The Interfolio Blog

For those unfamiliar with PhD Comics; the irreverent, sometimes satirical, always hilarious web comic, you are truly missing out.  Developed and maintained full time by Stanford PhD graduate, Jorge Cham, the site has become the home page of struggling graduate students, frustrated faculty, and disillusioned administrators at colleges and universities across the country.

When our staff isn't busy building software, answering your abundant emails, and working on sales initiatives, we're reading PhD Comics.  And, so should you.

I've had the pleasure of working on one of these initiatives with Jorge -- an advertising campaign that will be running on the PhD Comics website in the next week or so.  As we worked together, I became more fascinated with the origin of his comic strip and was able to interview him for our members' (and my own) insight.

When did you first begin writing comics with academia in mind?

I started PHD comics my first term in grad school.  I was taking a full load of classes, TA'ing and doing free work for a professor in hopes that he would hire me as a Research Assistant, so drawing comics was probably not the best idea. But it seemed to me at the time that there were all these stories about the grad school experience that hadn't been told, so I felt compelled to do it.  Also, it was a good way to procrastinate.

How does life in graduate school compare to your work on PhDComics.com?

I travel to a few dozens of Universities worldwide each year and hang out with grad students, so it feels like I never left!  But the life of a cartoonist is not that dissimilar from that of a grad student. There's plenty of opportunities to procrastinate.

You have your PhD in Mechanical Engineering.  Do you ever miss the research you did at Stanford?

There's a thrill to research that I definitely miss.  I'm having fun so far being a cartoonist, though.

What advice do you have for graduate students working through their degrees today? Was there some tactic you used to stay sane while working through your PhD?

Well, the advice I give in my lectures is that academia is so flexible sometimes that it's easy to feel like you're never doing enough. My advice is to learn to relax a little and enjoy the process.

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