1. Introduction

Need a Graduation Gift?: "Doctor" Mugs are back in stock, and we have the new TA Shirt! UK Spring Tour: Jorge will be speaking at 4 UK Universities April 15-19! Apr. 15 - Imperial College London Apr. 16 - Uni. Southampton Apr. 17 - Cardiff Uni. Apr. 18 - Uni. Portsmouth NC STATE + UCONN: Jorge will be speaking at NC State (6pm, March 27, Hunt Library) and at U. Conn. (5:30pm, March 28, Student Union) this week! Come on by or tell your friends who go to these schools! Click here for more info! Sign up: Sign up for new comics using our e-mail subscription, RSS Feed, by liking the PHD Facebook Page, OR following us on Twitter. Procrastination without preoccupation! The Science Gap: Watch Jorge's TEDx Talk: THE FINGERPRINT OF STARS: Watch the latest awesome animation! Click below! The 2013 PHD Calendar: is coming Nov. 16!! Mark your, uh, current calendars! Click here for the Preview! Watch the Latest Video: What is Open Access?

"Piled Higher and Deeper" (PhD) is the comic strip about life (or the lack thereof) in academia. "Piled Higher and Deeper" the comic strip has appeared in The Stanford Daily for the past nine years, and in the MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and Caltech newspapers among others. The strip has appeared or been featured in the journal Nature, the Chronicle of Higher Education, IEEE Potentials magazine, Math Horizons magazine, Stanford Magazine and Canada's The Peer Review magazine among others, and has been linked to by USA Today's and The Washington Posts websites. Three collections of the strips have been published: "Piled Higher and Deeper: A Graduate Student Comic Strip Collection" (ISBN 0-9721695-0-4) was first published in June 2002, and collects the first five years of the strip; "Life is tough and then you graduate: The