The latest example for parents to point to in order to shame their own kids into studying harder appeared online this week, with the story of Zhejiang youth Zhou Xinjing, who went from being a slacker at a lowly vocational high school in Wenzhou to receiving an offer to study for a PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

Zhou's story has trended on Chinese social media platforms, and has even been used by universities and colleges to inspire their latest intake of students.

Zhou was born into a poor family, and in junior high school he didn't study hard so he decided to enroll in a vocational high school in Longwan district of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province.

However, over the next three years Zhou experienced a huge life transition, realizing that he should no longer slack off on campus. From then on, he began to study hard and gradually found a learning method suitable for himself.

Unfortunately, due to being behind in his studies for so long, Zhou was only admitted to a junior college: the Zhejiang Institute of Economics and Trade. But he never gave up and kept on studying hard. Eventually, he was able to enroll in Hangzhou Dianzi University through the upgrading examination from junior college to university.

At the university, he stood out among more than 600 students in the School of Computer Science, ranking first in his major, and won the university's first-class scholarship twice as well as the national scholarship. "The new life at Hangzhou Dianzi University brought me infinite passion and vitality," said Zhou. He kept the good habits he developed at Zhejiang Institute of Economics and Trade and started to study for the postgraduate entrance exam for Zhejiang University.

His efforts paid off. In 2017, Zhou successfully began his postgraduate study in computer science and technology at Zhejiang University. At the end of 2020, he received a PhD offer in computer science from MIT.