Saksham Khosla '15 Receives a Carnegie Junior Fellowship

Saksham Khosla ’15 has been awarded a Carnegie Junior Fellowship in the South Asia Program, which places him as a research associate for a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A politics and creative writing double-major with an economics minor, Khosla was chosen from a pool of nominees from almost 400 participating colleges.

Hailing from New Delhi, India, Khosla has been cochair of the South Asian Students Association, a member of the Politics Majors Committee and the men’s rugby team, and a cofounder and current director of business outreach of LumenEd, an organization that seeks to bring educational technology to students in developing countries without reliable access to electricity or internet and connect students across the world through a video pen pal program.

At Oberlin, Khosla was able to study South Asian politics and culture in-depth, turning his personal interests into an academic pursuit. With the Carnegie Junior Fellowship, Khosla plans to take his interest one step further. “I applied for this fellowship because I want to transition from being a passive observer of South Asian politics to being an active participant in policy research and design,” he says.

Currently at work on an honors thesis studying post-Cold War foreign policy convergences between India, China, and the United States, Khosla plans to pursue graduate studies and, eventually, a career in foreign policy. With its focus on combining theory with policy-relevant scholarship, Carnegie is just the place to get him started, he says.

“Assisting with research on policy papers and books and possibly even coauthoring journal articles straight out of college is a great honor that I don’t take lightly, and I look forward to becoming a better student of South Asia through the process,” he says.