PHD Comics is one of the many wonderful little things that makes gradual school more bearable. While at first glance PHD might logically stand for Doctor of Philosophy, it technically stands for Piled Higher & Deeper in this case. A pretty accurate description of grad school I must say... The strip is written by a fellow who did his PhD in engineering at Stamford, and what makes it so brilliant is how frighteningly true many of the comics are.
Today's comic is brilliant. It's essentially a list of phrases you'll never see published, but one or more of which could be honestly applied to probably just about ever paper ever published in a peer-reviewed journal. Which brings me to another point. Why does nobody publish negative results? While understandably lots of negative results are crap, there are also lots of negative results that would be useful for people to know about before they go off to be the 123857th person to attempt and fail at _____ experiment.
For your enjoyment, here are a few of my favorite PHD comics that particularly hit home.
Exclusive Focus
If TV Science Was More Like Real Science
Seminar Bingo - This is possibly the best ever. One of the comic's readers made a little algorithm that will shuffle the squares, so you can have variations of the board so each player's is different. One of my classmates printed and laminated several copies, so now we can play seminar bingo whenever we want. :) Several times during seminars we've made lists of bingo items specific to our department - Dr. Hruby falls asleep, Dr. Brown arrives as the seminar is ending, etc.
I used to be a grad student. And now I'm not (thank goodness). I spent a year as a post doc in industry in Baltimore before starting a "real" job with the same company. These are my tales of science, food, travel, and life.
Please tell me someone has yelled Bingo!!!
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