This is the domestic edition. The overseas edition can wait until there is enough lived experience to justify it.

Entry-level species in the graduate ecosystem

• Graduate student: a low-paid job with high symbolic prestige, often used by undergrads to soften the embarrassment of not finding work; also the advisor’s cheap labor force, and in some sense the 21st-century version of how late-20th-century China once imagined the future of bachelor’s degree holders.
• Postdoc: the doctoral version of the same arrangement—another low-pay, high-vanity position that helps cover the awkwardness of a bad job market; the advisor gets inexpensive, highly productive labor, and in Beijing it also doubles as a shortcut in the residency game.
• Undergrad in the lab: free labor powered by “personal development credits,” graduate-school recommendation schemes, faculty networking, or the pursuit of an overseas reference letter. They present as cheerful and harmless, but their backgrounds are often completely mysterious. They are also one of the main ways grad students learn what is currently popular outside the lab.
• Senior male labmate: a vaguely sleazy all-purpose NPC whose signature line is often, “I’ll put you as second author.” Some are socially seasoned operators; others have been detached from the real world since college. Standard visual markers: plaid shirt and blue sneakers.
• Senior female labmate: if married, she evolves into the elder-sister type; if she has children, her most-used phrase becomes “my little XX,” where XX is the child’s nickname. If unmarried, she tends to hover between experiments and parental pressure to marry, with a low-grade but advanced-state melancholy. Frequently seen anonymously reading romance fiction online.
• Junior male labmate: the labor force most often mobilized by senior female labmates. A single, genuinely desirable one is an endangered species; a single but ordinary one is usually just background to the endangered kind. Same plaid-shirt, blue-shoe aesthetic.
• Junior female labmate: not usually labor, but highly effective at getting senior male labmates to do labor. In big cities, the single woman who does not belong to the endangered-species category but believes she does is a recognizable type. Often found anonymously writing romance fiction online.
• The lab next door: bounty hunters of national scholarships and papers in journals everyone talks about as if they were mythical. Talking to them can make your knees go weak.

Collective rituals and shared illusions

• Group dinner: an AA-style social gathering, usually motivated by people trying to push two lab members together. The low success rate is exactly what keeps the event sustainable over time.
• Academia: once the lifelong dream from some earlier stage of a graduate student’s life. Later, after repeated blows, it gets converted into coins, likes, and reposts directed at video creators, public intellectuals, or one’s social feed. A few go on to pass the damage to the next generation.
• Group meeting: a cheap-labor perk mainly because food may be provided; also the main reason graduate students suddenly start reading papers, and one of the few days senior male labmates wake up early.
• Academic conference: on average, a once-a-year publicly funded trip or job-hunting opportunity for cheap labor—assuming you manage to get an oral presentation.
• Talk / presentation: a close-range networking arena for postdocs, PhD students, and faculty job seekers. Photos usually come out with the charm of awkward official portraits. At least one of the following will fail: the projector, the laptop, or the Q&A.
• CSC: a well-known fund in overseas professor circles for exporting cheap labor while providing the minimum subsistence package.
• Alumni association: part internal referral network, part performance of success for graduates who did well; graduates who did not either never receive the invitation or pretend not to have seen it.
• Alumni group chat: for graduates with time but not money, it is a place to beg for likes and votes; for those with neither time nor money, it is where they provide those likes and votes.
• Department / institute / lab annual party: a competition in which principal investigators alternate between showing off wealth and complaining about poverty.
• Dormitory: it may contain books, a desk, flowers, and a private bathroom, but in practice only the bed and clothesline see regular use.
• Graduate student union: a virtual NPC organization that exists mostly on posters in the lobby downstairs, often operating an official account whose readership follows something like a Poisson distribution.
• Labor union: organizer of staff sports meets, though graduate students are often drafted to win the prizes. Also the office that reimburses their athletic outfits.
• Campus clinic: the place that asks you for detailed medication names and dosages precisely when you are too sick to remember any of them.
• Equipment: the storeroom contains everything except the one thing you actually need.
• Administrative staff: an underground matchmaking network between research groups and a major distribution center for stories about advisors.
• Finance office: unrelated-by-blood NPCs who treat graduate students like cherished grandchildren. They regularly feud with others over whether invoices should come before payment or after it. For students, this office also serves as an introductory course in accounting, tax, and financial procedure.
• Joint training: a widely used solution in the Chinese Academy of Sciences system for easing pressure from Ministry of Education enrollment quotas.
• Halal cafeteria: the final refuge of genuinely affordable and decent campus food.
• Takeout: what you order after spending far too long wavering among grilled skewers, crayfish, and sweet-and-sour pork, only to choose the day’s discount combo.

