"Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry ... After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell

"Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry ... After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country." This matches my experience. During the final year of my Engineering degree I decided to take a third year particle physics elective because it sounded interesting. The course had no pre-requisites but it probably should have. I remember showing up to the first lecture and being one of the only non-science students in the theatre. The lecturer started talking about Hamiltonian's, Fermi-Dirac Statistics and Wave-Functions and it all just went completely over my head. There was a whole bunch of "foreign" concepts that were assumed. I ended up needing to check out a bunch of physics texts from the library and over the next few weeks I had to teach myself the 2+ years of physics knowledge the rest of the class was familiar with. I passed the course but it was a lot of work for what was supposed to be an elective.