Grins for Grads
Jorge Cham makes the daily grind just a bit more tolerable. Cham, MS ’00, PhD ’03, creates the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper. His shtick is graduate student life, especially the nutritional, sleep and work habits peculiar to the species. PhD started as a Stanford Daily strip in 1997; it now appears in newspapers at MIT, Caltech (where Cham is a mechanical engineering postdoc), Carnegie Mellon and other universities. Online readership spans the globe, judging from fan mail. From an aerospace engineer in India: “Amazing comics, big fan base in IIT Bombay. Keep it up!” From a Yale undergrad: “Your comic strip rocks. I’ve decided not to go to grad school.” Cham claims 900,000 monthly page views and followers in 300 universities.
Like grad school, Cham’s cottage industry goes on and on. His self-published book compiling five years of the strip has sold 4,500 copies, and there are PhD T-shirts, tank tops and mugs. Cham’s characters may be incurable procrastinators, but his own pace impresses: a strip a day the first year and three strips a week since. Profits have gone to orphanages in his native Panama and to the World Wildlife Fund.
Art for Keeps
Cantor Center for Visual Arts
When the Cantor Arts Center’s recent show Picasso to Thiebaud closed June 20 (“The Work of Art,” January/February), 64 paintings and sculptures went back home to the alumni and friends who had lent them for the occasion. But seven will one day return for good as promised gifts to the museum. They include Picasso’s Courtesan with Hat (shown), and works by Deborah Butterfield, Richard Diebenkorn, ’44, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, ’36, Manuel Neri and David Park.
To add to the bonanza, the museum recently received a major oil painting by Sean Scully. The Irish-born artist says Angel was inspired in “a flash of insight that took place in a free and unburdened space”—that is, a flight from Pittsburgh to New York. The work is a gift from Jill, ’63, and John Freidenrich, ’59, JD ’63, and the Robert and Ruth Halperin Foundation. Angel can be seen on the museum’s second floor.
