He also worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop.[2] A profile published in the Quanta Magazine reports that Zhang used to live in his car during the initial job-hunting days.[2] He served as lecturer at UNH from 1999[15] until around January 2014, when UNH appointed him to a full professorship as a result of his breakthrough on prime numbers.[4] Zhang stayed for a semester at Princeton University in 2014, and he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara in Fall 2015.[17]