Profile - Baljaa Borgil '24

BALJAA BORGIL ’24, CIVIC STUDIES AND PSYCHOLOGY MAJOR FROM WEEHAWKEN, NJ

Chatting with Baljaa Borgil ’24, I quickly came to acknowledge his infectious energy, passion for community service, and genuine motivation for holding affirming spaces and supporting other students. As a child of Mongolian immigrants growing up in the greater New York City area, Baljaa attended a middle school specifically focused on disadvantaged and low-income students and later gained a scholarship to a boarding high school in Connecticut. Baljaa shares that he “was a part of a world that [he] never thought [he] would be a part of.” Unlike his home community, Baljaa found himself navigating the challenges of his Asian American identity in a predominantly white space. From this experience, he reinforced his commitment to championing diversity, equity, and inclusion and holding space where students could feel seen and understood.

Now as a junior at Tufts, Baljaa has very intentionally spent his time in multiple roles doing just that. More specifically, he has held an internship at the Tufts Asian American Center (AAC), one of the many identity-based resource centers within the Division of Student Diversity and Inclusion, where he supports community-building and personal development programming for Asian American students at Tufts. Baljaa shares, “One of the main reasons why I chose Tufts is because it is one of only 30 or 40 campuses across the country with a space specifically for students under the Asian Diaspora.” In his capacity as an intern, Baljaa has collaborated with the LGBT Center to create a Queer Asian Social, which he describes as “an affinity space to celebrate intersectional identities that I never had access to before.” He continues, “This is just one of the wonderful ways that Tufts comes together to provide community for students.”

Apart from his programming initiative, Baljaa is a peer mentor in the AAC Peer Leader program designed for first-year and transfer students to be connected with a continuing student peer leader tasked with mentoring their cohort on how to navigate Tufts. In interactions with his mentees, Baljaa has centered themes of self-advocacy, or enabling students to take agency over their experiences. He admits, “As Asian students, I feel like these things aren’t necessarily taught to us—I want to empower students with important tools that aren’t often shared.”

Majoring in civic studies and psychology with the goal of understanding how individuals interact with civic institutions, the Tisch Scholars program in the Tisch College of Civic Life naturally piqued Baljaa’s interests. Designed as a three-year experience for selected undergraduates, the Scholars program is a combination of leadership development coursework, field placements in local communities, and academic integration. With the ambition to contribute meaningfully to Tufts’ host communities, Baljaa’s current placement as a Tisch Scholar is in Malden at the Asian Community Development Corporation. Through this work, Baljaa works closely with local Asian American high schoolers and seeks to motivate them to use their voices to affect positive change in their communities through dialogue, storytelling, and placemaking. For Baljaa, his Tisch Scholar experience means so much more to him because “getting to form connections with these students has been really impactful.” In reflecting on his own upbringing, he shares, “I 100% would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for the Asian American mentors I had in my life who walked me along the way. That is why youth empowerment is so important to me.” Each week, Tisch Scholars connect with each other in a classroom setting to discuss their work, what it means to be civically engaged, and the tools and competencies that they can take away from their fieldwork.

Across all of his diverse involvements, Baljaa Borgil is committed to paving the path towards equity in higher education. He concludes with his most important affirmation for students, “This is your time. This is your space.” Baljaa reminds all of us to embrace our individuality, value and celebrate our own voices, and seek out the communities that empower and motivate us. —JOSH COHEN ’24