All there is to know about me that’s not UX!

The green wall photo every CMU MHCI’er will have!

Hi there, I’m Payal Bhujwala, currently a Master’s student of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and graduating in August 2020.

I have grown up in Oman, which is a beautiful country in the middle east and my family hails from Gujarat, India. I completed my bachelor’s degree in engineering with a focus in Information Technology at the College of Engineering, Pune. After which I worked at Wipro Technologies Ltd. as a software developer on market data applications before starting my Master’s program.

Corniche, near the Mutrah Souq(market), Oman[left], Market with supplies for a widely celebrated kite-flying festival in Vadodara, Gujarat[right]

During my bachelor’s degree, I was also part of a street theatre society that performed satirical plays on social issues and created awareness about them. While developing content and also directing these plays, they helped me in becoming a better leader and a better team player. It taught me how to be collaborative and find common ground on goals when you are working with people with differing opinions. In my final year, I led the team to win several national-level competitions across India as well as we performed for a number of non-profits to help them create awareness more effectively.

Our team in action(left), After winning our first competition for 2018(center), Performing at Aagaaz, India’s biggest street theatre competition at IIT Bombay(right)

Besides street-theatre or theatre in general, I’m also interested in digital art and working with pastels and sketching. I have done a course in graphic design to get more hands-on experience in branding and digital design as well as taken several sketching classes while I was in school. I have also completed a certification course in front-end web development from Udacity where I learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

On a more personal front, I have been fortunate enough to have lived with 4 generations under the same roof while growing up and I shared a lovely relationship with my great-grandfather who passed away in 2018, just 5 months short of a century :(

From him, I learned to be organized, disciplined, and punctual(something that I’m still working on), but mostly how to be proactive and also have the same playful spirit, even at that age.

And that’s all there is to know about me!

If you are looking to talk more about theatre, movies, design or something work-related hit me up on mail or connect with me on LinkedIn.