Hoop Jumping V: ‘Piled Higher and Deeper’

This graph/cartoon appeared in this week’s Times Higher. I think it sums up the main potential danger of the PhD process very nicely indeed, which is why it (including the proclaimed “everything” level of undergraduate knowledge) made me laugh out loud.

Although “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Stanford alumni Jorge Cham seems to have taken off in a big way across North America, this is the first time I had heard of it. The www.phdcomics.com site, which explains itself here, contains lots of very funny – and highly accurate – visual and verbal material on the agonies and pitfalls of doing a PhD.