The Engineering Professor meme template encapsulates the collective trauma and dark humor shared by students in the STEM fields. It typically depicts a scene or personified figure representing the disconnect between simple classroom examples and the brutal complexity of actual exams. The humor stems from the trope of a professor claiming a topic is 'trivial' or 'straightforward,' only to present a problem that requires advanced knowledge or non-existent materials to solve. While it has various visual iterations, the core theme remains the same: a satirical look at the high expectations and often absurd difficulty levels found in engineering and hard science curricula worldwide.