A Thousand Miles Underfoot: My Journey at Jiaotong University
学无止境 (xué wú zhǐ jìng — learning has no end)
Landing in Shanghai with two suitcases and a head full of ideas, I promised myself one thing: treat the PhD not as a race but as a craft. Jiaotong University (SJTU) became my workshop—labs that hum after midnight, tree-lined walks that reset the mind, and a city that moves fast enough to challenge any excuse. Here’s how this place has been shaping me—technically, personally, and quietly.
“工欲善其事，必先利其器”
— 《论语》
gōng yù shàn qí shì, bì xiān lì qí qì — to do a good job, first sharpen your tools.
The first months weren’t about breakthroughs; they were about frictions. I standardized Python environments, templated data loaders, wrote plotting utilities that respect the reader, and set up experiments to be re-runnable on a clean machine. That quiet housekeeping made room for real thinking. Only then did I start building PIBERT—a physics-informed BERT-style transformer for PDE/CFD—so it wouldn’t just fit data but remember physical constraints.
“不积跬步，无以至千里”
— 《荀子·劝学》
bù jī kuǐ bù, wú yǐ zhì qiān lǐ — without small steps, no thousand miles.
Progress here looks like careful baselines, ablations that go to the bone, and figures that reveal rather than flatter. I learned to love incrementalism: a tighter residual loss today, a clearer boundary-condition token tomorrow. Each small test compounds. The thousand miles are real; they’re just walked in millimeters.
“三人行，必有我师焉”
— 《论语》
sān rén xíng, bì yǒu wǒ shī yān — among three, one can be my teacher.
My teachers at SJTU are everywhere: a labmate who spots a numerical instability in my solver; a professor who asks one question that halves my method section; a facilities guard who reminds me to rest. The best meetings aren’t consensus rituals—they’re truth-seeking sessions. “Show the evidence” isn’t a challenge; it’s an invitation.
“冰冻三尺，非一日之寒”
— 谚语
bīng dòng sān chǐ, fēi yī rì zhī hán — three feet of ice don’t form in a day.
Some nights the plots don’t converge, the reviewer is painfully right, and the code refuses elegance. Patience became a method. I learned to pause, walk under the plane trees, and return with simpler defaults and fewer assumptions. The work remains hard; I just carry it better.
“海纳百川，有容乃大”
— 林则徐
hǎi nà bǎi chuān, yǒu róng nǎi dà — greatness comes from embracing many rivers.
PIBERT borrowed from language modeling, spectral methods, and physics priors. In parallel, I kept building PharmaDissolve MCP—a multi-agent toolkit for segmentation, retrieval, and dissolution prediction—because real users tug research toward the ground. The interplay keeps me honest: theory stretches; practice snaps it back into shape.
“精益求精”
— 成语
jīng yì qiú jīng — from good to better, pursue excellence.
A figure should earn trust before applause. I moved to hazard curves for time-to-event questions, ridgelines for distribution shape, ribbons for uncertainty. Each visual must carry its argument without me in the room. If a plot needs a paragraph to be legible, I redraw it.
“行胜于言”
— 成语
xíng shèng yú yán — deeds speak louder than words.
Shipping beats promising. I cut features, reduced scope, and released smaller artifacts: a reproducible script, a minimal demo, a testable hypothesis. That cadence—ship, watch, iterate—built more momentum than any grand plan on a whiteboard.
“水滴石穿”
— 谚语
shuǐ dī shí chuān — dripping water wears through stone.
Rejections came. So did bugs that hid in plain sight and experiments that contradicted my intuitions. Persistence isn’t just stubbornness; it’s structured return. I logged failures openly, traced them to assumptions, and built guardrails to prevent reruns of the same mistake.
“知之者不如好之者，好之者不如乐之者”
— 《论语》
zhī zhī zhě bùrú hào zhī zhě, hào zhī zhě bùrú lè zhī zhě — knowing < liking < loving.
Somewhere between late-night debugging and early-morning writing, I started to enjoy the craft itself—the click of a clean proof sketch, the elegance of a stable discretization, the kindness of a concise caption. Loving the process turned out to be the most sustainable strategy.
“千里之行，始于足下”
— 《老子》
qiān lǐ zhī xíng, shǐ yú zú xià — a thousand-mile journey begins under your feet.
SJTU taught me not to wait to “be ready.” Begin, then refine. My journey here isn’t a straight line, but it is forward. Today’s footstep is a small experiment run cleanly, a figure that argues clearly, a paragraph that survives editing. Tomorrow will ask for the same, with a little more grace.
— Somyajit Chakraborty, Shanghai