Student Spotlight: From Intern to Senior Product Designer

How Khushi Dalal (MIIPS Online ‘26) turned from an intern at CarMax to a Senior Product Designer — and how she plans to use her MIIPS degree to innovate

Khushi Dalal was born in Dallas but spent half of her life growing up in Mumbai, India. Her parents wanted her to experience the cultural life in Mumbai when she was younger, and that is where she has her fondest memories with friends and family. 

Khushi returned to Texas to complete her undergraduate studies at the The University of Texas at Dallas with a BA in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication. Now, she is working on her next degree, an Online Master of Integrated Innovation for Products and Services at the Integrated Innovation Institute (iii) at Carnegie Mellon University.

“I do not want to be at the tail end of change. I want to be the one who brings in the change.” 

The Fast Facts: A Summary of Khushi’s Time in the Online MIIPS Program

A Love for Design 🎨

• Passion for animation
• Discovery of love for UX design 

Becoming a Lifelong Learner 📝

• Love for an academic environment 
• The flexibility of the Online MIIPS program 
• Expanding her professional role through learning

Growing at CarMax 🚘

• Started as an Intern and grew into a Senior Product Designer 
• Passion for design and all parts of the customer experience

What’s Next 🎓

• Decompressing outside of the classroom
• Intended Graduation of Summer 2026
• Hopes for the future of AI and herself 

Khushi and her family at her Undergraduate Graduation

A Love for Design

Khushi discovered UX design during her time at UT Dallas, where she was studying Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication. She was immediately drawn to how UX combines creativity, empathy, and logic, allowing her to be artistic while solving real problems for real people.

She intentionally pursued opportunities to build experience in UX through coursework, internships, and self-initiated projects. As her career began to grow, Khushi realized that to truly lead in this space, she would need to deepen her understanding of how design connects with business and engineering. That’s what led her to the Online MIIPS program, which blends all three disciplines and gives her the tools to design with a more strategic, systems-level lens.

Khushi at a Figma Conference

Lifelong Learner

Khushi always thrived in an academic environment. The structure they provided inspired her to learn more and reach higher, making the decision to return to graduate school easy; she just had to figure out which school best fit her endeavors. 

Changing her life for graduate school was very intimidating to Khushi because for some students it means leaving their jobs behind, their family and friends, and uprooting to a whole new city. Finding the Online MIIPS degree allowed Khushi the flexibility to fit this educational pursuit into a life that she had already built, instead of having to put it on pause. 

This flexibility allows Khushi to include learning in her everyday life by eliminating the time of a commute and giving her the opportunity to create a learning network with people from all over the world.

She appreciates the flexibility because being a part-time student and full-time professional, the workload is a huge commitment, however, Khushi has found a good routine to get her work done. With work during the week, she focuses on her readings over the weekend so that when she is in class during the weekdays, she can focus on taking notes. 

In the classroom, Khushi finds Professor Sarah Laiwala particularly inspiring. “I really appreciate from a representation perspective that she is a woman of color who is in such a high leadership role, who has done such amazing things in the industry.”Additionally, as Professor Laiwala worked at Disney as the Director of Digital Consumer Experiences, PhotoPass & Innovation, as a lover of animation, Khushi finds that particularly inspiring.

In her other classes, Khushi loves having the opportunity to meet the strong industry professionals who are her classmates. Through these biweekly class discussions and team meetings outside of class, students get a chance to connect. “I love the dedication that the other students have to their learning,” she said when discussing how her peers inspire her throughout her work. 

Overall, she loves the curriculum and the combination of the three disciplines of design, engineering, and business. This degree allows Khushi to deepen her knowledge in design while growing her foundational knowledge in other disciplines to make her a well-rounded professional. The classwork is directly applicable to the current industry world as they work on solving problems that others still have yet to find a solution to. 

“Carnegie Mellon has a unique program that caters to the current world and what the current world needs.” 

The iii helps expand the horizon of her work at CarMax beyond her initial discipline to a holistic product development cycle. It allows her to bring on the different lenses of design, business, and engineering to help customers through their process of the product life cycle. 

Growing at CarMax 

Khushi began her professional journey at CarMax, the largest used car retailer in the U.S. with a buy-and-sell business model. She joined as a Product Design Intern in the summer of 2022, shortly after graduating from UT Dallas. As an intern, she was embedded within a product team and collaborated closely with senior designers and engineers. She contributed to a live feature release, gaining valuable exposure to real-world product development cycles.

She later returned full-time and recently became a Senior Product Designer, just three years after her internship.

“As you grow in your role, you start to see patterns in what customers need — and how design can bridge that gap.”

Today, Khushi leads across the entire design lifecycle, from problem discovery through solution delivery. Her current focus is on helping customers better understand the value of their car over time, so they feel informed and supported when deciding to sell.

“A car is often your second biggest asset after your home, so selling it is a big decision. We want customers to feel confident when they make that call.”

Khushi is extremely grateful to CarMax for giving her a platform to start her career from where she has been able to learn, grow, and experiment within her role. "The cross-functional collaboration and focus on customer experience have shaped my growth as a designer in such a meaningful way," she said, when describing the value that CarMax has added to her career.

What’s Next

Outside of work and school, Khushi has to find ways to decompress. One of those is her love for travel, and she is trying to get in as many trips as possible in the near future. Previously, she has gone to Spain, and next, she is focused on her upcoming trip to Mexico. Outside of travel, she enjoys hot yoga because of the mental and physical connection that it provides her. She is also trying out new cooking recipes by blending different types of cuisines together.

Khushi out exploring

“Graduate School is no joke,” she says, and while it can be overwhelming at points in combination with her hobbies, Khushi uses her love for learning as a constant motivator. 

Currently, Khushi is taking her fourth online course and looks forward to having her degree all come together with the capstone project, with the intention to graduate by summer 2026. 

As for the future of technology in products and services, Khushi is excited about AI’s potential to amplify human creativity and solve real-world problems — especially when used thoughtfully and ethically. She hopes the industry continues to lean into using AI not just for speed or automation, but to build more inclusive, human-centered systems.

Looking ahead, she hopes to build something of her own — maybe even through her capstone — that reflects those same values of thoughtful innovation and ethical design.