The Worst Exams Are Those With All Aids Allowed

The terror of seeing "only 5 questions" on a thermodynamics exam hits different. It's like the professor saying "I've prepared 5 separate ways to destroy your weekend, self-esteem, and will to live." Each question is basically a multi-stage rocket launch of pain that'll age you 51 years in 3 hours. The fewer the questions, the more each one feels like you're attempting interstellar travel with a calculator and pure desperation. Physics students know: "only 5 questions" translates to "hope you brought snacks, we're gonna be here awhile."

The pandemic learning gap strikes again! Someone actually paid attention during a Zoom class and the rest of us are SHOOK. While most of us were perfecting the art of looking engaged with cameras off (or mastering the strategic unmute-to-say-"thanks-professor"-then-immediate-mute technique), this note-taking overachiever just exposed our collective academic crimes. The true hero here isn't just sharing notes—they're shattering the illusion that any of us were doing more than counting ceiling tiles during virtual lectures. The digital equivalent of "wait, there was homework?" just hit an entirely new level!

Ever had to choose between mathematical frameworks? It's like picking between "Math: Easy Mode" and "Math: Nightmare Difficulty"! On the left, we have Set Theory - the friendly, approachable foundation where you start with an empty set and build your mathematical universe step by step. "Put anything you like in it!" they say cheerfully, with cute emojis and reassuring warnings about paradoxes. Meanwhile, Type Theory is that professor who begins explaining with "It's simple, really" before unleashing an incomprehensible avalanche of symbols, categories, endofunctors, and homotopy. The confused cat at the bottom perfectly captures every student's internal screaming: "THIS ISN'T EVEN A MEME IT'S A CRY FOR HELP!" This is basically the mathematical equivalent of choosing between taking the stairs and being shot directly into space! No wonder mathematicians develop that thousand-yard stare...

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.

That moment in your thesis when you've stared at data visualizations for so long that brutal honesty becomes your only coping mechanism. "A fancy plot I made" is just code for "I've spent 72 hours trying to understand what this graph means and I'm no closer to an explanation than when I started." The transition between blues? Probably significant. The weird line? Could be groundbreaking physics or just a software glitch. At this point in your PhD, they're essentially the same thing.

The expectation vs. reality of physics in one perfect image! Up top we have the romanticized version: stylish people with neat beards and glasses, the famous E=mc² equation (which everyone knows but few understand), and pretty cosmic galaxies. Pure aesthetic physics! Meanwhile, the bottom half shows the gritty truth: sleep-deprived students hunched over at 2AM, surrounded by quantum field equations that would make Einstein sweat, vacuum fluctuation graphs that look like someone's having a seizure, and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation that basically says "good luck understanding the universe, buddy!" The transition from "I love physics!" to "I'm being physically and mentally destroyed by physics" happens faster than particle decay in a hadron collider. The floor-sitting position is the universal posture of a physicist who has abandoned all hope of normal sleep patterns.