Piled Higher and Deeper 20th Anniversary Collection

Piled Higher and Deeper #6

by Jorge Cham

Celebrate 20 years of PHD Comics with us! This sixth collection of comics continues the saga of Cecilia, Mike Slackenerny, Tajel and the Nameless Hero as they deal with tough advisors, frustrating undergrads and writing their thesis. This collection contains exclusive essays by Jorge Cham on why he started drawing the comics, who inspired the characters (including Prof. Smith!), and where all his ideas come from. Other highlights include PHD Comics' take on Dr. Who, Les Miserables, and Downton Abbey. Want to know how many academics it takes to get a Powerpoint presentation to work? Or where you stand in the lab/department hierarchy? This book has comics for you. It also includes Jorge's Tales from the Road comics and a handy guide to Academic Regalia.

Genres: Comics

200 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2018

About the author

Jorge Cham is a Chinese-Panamanian post-doc best known for his popular newspaper and web comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics). He first started drawing PhD Comics as a graduate student at Stanford University, and has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in three published book collections.

Jorge Cham received his Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in 1997, and earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He subsequently worked at Caltech as an instructor and as a researcher on neural prosthetics.

In 2005, Cham began an invited speaking tour of over 80 major universities delivering his talk titled "The Power of Procrastination". In this lecture, Cham talks about his experiences creating the comic strip and examines the sources of grad students' anxieties. He also explores the guilt and the myths associated with procrastination and argues that in many cases it is actually a good thing.

Reviews

[Erin Penn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike most 20th Anniversary Collections, this is not a cherry-pick of the last twenty years of the PhD comic strip, instead it is really Collection Six covering years 2012 to 2014. Note that while this is the last of the printed collections, Dr. Cham continued to make more strips and publish them at his website until 2021. Well, he really stopped sometime in 2019. No new strips were published in 2020 and only six more published in 2021.

In this collection he talks about the births of his son and daughter and how they impacted his strip in his author's notes -so if the last baby was born in 2014, then 2019 would be having a seven and five year old (guessing) and 2024 (when I am reading this) would be a 10 and 12 year old children - maybe older. He switched to longer form stories, looks like the most recent one is "Oliver's Great Big Universe", and his FaceBook page is still active (unlike his webpage which doesn't even include the 20th anniversary book). He gave us a career, over 20 years, of comics and academia humor; I guess he is allowed to start his second career (or is it third? - did his grad studies count as one?). We have really enjoyed the ride he provided with the comic strip portion of his life.

I loved this particular collection for Cecilia really cracking down on getting her thesis written. As someone in the publication industry, her struggles of getting words on screen is very real. p. 153 - "Ok, I need to transfer my thoughts from my head to this screen. C'mon, Write! -- (she brings her head into contact with the computer screen) They're Touching! Transmit! Transmit!" -- I feel this to the depths of my soul every time.

Great collection. Sad to come to the end of this series readthrough. But it is a great collection, and a great collection of collections.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 6th book in the collection, this book is made up of the comics from 2012-2014. It’s marketed as the 20th Anniversary edition, so it does have a few added essays from the author/cartoonist! I loved this so much, because you got some insight as to how the characters came about, and a little bit more info about Cham himself!

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite honestly what gave this book 5 stars for me, rather than 4, was the text discussion of Jorge's career and whatnot. I liked this webcomic back when it was coming out and was happy to finally read this collection.

[Federico Lucifredi · Rating 5 out of 5]

My wife and I used to read these in grad school. I could not resist reading the sixth collection, it has retained the same charm as the original... and it always makes you think, without hurting too much.