Piled Higher and Deeper: Difference between revisions

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The characters are a bunch of graduate students at Stanford University. They obsess about ever getting their theses completed, struggle to make ends meet with their meager stipends, wonder why life is passing them by, and slack off while their supervisors aren't looking.

* [[Eating Lunch Alone]]: Doing it at the campus cafeteria makes Cecilia feel unbearably self-conscious.

* [[Education Through Pyrotechnics]]: The machines used for experimental research frequently blow up in people's faces.

* [[Failure Is the Only Option]]: To keep going, the series needs the characters to remain grad students, meaning they have to postpone the completion of their respective theses indefinitely. Ultimately averted with Mike, who does complete his own thesis after years of procrastination, but stays anyway as a member of the teaching staff.

** As the main character [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=359 put it] in a [[Break the Fourth Wall|press conference]] in 2003, "Basically, if Mike graduates, we're all out of a job..."

** Professor Smith changed too. Originally he was [[The Faceless]] (see [[Scary Shiny Glasses]] below), then started to become more of an [[Absent-Minded Professor]]. Later, he just became a professor with a serious [[Lack of Empathy]].

* [[Freud Was Right]]: I refuse to believe that the line break in the middle of "encephalic" in [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=999 this strip] (in the part about "The Campus Tower") was anything other than deliberate.

* [[Granola Girl]]: Tajel.

* [[Heavy Sleeper]]: The main character, Mike Slackenerny, and increasingly Dee.

* [[Running Gag]]: π/2

* [[Scary Shiny Glasses]]: Prof. Smith

* [[The Slacker]]: While several characters are slackers to some extent, Mike Slackenerny stands head and shoulders above the rest in this regard. An eternal student, he's the ''PHD'' answer to ''[[Doonesbury]]'''s Zonker Harris.

* [[Spit Take]]: Cecilia pulls one on purpose [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1123 here].