It’s Friday morning — 9 am. The Orgo professor babbles on while everyone sits bored as ever, waiting for something to spice up the day. It’s as the class loses all hope for an enlightening morning when it rises: a hand slowly creeping into the air from the audience.  A single tear falls down their faces. Then, everyone hears a voice echoing through the walls of the lecture hall: “I have a question.” 

The professor, only mildly peeved to be interrupted, takes the student’s question and life moves on. But not two minutes later does this humble scholar lift her hand up high towards the heavens once more. More insistent this time, she electrifies the room with her thought-provoking question. The professor⁠—beads of sweat forming on his forehead⁠—wonders if his PhD in organic chemistry can hold up to her earth-shattering questions. He attempts once more to sate her burning curiosity.

Students in the lecture hall look at the clock on the adjacent wall — with over half the material to go, only five minutes of class remain. But they don’t mind. What they are witnessing comes once in a lifetime.

Unsatisfied, this pillar of intellectual prowess raises her hand yet again, asking “Excuse me… can you explain that again, but like… better?” The professor is astounded. His bold, shrewd student, in asking for the twelfth time how many bonds are formed by carbon, makes him wonder whether he really deserves his tenure. Utterly defeated, he collapses into a plume of dark smoke and is never seen again.

Meanwhile, the class erupts in applause and rushes to her front row seat with pen and paper in hand, begging for an autograph. Also erupting through the crowd are scores of medical school admissions counselors, who trample one another to recruit their champion.

When a fellow classmate asks how she managed to transcend our feeble understanding of the natural world, her blank stare is worth a thousand words.