Jorge Cham had barely begun a Ph.D. program in robotics at Stanford University when he decided he had something to say about the trials and tribulations of being a graduate student.
The outlet for his message: the university’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily. Cham, a self-taught artist, created a comic strip called Piled Higher and Deeper — PHD Comics for short. The first strip made fun of how close together graduate students were seated in class.
Twenty years later, Cham — known as the “Dilbert of Academia” — is still chronicling life in higher ed. He ultimately turned drawing comic strips and posting them online into a career.
Apparently many people can relate to the humor that Cham says “is usually embedded in a nugget of truth.” He has given hundreds of lectures worldwide, and his comics have been turned into a feature-length film — and a sequel. Cham has also had six collections of his comics published, with the most recent one — a 20th-anniversary edition — backed by more than $234,000 in pledges on Kickstarter from nearly 2,800 fans.
It just struck me that no one is really writing about these issues, no one’s told these stories. Maybe I should be the one to do it.
Cham, 42, spoke recently with The Chronicle about leaving academe behind to become an independent artist, the reactions his comic strips elicit from fans, and his adviser’s response to his early work.
I know about your academic background, but what kind of artistic background do you have?
My parents worked for the Panama Canal. One day my father was driving to the American side, and he saw a garage sale, and he picked up a huge box of comics and brought them home. There were Archie comics, Snoopy, Garfield. This was the mid-'80s.
My older brother and I didn’t know any English. But that’s how I learned — by reading all those American comics. As a kid you always try to copy the things that you like and you see, and so that’s what I did with those comics. That’s how I started drawing. I doodled in my notebooks a lot. I guess you could say I got my art education from reading a lot of comics as a kid.
Fast forward to you drawing your first strip. How come you weren’t too busy as a grad student to submit that initial cartoon to the Stanford newspaper that launched your career?
I really felt that the comic strip was something that needed to happen. I was going through this really intense experience starting grad school. My friends were all dealing with it too.
I was talking to a lot of my older brother’s friends who were in grad school, and they had the same issues. We’re all dealing with these common themes and common challenges with professors and research and publishing.
It just struck me that no one is really writing about these issues, no one’s told these stories. Maybe I should be the one to do it.
What did your adviser think about your work?
Fortunately, he was really cool about it. At Stanford it’s a very entrepreneurial environment. If you don’t have something entrepreneurial going on, there’s a lot of peer pressure to do that.
I never tried to avoid talking to him about it. The first day it came out in the newspaper there on campus, he said, “Jorge, I saw your comic strip today in the newspaper. Piled Higher and Deeper — that’s a very accurate description of what your next five or six years is going to be like.” I think he was a fan of it.
I’ve heard you say you’d wanted to be a professor since you were a sophomore. What was it like to shift away from a goal that you’d had so long?
I held onto this goal even after I finished grad school. I was a Caltech instructor, but still filling out job applications. It was pretty difficult to let go of that, to be honest. I had to shed my ego and be able to say, “All right, I’m going to be an artist, and I might fail and end up working at McDonald’s instead of as a professor somewhere.”
It was sort of clear to me that this was popular, that I really enjoyed doing it, and that I could possibly make a living at it. I always describe it as an easy decision that was really hard to make.
Your grad-school years are way behind you, and you obviously no longer work in academe. So how do you maintain a connection with graduate students to get the material that you need for your comics?
So basically, you want to know how deep are the scars? [Laughs.] It’s true. The scars are deep. I spent thousands of days in grad school. It’s not that hard for me to go back to some memory I have. It’s not hard for me to relate to being there.
But what happens these days is that people send me their ideas — through the website, Twitter, or in Facebook comments. Or if I go give presentations, graduate students or deans take me out to dinner or to a bar, and that’s when the real stories come out. It’s always been a community effort. I’m just the guy who happens to be an artist.
But you’ve got a full-blown business now — comics, T-shirts, lectures, two movies, books. Is this the path you always wanted to take?
It’s not like I had these goals and directly went after them. A lot of these things are happenstance. The opportunity came up, and I decided to do it. Like the movie — a lot of people wanted to see one, and then people wanted to see a sequel. I do science communication, and we do documentaries. These are all things that sort of grew organically.
I notice that you hit the road a lot to talk to grad students about the power of procrastination. What role does procrastination play in your life now?
These days, as an artist, I procrastinate a lot still. There’s always something you can be doing. That’s how a lot of these side projects grow. Obviously, I’m supposed to be doing three comics a week for PHD Comics. But you get interested in something else, and then you think, well, that’s interesting. …
After all these years, what have you noticed about the responses that you get from people about your work?
They’re divided into a few categories. The most immediate feedback I get is “Oh, man, that is so true” or “I’m laughing and I’m crying at the same time, I don’t know how to feel about this.” People forward my work to other people, and that’s the best thing, to see that. Hopefully all of this means I’ve captured them in a way that feels true and not sort of just making things up.
I also usually get people saying they feel less alone. They would write me or come up to me at presentations and say, “I was stuck in a hole for a long time, and then I found your comics, and that made me realize that I’m not the only person going through this.”
Academia is a very isolated experience. You and your faculty adviser know the details of what you’re struggling with. There’s a certain competitiveness in academia. No one talks very openly about their struggles, like, “I don’t know if I’m going to solve this research problem.” No one says these thoughts out loud. But seeing them expressed in a comic strip — and one they can tell is popular — they can see that they’re not the only one.
How long do you think you can keep drawing comics?
When I published the first collection of comics, 300 comics, I thought at the time, “I just did 300 jokes about academia. I couldn’t possibly make more. This is probably the only book I’ll ever publish.” Then I did another 300, and I thought that would be it, and I should probably start looking for something else to do. But I just kept going, and now I’ve done 2,000 strips. I’m thinking about what’s next.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
