Me. From Piled Higher and Deeper.

I'm consistently amazed by how eerily accurate Jorge Cham is in his depections of the grad student life in PhD. I mean, yeah, I know the guy suffered through a PhD of his own while doing the comic, but I figured every grad student has a pretty much unique and different perspective on graduate school. So I'm always pretty surprised when Cham posts a strip that has me looking over my shoulder, expecting him to be standing there with a notebook, sketching what I'm doing.

But I must say, today's strip is the most accurate depiction of me I've ever seen. Unnamed Guy is doing exactly what I've done every single night of this summer while trying to write my thesis. And here I sit, three weeks from publication deadline, knowing full well that next week (not this coming week, the one after it) is shot because of the Comicon. And what am I doing? Dutifully plugging away, getting data and writing about it?

Nope. I'm rewatching the second season of Rurouni Kenshin (which, by the way, is quite possibly one of the greatest pieces of anime ever made. Now, I'm only talking about the second season, mind you. The rest of the series was only average). Why am I doing this? Beacause I am the Unnamed Guy. And I imagine very many grad students have had this exact same experience in their lives. It's just something you won't understand until you've been one of us. It's just how we operate.

But right now, I need to go to the video store, and rent more volumes. Because I've finished the ones I have.