About

Student Athlete is a dialogue meme popular on Twitter that mocks overly enthusiastic and self-centered student athletes who make every conversation about themselves and their physical fitness. In the joke, someone says something innocuous and the student athlete replies by somehow spinning the topic to physical fitness while peppering their response with emoji. The meme has expanded to spoof other subcultures, most notably STEM Majors.

Origin

On February 26th, 2017, Twitter user @beyonseh^[1] tweeted "me: hi
student athlete: yo 🤔 tf you complaining for 😤😂 i grind 24/7 💯☝🏽🤣 you don't see 👀 me crying 😳👌🏾‼️ foh lil bitch 😛🅱️🤣." The tweet gained nearly 19,000 retweets and over 39,000 favorites in two weeks (shown below)

Spread

The tweet was soon picked up by popular Twitter accounts that copy other popular tweets like @memeprovider^[2] and @memearea.^[3] On March 5th, user @TwoZeroSixGod^[4] posted his own variation of the joke, gaining nearly 4,000 retweets and 10,000 likes (shown below).

On March 10th, @memeprovider tweeted another variation and gained over 24,000 retweets.^[5] This likely caused an influx of student athlete jokes, which began gaining widespread popularity on Twitter on the 12th and 13th. The popularity was covered by SelectAll^[6] and The Daily Dot^[7] that week.

STEM Major

In the following months, the "Student Athlete" joke began being applied to various other subcultures, most notably, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors. As with "Student Athlete" jokes, the STEM major is portrayed in dialogue memes as being overly enthusiastic about their field. On March 15th, 2017, Twitter user @beyonseh,^[8] the same user behind the Student Athlete meme, tweeted "can we do the same thing we did with student athletes to STEM majors," gaining over 1,500 retweets (shown below).

This inspired tweets in the same style applied to STEM Majors. For example, Twitter user @probablynida posted a STEM Major joke that appeared exactly as the Student Athlete jokes, complete with emoji, on March 31st (shown below). On March 19th, Twitter user @rudy_mustang tweeted a variation in which a STEM major is in conversation with a kindergartner, gaining over 39,000 retweets and 116,000 likes (shown below, right).

Other Subcultures

STEM Major jokes would continue through 2017, outliving the Student Athlete meme. The popularity of STEM Major jokes led the meme to spread to other subcultures. For example, Twitter user @Primmademma tweeted a variation with Journalism majors on December 19th, 2017 and gained over 2,300 retweets and 11,000 likes (shown below, left). The same day, user @areyoumydoctor tweeted a variation of the joke with Music majors, gaining over 660 retweets (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References