Piled Higher and Deeper
| Piled Higher and Deeper | |
|---|---|
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| Author(s) | Jorge Cham |
| Website | http://www.phdcomics.com |
| Current status / schedule | Three times a week |
| Launch date | October 27, 1997 |
| Genre(s) | Academia, doctoral research |
Piled Higher and Deeper (also known as PhD Comics), is a newspaper and webcomic strip written and drawn by Jorge Cham that follows the lives of several grad students. First published in the fall of 1997 when Cham was a grad student himself at Stanford University, the strip deals with issues of life in graduate school, including the difficulties of scientific research, the perils of procrastination, the complex student–supervisor relationship and the perpetual search for free food. Cham continued the strip as an Instructor in mechanical engineering at Caltech, and now draws and gives talks about the strip full-time. Originally, the strip was drawn in crude black-and-white, eventually became grayscale, and finally became color in June 2004.
Piled Higher and Deeper introduced its main characters early in its run, and their personalities have remained fairly constant during the strip's several years of publication. In the strip's first few seasons, the characters were clearly Stanford University students, though the number of school-specific references and jokes has decreased since.
The title of the comic comes from an old joke about becoming a Ph.D., which explains that if one knows what "B.S." stands for (in this context, "bullshit"), then "M.S." stands for "More of the Same" (or "More Shit"), and "Ph.D." stands for "Piled Higher and Deeper".
One of Cham's recurring themes is to re-cast an item of popular culture in the grad-school milieu. Upon several occasions, the strip has included spoofs of popular movies, like The Thesis (The Matrix),Raiders of the Lost Dissertation (Raiders of the Lost Ark),I, Grad Student (a mixture of the book and movie I, Robot), and Summer days ("Summer Nights"). In addition, Cham has parodied television programs like The Jerry Springer Show, among others.
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