Hard work！the only way to change fate
However, the acceptance into Peking University was not the end of his academic troubles.
Yu was placed in a class for sub-standard students. The first and second years were hard for Yu, being a poor student both financially and academically. Not a single girl fell in love with him at that time.
Worse than that, Yu caught pneumonia in his junior year and had to take a year off from his studies. However, the misfortune came to him as a blessing. Yu learnt to enjoy life after recovering from the disease and had happy junior and senior years at school.
Yu graduated in 1985 and made a speech at the commencement, which is still widely known among students nowadays. "I had been trying to catch up with you for five years, but still could not make it. But please do not give up on me. I can work for 10 years to achieve what you can make in only five years," said Yu, adding that "if I still could not keep up with you for the rest of my life, I will be healthy and happy, and leave the world after all of you have left."
After graduation, Yu became a teacher there. However, in order to earn enough money to study abroad, he trained other students to prepare for the TOEFL exam in a class outside PKU, which caused him punishment eventually. Thus, in 1991, after working there for six years, Yu quit PKU in disgrace.
Two years later, Yu founded the New Oriental, offering TOEFL test preparation courses at the very beginning, and later grew it from a class of merely 30 students to China's largest private education institution with more than 12 million students enrolled as of 2010.
Placed 134th on the Forbes Global China Rich List in 2010, Yu, the once poor rural boy, finally shocked his classmates with his brilliant success.
He firmly believes that fate can been partially changed, by hard work.
