When Jorge Cham said a recent study showed 95 percent of graduate students have felt overwhelmed, he had one question: "Who are these other 5 percent?"

Cham, creator of the Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) comics, spoke to an audience of about 400 Monday night in the HUB Auditorium about life as a graduate student and "the power of procrastination."

"There is an alternative," he said of that overwhelmed feeling. "There is a way, and that way is procrastination."

While procrastination can often be compared with laziness, Cham said there is a distinct difference.

"Laziness is when you just don't want to do anything," he said. "Procrastination -- you just don't want to do it now."

Cham used famous procrastinators such as Isaac Newton ("What was he doing under that tree? He certainly wasn't in the lab, was he?") and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who took 10 years to complete his graduate degree, to prove his point.

Cham also spoke about the creation of his comic while working on a graduate degree in robotics at Stanford.

"It was what I was doing when I should have been doing research," he said.

He said his work -- creating small robots that mimicked cockroaches -- represents what school was like for him because the robots were "running frantically, not getting anywhere."

While at Standford, Cham saw a newspaper advertisement asking for student comics and realized most comics and television shows represent police officers, lawyers and doctors, but never graduate students.

"I wondered, 'Who are these strange creatures called grad students?' " he said.

Cham began drawing his comics and posting them on the Internet, which eventually spread in popularity through word of mouth.

"It was kind of like a virus," he said. "It wasn't limited to Stanford University. Apparently it's a global misery phenomenon."

Cham illustrated his lecture with images from his comic strip and clever graphics showing "Newton's Laws of Graduation," and comparing such statistics as the average yearly salary of a graduate student ($14,055) to a McDonald's employee ($14,040), which gained excessive laughter when the audience of mostly graduate students realized the difference was only $15.

Stephanie Petrina, a member of the Graduate Student Association, which hosted the lecture, was surprised with the high turnout.

"People were laughing pretty hard," she said.

Dan Natale, who recently completed a graduate degree at Penn State, said he went to the lecture because he was a fan of the comics.

"It's one of those things that are posted all over desks and message boards," he said. "It is sort of a love-hate thing. It's funny, and then sadness sets in when you realize you're the butt of the jokes."