I Am a Research Animal

For most people, graduate school is about studying. For me, Zhao Linlin, it’s an immersive crash course in the many sides of human nature!

Every day, I’m holed up in the lab battling centrifuges and pipettes, botching Western blots 800 times, losing my hair from my advisor hounding me for data, and revising my thesis until I question my very existence. It’s all standard fare for a research slave: exhausting, but bearable!

But the lab group gossip is what really opened my eyes. Our supervisor was caught soliciting sex late at night, throwing the whole lab into an uproar. A sweet senior student secretly stole a fellow student’s partner and managed to climb the social ladder. A married senior student pretended to be single and thoroughly duped an unmarried senior student. Even the former top student in our year, who made a name for himself online by courting controversy, had a silent farewell to seven years of youth hidden in his wedding ceremony…

Cutthroat competition in research, fights over resources, bizarre gossip, and workplace schemes: this little society of a lab group is more outrageous than any TV drama!

I grit my teeth through the pressure of research, clinging to my belief that I’ll run for the hills as soon as I graduate, while watching one jaw-dropping spectacle after another and picking up a few survival skills along the way.

Who says life as a research slave is nothing but misery? Here you’ll find the real day-to-day of research, melodrama that will make your jaw drop, and young people struggling and growing amid self-interest and temptation!

Dive into this firsthand account of surviving grad school and see how I navigate life in an absurd lab group, graduate successfully, and watch the drama unfold with a smile!

(A researcher's candid complaints + outrageous lab gossip + a workplace survival guide. No filters, no fake drama: just a story that’s real and addictive!)