PhD Comics comes to U of T!

I'll tell you when I'll be done when you tell me your cup size, waist, and number.

This was me over the Christmas break. I had basically that exact conversation with my prof.

Santa didn't leave me a finished thesis either :(

Jorge Cham, the creator of PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) comics came to U of T yesterday to give a talk. It was entitled "The Power of Procrastination". He's a pretty good speaker and got a lot of laughs out of the audience. Aside from a few undergrads and faculty, the crowd was almost entirely grad students. It was pretty spectacular to see grad students from all over the university. There was a shockingly large number of females in the audience, may be even close to 50%. That is definitely something I had never witnessed before for anything related to grad school. Thank god for PhD's in humanities!

At one point, Jorge was talking about why go into grad school in the first place, and mentioned the nice lifestyle of grad students, strolling into the office at 10. People chuckled, others were like "No, 10's too early..." Jorge was like "11?" The audience was still not completely satisfied. Jorge asked "Ok, how many of you came directly to this talk from your apartment?" My hand shot up, along with a couple others. The talk started at noon :)

He jumped all over the place in his talk. He talked about how the comic came to be and his theories about grad life. Most grad students feel that they are overwhelmed with work, but when asked what they had to do, they replied with things like sports, organizing events, sewing classes, procrastinating things, etc., but that they should be doing research!!! I completely identify with this. I should be doing research. In fact, I should be doing research now. No, I take that back. It's 3:45 am and my bus leaves at 8 am to go snowboarding. I should be sleeping :p

Anyways, he told us not to feel guilty for procrastinating and that procrastinating has a bad rap as it is commonly equated with laziness. Laziness means not wanting to do something. Procrastinating means not wanting to do something *now*. It's ok to procrastinate. There were more points and funny things, but I can't think of them right now b/c I'm sleepy. I was napping in class today, which is brutal when there are only 10 people in your class :s

The whole talk thing was a scam though. It was sponsored in part by the U of T Career Centre and they handed out all these propaganda pamphlets and the organizing lady was telling us about the Career Centre and shit and tried to put a moral to the story. Then, the book signing was in like this tiny back room of the Career Centre and they had all these stations and posters set-up, not unlike a science fair. What a scam!!! They were just trying to lure us into that place the whole time!!! What's even worse is that they advertised free food, and it was the worst free food I've ever seen. There were like 10 cookies. Not even good cookies either. They were like the crappy assorted variety for $2.

Anyways, PhD Comics is one of the three webcomics I read. I've previously mentioned the other two I read, xkcd and Natalie Dee. PhD Comics is really only funny if you're in grad school. Funnier if you've been in grad school for a while...

Here are some of my favourites, aside from those at the top of this post:

• Three Laws of Graduation


• The Lab Food Chain


• Grad Student Work Output


• Addressing Reviewer Comments


• The Author List


• 10 Year High School Reunion