My Rollins Gateway
A Pillar of Progress By Adrienne Egolf | Portraits by Natalie Chitwood
Aditya Mahara ’12’s path through Rollins was defined by both the opportunities he seized and those he created for himself. You might think that a person like Aditya Mahara ’12—a Rollins Cornell Scholar who earned a PhD in engineering from Dartmouth and is now a product manager at AstraZeneca—would have spent his time in college laserfocused on academics. And your assumption wouldn’t be wrong exactly—just incomplete. “Coming from Nepal,” says Mahara, “everything felt like a great opportunity to me—the community, the service aspect, the friendships. I learned to exercise this muscle of gratitude. And I ended up being quite involved at Rollins.” A physics major, Mahara knew going into college that he wanted to pursue a career in the medical field. But he wasn’t sure where that path would lead, and he embraced every chance to explore all the opportunities available to him at Rollins. He joined the X Club fraternity 40 | Summer 2021
and spent spring breaks in places like the Bahamas working with special-needs children. In Rollins’ very own anechoic chamber, he conducted original research on acoustics and optics through the College’s StudentFaculty Collaborative Scholarship Program. He teamed up with a fellow classmate to co-found Making Lives Better, a service club that traveled to Nepal to focus on improving community health and education. “My education at Rollins was not just about enhancing knowledge, but rather enhancing life skills and then acquiring knowledge as a byproduct,” he says. From conducting research on campus to learning what it really takes to effect change in communities across the globe, explore some of the transformative waypoints on Mahara’s personalized pathway through Rollins.
