I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to spend some of the past couple of days with a comic-writer who stud­ies the aca­demic exper­i­ence, and who might well have a greater aggreg­ate impact on sci­ence than almost any­one else I’ve ever met.

This week has been the SICSA gradu­ate stu­dent con­fer­ence, giv­ing SICSA’s  PhD stu­dents to share their ideas in front of a friendly audi­ence. As well as the sci­ence, one of the goals of the event was to improve the stu­dent exper­i­ence in social ways, let­ting them find new col­lab­or­at­ors and share their exper­i­ences and wor­ries. And what bet­ter way facil­it­ate this than by invit­ing the writer of PhD Com­ics, one off the most pop­u­lar inter­net comic strips, to come and talk?

The man behind PhD Com­ics is Jorge Cham, whom I have to say is one of the nicest guys you could want to hang out with.

Jorge has a PhD him­self, of course. His research topic was robot­ics, spe­cific­ally small, fast robots mim­ick­ing cock­roach loco­motion to move over uneven sur­faces. These sorts of sys­tems have huge poten­tial applic­a­tions, from space mis­sions and envir­on­mental rovers to accident-victim loc­a­tion and dis­aster recov­ery. How­ever, his main pas­sion even dur­ing his PhD was car­toon­ing, reflect­ing on and respond­ing to the gradu­ate stu­dent exper­i­ence. It star­ted as a print comic in a Stan­ford news­pa­per and pre­dict­ably did well in a place where the stu­dent dens­ity is so high.

But it was only when he put it onto the inter­net that it really took off. Like many things on the inter­net, there’s a law-of-large-numbers effect that can come unex­pec­tedly into play. The num­ber of gradu­ate stu­dents in any par­tic­u­lar place is usu­ally small, but integ­rated over the world you have a respect­able audi­ence — and PhD Com­ics now sus­tains around half a mil­lion hits per day.

The goal of PhD Com­ics is to act as an encour­age­ment to gradu­ate stu­dents. For any­one who’s been through it  — as I have — it’s over­all an extremely reward­ing, lib­er­at­ing intel­lec­tual, social and life exper­i­ence; it’s also a lonely, frus­trat­ing, depress­ing, isol­at­ing and self-critical one. It takes an effort of will to believe that you’re mak­ing a con­tri­bu­tion, mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies that oth­ers will find inter­est­ing and worth­while. Even those with unboun­ded self-confidence — which most cer­tainly does not include me, not now and cer­tainly not then — will find them­selves ques­tion­ing their motiv­a­tions and cap­ab­il­it­ies over the course of their PhD.

Often the most sober­ing part of the whole exper­i­ence is the real­isa­tion of how smart other people are. Most gradu­ate stu­dents come from being top or near-top of their under­graduaate class. They then land in an envir­on­ment where every­one was top of their class: the aver­age sud­denly lurches upwards, which can be dis­or­i­ent­ing. Not only that, but gradu­ate stu­dents gen­er­ally mix, on fairly equal terms, with postdocs and staff who have enorm­ously more exper­i­ence and who may in some cases be quite fam­ous within the lim­ited bounds of their fields, put­ting fur­ther strain on self-confidence.

I have a quite vis­ceral memory of going to my first graduate-level present­a­tion on a topic (type the­ory) that I thought I under­stood well — as indeed I did, at an under­gradu­ate level. Three slides into the talk, I real­ised that I knew abso­lutely noth­ing about type the­ory as it actu­ally is, its import­ant con­cepts, chal­lenges and uses. It was quite wrench­ing to real­ise the extent of my own ignor­ance. Con­versely, though, when I now talk about my own work I’m con­scious of the gap that exists between people with a reas­on­able (in every sense) know­ledge of a field and those with an expert know­ledge, and try to pitch the mater­ial accordingly.

Which brings us back to PHD Com­ics. Every indi­vidual gradu­ate stu­dent will feel over­whelmed at some point, and may not be able to reach out loc­ally to find sup­port. But they can reach out to the shared exper­i­ence that is the comic and its archive and see how oth­ers feel about the same situ­ations and chal­lenges that they face — and do so in a way that’s far more enter­tain­ing than talk­ing to a coun­sel­lor. I sus­pect this is an incred­ibly valu­able ser­vice, and one that I’d’ve wel­comed when doing my own PhD.

Does this help with the pro­cess of doing sci­ence? The com­ple­tion rates for PhDs is high –over 99% for Scot­tish com­puter sci­ence, for example — but the time taken, and stress endured, in that pro­cess var­ies widely. Any­thing that helps mit­ig­ate the strain, help­ing stu­dents cement their self-confidence and deal with the chal­lenges, is very much to be welcomed.

This got me think­ing. Robot­ics is an import­ant field, and it’s impossible to say what we lost in terms of research and innov­a­tion when Jorge fol­lowed his pas­sion. But it’s almost cer­tain that he’s influ­enced more sci­entific activ­ity, more widely, as a car­toon­ist than he ever would have done as a researcher or an aca­demic. Not every­one can be a researcher, but even fewer can provide insight and enter­tain­ment as car­toon­ists, and even fewer can spot and take the oppor­tun­ity to become the voice of gradu­ate stu­dents worldwide.

Fol­low­ing this logic a little fur­ther, I sus­pect that bring­ing Jorge over to SICSA may have been the single most effect­ive “soft spend” in the whole pro­gramme to date. We don’t have a prob­lem with com­ple­tion, but we do, like all uni­ver­sit­ies, have issues with con­fid­ence and motiv­a­tion, and any­thing we can do to improve those is money well spent. I wish I could think of a way to con­firm that value empir­ic­ally, but I can’t: but that’s not going to stop me recom­mend­ing Jorge as a speaker to any­one want­ing to improve their research environment.