I Majored in Muk-Jji-Ppa During My College Years

Origin

This line did not start on the internet — it is a lyric from an opera stage. The source is "Rita", a one-act comic opera written around 1840 by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti, a small piece with only three characters: Rita, Beppe, and Gasparo. The plot follows Beppe, currently bullied by his violent wife Rita, when Gasparo — the previous husband everyone assumed was dead — suddenly reappears.

The scene in question is the contest over which man has to take Rita. In the original the two play morra, a traditional Italian finger game; the Korean production staged at Chungmu Art Center in Seoul on November 8–9, 2014 swapped it for muk-jji-ppa and the "zero" game, two playground games every Korean knows. It was the directorial debut of musical actor Yang Jun-mo, presented as a salon opera rather than a grand-stage production under the banner of "easy, fun opera." Lee Kyung-soo sang Beppe, Choi Jae-rim sang Gasparo, and Jang Yu-ri sang Rita.

The comedy lives in how the lyrics are twisted. The two men puff themselves up with boasts like "I majored in muk-jji-ppa back in college," but the joke is that the winner is the one stuck living with Rita, so both are straining to lose fairly. Operatic delivery worthy of a duel to the death, applied to a claim of having built one's academic career on rock-paper-scissors, is the entire gag.

Spread

The production is from 2014, but the meme is far more recent. A YouTube clip isolating the muk-jji-ppa and "zero" scene circulated and was rediscovered as gloriously absurd lyric writing, and the Korean trend outlet Careet featured it as "meme of the week" on March 29, 2024 — a decade-old stage recording finally detonating thanks to short-clip culture.

What followed was a template: keep "I majored in ___ back in college" and swap in anything. The standard is to lay some trivial skill over the original's grandiose operatic accompaniment, so the more pointless the subject, the better the result.

Usage

Declaring a trivial talent as though it were a credential — "I majored in instant-noodle cooking back in college"
Trash talk before a game or a bet
Mock-serious bits before pure luck games like rock-paper-scissors or ladder draws
Parody opening lines in self-introduction posts and profiles

Among people who know the original context — that winning is the bad outcome — the phrase carries an extra layer of "desperately trying to lose." Imitating the exaggerated operatic vibrato is customary.