The Quantum Uncertainty Of Internship Applications

Nothing kills your spirit faster than six measly pages of quantum mechanics when you'd rather scroll through 496 Reddit comments about why cats are liquid! The scientific method doesn't mention anything about "motivation inversely proportional to textbook density," but every student knows it's the fundamental law of academic survival. Physics textbooks somehow bend spacetime to make each page feel like an eternity—it's the only explanation!

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."

Physical chemistry students having an existential crisis in 3...2...1... The meme brilliantly captures the thermodynamic gang war that's been raging since the 1800s. Ideal Gas Law thinks it's the big shot, but Van der Waals comes in with those pesky molecular interactions. Meanwhile, Redlich-Kwong-Virial is flashing its improved accuracy at high pressures like it's showing off a new sports car. But the real victim? That poor student in the pews getting absolutely demolished by Soave-Redlich-Kwong-Peng-Robinson and literally ANY real mixture model. Nothing says "I've made terrible life choices" quite like trying to calculate fugacity coefficients at 3 AM before your p-chem final.

Factorial notation strikes again! When the student answers "5!" to "117 + 3," they're technically correct because 5! (5 factorial) equals 120. It's that beautiful mathematical loophole where 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 120. Meanwhile, both student and teacher are congratulating themselves for completely different reasons—one for being accidentally correct through mathematical trickery, the other for thinking they've successfully taught basic addition to someone who clearly needs it. This is why mathematicians shouldn't be allowed to teach elementary school. We make everything unnecessarily complicated and then feel smug about it.

Every science student's nightmare in two panels! 😂 That moment when you're walking along, thinking you've got everything under control, then BAM—you realize your lab report is a complete disaster. The perfect metaphor for when your experiment goes perfectly until you have to actually write up what happened. Nothing quite captures the academic despair of staring at your jumbled data and thinking "How am I going to explain THAT to my professor?" We've all been there, frantically rewriting conclusions at 3 AM while questioning our life choices!

The eternal battle between physicists and mathematicians in one perfect exchange! Physicists are all about practical approximations—"close enough" is practically their motto. Meanwhile, mathematicians are sitting there hyperventilating if you don't rigorously prove every microscopic step. When a physicist says "I think you're over-thinking it," what they really mean is "Stop making this harder than it needs to be—just round π to 3 and call it a day!" The mathematician's response? "I think you're under-thinking it"—translation: "Your shameful approximations make baby Euler cry." This is basically every interdepartmental meeting in STEM history compressed into two lines. Pure gold.