Every type of professor you’ll have in college

I can smell your coffee breath from here

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From your first day as a doe-eyed freshman to your final class as an embittered senior, professors can be divided into two universally-accepted personality types. There are the ones everybody loves, who make the weekly hour you spend with them as painless as possible, who are endearing, friendly, encouraging. And then there are the total assholes, the ones who stretch out every second of your lecture into a series of unbearable, crushing defeats – they push the definition of tenure to its very limit. Each of these two personality types can each be split into dozens of variations, which you’ll need to navigate if you have any hope of saving your GPA. Here’s the definitive run-through of every professor you’ll have in college.

Professor going through a messy divorce

He’s always late, always scatterbrained and always manages to bring up Stephanie every lecture. “Take your reviews with you,” he calls out as the class begins to file out. “As long as you don’t take my kids like Stephanie did!” He tries to laugh it off, wheezing uncomfortably as tears leak out from the corners of his eyes.

The professor who is immune to your emotions and struggles

It doesn’t matter if your cat has died, your house has been repossessed, your car has been jacked, your roommates have stabbed each other, your grandmother is literally on fire, your hands have been crushed in a machine accident and you can’t type, Professor Gilligan will die before he grants you an extension on this essay.

The professor who let his OChem class get 100 on the quiz because one guy threw a balled up piece of paper into the trash

Professor who so clearly wants to fuck one of his students

He just won’t stop staring at me.

Professor who so clearly is fucking one of his students

At what point does this get weird? Your friend Jennie started staying late in class for “extra help,” going round to his house for “a special office hour” and away to his lake house in Vermont for “a special romantic getaway for two.” Something must be up.

The one who shoehorns in a outdated cultural reference to be relevant

I, too, have seen The Matrix.

Effortlessly European professor (hot edition)

This professor exists and his name is Pietro Boselli

Jan (pronounced as if it had 1000 “a”s) is from Sweden. He has impeccable bone structure and the sort of effortless style that means he can wear mustard cords three out of five days a week and still look outstanding. He’ll be biking to class, his blazer flapping in the wind, his perfectly coordinated scarf draped handsomely around his neck but not distracting the eyes from his gorgeous bone structure. Is he 40? Is he 19? Is he 105? You may never know, but you will do everything you can to please him.

Effortlessly European professor (not so hot edition)

The male professor who conceals his hatred of women very thinly

The giveaway is when he’s just a bit too gleeful when women on occasion get the answer wrong in a science class, confirming, in his mind, some fairly heinous opinions on women in STEM. Checkmate, feminists! My subreddit shall hear about this tonight!

The one who tries to ‘open your mind’ with absolutely no heed to the syllabus or having to sit midterms in a matter of weeks, I mean what is this, I’ve actually learned nothing but platitudes about saying controversial things and it’s too late to change my classes now, my GPA is dropping like the Hindenburg and he wants to talk about opening my mind AGAIN I cannot

The professor who wants to be known as the funny one

“And of course, we all know the difference between cats and commas,” he says – it’s always a he – smiling, letting his audience know a gag is coming. In another life, in his head, he would have had a career as a talk show host, effortlessly cooking up hot repartee with his celebrity guests. “The difference between cats and commas,” he says again, just in case you weren’t able to keep up, “is that one has claws at the end of its paws… the other is a pause at the end of a clause! Ha ha!” He looks across the room, desperate for a flicker of amusement. A polite student manages to breathe heavily out of her nose, the closest she can manage to a laugh, saving him slightly. It’s not the first time she’s heard this.

The professor who is re-reading his notes from last year’s lecture on the same topic like you haven’t shelled out $50,000 a year for this

This isn’t worth the paper it’s printed out on.

Professor who has two PhDs but has not grasped basic personal hygiene

I once had a Scottish professor called Hamish. Hamish was brilliant in his field, an expert in nuclear proliferation as it impacted on Baltic states during the Cold War. One unimaginably complex concept that Hamish never grasped was washing. He turned up to every class in the same button down shirt and stained vest combo, his shoulders littered with a thousand dead skin cells. His breath reeked as he leaned in to offer some astute analysis on Soviet satellite states. He may have been a genius, but he was just too weird to impart any real knowledge.

Coffee breath prof

I can smell your third macchiato emerging from deep inside your throat, and I can hear the sound of your dry tongue unsticking from the roof of your mouth when you speak. Please, for the love of Christ, drink some water.

Whisky breath prof

It’s 10:30 in the morning.

Biased TA

They say to be a great teacher you need to live and breath your subject until you know it inside out and backwards. Salim takes this advice very much to heart. As a comrade in the global fight against the bourgeois elite, he takes everything class-related a bit too seriously. He casts a disparaging eye towards anyone wearing any clothes that cost more than ten dollars and probably has a bit too much desire to live in Stalin’s Russia.

On a knife-edge emotionally TA

Getting accidentally called “professor” by a clueless freshman is the highlight of their underpaid, undervalued day.

The one who quotes Judith Butler like it’s scripture

Bobcut. Short hair. Thick-rimmed glasses. Dark clothes. Perfected power stance. Icy stare. Tells off female students for saying “sorry”. The word “heteronormative” rolls off her tongue like it’s a curse. If you’ve got a penis, you’ve got a D.

The indecipherable business school professor

His emails are ALL IN CAPS.

The professor who cannot grasp eye contact

Professor Conley is doing that thing again. He can’t look anyone in the eyes, for some reason, but instead tries looking above you to some point over your head. He might try looking at your shoes later, and if he’s feeling brave, he’ll try looking at your chin, just anywhere, anywhere but in your eyes.

The professor you see out at the bars on the weekend

Two options here. Either you see them at the bar and they greet you like you’re a long lost friend, buy you a drink, and they tell you to have a great night. Or you see them with their friends, they cringe and say “oh shit not this kid” just when they think you’re out of earshot.

The professor who says ‘going to the bars this weekend, I’ll bet’

“Ah, Friday night out as a young woman. College life! Wonderful. You’ll be hitting the bars, eh? Drinking with your fellow… girls? A group of you, all together, dressed up for a big Friday night on the tiles, no doubt? Haha, if I were 30 years younger, I’d be buying you a drink at the bar and asking for a dance!” Please stop salivating.

The professor who says ‘I don’t know, can you?’ when you ask to go to the bathroom

I want to crawl into a hole.

Professor Ross Geller

The professor who has not mastered using a laptop properly

Professor Gordon fires up his laptop to begin the lecture, and connects it to the projector. A picture of his MacBook profile appears, and it is a head tilted back, mouth agape, eyebrows frowning, eyes straight down the nose dad selfie. The class giggles. He goes onto Chrome to load his presentation, and you can just about make out the other tabs on his browser: “how to trim nose hairs no pain”, “Olive Garden discount voucher” and “how to erase browser history properly this time.” Your heart cries out for him.

The professor who never shows up

It’s not like you have anything better to do?

The professor who arrives late and breathless, who then delivers the entire lecture out of breath and sweaty

Huff huff, good morning everyone, sorry I’m late huff huff, someone parked in my space again… had to run over from the Psych building…now today, has everyone read the huff huff huff notes for the 1848 revolutions cough cough. If everyone could please turn to page heeeeurgggh.

The professor who continues talking 10 minutes after the lecture ends

“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words: Wait and hope.”

― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

The professor who unsuccessfully asks everyone to sit closer

“I don’t bite.”

By Amanda Ross, Charlie Capel, Josh Kaplan, Matt McDonald, Caroline Phinney and Harry Shukman.