A Chinese father in his 40s who threw himself into five months of exam preparation after an argument with his daughter has won admission to a prestigious business school's MBA program.
Chinese outlet Dawan News reported on the 13th on Zhang Zhichang, 44, a resident of Xi'an in Shaanxi province.
Zhang works in the medical industry and spends much of the year traveling for business, leaving most of his daughter's schooling to his wife. That changed last year, when he began overseeing her studies himself as she prepared for her high school entrance exam.
His daughter, then 15 and entering adolescence, pushed back against his nagging, saying he was speaking without knowing how hard studying is these days. "If you're so confident, go take the graduate school exam yourself," she shot back.
The remark struck Zhang hard. After briefly holding back his anger, he began to weigh whether graduate study was actually feasible. Nearly two decades had passed since he finished college, and he had serious worries about his memory and ability to learn, on top of a heavy workload. Even so, Zhang decided to sit for the exam that same month he had quarreled with his daughter.
He said he had concluded that showing himself studying would be more effective than pressing her with words. At first the main goal was to set an example for his daughter, he explained, but over time it turned into a challenge for his own life.
Over the next five months, Zhang's days were rebuilt around studying. From 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. he devoted himself to online lectures and memorizing English vocabulary, and in the evenings he spent four to five hours on math and logic problems and mock exams. At home, father and daughter naturally settled into sitting side by side at their desks, each focused on their own work. His daughter was indifferent at first, but she watched steadily as her father stayed at his desk late into the night, day after day.
The prolonged, intense studying took a toll on his health. A month before the exam he suffered from chronic headaches, and on the day of the test last December he had to sit the exam while rubbing his head, neck and shoulders.
His efforts paid off when Zhang received final notice of admission to the MBA program at Northwestern Polytechnical University's business school on June 30. Northwestern Polytechnical is one of the universities in China's "Project 985," a group the government has designated for priority development.
The father's transformation rippled to his daughter as well. She had refused when urged to go to the library, but on the day she heard he had been admitted, she immediately called her friends and started studying at the library, and afterward began going on her own more often.
As the story spread, it resonated with middle-aged people who had put off self-improvement because of their age, families and jobs. Zhang advised that there is no need to set a big goal like graduate school from the start. The idea is to begin with something less demanding — reading a novel or a specialized book, or watching a lecture or a short educational video. "The older you get, the more important it is to keep learning," he said. "You can start from your interests and hobbies, build a study habit, and gradually expand into harder fields."
