Creating PhD Comics

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00:00:15.10 My name is Sarah Goodwin, I'm a fifth year graduate student at UCSF
00:00:19.06 and today I'm going to be interviewing Jorge Cham about PhD Comics,
00:00:24.18 also known as Piled Higher and Deeper. And PhD Comics follows the life of several graduate students
00:00:31.09 as they embark on the trials and tribulations of graduate school.
00:00:35.12 and he writes about things like dealing with advisors, procrastination, and the endless search for free food.
00:00:42.25 I thought that maybe we could start off just by talking a little bit about how you got started
00:00:48.03 drawing comics and how you drew from your own experience in graduate school.
00:00:52.21 Yeah, well, thank you or having me here, Sarah.
00:00:55.18 So the way it all started was, it was my first term in graduate school,
00:00:59.21 I was in the PhD program at Stanford University studying mechanical engineering.
00:01:05.13 So I did robotics for my PhD. And I was looking through the student newspaper there one day
00:01:11.11 and there was an advertisement for, they were calling for comic submissions from students
00:01:16.11 and I imagined they were probably asking for undergraduates
00:01:19.06 cause, you know, most of the papers have comics from undergraduates
00:01:22.17 But I was talking to some grad student friends of mine
00:01:26.11 including my brother who had gone through grad school
00:01:28.13 and we were just saying, like, don't they know, like all these undergrad comics
00:01:32.21 they're always about how stressful it is to be an undergrad
00:01:35.05 but don't they know grad school is when the real pain begins.
00:01:38.22 And so, kind of this lightbulb kind of popped up in my head and somebody said
00:01:45.08 "Hey, yeah, there should be a comic strip about what its like to be a grad student."
00:01:48.27 And so I thought, "Yeah there are a lot of stories kind of about this process
00:01:54.20 of starting grad school; of what its like when you first get to campus,
00:01:57.10 what its like to try to match with a professor, and trying to impress them
00:02:02.00 and you know, kind feeling like you're just part of this really huge pack of
00:02:06.03 really kind of talented and intelligent people and getting lost in that."
00:02:11.04 I just thought there were a lot of stories that I hadn't seen before told anywhere else.
00:02:16.14 And so, just kind of on a whim, I just drew a few as a submission
00:02:22.28 to the paper and that's how it all started.
00:02:27.07 And when did it ascend beyond the Stanford newspaper?
00:02:32.16 Well, early on, you know, I might date myself, but this was sort of back before even,
00:02:40.13 at around the time Google started. So that might tell you how old I am.
00:02:44.23 But, back then you know, it was the Silicon Valley, and so everyone was having their own websites
00:02:50.26 and putting everything they did on the web and so I just put these comics on the web
00:02:54.01 and I reserved the name phd.stanford.edu and some how they gave it to me.
00:03:00.17 I don't think you could get away with that now.
00:03:02.24 But I did that, and I put the comics up there
00:03:05.05 and so, and then the ones that appeared in the newspaper, they would have the URL
00:03:08.20 down on the bottom right corner.
00:03:11.11 And so, I just put them up on the website and I think, you know,
00:03:14.20 what kind of, what's happened is that, you know, people will read it there,
00:03:17.12 then tell their friends who they knew from undergrad who were going to other grad schools
00:03:22.09 about this website and then those people would tell their friends around them and their lab mates.
00:03:26.03 And then those people would then tell their friends from undergrad
00:03:29.05 at other universities and so its kinda spread out, kinda like a virus out into the world.
00:03:37.18 And so, how many, how often did you draw from your own experiences
00:03:41.05 in graduate school or your classmates' around you when you first started the comics?
00:03:45.23 Yeah, its always been kind of drawn from real life comic strip
00:03:51.10 Even if it wasn't my experience, at least somebody that I knew or that I had seen in somebody else.
00:03:56.28 So I try to always kind of stay true to that, like, it has to be funny, but it has to
00:04:06.00 bring some sort of emotion or some kind of situation that people can identify with.
00:04:11.03 That's what I try to do.
00:04:13.01 So, are any of the characters that you follow based on any of your friends or yourself?
00:04:18.04 No, so officially, its not based on anyone that I knew or worked for
00:04:28.04 or dated, you know, but really, yeah, its all kind of based on people that I knew at the time.
00:04:37.16 So, I like how the characters all kind of have their own personality
00:04:40.09 and they really stay true to that personality throughout the strip.
00:04:43.29 Well, thanks, yeah, at some point, yeah, its funny, at some point these characters,
00:04:48.17 they were basically somebody that people can take a life on their own
