Lol the code I wrote in academia was a war crime. I was loudly praised for it. Others adopted it and used it in their work, my god

Undergrads: I get dumber, they stay the same age.

That someone better is you. Research is always like that. If you started your project with all the knowledge you gained from doing it, it would only take you two weeks, sure, but the whole point of research is gaining that knowledge and teaching it to other people.

Holy crap was that Chalamet in interstellar?

Academia only really rewards novelty, but the scientific method is supposed to be a slow slog towards the truth with lots of redundancy and endless cycles of minor tweaks that in turn force you to tweak theories that connect so that our picture of the world maintains its internal coherence