Author of the popular web comic, “Piled Higher and Deeper,” Jorge Cham, armed with a PowerPoint and a stock of well-timed one-liners, provided an hour of laughter, authenticity and empathy to a hall of Brandeis graduate students last Thursday.

The public speaker and Stanford Ph.D. alum came to campus as part of a physics colloquium to present a new book he co-authored with physicist Daniel Whiteson, titled “We Have No Idea,” which is intended to make the most complicated scientific mysteries accessible to all.

After several opening jokes, his presentation began with a brief history of his comic strip, which he started writing during his own graduate school years. “It’s become clear to me,” Cham pointed out, “that a little bit more popular than the research that I spent years working on as part of my actual career has been what I was doing when I should have been doing research,” or, “Piled Higher and Deeper.”

The audience laughed, but Cham continued to point out the real merits of procrastination, referencing several psychological studies. “If you focus on your problems too hard, you can actually suppress what is important,” said Cham. He also noted that many successful individuals, including the author Isaac Asimov and the founders of Google, began their most famous accomplishments beneath their “day jobs.”

Mirroring the minds of many laboring grad students, Cham brought up the negative aspects of procrastination and the reputation it has acquired. 

“Why can’t we just do the things we’re supposed to do, instead of doing other things, and then you feel guilty and depressed about them to the point where you don’t even enjoy those things that you used to enjoy?” he asked. “It might have something to do with the fact that we just don’t want to do these things.”

To answer, Cham brought up a former professor of his, Bernie Roth, who had a habit of stunning his stressed out graduate classes with the simple statement: “In life, there’s nothing you have to do. Nobody’s making you do anything. Everything you do, you do because you want to do it.” 

Beyond procrastination, Cham’s talk explored the ironic qualities of various aspects of graduate school life, such as his own version of the physics equation F=ma: “Your age of graduation is proportional to your motivation and inversely proportional to the flexibility of your adviser,” and Cham’s lighthearted reminder that, contrary to students’ anxieties, their professors do not think they are idiots, — mostly because they don’t think about them at all.

While the majority of the presentation poked fun at academia, Cham sobered briefly to comfort his audience about the importance of their graduate years, in spite of their difficulty. “In grad school you learn the ability to teach yourself. … You become a self-learner. You have to think analytically … and you learn to keep in mind the big picture of things and communicate that to other people.”

He ended with a final quip: “The most important thing I learned in grad school was how to give a one hour presentation in any topic — including procrastination.”