AboutWhat does the meme depict?

Engineering Professor is a meme in the style of an advice animal image macro, depicting a photo of a professor standing before a whiteboard filled with extensive notes. The captions typically characterize the professor as highly knowledgeable in academia yet somewhat lacking in technological skills, and portray him as having stringent academic expectations of his students.

OriginWho did it first?

The Engineering Professor meme originated with an image macro created on Memegenerator and first appeared on Reddit on March 28th, 2011. The initial caption humorously contrasted the professor's statements about the course's mathematical demands with the reality ('Says class won't involve much math / Entirely math'). The meme utilizes a photograph featured in a January 2010 profile article about Dr. Richard Gitlin, a professor at the University of South Florida known for co-founding digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies, originally published here and further mentioned in this article. This meme series focuses on the quirks of college-level engineering classes, reflecting on professors perceived as excessively demanding, contradictory, or inept with technology, themes commonly seen in similar advice animal memes.^[1]

Origin: 2011