The Philippine Online Chronicles

Grad students! Are you working too hard? This comic strip collection can help.

I am a grad student. This is my persona now. It is the self I identify with before thinking of myself as “woman,” “Filipino,” or even “human.” I live and breathe grad student life— from the cupboard stacked with instant ramen, to watching and re-watching Dollhouse and Battlestar Galactica instead of doing papers— you name it, I’ve done it, all for the postgraduate cause.

Procrastination is akin to a living god in the grad school world, and nothing can halt research progress like browsing webcomics. I have RSS feeds of all the best of the web: xkcd, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), Girls With Slingshots (GWS), Oglaf, and many many more, but by far my favourite and most-eagerly anticipated comic is Piled Higher and Deeper, or PhD for short.

Piled Higher and Deeper is a webcomic by Jorge Cham written from the time he was a student at Stanford University, until he became an instructor at Caltech. What began as a simple series of sketches back in 1997, about stressed out postgrads and indifferent professors eventually became a succession of comic books, merchandise, and recently, a movie.

What makes the PhD comics funny is not exaggeration, but the fact that all these problems are literally the life of a grad student. Some of the humour may be depressing at times, particularly jokes regarding years and years of being stuck in the same place, but those little moments of reality sucking are what makes Piled Higher and Deeper more realistic, and all the more compelling.

The comic basically revolves around the narrator (an unnamed grad student who is the epitome of all grad students), and his friends Cecilia, Michael Slackenerny, and Tajel. Auxiliary characters occasionally appear— such as Gerard, a major in Medieval Scandinavian Cultural Philosophy and the only humanities major, whose appearance was due to great demand from humanities grad students. The narrator and Michael are engineering students whereas Tajel is an anthropologist, and the lone social science major in the cast. No matter what your major is in grad school though, the characters and readers face the same challenges; namely, the difficulties of scientific research, the perils of procrastination, the complex student-supervisor relationship and the endless search for free food.

It works because we each know a Cecilia, Michael, and Tajel. We have friends who always try too hard, friends who make it a point to rally against every single thing, and that friend who knows where all the free stuff is and how to get it. And if not, hey, we might even be that person.

The only critique I have heard about the comic is that it only appeals to a niche crowd— that of grad students. To that I say yes, and so what? Every form of entertainment appeals to its own crowd, and no one makes a fuss about, say, making Twilight appealing to the intellectual elite. In addition, the comic title itself, “PhD,” should really give people a hint. In any case, grad students already get enough stress as it is, so stop bothering our sources of relaxation!

And of course, grad students are not the only people who can enjoy the series— former grad students and future grad students will almost certainly enjoy it as well, as I can attest to, I remember liking the comic back when I was an undergraduate.

In addition, The PhD Movie has recently been released and is currently touring university campuses around the world. The Australian National University was one of the first campuses to host a screening— with free pizza and Coke— and how could a poor, hungry postgrad say no to that? The movie in itself is rather flat. Even though 300 and Watchmen do a pretty good job of it, the fact is that it’s extremely difficult to translate comics into film. In the case of the PhD-Comic-turned-Movie, using the comic strip archives as elements of the plot proved detrimental to the general cohesiveness of the film. Many aspects of the movie take the form of set pieces and one-liners and long-time fans can even try their hand at “spot the comic”.

Nevertheless, the entire experience was fantastic. Aside from the fact that the characters not only looked exactly like their web counterparts and were endearing in their own way, the real value of the PhD movie is being in a packed lecture theatre with a couple hundred like-minded souls— laughing at the same jokes, thinking of the same references, and all in all being together as fellow postgrads. There is a certain joy that you get when an entire auditorium laughs at the scene where Cecilia walks into a classroom of students, with all of them looking up, sizing her up, and then look down again, each briskly perusing Facebook. Even though I came to the lecture hall alone and was in the midst of three hundred strangers, I felt the love (and the shared frustration regarding undergrads and Facebook during class hours).

Another enjoyable feature from the movie was knowing that all the actors and actresses were all Caltech graduate students, with the end credits detailing their current research and/or thesis status. These were real students, taking time out of their very real lives, to create a shared experience that reached grad students around the world. Kudos, Caltech!

In the end, grad school is a long, uphill grind. Collecting and interpreting data, synthesizing hundreds and thousands of journal articles into a coherent narrative and then putting it down on paper is a tough, sometimes impossible, but ultimately rewarding, experience. Grad student lives aren’t the cushy dream job non-grad students assume they are. The truth is, you need passion to be a grad student as well as the ability to fight to survive in the academe (as well as literally survive your day to day existence).

All grad students should read this. All wives/ husbands/ significant others of grad students should read this. I encourage those young enough to be thinking about potentially changing their lives with grad school to think long and hard, and read this comic. Seriously. And if you can take the egocentric undergrads, the indifferent professors, and all the ramen, then I say go for it.

All images from Jorge Cham's Piled Higher and Deeper webcomic.