From the Other Side of the Globe: Squash's Raghavan Finishes Princeton Career Abroad
4/25/2020
A sense for opportunity is important for any entrepreneur, and even in a time that seems unlike any other in living memory, Adhitya Raghavan has kept his eye out for a chance to help.
A senior who wrapped up his Princeton squash career in March by helping the Tigers to their best finish since 2013 in the Potter Cup, the College Squash Association’s top tournament, Raghavan has headed back home to India with the move to online classes.
As with his fellow Princetonians and college students across the country, having to finish out the semester somewhere other than on campus has led to some adjustments in routine. For Raghavan, that means that daytime activities moved to nighttime, as he has opted to follow classes live rather than watching recorded lectures on demand. With India being nine and a half hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time, Raghavan’s classes continue into the wee hours.
“I have class from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m,” Raghavan said. “My professors have been very nice about recording the lectures so that I can view it later, but personally I decided not to do that since I couldn’t engage with the professor, so it was worth staying up late just so I could ask questions and engage in conversations with the professor and my classmates.”
The shift upends the usual flow of events for a busy senior who was not only a student-athlete, but a member of groups like the Varsity Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, Undergraduate Student Government and the Council of the Princeton University Community, in addition to his mechanical and aerospace engineering major. Those groups continue to meet online as well, with Raghavan again having to factor in the time difference from the other side of the globe.
Senior year means a senior thesis or project for most Princetonians, and most students’ having left campus has added a wrinkle in completing projects that require collaboration. In Raghavan’s case, that collaboration includes keeping in touch with fellow students whose time difference from India is even a little larger than the difference with Princeton, with Raghavan’s counterparts living in Montana and Wisconsin.
The project itself has an entrepreneurial flavor, looking at a way to save product from spoilage and doing it in a way that involves new technologies.
“Our project is a cold-storage plant to store food produced, making sure it doesn’t get spoiled, and we’re powering it with biogas. Our concept is ‘waste to work,’ so we take organic waste material, and turn that into useful energy,” Raghavan said. “Luckily, we finished most of our design work before (classes moved online). We worked throughout the year, so we ended up just being able to write the report remotely, which was nice for us. We couldn’t build anything after leaving Princeton (because) all of our stuff is back in Princeton. We did want to do some more tests we couldn’t do, but we’re trying to make the best of it.”
The project hasn’t totally satiated the entrepreneurial bug for Raghavan, who is also investing his time in developing an assistive sports training app named LUDIS to help fellow athletes maintain a training routine focusing on self-accountability. That project also requires collaboration with a different group of Princeton students across oceans and continents.
“We’re still designing it, but the idea is for holding players accountable, helping motivate them and mainly acting as a planner. Especially in times like this and during the offseason, trying to plan out your schedule for the week and holding you accountable to it, that’s the main motive of the app,” Raghavan said. “What better time to try out something than when we have four months now? The last two weeks, I interviewed different people, just reached out to the Princeton community, and I found my teammates there.”
Between the squash team, his project collaborators, and now his fellow app developers, Raghavan has met plenty of teammates at Princeton, and he has sought to give back to the campus community, having the privilege to have been elected to the Undergraduate Student Government and the Council of the Princeton University Community, a group that includes alumni, faculty members, administrators and students that meet about once a month and discuss a range of campus issues.
His involvement is just one example of how instead of being cloistered with their teammates, Princeton student-athletes have made the effort to take an active role outside of their sport.
“A lot of student-athletes are involved in the overall campus community,” Raghavan said. “A big, important step is to not just stick with your team all the time. A lot of student athletes get involved as RCAs (Residential College Advisers), PAAs (Peer Academic Advisers), advising students, and also in the McGraw tutoring centers.”
Although you spend a lot of time with your team, you build relationships outside, make friends outside, maybe it’s through your eating clubs or your residential colleges.Senior Adhitya Raghavan
While still aiming to find ways to employ his entrepreneurial spirit, Raghavan plans to take a position in management consulting upon graduation. The squash team was able to complete its season before overall competition ceased, and though the final steps on the path to graduation for Raghavan and the Class of 2020 haven’t played out in quite the environment they probably envisioned, he was able to deliver a message to the Tigers set to return for a squash team on the climb.
From the 2019-20 team that finished fourth in the nation, Princeton graduates Raghavan, who played primarily at third, Gabriel Morgan, who split time between fourth and fifth, and Henry Parkhurst, who competed on court nine in five of the team’s 15 matches this past season.
That leaves Princeton with seven returning starters to build on its best finish in seven years.
“It was a great season. It was a good way to finish off representing Princeton squash for me as well,” Raghavan said. “Something that I distinctly remember telling my teammates is that this is nowhere close to the end, but a stepping stone, and I really look forward to seeing them ending up number one, because that’s our goal and we’re not going to stop until we get there.”
