[Applicant: Clara Caldwell]
Li Dong stared at the applicant’s name, stunned for a few seconds.
He definitely recognized the name.
During the recent arXiv controversy, she was the only one who had spoken up for him.
Later, Li Dong had made a point to look up her resume.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Institute of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, a student of Bruner, twenty-three years old.
As an undergraduate, she had been the first author on a paper in *Solar Physics*. In her first year of grad school, she was the second author on one in *Astronomy and Astrophysics Journal Communications*.
For a young solar physicist in Europe, that resume was exceptionally eye-catching.
...
Li Dong had a good impression of her.
It wasn’t just because she had defended him.
It was because he had later casually browsed a few of the papers she had authored, and one preprint on low-latitude circulation phase reconstruction had left a deep impression on him.
In that paper, when dealing with a gap in observational data, she had used a phase-splicing technique Li Dong had never seen before.
First, she performed a local ring diagram inversion on the Dopplergrams from two adjacent observation windows. After inverting the phases of both segments to the same intrinsic reference plane, she then used a weighting function to smooth out the phase discontinuity at the seam.
The usual method was to simply fill the gap with a linear extrapolation.
But Clara’s approach was more subtle, clearly separating the statistical noise from the actual phase drift.
At the time, Li Dong had even jotted down a sentence in the margin of his scratch paper.
’This girl has a real knack for inversions.’
That was the kind of impression she’d made.
He never would have thought that she would be the first person to submit a resume for the job posting he’d put up.
...
Without delay, Li Dong opened the dialogue box using the built-in private messaging function on Nature Careers.
Li Dong: Hello, Dr. Clara.
Clara: Hello, Dr. Li Dong.
Li Dong: I saw your resume. I won’t beat around the bush. You should know what I’m trying to do, right?
Clara: Of course.
Li Dong: Good. I was afraid you might get cold feet and run off.
She sent back a sticker.
It was a Shiba Inu tilting its head with a look that said, "You really underestimate people."
Li Dong glanced at it, paid it no mind, and typed back directly.
Li Dong: The requirements to join my team are simple.
Li Dong: I need three sets of data.
One: The high-cadence Doppler intermediate products from SDO/HMI between May 2010 and June 2024, with the inversion radius locked at R minus 0.01R.
Two: The level-2 vector magnetograms from Hinode/SOT for all βγ and higher active regions from the same period.
Three: The raw archives of the extended magnetic classification for βγ and higher active regions from the NOAA SWPC.
Li Dong: If you can provide any one of these three sets, you’re on the team.
After typing that, Li Dong moved his mouse away and waited for her reply.
Half a minute passed with no activity from the other side.
Li Dong sighed silently to himself.
To be honest, he had been a bit too blunt.
She was, after all, a student of Bruner with such a stellar resume. For him to skip the pleasantries, not ask about her background, not discuss the research, and just demand things right out of the gate—it was unacceptable in any academic recruitment scenario.
He even started to consider whether he should reveal a little about his "Phase Locking" idea, just to show her that he was genuinely working on something and not just trying to get something for nothing.
Just as he was thinking this, a message came back.
Clara: Except for the NOAA SWPC’s extended archive.
The approval from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information requires an institutional endorsement, which I can’t get. But I can get the other two sets.
Li Dong stared at the message, completely floored.
Wait.
’Did we just complete two-thirds of the work?’
He had originally estimated that just finding someone willing to be in the same boat as him from this job posting would be considered lucky.
Prying even one of the three data sets out of their hands would have meant his luck was incredible.
But now?
She comes right out and tells him she can get two of the sets.
Li Dong took a deep breath, a smile instantly spreading across his face as he typed.
Li Dong: Welcome to the team, Dr. Clara.
Clara: One moment, Dr. Li Dong.
Clara: Before I hand these over to you, there are a few questions I’d like to clarify.
Clara: First, I don’t know if your method is correct, or if it can truly predict the origin time and source region of a Carrington Level solar flare.
Second, even if you do succeed... what do I get out of it?
Li Dong replied without a moment’s hesitation.
Li Dong: You’ll get intellectual satisfaction.
Then the other side went silent.
Only then did Li Dong realize.
’Wait.’
’Intellectual satisfaction’ was what *he* wanted, not what *she* wanted.
He quickly ran through the standard toolbox of "empty promises" used in academia.
Academics tend to care more about reputation than money.
’So, I’ll offer reputation.’
Li Dong: Sorry, that was a joke.
Li Dong: How about authorship? Second author?
After he sent this message, there was still no response.
Now Li Dong started to feel uneasy.
He frowned subconsciously.
’Does she think second author isn’t enough?’
To be honest, once he got the data for this project, he could handle the entire process of phase reconstruction and magnetic helicity alignment all by himself.
Offering the second author position was already quite generous.
’She doesn’t actually want co-first authorship, does she?’
Just as Li Dong was weighing whether to concede further between co-first and second authorship, a message finally came back.
Clara: No money?
