Haozhe Jiang

I am advised by Prof. Nika Haghtalab and Prof. Jiantao Jiao. Coming to Berkeley for grad school is probably the best decision in my life. The weather here is the best among all the places I have lived. Besides, people here are extremely sharp and diverse. My advisors are very supportive, patient and open. Notably, they are happy with me working on nothing in most of my first year 😈.

I am deeply affected by the school motto of Tsinghua University: “自强不息，厚德载物”. I take inspiration from the deep culture and long history of Tsinghua all the time. A small wish is that I hope Tsinghua could be less grindy in the future. During my undergrad, I was fortunate to have worked with Prof. Chongjie Zhang, Prof. Yilei Chen, and Prof. Shude Mao. I am very grateful for all the courageous research projects that they agreed to advise me on.

At UW, I worked with Prof. Simon Shaolei Du and Prof. Maryam Fazel on multi-agent learning. Seattle gave me a lot of cultural shocks, and it is certainly an eye-opening experience. Besides, I enjoyed how close Seattle is to nature, which is not quite accessible from where I grew up.

In high school, I participated in Physics Olympiad and won some provincial and national awards. I got recommended admission to Tsinghua University due to my extraordinary performance. My high school is known for its freedom among the high schools in Shanghai. I was allowed to focus on my interests during those three years. A lot of people question the value of Physics competitions. For me, however, I could not be skilled in maths and physics if I did not have those competitions to push me forward, and a lot of research works I did would be impossible without those skills.

I was born and raised in the wonderful city of Shanghai, the best city in the world in my opinion. I want to keep where I went to school before high school a secret. According to my mom, I was not an outstanding/obedient kid. Indeed, unlike most of my Tsinghua classmates from Shanghai, I did not go to a top-tier middle school/primary school. My childhood dream was to become an astronomer, and I was foolish enough to read any science material I could get my hands on, foolish enough to teach myself calculus when I was 14 even though I cannot get past the first rounds of Math competitions. To my parents’ surprise, such curiosity and fearlessness led me to greater success academically in the long run.