Early on, Ishida remained in at home in Nayoro, living with his mother and commuting twice monthly to Tokyo by plane to participate in the apprentice school.[3] He would attend junior high school during the week, leave school early the day before his schedule games, and fly to Tokyo where he was met by his father. who was stationed in Tokyo as a member of the Japanese Self Defense Forces.[3] After Ishida finished his games, his father would take him to the airport for the return trip back to Hokkaido.[3]
At first, Ishida found the apprentice school quite difficult and actually was demoted from 6-kyū to 7-kyū because of poor results; eventually, however, he started to perform better and obtained promotion to 5-kyū.[3] After graduating from junior high school, he and his mother moved from Hokkaido to Tokyo and he enrolled in a local senior high school; he continued to perform well as an apprentice professional and was promoted to the rank of 2-dan by the time he was a third-year high school student.[3] After graduating from senior high school, Ishida decided to continue his education at university to not only please his mother, who felt that further education would help his job prospects if he did not become a professional shogi player, but also because he was really interested in mathematics.[3] He passed the entrance exam for the Department of Mathematics for the Faculty of Science and Engineering of Chuo University and began living on his own after his mother moved back to Nayoro.[3]
Nishida was promoted to the rank of 3-dan in 2008 while he was a second-year university student, but was still ranked at 3-dan as he entered his final year of university.[3] Being around his fellow fourth-year students who were already going on job interviews and participating in other job-hunting activities made him wonder if he would ever become a professional shogi player.[3] His mother even said he could come back to Nayoro and look for work if he wanted to after graduation if he still had not obtained professional status, but he decided to continue at the apprentice school,[3] He finally obtained full professional status and the rank of 4-dan in October 2012 after finishing second in the 51st 3-dan League (April 2012 – September 2012) with a record of 13 wins and 5 losses.[2][4]
^"Gakusei Puro Kishi Tanjō" 学生プロ棋士誕生 [University student becomes professional shogi player] (PDF). Hakumon Chuo (in Japanese). Vol. Fall, no. 243. Chuo University. October 25, 2015. p. 23. Archived from the original(pdf) on June 12, 2018. Retrieved June 18, 2019. 中大出身のプロ棋士は4人。米長邦雄永世棋聖 (中退), 大内延介九段, 横山泰明六段, 石田直裕四段 [Chuo University students who went on to become professional shogi players: Lifetime Kisei Kunio Yonenaga (did not graduate), Nobuyuki Ōuchi 9d, Hiroaki Yokoyama 6d, Naohiro Ishida 4d]