Productivity products that live mostly in theory

• Pomodoro method: know it, used it, it seemed good, now abandoned.
• To-do lists: know them, used them, they seemed good, then replaced by the back of a takeout receipt.
• Lifelong learning: know it, never really used it, sounds good, but whenever you decide to try, someone is already charging an intelligence tax for it.
• Evernote: know it, paid for it, it seemed good, but the premium features are completely unnecessary.
• Bullet journaling: know it, bought it or wanted to but found it too expensive, sounds good, and in practice gets replaced by the blank back side of a single-sided printed paper.

How papers are actually understood

• First author: the final objective of graduation.
• Corresponding author: the person in charge of the money.
• Second author: basically no different from any other nonessential author slot; functionally part of the acknowledgments list.
• Last author: a lucky mascot attached at submission.
• Introduction: a summary of all the meaningless things other people have done, followed by a presentation of your own earth-shattering work.
• Methods: a complete training manual in converting Chinese logic into English word order.
• Results: a curated collection of positive findings.
• Discussion: an explanation of why other people’s meaningless work is meaningless, and why your earth-shattering work truly is earth-shattering.
• Conclusion: another abstract-style way of describing how earth-shattering the work is.
• Acknowledgments: a nearly completed grant list over which the advisor is still debating the order.
• Similarity check: a mysterious software system whose services can also be purchased online.
• External review: essentially a lottery promotion mechanism.
• Thesis acknowledgments: a roster of everyone who has ever passed through the lab, and the one section of the thesis your advisor will actually read word for word during the defense.
• Defense: an important occasion for advisors to perform understated grandness, and the official plating ceremony that completes the graduate student.
• Tassel turning: the reason the graduation photos look bad is simply that you were not the one taking them.
• Peer review: what forces you to read the literature.
• Reviewer: under cover of anonymity, a habitat for people who do not understand but speak as if they do, a refuge for perfectionists, and a channel through which self-citation opportunities may arrive.

Websites, platforms, and digital habitats

• Department homepage: where scholarship application forms are downloaded.
• Lab website: updated only when a key-lab evaluation is approaching, or quietly maintained by a young PI.
• BBS forums: once the complaint garden of graduate students, now largely gone after becoming intranet fossils.
• Zhihu: the successor complaint garden after the fall of BBS, and also a manual for graduate students trying to act like worldly professionals.
• Guokr: once a complaint zone for students in the CAS orbit, now faded.
• Douban: the complaint zone for depressive-grad-student energy; self-mockery is welcome, but collective mockery is dangerous territory.
• Bilibili: the website on which graduate students must never reveal their real ID.
• Dedao: a major institution for collecting intelligence tax from graduate students.
• Taobao: a site where senior female labmates browse without buying.
• JD.com: a site where senior male labmates browse what they cannot afford.
• Alipay: a financial management tool for graduate students whose balances stay steadily in the three- to four-digit range, yet somehow others assume they have six or seven digits.
• Bank statement: the diary of being trapped in stocks since around 2015.
• Crypto wallet history: the diary of being trapped in coins since around 2017.
• ScienceNet: a complaint forum for scholars with faculty positions, whose average user age is roughly ten years older than that of Guokr or Zhihu.
• Baidu: the savior of introductions.
• Muchong: a powerful tool for downloading papers.
• MOOCs: online vocational schools people turn to when determined to learn something new, usually with average attendance under three sessions.
• Lab science / experimental disciplines: the mainstream fields that produce research laborers and populate most of the sites listed above.
• Intellectual: a public account almost every graduate student subscribes to, but mostly reads only when someone reposts it in their feed.
• IPv6: the entertainment world of graduate students, and for a few, part of the academic world too.

