Brandeis Stories

By David Levin
May 6, 2026

When Khimaya Bagla ’26 was searching for colleges from her home in India, she had a clear picture of what she wanted: a small university with serious undergraduate research. Brandeis seemed like the perfect fit — so she packed up and flew roughly 8,000 miles west to enroll as a psychology major, her sights set on becoming a therapist.

That plan lasted about a semester.

What Bagla found at Brandeis was something she never anticipated: a liberal arts environment that kept pulling her in new and exciting directions, each one more unexpected than the last. A multimedia class she took on a whim led to a journalism minor. A writing course led to a podcast internship. A single economics class — taken, she admits, mostly out of curiosity — inspired her honors thesis on decision fatigue and financial risk-taking.

“Being a liberal arts college, Brandeis allowed me to explore all of those interests at the same time,” she says. “I probably wouldn't have gotten a multimedia class my first year. An econ class. A law class. But I'm so grateful for those, because they ended up informing everything else I’ve done.”

The feedback between her creative and scientific sides is something Bagla sees as distinctly Brandeisian. Her journalism minor taught her to communicate science; her science background gave her journalism a sense of rigor. Even a photography class she signed up for to meet a core requirement ended up giving her fresh angles on research problems.

“It gave me the ability to interconnect all these different fields,” she said. “Every time I run into a research question, those experiences help me approach the problem in a totally fresh way.”

This May, Bagla — a neuroscience and psychology major — will deliver the undergraduate address at Brandeis University’s 75th Commencement exercises on May 17, a fitting capstone for someone whose college experience has defied any single narrative. Over the past four years, she’s led the South Asian Students Association, worked in the campus Sound and Image Media Studios, served as a Community Advisor, and, during an internship with the University of Illinois, worked with a Coast Guard ship simulator in Connecticut (that one, she concedes, was a long way from Waltham — and from psychology.)

The thread connecting it all, she says, has been the ethos of Brandeis itself, from its small and supportive community to its culture of taking on many challenges at once. She simply couldn't have predicted that experience when she first landed in Boston, she notes.

Today, Bagla is still searching for novel opportunities. She doesn't yet know whether she'll pursue a PhD, head to business school, or just work in a research field until she figures out her next move. But she knows the mindset she's leaving with — curious, cross-disciplinary, willing to try things that don't obviously connect — is one she couldn't have built anywhere else.

“One of the things Brandeis has taught me,” she says, “is that as long as you're learning and growing from an experience, that's what matters.”