When An Engineer Goes To Medical School

The perfect encapsulation of academic gatekeeping! Top panel shows a music professor drowning students in complex notation while saying "it's not rocket science." Bottom panel shows an aerospace engineer pointing at actual rocket schematics saying "it's not music theory." Every field thinks their complexity is the baseline while dismissing others as trivial. Meanwhile students are sobbing in both classes. Trust me, after 30 years in academia, I've seen engineering students crumble at Bach and music majors faint at differential equations. We're all just specialized monkeys pretending our particular banana is the hardest to peel.

The moment you realize this isn't about geography at all but a classic catenary curve problem that haunts physics students everywhere! That innocent-looking cable with its 80m length, suspended between two 50m poles with a 10m sag is basically asking "how good are you at the Pythagorean theorem's evil cousin?" The true distance between poles isn't just handed to you—you've gotta earn it through calculus and tears. Nothing says "we want someone who solves problems under pressure" like disguising a differential equation as a simple distance question. Tech interviews: where your ability to calculate the horizontal distance between two poles determines if you can manage a warehouse inventory system.

That suspicious moment when your code runs perfectly on the first try or your experiment yields perfect results immediately! Your brain goes into full panic mode because something MUST be wrong. No scientist or engineer in history has ever trusted first-try success. It's like finding a unicorn that does your taxes—too good to be true! The real scientific method has an unofficial step: "Doubt success more than failure." You'll spend the next three hours frantically checking everything because success without suffering feels like a cosmic practical joke!

This is mathematical genius disguised as a joke! The meme shows the digits 1-9 in reverse order (987654321) divided by the same digits in forward order (123456789), giving us approximately 8.000000729. It's the most unnecessarily complicated way to remember the number 8! Engineers and mathematicians everywhere are simultaneously facepalming and secretly writing this down for future reference. Next time someone asks you what 8 is, just whip out this formula and watch their expression shift from confusion to pure existential crisis! 🤓 Fun fact: mathematicians actually love these ridiculous "proofs" of simple numbers - they're like inside jokes that make us feel smart while being completely useless in practical situations!

The eternal struggle between theoretical physics and practical engineering! While physicists obsess over electron flow direction (negative to positive, contrary to conventional current that flows positive to negative), electrical engineers are just like "does the circuit work? cool." The convention was established before we knew electrons were negative, and now we're stuck with this delightful contradiction. Kirchhoff probably rolls in his grave every time an engineer shrugs off the discrepancy while successfully building something that works anyway. Physics purists in shambles!

The eternal academic identity crisis, visualized! Pure physicists look perpetually disappointed that reality doesn't match their equations. Engineers appear to be having an existential crisis about whether their bridge will collapse. The real comedy gold is in the crossovers. A physicist forced to build something practical looks suspiciously happy—probably because they finally get to ignore quantum effects and assume spherical cows. Meanwhile, the engineer wearing a Flash shirt is clearly compensating for the fact that no amount of applied science will let them break the speed of light. The four horsemen of the STEM apocalypse, where everyone secretly wishes they were in a different field while publicly claiming theirs is superior. Classic academic tribalism at its finest!