What people watch while pretending to work

• American TV: the procrastination engine watched during the wait for experimental results while a paper remains open on screen.
• British TV: also watched while waiting for experiments, but with the added distinction of claiming it is superior to American TV, often because of Sherlock.
• Japanese TV: watched, but rarely discussed.
• Korean TV: watched, but firmly denied.
• Web dramas: watched because otherwise there is nothing to talk about with friends.
• Thai dramas: mocked after viewing only a summary clip.
• The Big Bang Theory: an American show everyone claims to have seen whether they have or not; people usually know a few catchphrases and insist it is inferior to the British series The IT Crowd, which they also usually have not seen.
• Star Trek: impossible to sit through, yet many still learn enough from encyclopedic summaries to claim they have watched it; a classic pseudo-geek marker.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: the novel behind a famous explicit TV phenomenon; one must complain about Martin with everyone else while often being unable to explain the difference between the books and Game of Thrones. Having read the original is worn as a badge.
• Westworld: HBO’s other premium conversation piece.
• Downton Abbey: a style guide for performing one’s fantasy of refined British life.
• One Piece: the anime whose ending date is used to estimate one’s own graduation date.
• Gintama: a loser’s guidebook for graduate students who recognize themselves in it.

Daily tools, apps, and objects of aspiration

• WeChat: the real lab management tool, and what people born before 1990 still imagine to be the dominant communication method.
• QQ: what many post-90s or post-95s graduate students actually use in private.
• Moments: the main arena for performative paper-posting.
• EndNote: reference management software used only when writing papers, and even then the bibliography often ends up being formatted by hand.
• Origin 7.0: the stable pirated plotting software one can still find online.
• PDF reader: specifically Adobe Acrobat Pro rather than Adobe Reader, and preferably a cracked version.
• QQ Mail: a key clue when a graduate student gets doxxed for something they did online.
• Raspberry Pi: a pseudo-geek accessory; beyond online tutorials, most owners do not really know how to use it.
• Lottery ticket: in graduate students’ minds, the odds are about equal to graduating on time or having a paper accepted outright, which is why one often gets bought during graduation season just to test luck.
• Civil service exam prep book: a stage-specific dream handed down through generations of graduate students, usually resold as waste paper in nearly brand-new condition.
• GRE vocabulary book: essential purchase for would-be students going abroad, seldom read, highly effective as a late-night sleep aid.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: its solitude lies in the fact that the people who buy it never keep it company; another graduate-student sleep aid.
• The Catcher in the Rye: its guarding lies in the fact that the buyer never returns to it; also a sleep aid.
• The Three-Body Problem: for many graduate students, the totality of science fiction.
• Those Ming Affairs: for many graduate students, the totality of historical reasoning.
• Miracles of the Namiya General Store: one of those books people give up on and watch the movie instead.
• The Kite Runner: same category—abandoned for the film version.
• The Little Prince: the book everyone wonders why is so expensive.
• Keigo Higashino: Japanese writer, often confused with Haruki Murakami.
• Haruki Murakami: Japanese writer, often confused with Keigo Higashino.

