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Free food and procrastination with jorge cham.

Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) is a comic strip that depicts the hectic life of a grad student. Graduate Professional Council brought PhD creator Jorge Cham to campus earlier this week.

What little happiness exists in graduate school lies in precious hours of procrastination. Students eager for time excellently wasted should consider reading Piled Higher and Deeper Comics. Also known as PhD, the webcomic details the struggles of young academics. The author of these comics, Jorge Cham, recently presented a movie based on his comic and spoke at a University event sponsored by the Graduate Professional Council.

The inspiration for PhD came when Cham himself was a graduate student. “I got my Ph.D. at Stanford University studying robots that could run like cockroaches—that’s your tax dollars at work,” he joked. “An idea came up to do a comic strip about what it’s like to start off as a graduate student and what it takes to get a Ph.D. The comic is generally about academia: professors, teaching assistants and research assistants. It’s told mainly through the viewpoint of four grad students at different stages. Some are starting out, some are in the middle, and some are trying not to graduate,” Cham said.

The original strips were for the Stanford paper, but now they’re publicized online thrice weekly. “At the beginning it was very local. When it went online, I kind of very quickly realized that it had a worldwide audience. After that, I tried to make it as general as possible. I then started traveling to other universities, so that opened up a lot of new material, like grad students at the University of New Mexico who scan the skies with radio telescopes,” Cham said.

The strip’s immense popularity eventually led to demands for a movie. Cham weighed the idea for a while and eventually accepted. “So one day I just decided to do it. I had the idea of doing it all with real graduate students. The story is about real people, their passions and struggles. You don’t really think of them as people. They grade your papers, but you don’t think of their lives.”

About 400 students attended the screening, proof of the strip’s popularity here. The film portrays many aspects of Cham’s graduate experience, from the simple joys to the awkward interactions.

“Free food is a big part of graduate student life. You’re always trying to save a dollar,” Cham explained. “In graduate school, you’re expected to be more independent, more autonomous. Your relationship with your professor is uneasy. You’re in this state of limbo. Should they be holding your hand, or should you be totally independent. It’s a little bit vague.”

Finally, Cham praised procrastination and its benefits for a researcher. “I think we have this uneasy relationship with procrastination, but I say it’s not such a bad thing, for a couple of reasons. One, it’s actually an important part of the creative process. A lot of Eureka moments occur when someone’s mind is thinking of something else. There are scientific studies that show that if we try to focus too hard on problems it’s actually harder to solve them. Procrastination also tells you what you’re really passionate about, since you’ve chosen it over what you’re supposed to be doing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll change careers, but it’s useful.”

Tags: free food , Jorge Cham , procrastination

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Balanced Diet | Best of the First

Sep 18, 2013

I love this joke because a) it's a funny punchline, and b) my brother came up with it. This was the first and only time he actually sent me a joke, with a sketch and everything. My brother was a big part of starting this comic. It was his idea to name it, "Piled Higher and Deeper".

Comments ( 5 )

Top comment

I did not know Americans ate anything other than fast food and cake?

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