44 Times Higher Education 12 February 2009

Life as a graduate student can be stressful.It can be lonely, anxious and confidence-deflating, too... but it can also be funny.

That was the way Jorge Cham preferred toapproach what he calls the “pain” of his firstterm of a masters programme in mechanicalengineering at Stanford University – withhumour. Cham created a comic strip for andabout graduate students and their facultyadvisers. Eleven years later, his comic stripboasts hundreds of thousands of readers, plusspin-off books, merchandise and lectures.

“It was a time when the last thing I shouldhave been doing was drawing a comic. I was ateaching assistant, I was taking a full load ofclasses and trying to impress my professor. Butthere was an advertisement in the student paperlooking for someone to draw a comic.”

Undergraduates usually supply Americanstudent newspapers with their comic strips.But Cham’s brother, who also attendedgraduate school to study engineering, said hehad always thought there was a need for acomic strip looking at life for those pursuinghigher degrees “because that’s when the realpain begins”, Cham recalls. His brother evensuggested the strip’s name – Piled Higher andDeeper, or PhD for short. Cham later addedthe subtitle, “Life (or the lack thereof) inacademia.”

Populated by overworked and under-appreciated graduate students, unmotivatedundergraduates and absent-minded faculty,PhD is a world of grant deadlines,employment worries, political correctness andother sources of relentless angst that Chamsays reflect his own experiences as hesuccessfully studied for his masters and then adoctorate in mechanical engineering. Each ofthe characters, he says, “has a little bit of mymultiple personalities in them”.

Some characters have more Cham in themthan others. One, the Nameless Hero, isstudying in Cham’s field of engineering, hasspoken of becoming a cartoonist and has an

older brother who is an engineer, too. TheN. H. also has a younger sister, Dee, anundergraduate who is preparing for hergraduate-school entrance examination butwho otherwise spends most of her time eating,napping and talking on her mobile phone.

The character Michael Slackenerny is aperpetual student who began working towardshis graduate degree at some point in the1980s. He lives off food provided free atcampus events but has now finally reachedthe postdoctoral level.

One of Cham’s more popular creations isCecilia, an engineering student to whomwomen readers particularly respond. Chamsays his lectures draw a disproportionatenumber of women, despite their comparativerarity among the graduate-student ranks.

“You nailed down so well what it means tobe an overachieving girl in a man’s world,”one female reader wrote to Cham. “You reallydeserve an honorary ‘Geek Girl’ title.” A malereader said that he likes Cecilia so much hewants to marry her.

The social sciences are represented by Tajel,an anthropology student, and the humanitiesby Gerard, who studies medieval Scandinaviancultural philosophy and who has appeared inthe strip only twice during its run.

All the characters share a dry wit, a certainfatalism and ineffectively concealed fear.

Academia, says Cham, is a relativelyundisciplined environment, “so oneof the main themes that comes up [in the

comic] is procrastination.“There’s a constant sense of guilt because

there’s always more research you could bedoing, more time [spent] in the lab.”

Many of PhD’s jokes seem funny only topeople who live and work in higher education,such as references to “Einstein’s SpecialTheory of Research Inactivity”.

“And that’s the point,” Cham says. “But Itry to also add another layer in the sense that

heroGraduate student JorgeCham decided to lookon the bright side ofhis experiences andcreated a comic that isentertaining millions,writes Jon Marcus

Comic-strip

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Cham’s three books have sold 51,000copies collectively and he has beeninvited to speak at 140 universities todate, including Cambridge

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46 Times Higher Education 12 February 2009

at least some of the humour comes from theuniversality of the situations. What makesacademia funny is the high aspirations peoplego into it with and the egos that develop. Ithink that’s common to a lot of things in life.”

But the comic strip is primarily aimed atacademics, something that wouldn’t have beenpossible without the internet, Cham believes.Although it is now syndicated in studentnewspapers at universities includingStanford, the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Carnegie Mellon University andthe California Institute of Technology, hiswork is most widely seen on his website,www.phdcomics.com, which attracts morethan 600,000 unique visitors a month.

The site is free. Cham, who is 32 and livesin southern California, also lets student papersprint PhD without charge. He makes hismoney from sales of T-shirts, coffee mugs,calendars and three self-published books (oneentitled Life is Tough and Then YouGraduate), and by lecturing about thegraduate student experience at universities inthe US and Europe.

If there is a serious side to PhD, it’s that thecomic reflects a sense of the alienation somegraduate students feel.

“That’s probably the most commonfeedback I get from students, by email andwhen I go out and do these lectures,” Chamsays, “the sense that graduate students say theyfeel less alone [after reading the comic]. Thedoctoral process is such an isolating experience.

“They feel like they’re the only ones having

these difficulties with their advisers or theirfunding agencies, that they’re lost or theydon’t really know what they’re doing withtheir lives. That’s why I think the comic ispopular, because they see that there are otherpeople out there like them.”

Cham’s doctoral degree is also fromStanford, where he focused on robots andbrain-machine interfaces. He co-authored

such papers as “Hexapedal Robots via ShapeDeposition Manufacturing” and “Semi-ChronicMotorized Microdrive and Control Algorithmfor Autonomously Isolating and MaintainingOptimal Extracellular Action Potentials”,before teaching at CalTech from 2003 to 2005.But now he works on the comic strip full time,drawing it directly on a computer using agraphics tablet.

Some of Cham’s hard-earned academicskills come into play in his art, he says.

“Part of my research was in design – howengineers come up with ideas and select thebest ones. A little bit of that creative thinkingcomes into play, but mostly you learn a lot of

broad skills in terms of thinking analyticallyabout things.”

University faculty are portrayed in Cham’sstrips as generally affable, self-absorbed types.There’s the forgetful Professor Smith, forinstance, who takes credit for his doctoralstudents’ research and tries unsuccessfully toseem hip, and Professor Jones, whose adviceis fairly useless.

“There’s no implied criticism,” Cham says.“[The characters are] never mean-spirited orout to be hurtful. They’re really trying to gettheir job done. And one thing that has beenmade clear to me is that being a grad student istough but being a professor is even worse. Theyhave very high expectations on them, too.”

Cham’s own PhD adviser at Stanford, MarkCutkosky, says he is more or less a fan. “Thereare times when it is very funny and a quiteaccurate portrayal of postgraduate academiclife,” says Cutkosky, who reads the strip often.

Cham says he plans to continue for as longas he can. “I’ll do it until I can’t do it any more.Or, more specifically, until nobody wants toread it.”

There seems no imminent danger of that.Cham’s three books have sold 51,000 copiescollectively and he has been invited to speak at140 higher education institutions to date,including the University of Cambridge.

With 1.7 million graduate students studyingat American universities alone, and a fewhundred thousand more starting each autumn,Cham figures he has a market that is asenduring as it is stressed out. l

If there’s a serious side to PhD, it’sthat the comic reflects a sense of thealienation some graduate studentsfeel. ‘The doctoral process is such anisolating experience,’ says Cham

The comic is a world of grantdeadlines, employment worries,political correctness and other sourcesof relentless angst that Cham saysreflect his own experiences

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