Chapter 2501: Why Get Involved

Their shocked reactions were all taken in by him. Feeling extremely proud, Ren Chongda said, "Yes. It’s Director Yang."

"I don’t believe it."

Ren Chongda turned around to look at his old classmate who’d said those three words, Cao Yong, and demanded angrily, "Why don’t you believe it?"

"It’s true that Director Yang is the director of the Medical Education Department, but as far as I know, he stopped personally supervising students’ research a long time ago. He’s not even a doctoral advisor," Cao Yong analyzed coolly, not someone who could be easily fooled.

"Right," Tao Zhijie picked up the thread, his tone returning to that refined, cold register. "These past few years, I’ve never heard of or seen Director Yang being hired by the university as a doctoral advisor."

The appointment process for doctoral advisors had been explained before and would not be repeated here.

"You didn’t listen to everything I was going to say," Ren Chongda explained to them and stressed, "I said Director Yang called me, not that he himself was going to be the research advisor for our class. And if it were something completely made up, would I dare say it in public? Like what you were just questioning—lying is useless, it would be exposed."

"What do you mean by that, spell it out properly." A bunch of people grew anxious and started jeering, accusing him of keeping them in suspense.

But he couldn’t not keep them in suspense; he had to drive up the price for his own students. That was the counselor’s job. Usually it was a buyer’s market, and now, for once, it was a seller’s market. After all, medical students scrambling to get into a top-tier hospital was pure cutthroat competition. In this moment of glory, Ren Chongda kept to his own rhythm and said, "Director Yang called early this morning to tell me someone wants to join our research advisor team. As for who this person is, he said it’s temporarily confidential and that when the time comes he’ll coordinate with our university’s Academic Affairs Office. He just wanted to give me, the counselor, an advance heads-up. So that person is the first advisor on our class’s research advisor team. There has never been any such thing as our class not being able to rope in even a single research advisor."

If it were in the past, everyone knew this advisor team was the kind that wiped the asses of students who were there just to make up the numbers; no one was willing to volunteer to get involved. The school and the counselors had long been worried sick about it.

What exactly was going on with the current situation? Why would the hospital leadership be the first to jump in?

The crowd on the scene was stunned beyond stunned.

"He didn’t reveal any information to you at all?" Everyone continued to question Teacher Ren.

"No," Ren Chongda denied very firmly. "I have no idea what’s going on." He had to admit that for a while earlier, he, as the counselor, had been extremely anxious and worried about the students’ research issue, afraid they wouldn’t be able to recruit even one teacher. If it came to that, he feared he’d have to go into battle himself. The problem was, he did anatomical teaching, which had nothing to do with the clinic. If students did research with him, they wouldn’t be able to do clinical projects. If, after graduation, they wanted to work in clinical practice, a nonclinical project paper wouldn’t be convincing when they took it out, and it would affect their employment.

Silence, deep silence.

It felt like the moments before a storm, the air making one feel a bit suffocated. He Guangyou and the others stared only at the suddenly silent faces of Tao Zhijie and Cao Yong, which made everyone’s hearts grow flustered.

Their senior brothers were all academic gods; Senior Tao was known as scheming and black-bellied, and though Senior Cao preferred to speak bluntly, he was just as sharp-minded. The more silent their seniors were, the more it meant things were not simple—this was what was going through the mind of classmate Xie Wanying, who was crouched behind the bathroom door.

She definitely wasn’t deliberately eavesdropping; she’d only realized after washing her face that the counselor and the senior brothers were talking about important matters concerning the students in their class. This kind of conversation belonged to the teachers’ official business; as a student, she actually shouldn’t be listening. She had no choice but to retreat and hide first.