Finally, today is the Jorge Cham talk (author of PhD comics), called the Power of Procrastination, since I thought it was last Wednesday. Hey, but last Wednesday was the Microsoft Windows Live talk and I got free pizza and a T-shirt so it wasn't quite a waste :) Just signed in so the U of T Career Centre knows that I'm here, because it's a first come first served basis. There seems to be a lot of people in the room here and Jorge was just here a minute ago and seems to have stepped out. There will be a book signing by Jorge right after the talk. Right now, the PhD comics are cycling on Powerpoint on the screen while we're waiting.
Jorge has just returned and we're waiting for about 5 minutes before he starts. So, in the meantime, I'm writing this blog post. Apparently, Jorge Cham came to U of T after approached by a student at U of T who contacted the Career Centre. Jorge started this work in PhD comics, when he saw an ad for a comic strip author in the Stanford University newspaper (the Stanford Daily). He's starting the talk and asked why the students came here to the talk, when they could be doing something else productive. He's really funny! He asked how many people are graduate students, how many are undergrads (which were only like less than 10), and how many are faculty (only one put his hand up, and he said to ask security to escort him out *laugh*).
He's now giving some U of T wikifacts. He gave an amount of money that what graduate students should be getting (517 million divide by 10300 students = $51,000 per grad student!). He's also talking about the distribution of U of T wiki-alumni, it's a great diversity of people, the longest in any school. One U of T wiki-notable is Simon Pulsifer because he is the largest contributor to Wikipedia.
Jorge was a grad student at Stanford for a number of years. He just showed a video clip of a robot running frantically, which is related to what he felt when he was doing his research, which is actually very relevant to grad students (and me). So, Jorge wrote the comic strip, Piled Higher and Deeper. TV and movies seem to ignore grad students in pop culture. One of the first movies about grad students was "The Seniors" in 1978 starring Dennis Quaid. In 1985, there was the movie called "Real Genius", popular among geeks. Then in 2001, there was the movie called "A Beautiful Mind", and then in 2003, "The Hulk". These are examples of movies of what can happen when you try to do a movie search.
There's this stereotype that grad students have this mad, crazy type of personality.
This was the beginnings of the creation of PhD comics, how do grad students think, what goes inside a grad student's complex mind. These are free food, keep advisor happy. Therefore the script for the PhD comics became about surviving in grad school, surviving being a teaching assistant, surviving meeting with your advisor, surviving late night homework questions, surviving grad student housing, surviving having to call home to explain to your parents, grad student etiquette, qualifying exams. Then, he started introducing various characters in the comic strip, like Cecilia, a woman in computer science (5% of the grad student population). He also introduced this grad student named Mike who's been in grad school for the longest amount of time, and to educate the new incoming grad students with his wisdom.
The big question: WHY!? Why do we grad students put up with all this stuff for survival? He's now comparing the average grad stipend in the US with someone working at McDonald's (the grad stipend is $14055, and McDonald's is $14040 so the different is only $15!). In 1997, PhD comics from the Stanford Daily newspaper went online. The comic strip then spread like a virus into the world. Apparently, this is a global mystery phenomenon, as he showed the list of all the schools that subscribe to PhD Comics (the list kept scrolling and scrolling!). He showed a list of disciplines that subscribe to the PhD comics, which were many!
Jorge gets 4 different types of reader emails. The first is "Oh God, I break down and cry each time there's a new strip, don't know whether to laugh or not". The second is like "Thanks for helping me slack off because I spent lots of time reading your strip!" The third type of email is "Cecilia is so hot, can I marry here?" (*laugh*) , Cecilia is his own imaginary character. The fourth type of email is that "The comic makes me feel less alone and makes me feel sane". There is another way to escape this madness. Which is "The Power of Procrastination".
Procrastination is not the same as laziness, laziness is you don't want to do anything, but procrastination is you don't want to do the thing now. Procrastination he argues is actually not a bad thing as many people think. There are many instances in history where procrastination has really worked. One example is Isaac Newton discovering gravity where he was under a tree instead of in a lab. Another example of famous procrastination was Albert Einstein. The third famous procrastination was Poincare where he took off and went traveling which made him forget his mathematical work. A fourth famous person who procrastinated was Isaac Asimov where he took 10 years to finish his PhD. And finally the most recent procrastinators are Yahoo and the Google guys who were grad students at Stanford. Rumour has it that Jerry Yang and David Filo went to categorizing the Internet when their advisor went on sabattical, yahoo!
Research also shows that people are less creative "under pressure" and people work better when under pressure. So what's the problem with procrastination? Basically, there are too many things to do, but not related to research (oh so true!!!). Why can't we just do the things we're supposed to do? The answer: Because we don't want to do them. Jorge has this grand theory of procrastination, which relates to Newton's Laws of Graduation.
Age of a PhD = flexibility / motivation
a = F/m
F = ma (Newton's law of motion, which is related to Newton's law of graduation)
Now's he's giving the theory and explaining m which is motivation and showing motivation in grad school in the motivat-o-meter. The motivation drops because of various factors due to before you were at the top of the class, and now everybody is like you, you feel dumber than before because you're surrounded by many intelligent people.
There is a book signing from him at the Career Centre, but unfortunately I have other business that I need to do and procrastinate! I've started to subscribe to his PhD comics, but I'll probably read it during the night and not during the day, otherwise I won't get any research done! During the question period, someone asked him if he was going to do a comic strip for professors to which he replied that's an even smaller market, but he did say that when his characters graduate and he still has the writing and creativity in him, it might be a possibility.
It was really a great talk and I'm glad I went to it!
Now, stop reading my blog, and get back to work!
On Technorati: procrastination, Jorge Cham, PhD
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