Rohan Angadi’s education at Yale has helped him make a career choice. But he also learned many lessons simply applying to the school.
Angadi is from Clovis, New Mexico, located in an agricultural region in the eastern part of the state, near the Texas border. His high school’s lone guidance counselor had little experience in helping students apply to top academic institutions, he said. Most of the counselor’s time was spent helping 300 students simply graduate from high school.
And Rohan faced another obstacle. He suffers from Stargardt disease, an untreatable and progressive form of macular degeneration, an eye condition that can cause blurry vision over time.
“I was lost. I simply didn’t know what to do,’’ he recalled.
So after he was accepted at Yale, one of the first things he did on campus was to volunteer at Matriculate, a non-profit organization that helps low-income and first-generation students apply to top colleges and universities. In the past four years, Angadi, a resident of Davenport College, has counseled dozens of poor high school students from mostly rural districts about how to take the leap from their local school to the sometimes intimidating culture at top academic institutions.
By his senior year, he was head advising fellow for Matriculate at Yale, providing training and guidance to 73 college students, and counseled incoming first year student at Yale.
Angadi started his academic career at Yale taking basic remedial math. Using a monocular to see in class and depending upon audiobooks, he excelled in such courses as “Vector Analysis,” “Real Analysis,” and “Mathematical Game Theory.” He will graduate with degrees in economics and mathematics.
He landed a job with Boston Consulting Group in Denver, which is close (at least by Western standards) to his beloved New Mexico. But regardless of where he ends up, he says his future will always include helping shape rural education policies that can help students in places like Clovis.
“There are a lot of brilliant kids in New Mexico,” he said. “I’d like to help them all get a shot at a great education.”
