Kajal Schiller’s thesis draws on her life as “street child” in India

Drawing on her personal experience as a so-called “street child” in India before her adoption at the age of six, Kajal Schiller, a recent Princeton University graduate, applied the concept of ‘resource allocation’ for her thesis research.

Long before she heard the term ‘resource allocation,’ Schiller understood it as a matter of survival with nearly 100% of her time and attention focused on food, shelter and safety before her adoption, according to a story on Princeton website.

Her thesis research as a Princeton senior applied the concept of resource allocation to ask whether socioeconomic status might determine how likely people are to take advantage of resources that can help them solve problems.

She has also designed a computer simulation game to measure it. She hypothesized that her data might help illuminate why real-world decisions about whether to access mental health resources are affected by differences in income.

“The field of computational psychiatry can help create better models for how these processes occur,” she said.

Schiller graduated this May with a major in psychology and a minor in statistics and machine learning. This fall, she will begin a master’s program in public health data science at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Schiller had been curious about psychology since childhood but arrived at Princeton undecided on a major. She pursued coursework in classics, linguistics and Sanskrit before an introductory course in developmental psychology convinced her the major would be a good fit.

She gravitated toward her minor in statistics and machine learning after taking a data science course through Princeton’s Center for Statistics and Machine Learning.

Her humanities coursework helped ground her STEM studies in aspects of human experience, across time and cultures, she said. “It can be very easy to feel so distant from that when all you do is spend six hours in the office just coding or you’re working on an engineering project.”

Beyond the classroom, Schiller participated in the Scholars Institute Fellows Program (SIFP) in the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity, where she led mental health initiatives and discussions with other lower-income students.

“There are going to be times where you talk to Princeton students and they’re going to be stressed,” Schiller said. “The thing is, if they feel comfortable enough to tell you, I think that is already a good starting place.”

She was a peer academic adviser at Whitman College and served on the Whitman College Council. She was a member of the South Asian Students Association, 2D Co-op, the Princeton Psychology Society and Acts of Kindness.

The summer before her junior year, Schiller traveled to Bengaluru, India, for a Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies global seminar in collaboration with the High Meadows Environmental Institute. It was her first time returning to her home country since being adopted.

“Going to India the first time with Princeton was definitely, I think, probably the healthiest way to have that interaction,” she said. Her earliest memories of childhood poverty are among her strongest motivators to pursue an advanced degree in public health.