Piled Higher and Deeper - Life (or the lack thereof) in Academia (also known as PhD Comics), is a newspaper and web comic strip written and drawn by Jorge Cham that follows the lives of several grad students. First published in the fall of 1997 when Cham was a grad student himself at Stanford University, the strip deals with issues of life in graduate school, including the difficulties of scientific research, the perils of procrastination, the complex student–supervisor relationship and the endless search for free food. Cham continued the strip as an Instructor in mechanical engineering at Caltech, and now draws and gives talks about the strip full time. Originally, the strip was drawn in crude black-and-white, eventually became grayscale, and finally became color in June 2004. (from Wikipedia)