Scientific career Memes

The road to scientific enlightenment is paved with... paperbacks? This meme nails the scientific career trajectory—you start thinking you'll be pipetting groundbreaking discoveries in a pristine lab, but end up devouring popular science books like they're potato chips. Nobody tells you in grad school that your actual superpower will be explaining why Hawking, Sagan, and Dawkins are technically oversimplifying things at dinner parties. The real qualification for being a scientist isn't lab skills—it's having strong opinions about which Neil deGrasse Tyson book is the most overrated. Let's be honest: most of us went into science because we were the weird kids who got "Cosmos" instead of toys for Christmas. And now we just cite these books in our grant applications and pretend we came up with the ideas ourselves.