School prestige and institutional labels

• Tsinghua and Peking University: two globally recognized Chinese universities that look down on each other while looking down even more on the rest of domestic higher education. On Zhihu, half the users can somehow claim a connection to one of them.
• The East China Five Schools: the five domestic universities that foreign advisors might know besides Tsinghua and Peking.
• C9: mostly useful in online self-introductions by students from Xi’an Jiaotong University and Harbin Institute of Technology.
• 985: the online self-introduction label for students from elite universities that are not C9.
• 211: the corresponding label for students from strong universities that are not 985.
• Double First-Class: a signature-line term used seriously by students from only a very small number of institutions.
• UCAS: an abbreviation shared by two institutions with deep background associations.
• Chinese Academy of Sciences: a degree-granting system that likes to see itself on par with Tsinghua and Peking, but whose graduates are often screened out in hiring because they are not technically from a 985 university.
• Ministry of Education: the degree-granting authority that seems forever trying to edge the CAS system out through one ranking mechanism or another.
• Ministry of Science and Technology: the body that has funding but receives fewer applications from educational and research institutions.
• National Natural Science Foundation: whether the money is abundant or scarce, everyone still applies.

Academic careers and rank mythology

• Faculty postdoc: an academic transition period, or a period of waiting to leave academia, often accompanied by verbal promises of conversion to lecturer or associate-level status after two years.
• Lecturer: a high-pressure all-rounder in the department, expected to handle administration, teaching, research, and miscellaneous chores.
• Young faculty: anxious low-income dreamers without title security in academia, usually holding doctorates and commonly positioned as faculty postdocs, lecturers, or research assistants.
• Associate senior title: the retirement plan or pension-grade title for the vast majority of young faculty.
• Professor: often the retirement-grade title of former associate-level academics who once had six months to a year of state-supported overseas visiting experience and perhaps took the opportunity to let their child practice English.
• Advisor: usually a person with no formal background in pedagogy who nonetheless must appear omniscient about education; also the graduate student’s boss, a partner in a lab-scale startup, a social operator, and a professional fundraiser whose level of education appears to be somewhat above that of a beggar.
• Hat: collective term for talent titles and elite recruitment labels.
• Young Thousand Talents: the university-system mechanism for guaranteeing the willingness of overseas-trained PhDs and postdocs to return.
• Hundred Talents: the CAS-system version of that return guarantee.
• National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation / similar distinctions: certification that an excellent domestically trained PhD has made it; in the CAS system, some of these assessments have already disappeared.
• Excellent Young Scientist: the lower configuration of the more prestigious young-elite title.
• Changjiang Scholar, Distinguished Young Scholar, National Thousand Talents: lower configurations of academicians, mechanisms for distributing interests across disciplines, spokesperson teams for subfields, and routine keynote sources for sectional academic meetings.
• XX Scholar: aside from Changjiang Scholar, usually a provincial or local talent-introduction project holder; also either a reserve force for bigger titles or part of the review apparatus.
• Youth grant, general grant, major grant: the Foundation’s unofficial title-promotion manual, roughly corresponding to applicants at intermediate, associate-senior, and full-senior levels. Winning one improves your promotion odds.
• Academicians of the two academies: disciplinary balancing devices, conference plenary speakers, and mascots.
• Subdiscipline director at the Foundation: a patron whose status can feel equivalent to an academician.
• Vice president of a university: the person giving opening remarks at a conference despite having research interests completely unrelated to the conference theme.
• Leader: the provincial or municipal second-in-command for science and education, also available for conference remarks with no research direction whatsoever.

The publication hierarchy in plain language

• Dry / solid paper: a high-level paper within the field.
• Water paper: a non-high-level paper within the field.
• CAS journal ranking: a journal classification system popular outside the CAS system as well.
• Core journal: effectively a collected volume of undergraduate research outputs.
• SCI: effectively the collected volume of graduate research outputs.
• h-index: an index useless to self-citation maniacs, unavailable to most young scholars, and mainly important once a mid-career academic has enough digits to place it proudly on a lecture poster.
• Impact factor: usually spoken of in terms of “points”; a measure of a journal’s face value, where more points mean more prestige, though certain categories remain reputational minefields.
• CNS: a powerful tool for promotion and a key to elite titles; depending on the field, even sub-journals may count.
• Open access: another name for expensive journals.