PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
PhD comics has been a staple of my grad student life. Ever since I got into graduate school, the PhD Comics series has been both a humourous look, and a startlingly accurate reflection, of my graduate student career. The feeling of being overwhelmed, the “what am I doing here,” the constant grind, PhD Comics captures it all well. Especially when it comes to grad students and free food. But I’ll get to the movie later.
The joy for me came not from the movie itself, but the joy of watching it with my peers. Let’s start at the beginning.
The movie was held in a lecture theatre on campus – one that many of those watching had likely lectured in as part of the graduate training. I’d presented there myself for the Queen’s Health Science Research Trainees day (protip: always remember when your microphone is on, and don’t talk to yourself if it is). It was a fitting location for a movie about our graduate student lives.
The movie began to a packed house. The opening scene set the tone for the rest of the movie – Professor Smith was almost an exact duplicate of his comic self, down the green sweater vest. It was wonderful.
However, disaster struck about 10 minutes in, as the DVD started to skip, and eventually froze! How would the organizing committee resolve this issue!! They had an auditorium full of tired graduate students who were excited for the movie!
They did what anyone would do to occupy graduate students. The Google’d a solution and when that didn’t work, then they put on a video of cats doing funny things to distract us while they fixed it. It was genius.
Mr Epidemiology 