Life at VCU

Roshan R Sivakumar's first day at VCU's School of Business set the tone for the whole year: a new country, a new academic language built around statistics and prescriptive analytics, and a campus that felt nothing like Karur or Bangalore. He leaned into it fast. Within his first year he was an active member of the American Marketing Association's VCU chapter and picked up the AMA Best Spokesperson Award at the chapter's induction ceremony.

Professors like James Eggleston pushed him toward the rigorous, evidence-first thinking that later showed up in his NOAA microplastics analysis and his "Breakfast by the Numbers" time-series project. Outside class, VCU's international community felt like home: Diwali with fellow Indian students, his first-ever snowfall (nothing like that growing up in Tamil Nadu), Halloween on campus, and weekend trips to the Outer Banks and Washington D.C. with the friends he'd made along the way.

Graduation closed the loop. Roshan R Sivakumar crossed the stage in Richmond with a Master's in Decision Analytics in hand, ready to bring a year of statistical rigor back to the factory floor at RR HEVIREX.