(January 10th, 2012) Famous as a comic strip, Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD) has now been brought to life through Piled Higher and Deeper: the Movie. Grad school stories told from a humorous perspective.
Do you often feel frustrated by getting no results at all with your research? Have you suffered problems with your advisor? Have grants been cut from your department? Is your social life affected by your job?
If these issues sound familiar to you, you are probably “among the millions of young adults that suffer from Post-Bachelor Disorder, otherwise known as Grad school”, as Jorge Cham, creator of PHD comics once wrote in his comic strip.
A decade ago, he was actually one of them and earned a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. But parallel to it and almost by chance, he started developing a comic strip for the student newspaper at Stanford. These comics, whose purpose was to reflect “life (or the lack thereof) in academia”, eventually became the phenomenon now known as PHD comics.
Now, as many fans have wished, the Nameless Hero, Cecilia, Tajel, Mike and the funny and 'evil' advisors have been transformed from the cartoons into real flesh-and-blood characters. Piled Higher and Deeper: the movie was created and written by Cham and actually produced by graduate students at the California Institute of Technology. Among the crew, we find people doing Planetary Science, Chemistry Theory and Aeronautics. Indeed, not the best background to participate in a film but most of them have had previous experience as members of the Theater Arts at the California Institute of Technology (TACIT). Even though the movie is not characterised by a great performance, the idea of having real students and even professors has attracted the curiosity of many and lends an original touch to the project.
One of PHD comics’ goals is to make us laugh; this is also true for the movie. Through jokes and irony about life in academia, Cham borrows the structure of a scientific paper to create the narrative of the film. Going from the introduction to the discussion and conclusions, it tells the story of students learning to confront failure in daily research life and also to understand that there is more to life than what’s inside the lab.
Most of the funny scenes were inspired by the PHD comic strips published in the last 14 years. But ... heed our warning: jokes in the movie seem to be only (or at least “mainly”) understood by people that have gone (or are going) through grad school, particularly those who know the value of free food at conferences, the normality of working at weekends and during holidays, not to mention the anxiety of spending one (or two) years on a research topic only to finally obtain one simple figure of positive correlation, for example.
The film has been travelling around the world in the last weeks and it has been quite successful. At least, in the university where I study, two screenings were held and both were completely full. I had only seen the academic auditorium that crowded some time ago, when a Nobel Prize winner gave a talk there! It is really amazing to see how PHD comics has enabled graduate students to feel identified, no matter whether they study in USA, Iceland, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, India or Germany.
As with books or any other fictional scenarios, I guess that we usually prefer the characters as we originally met them. Thus, I confess, I do prefer the comics rather than the ‘real’ PHD characters. However, the experience of watching it was worthwhile, not only for the laughs, but mainly for sitting there together with many other graduate students feeling reflected in this parody of life in Grad school. I conclude by only repeating what I have heard from many students when they talk about Cham's job, “We are not alone!”
If you are interested in watching the film, you can check here whether it is coming to your university.
Alejandra Manjarrez
Also check out an in-depth review of the movie in the upcoming issue of Lab Times.