Get Ready For the Real World
Piled Higher and Deeper: Lecture and Movie Screening with Jorge Cham
Grad students, do you feel unable to get motivated about anything except checking email? Or experience frequent headaches trying to count how many years you've been in school? Then you are among the millions of young adults that suffer from "post-bachelor disorder", otherwise known as "grad school"!
A recent survey by U.C. Berkeley found that 95% of all graduate students feel overwhelmed, and over 67% have felt seriously depressed at some point in their careers. In this talk, Tech grad Jorge Cham recounts his experiences bringing humor into the lives of stressed out academics, examines the source of their anxieties and explores the guilt, the myth, and the power of procrastination.
Brought to you by the Student Alumni Association, Student Government Association and the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL)
TESTIMONALS FROM OTHER SCHOOLS
"Your lecture was very insightful and one of the most entertaining I've heard."
-Ayan, University of Maryland
"Thanks for helping us to keep a good perspective on grad life."
-Calvin, Princeton University
"It was so nice to go to your lecture and laugh for an hour about how life is for all of us. It is SO good to know that other people are in the same spot as you. It's something we often forget when we're caught up in papers and the drama of grad school."
-Betty, University of Utah
"Thanks again for the fun you bring into the labs and lives(!) of grad students."
-Bilal, Johns Hopkins University
Writer and Artist of Piled Higher and Deeper
Is currently the writer and artist of Piled Higher and Deeper, a comic strip about life, or the lack thereof, in academia. Often called "the Dilbert of Academia," PHD has appeared in the Stanford, MIT, Caltech and Carnegie Mellon newspapers, among others, and is published online where it receives over nine million page views a month from over 1000 universities and colleges worldwide. The strip has also 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, The NY Times and The Washington Post's websites. Four PHD book collections have been published with over 55,000 copies sold.
Jorge Cham was born and raised in the Republic of Panama. He obtained his B.S. from Georgia Tech in 1997 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, specializing in Robotics. He travels and presents all over the world to thousands of graduate students, faculty and administrators on the graduate student experience.
He was a Research Associate at Caltech from 2003-2005 and obtained a Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, specializing in Robotics. His research at Stanford focused on dynamic legged "biomimetic" robots that incorporate novel manufacturing technologies and design lessons from biology. The resulting prototypes are among the fastest recorded running robots ever created (for their size), and achieve robust locomotion with no sensory feedback.
His research at Caltech focused on Neural Prosthetics, specifically the design and manufacture of "Smart" Neural Implants, capable of driving micron-precision motors to actuate electrodes that autonomously find and optimize signals from live neurons.
