Chapter 79

After the examination, Meng Wei and Ma Yuanhua sorted papers and talked. Both were Professor Wang's students; the School's teaching assistants had come to help but were only responsible for unlocking the room, and invigilating and collecting papers fell to them.

Meng Wei squared his stack. "That many applicants. I wonder which two get through."

"They won't be bad. There were several familiar faces in there." A good many of them, like Li Jing, had been research assistants; they were all in the same School and meeting a few times is normal.

"Our professor isn't as forgiving as the others, though. And Dr Zhao set a paper that hard, with the short answers from last term's final — I should think the pressure once they're in will be considerable." Remembering that those were last term's questions, Meng Wei couldn't help feeling for them. The two of them had taken the professor's module last term, and last term had not been a life fit for humans. The module was over and they'd scraped a pass, and the sight of those questions still made them uneasy.

Ma Yuanhua nodded. "True. Though they might get onto a project straight away, and learn a great deal, and with luck get their names on a paper. That was a chance we couldn't have had for the asking." Great pressure, great ability — that being the settled conviction of Professor Wang's students.

"True enough. Come on, let's get these to Dr Zhao. There are interviews to arrange." Meng Wei checked he'd left nothing and they went; the professor's team was short-handed and both of them had plenty to do, and the sooner it was done the sooner they could get back to their own experiments.

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Elsewhere, Zhao Qi — Wang Xin's assistant, who had set the paper — had noticed Li Lan. And not only Li Lan; Peking's undergraduates are never short of ability, and five or six had answered well. The results being in, Professor Wang had to be told, and the interviews settled. A research assistantship generally runs about six months, though larger projects run a year or more; this one was around a year, and the professor himself needed to be present to get a sense of the candidates.

He had no objection to Zhao Qi's shortlist. "Fine. Two hours on Wednesday evening. Arrange the order." Fifteen had passed, so two hours gave under ten minutes each.

Possibly not wanting to lose more time to recruitment, Professor Wang's team was extremely efficient: examination on Saturday, and on Sunday Li Lan received the interview email — six o'clock Wednesday evening, in his office. How many people there were she didn't know, but from the timing she was first, and whether that was good or bad she couldn't say.

She wasn't surprised to have passed. Apart from a few awkward blanks the paper hadn't been difficult for her, and the short answers that had defeated everybody else were nothing, because she'd read the relevant papers back in Professor Lin's laboratory. A coincidence, of a sort: Dr Zhang, who had supervised her there, had been working on a topic that overlapped with Professor Wang's, and having presumably taken his module himself, had handed her a dozen papers when she arrived and told her to understand the methodology and experimental design in them — which was exactly the content of those short answers. She'd never been near his main experiments, and she hadn't forgotten any of it.

On Wednesday afternoon she went to the classroom next door as instructed, and by six everybody had arrived. Looking round, she found only a dozen or so, where fifty-odd had sat the paper.

At six, on Zhao Qi's word, Meng Wei took the list next door. The whispering stopped as he came in and everybody looked at him. He cleared his throat. "Good evening. The interviews have begun. Would those I name follow me to Professor Wang's office. Li Lan, Fan Xiang, you two first."

Li Lan, at the front, stood, and so did a boy in glasses behind her.

Meng Wei took them along and briefed them. "Li Lan, you're first, so go in. Fan Xiang, go in when she comes out."

Li Lan nodded, and so did a faintly nervous Fan Xiang. At Meng Wei's signal she knocked, heard "Come in", breathed in and pushed the door open. Once she was inside, Meng Wei said quietly, "Right, wait here and go in when the person before you comes out." He had the next one to fetch.

Three people sat spaced around an oval table. At the head was a serious-faced middle-aged man, greying, with one person on either side. The head needed no introduction — Wang Xin; on one side Zhao Qi in thick glasses, on the other a man called Xie Nan, also in thick glasses. The interview panel.

Seeing a young girl come in first, Zhao Qi spoke gently, breaking the room's severity. "Li Lan, isn't it? Do sit down."

Once she had, he went on. "I'm Zhao Qi, conducting the interviews. This is Professor Wang Xin, and this is Dr Xie Nan. Let's begin."

Greetings exchanged, it began properly, and after her introduction Zhao Qi and Xie Nan asked a few mild questions. And then, at the end, Wang Xin spoke. "You say you're a first-year. What qualifies you to compete with the second, third and fourth-years outside? Or rather, where is your competitive advantage?"

Not a gentle question. Li Lan assembled her wording quickly and answered without either deference or bravado. "Professor Wang, I'm a first-year, but I don't think year of study is the criterion for choosing people. On the knowledge I currently have, I don't consider myself behind the second and third-years." And set out the useful parts of her work at Cerulean.

"You say you've spent some time on mint. Then tell me: what are the optimal process conditions for extracting total flavonoids from mint leaf?"

She considered, and decided to answer with the shop's method. "Optimising ultrasound-assisted extraction by response surface methodology: ethanol at eighty per cent by volume, a liquid-to-solid ratio of forty to one, an extraction time of a hundred and eighteen minutes and a temperature of sixty-two degrees. Under those conditions the yield of total flavonoids reaches 6.11 per cent, with the strongest antioxidant activity."

Wang Xin was surprised. Ultrasound-assisted extraction uses cavitation to break down plant cells and raise efficiency, and response surface methodology is a newish optimisation approach that establishes multi-factor systems quickly — but whether optimising ultrasound-assisted extraction by response surface methodology to raise total flavonoids in mint leaf actually works had never been tested by anyone.

He was plainly interested, and having gone into it with her at some length, found the process not in fact difficult to realise; what mattered was combining the properties of the active compounds in mint leaf with the extraction technique flexibly — and above all, that it was genuinely feasible.

When they'd finished, his expression had softened considerably, and there was satisfaction in it. "So one shouldn't select by year after all. Li Lan, was it? Some of your thinking is very good. Keep hold of it."

Neither of the others had interrupted, and from the exchange Zhao Qi judged this one was safe. He checked his watch — about ten minutes in all — adjusted his glasses and smiled. "That's the interview. The result should come in a couple of days. Go and wait for it."

Li Lan relaxed and let it show. "Thank you. Thank you, Professor." A few minutes, and she'd held her concentration at full stretch throughout, terrified of a slip.

Once she'd gone, Wang Xin said, "That one's good. Keep an eye on her."

Zhao Qi took the point and circled her name.

Outside, Fan Xiang knocked nervously at Meng Wei's signal, and once he was in, the girl behind him in the queue couldn't help asking, "What did they ask? Was it hard?"

Li Lan thought. "An introduction, then questions from your CV — answerable, mostly. Professor Wang's question was rather sharp."

The girl's mouth fell open. "God. Professor Wang asks questions? Then it must be awful."

Li Lan didn't know what to say to that. The man's reputation carried a long way.