00:04:52.09 you know, its kind of funny, I don't really tell these characters what they're gonna do
00:04:55.15 or what, what's going to happen to them, I just kind of think about them and
00:05:00.05 try to catch up with them and they sort of tell me what they're doing
00:05:03.00 and how they react and things like that.
00:05:04.21 So when you started gradaute school, did you, were you aspiring to be
00:05:08.08 an academic, was that kind of the...
00:05:10.28 Yeah, for sure, that was the plan and I mean, I knew that I wanted to be
00:05:13.20 a professor, like my sophmore year of undergrad. So I had these pretty like,
00:05:19.08 dynamic professor that I thought "Wow, that's really cool!" and that
00:05:22.01 if I could do robotics for the rest of my life, then that's even cooler.
00:05:25.07 So I was really set on the academic track for a long time, for over ten years.
00:05:31.26 After I did my PhD, I applied to faculty positions, and I was kind of in a two-body problem
00:05:36.28 with my then girlfriend at the time and so I ended up taking this kind of
00:05:44.00 adjunct faculty/post-doc postion at CalTech.
00:05:48.08 Yeah, where your ID says faculty but your paycheck says post-doc.
00:05:54.25 And as an adjunct professor, did you kind of, has your attitude, or view of
00:06:00.00 graduate students change at all?
00:06:02.18 A little bit, it is kind of interesting when you step on the other side
00:06:07.06 you know, I was sort of working with graduate students for this project that I was involved in
00:06:13.04 and so that's kind of when I learned the difference between laziness and procrastination.
00:06:20.24 So there's kind of this distinction there.
00:06:22.26 Laziness, that's when you don't want to do anything, and you don't do anything.
00:06:27.05 You know, procratination, it just means you don't want to do it right now.
00:06:32.16 And so if you eventually get it done, then its procrastination, if you
00:06:35.03 fail to do it then its laziness.
00:06:36.29 What made you decide to step away from being an adjunct professor
00:06:40.28 and go onto writing the comic strip and touring fulltime?
00:06:47.20 Well, it was kind of a difficult decision.
00:06:52.01 I kind of when through this kind of crisis of the ego.
00:06:55.14 Cause, you know you spend so many years with this goal in mind
00:06:59.18 to be this professor and its a very kind of prestigious goal and you tell everyone you know
00:07:05.08 and you feel like everyone you know expects that from you,
00:07:09.22 and so its really difficult kind of let go of that and persue something else
00:07:15.06 But, the decision wasn't that hard for me, I guess.
00:07:17.26 I was pretty lucky in that sense. I mean, I had been at CalTech for two years already
00:07:23.24 and after two years, they kind of start, you know, drumming their fingers
00:07:26.24 to see what else you're going to do. So, your PhD kind of has a half-life.
00:07:32.24 And that starts to decay after a couple of years
00:07:37.06 So I saw that kind of decaying a little bit and at the same time I saw the traffic for the website go up and up
00:07:42.28 and so I just kind of said, "Hey, I'll just switch curves"
00:07:46.15 and so that's where I've been.
00:07:49.13 You found a career where you're doing what you love and you get to kind of tour the world
00:07:53.01 and meet all of these people. I guess, what advice would you give to
00:07:56.17 graduate students right now, who are trying to figure out what they want to do with
00:07:59.23 their life? Whether its academia or something else that they might be passionate about.
00:08:07.07 Sure, well, first, good luck.
00:08:11.15 And second, don't do a comic strip about grad school because I don't need the competition.
00:08:18.15 But yeah, I mean, you know, I kind of tell people that, you know, you do need a job,
00:08:25.23 at some point. And being a professor is just another job.
00:08:29.29 I mean, its great if you enjoy it and you love it,
00:08:34.11 and at the same time, you know, life is short as well, so if you're not happy doing what you're doing
00:08:39.29 and you can do something else, and, you know, why not?
00:08:43.27 Why not take that leap?
00:08:45.05 I would like to thank you for coming speak with us today
00:08:48.00 about your career and your comic strip
00:08:50.16 And you can find Jorge's comics at phdcomics.com.

This Talk

Speaker: Jorge Cham

Audience:

General Public
Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: December 2010

Talk Overview

Jorge Cham tells graduate student Sarah Goodwin how and why he created PhD Comics, the comic strip about life as a graduate student. He also gives some advice on leaving the traditional academic career track to pursue new directions.

Speaker Bio

Jorge Cham

As a PhD student in engineering at Stanford, Jorge Cham submitted a comic strip about graduate student life to the university newspaper. This initial submission grew into PhD Comics. After a few years as an adjunct professor at the California Institute of Technology, Cham now pursues his career as a cartoonist full time. Continue Reading