at conventional wisdom, and rebuild calculus from scratch in the middle of your timed exam. Twenty minutes later, you've reinvented half of differential equations just to solve one problem worth 2 points.