A self-taught former factory worker who studied for his engineering degree by night has been elected as the head of one of the world’s leading electronic engineering societies.
This year, Gao Huijun will become the first president of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society from mainland China.
The society, founded in 1951, is a branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an organisation with over 400,000 members in more than 160 countries.
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Gao, a professor at the school of astronautics at the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), was born to farmworker parents in Jixian county in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang and left home at 15 to attend a technical secondary school in Shaanxi province, where he studied mechanical manufacturing.
After graduating in 1995, he earned an associate degree in industrial enterprise management through self-study while working as a factory grinder, and then went on to complete his bachelor’s degree course in 1997.
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He later told state broadcaster CCTV: “To get my bachelor’s degree, I had to pass 15 courses on my own. I’d take four exams every three months, after work, with no teacher to guide me.”
He then set his sights on postgraduate studies, although he admitted that at the time his advanced mathematics and English skills were not up to the required level.
