Piled Higher and Deeper: The PhD Movie

Speaker:

Film Screening & Conversation with Jorge Cham

27 Sep 2011

7:00 PM

Great Hall, Memorial Union

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This film adaptation of the popular online comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper by Jorge Cham introduces audiences to the unique and funny culture of academia. Filmed on location at the California Institute of Technology, it follows four graduate students as they struggle to find balance between research, teaching and their personal lives. Jorge Cham, the author of the Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip, has been called the Dilbert of academia. His strip appears in numerous university newspapers and chronicles the struggles and humor of the lives of graduate students and stressed out academics. Cham speaks about his experiences as a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Stanford and as an instructor and researcher in robotics at the Cal Tech. Three books compiling his strips have been released: Life Is Tough and Then You Graduate; Scooped!; and Academic Stimulus Package.

A discussion with Jorge Cham will immediately follow the 67-minute film.

This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.