Yongran is looking for: A Studio / Apartment / Room in Wageningen

My name is Yongran and I am currently a 4th year PhD student at WUR's Horticulture group (which means free tomatoes and cucumbers once in a while, haha). I see your advertisement and of the housing and I am absolutely in love with all the description of the house. So, I am writing to you for an application!

Born and raised in China, I came to Wageningen in 2012 for my master’s degree in plant breeding. After finishing the Master in 2014, I joined the horticultural group as a research assistant while I was applying for PhDs everywhere. Finally, in 2015, I started my PhD working on light quality in greenhouse tomato production. In other words, I study how to use different light colours to dope my tomato plants for more yield (this is actually a true story, check out my little talk about this on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8PGIxlpNpg) if you are interested.).

In the spare time, I have many other activities to keep me occupied. I play table tennis (not Ping Pong, there is a difference!) in a local club in Wageningen. I do some running several times a week and subscribed already for a half-marathon in Amsterdam. I visit bars and breweries to stay hoppy. I am a big aviation enthusiastic (yes that is a thing) and I like to visit the cockpits and talk to pilots. I have a small Instagram account with over 1k followers about Chinese calligraphy (@the_ink_tomato). I run a self-media in China with over 40K followers with some other friends to share knowledge about craft beers. I also have couple of thousands of hours spent on my Steam account. What else? Oh food of course. I enjoy a self-made fried rice as much as a 3- Michelin-star chef’s menu and I would be more than happy to share my knowledge in Chinese cooking.

What about motivation, you may ask. I have been living in the same room in Dijkgraaf for over 6 years and why would I want to move out?

For a change in my mind set.

Many things happen in the last year of the PhD and I needed something new to keep it going. I have been entering and exiting the same room for over two thousand days. It has become so repetitive that I start to get a little bit annoyed with it, or even a bit suffocated. I guess that’s what they call “institutionalized” in Shawshank Redemption and I don’t like it at all. Yes, I have also been too lazy or too scared to move out of this little room in Dijkgraaf. However, when I see the post, I would like to give it a shot, and give myself a go. Unfortunately, the motivation also comes partly from the fact that there are some kind-of-annoying corridor mates in my current corridor who, let’s say, failed to fully understand the responsibility of living with others.

What I look for, which is also what I think I can promise as a roommate, is that someone who is social, joyful, ready-to-share-a-beer/meal, but also appreciates the need of personal space of each other.