Night guard at Tsinghua gets into school after 8 years of trying, aims for Harvard next

A man who spent two years working night shifts as a security guard at Tsinghua University was admitted to the school as a postgraduate student on his eighth attempt at China's national postgraduate entrance exam. Yang Xiao, 31, from Shenyang in Liaoning Province, scored 388 in the exam he sat last December, 34 points above the cutoff.He received his admission letter last month and will study intangible cultural heritage and digital innovation at Tsinghua's Academy of Arts and Design, he told Chinese news outlet Jiupai News.He is now teaching himself GRE and TOEFL and hopes to apply for a fully funded doctorate at Harvard, the South China Morning Post reported.Yang wanted Tsinghua before he reached secondary school. His grades were ordinary and his parents, worried he would not reach university at all, enrolled him in a private vocational art school with a single college-prep class.He finished first in his year in studio subjects and once first in the whole school academically. At the gaokao, China's college entrance exam, he considered Tsinghua's art academy. But the cram class he had joined taught in the style of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and that is where he was admitted.After graduating he returned to Shenyang, opened an art school and continued his quest to enter Tsinghua.His first attempt was for art history. The program took one student nationwide, the cutoff was 390 and Yang scored 298.The following year he learned six new books had been added to the specialist syllabus. Coming from another discipline, he could not catch up, and failed again. Yang Xiao has been admitted to Tsinghua University as a postgraduate student. Photo courtesy of Douyin His third year of preparation was married by financial problem as a woman he met online took more than CNY1 million (US$148,000) from him. His finances collapsed and he could no longer keep the art school running. Parents who had paid course fees in advance lined up to get their money back, and it closed.On his fourth attempt he scored 391, but the cutoff rose from 345 to 400.He then switched targets to a newly created program in intangible cultural heritage and digital innovation, and spent a full year studying for its entrance exam before he had worked out what the exam actually required.His sixth attempt came four points short, his seventh six points short. The cutoff moves each year with the strength of the applicant pool, so a score that would have been enough one year was not the next.Yang was close to 30 when he took the guard job, after a year working as a cleaner. He chose the night shift, 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., so that he could slip into Tsinghua's lecture halls during the day and sit in on classes he was not enrolled in.He read a memoir by Pang Xunqin on those shifts and settled on his field. Pang was a principal founder of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts and its vice-president from the 1956 founding ceremony.That school merged into Tsinghua in November 1999 and became the Academy of Arts and Design, according to the academy's institutional history.Unable to afford prep courses, Yang read on his own and traveled to academic conferences, once spending almost everything he had on a plane ticket to reach one.The master's runs three years. Yang plans to finish in two, citing money and his next step."I hope I can stay humble and frugal," he told Jiupai, "and not let empty reputation affect why I started."