Li Dong stared at the two words, dumbfounded.
’Aren’t academics supposed to be above money?’
Every time he brought up money, his own eyes would light up, and the other person would give him a long, appraising look that screamed, ’My, how vulgar this young man is.’
It had made him start to wonder if he was just lacking in class.
He never expected to find someone who was just like him.
Li Dong immediately gave Clara a new label in his mind.
’This girl’s academic ability must be very high.’
He thought for a moment, mentally calculating a price.
Strictly speaking, the two data sets Clara was offering couldn’t be bought with money. They had to be acquired with time and favors.
On top of that, the work she would need to do—secondary alignment for the phase inversions, cross-baseline consistency checks—was a substantial amount of real work.
So Li Dong decisively named a price.
Li Dong: Six thousand Swiss Francs a week.
That converted to about 52,000 RMB.
Li Dong: What do you think?
Clara: ...A weekly salary?
Clara was clearly surprised.
Her surprise was perfectly normal, actually.
When it comes to salaries in scientific research, there are a few common international standards.
PhD students are funded by their university, receiving a monthly research assistantship or scholarship.
Postdocs are paid by their supervising professor, either monthly or quarterly, from project funds.
Visiting scholars are paid in lump sums for the duration of their visit.
Regardless of the method, the pay period is always monthly or yearly.
No one pays by the week.
Because in research, the cycle for producing results simply doesn’t operate on a weekly basis.
A short communication can take half a year to polish, a full article a year or two. If you paid weekly, you’d drive the finance department mad just processing the payroll for HR.
So, the "weekly salary" Li Dong offered seemed counterintuitive to Clara.
After a few seconds, she typed another line.
Clara: May I ask why it isn’t a monthly salary?
Without a second thought, Li Dong replied.
Li Dong: Because once we have the data, we won’t need a month.
Li Dong: We’re in a race against time.
Clara’s side went quiet for a moment.
Then a new message popped up.
Clara: OK.
Clara: Perfect. I’ve had my eye on a small Coach bucket bag. Now I can buy it.
Li Dong closed the dialogue box.
He leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh of relief.
He was quite satisfied with his own performance in this "online interview."
Honestly, if this interview had been in person...
His earlier line, "If you can provide any one of these three sets, you’re on the team," would have made any researcher with a normal sense of professional etiquette stand up politely, say, "I’ll think about it," and then walk out the door without a second glance.
Because that’s not how the process is supposed to work.
Normally, a discussion about academic collaboration doesn’t start with "I need data."
It’s supposed to start with both parties laying out their current work, discussing the problems, seeing if their methodologies align, and talking about the general pace of the collaboration, who is responsible for which part, and how intellectual property will be divided.
Only after these preliminary issues are more or less settled do you move on to discussing compensation, authorship, and delivery deadlines.
This is the unspoken rule in academia.
Because providing data is risky. If you hand over scarce data that you’ve earned with your academic reputation, and the other person’s methodology turns out to be flawed, you don’t just lose the data—you lose that reputation as well.
Li Dong’s "demand things from the get-go" approach essentially pushed all the risk onto the other party.
In any normal job-seeking situation, the other person would have turned and walked away.
But the problem was...
Li Dong couldn’t afford to care about any of that.
He didn’t need a collaborator’s "cooperativeness." He needed time.
Seventeen months.
That was all the capital he had in his race against the yet-to-occur Carrington Level flare.
Whether he could win this gamble had nothing to do with interview etiquette.
...
「Zurich.」
A graduate student apartment on the west side of the main campus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Clara was rubbing her face.
She was rubbing it quite hard because she felt like her face was about to cramp up from smiling.
She had already scrolled through their twenty-something lines of chat history twice from top to bottom.
She had never seen an academic "online interview" conducted this way.
Demanding data right from the start.
No discussion of the project, background, or methodology before asking for data.
She asked him, "What do I get out of it?" and he replied, "Intellectual satisfaction."
She then asked, "No money?" and he immediately quoted a "weekly salary" that completely defied academic norms.
She rubbed her face again in her chair.
This Dr. Li Dong was just too amusing.
However...
She hadn’t agreed to this just because the weekly salary was high.
That six thousand Swiss Francs per week certainly sounded like a lot.
But if she were really in it for the money, she could have easily switched to a different field and found a "safe" project.
The path in helioseismology that Bruner had laid out for her came with far better compensation than this.
What truly moved her was Li Dong’s first answer.
Intellectual satisfaction.
At that moment, she had stared at those words, stunned for a few seconds.
It was, admittedly, a bit of a silly thing to say.
But in that instant, she suddenly felt that the person on the other end was on her side.
Because that was precisely why she was in research to begin with.
As for whether Li Dong could actually predict that Carrington Level flare seventeen months from now...
Clara shook her head.
She didn’t know.
But so what?
’At least this way, I’ll have no regrets.’
She stood up from her chair, casually retying her hair.
Grabbing her laptop, she started humming a little tune as she headed toward her advisor Professor Bruner’s office.

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