Sometimes, to avoid unnecessary disappointment, you have to lower your expectations

After coming out of BYU, it was natural for me to start my own business and proceed to start a training course. Since I had already taken the TOEFL and GRE at that time and was very familiar with these two exams, I decided to start with TOEFL and GRE training.

Another reason was that I found that although there was a boom in learning English in China and more and more people were learning English, more students were learning English with the hope that they could go abroad by taking the TOEFL and GRE. This means that the pool of students taking English exams is more plentiful than the pool of students who are purely studying English. So I finally decided that I would start by taking the exams abroad. I later found out that this decision was very wise because if I had started with just English training, I would have ended up with a course that was probably a small English training institute. It was because I had a vague feeling that test-taking training would become a popular training in China and the number of people going abroad would increase every year that I had the idea that TOEFL and GRE would be the best choice to start with!

Frankly speaking, not many teachers at Peking University were willing to teach the GRE, because the basic requirement for teaching the GRE was that your vocabulary had to be around 20,000. At that time, not many people would have had enough to memorize 20,000 vocabulary words to put there, and I was just such a person who had nothing to do. When I was in college, I spent a year in the hospital with tuberculosis. That year, I had nothing to do in the hospital, so I memorized a lot of words while reading. So by the time I graduated from college, I had mastered nearly 20,000 words. Later, I worked as a teacher at Peking University for more than six years - being a teacher at Peking University is very challenging because the students themselves are very intelligent and there are many dark horses in the middle, so I had to be ready for students to challenge me at all times. In this way, during my six years at Peking University, my English skills also improved a lot. As a result, I was one of the best teachers teaching the GRE in Beijing at that time. It is not even an exaggeration to say that I was the number one teacher of GRE vocabulary in the capital.

In this way, I had a relatively high threshold for teaching these two exams. That is, I don't meet other teachers who teach as well or even better than I do to compete with me. Because I have taken both exams, and because of my continuous study, I have a better grasp of teaching these two exams.

In addition, another reason is that most of the students I recruited after I came out were from Peking University and Tsinghua University because the fever of going abroad in China started and spread from Peking University and Tsinghua University. Why? Because many foreign schools and graduate schools know that Peking University and Tsinghua are the best universities in China, so as long as students from Peking University and Tsinghua apply, they have the hope of being admitted. The next to follow are students from Fudan, Tongji, Wuhan University, Zhejiang University, Nanjing University, Nankai University, and other universities. So, competition arose among these students, who needed to score higher than others in TOEFL and GRE, and these students became the students in my course. Since most of these students come from prestigious universities and are aiming to go abroad, they just fit in with my teaching level and content.

In addition, these students have a very good foundation, so they can easily be taught to achieve high scores. Once they were taught to achieve high scores, they would in turn have a very good, if not important, impact on the development of my course. At that time, I didn't have the idea of opening training courses in China all the time, and even at that time the course was not called New Oriental, it was just a training course. My idea was to further improve myself through this kind of teaching, hoping to retake TOEFL and GRE when I reached a certain level so that I could apply for a scholarship to an American university or enter a famous American university and study abroad in the future.

In this sense, I was also very willing to deal with my students because I could meet some very smart and talented people and become friends with them when I went abroad in the future. This is one of the main reasons why I started with these two exams, even though English learning was still hot in China at that time.