During my first year of college, my organic chemistry professor assigned us Anda Brivin's book Gun Down the Young, a slim fictional account of professional academic life at an unnamed university. I suspect that she did so because she knew that many of her students were envisioning careers at top-tier research universities and she hoped to cure us of some of our more romantic fantasies of life as academics. Although the book did, indeed, provide some much-needed levity in an otherwise grueling course, Hope Jahrens Lab Girl might serve future students as a better introduction to the real stories of the ivory tower. Early in Lab Girl, Jahren recounts late winter evening visits to her father's laboratory at a community college in rural Minnesota, where she "transformed from a girl into a scientist, just like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, only kind of backward." The rest of the book serves as a reflection on that transformation, an exploration of the forces that drove-and hindered-Jahrens journey from frosty Minnesota to California, Georgia, Maryland, and Hawaii.
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机译：在我上大学的第一年，我的有机化学教授为我们分配了安达·布里文（Anda Brivin）的著作《枪杀年轻人》（Gun Down the Young）。我怀疑她这样做是因为她知道许多学生正在设想一流研究型大学的职业，并且她希望能够治愈我们一些像学者一样浪漫的生活。尽管这本书确实确实提供了其他课程中急需的内容，但霍普·贾伦斯的“实验室女郎”可能会为将来的学生提供服务，以更好地介绍象牙塔的真实故事。杰伦（Jahren）在《实验女郎》的早期，讲述了冬天晚些时候在明尼苏达州农村的一所社区大学里访问她父亲的实验室的经历，在那里她“从一个女孩转变为科学家，就像彼得·帕克成为蜘蛛侠一样，只是一种倒退。”该书的其余部分反映了这种转变，探索了推动和阻碍贾伦斯从寒冷的明尼苏达州前往加利福尼亚州，乔治亚州，马里兰州和夏威夷的力量。
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