Where are you from or where do you consider home?

I’m from Vizag — Visakhapatnam, India — known as “The City of Destiny.” That’s home.

Three words to describe your experience at Northeastern:

Build. Lead. Serve.

What motivated you to continue through challenging times in obtaining your degree?

I came to this country with an opportunity that most people back home will never have, and my family believed in me enough to let me leave everything familiar behind. Giving anything less than my absolute best was never an option. Beyond that, the people around me at Northeastern kept me going in ways they probably don’t even realize — when others are depending on you, quitting stops being something you consider. I also carried something personal through every hard moment: I wanted to prove what was possible as an international student. To show that someone from Vizag — a city most people in America have never heard of — could come to a place like Northeastern and not just survive, but lead, build, serve, and leave a mark. The challenges were real. But so was the purpose behind everything I was doing, and the purpose always won.

What has your journey revealed to you about yourself?

That the things I build matter most when they’re built for someone else. I arrived thinking success meant excelling individually — the grades, the co-op, the milestones I could point to. But somewhere between managing operations for 64 club sports teams, creating products that solved real student problems, and working on capital projects that serve millions of people, I realized I’m driven by building things for others. This journey also taught me that leadership has nothing to do with titles. It’s about whether the people around you are better off because you were there.

Experiential learning is a core component of a Northeastern education. Describe some of the highlights for you.

Growing up as a competitive figure skater, I’ve always learned by doing — you don’t learn a jump by reading about it. That’s exactly how Northeastern’s approach felt to me from day one. My co-op at the MBTA dropped me inside a $9.6 billion Capital Program portfolio, where risk management stopped being a framework on a slide and became real conversations with contractors about delays that could affect thousands of commuters. Working at Carter Field in Club Sports taught me something no course could have — managing the relationships between Northeastern students and Boston community members in real time, shift by shift. And leading the Aspiring Product Managers Club meant we didn’t just talk about building products; we actually built them, because students around us had real problems worth solving.

Giving anything less than my absolute best was never an option. Beyond that, the people around me at Northeastern kept me going in ways they probably don’t even realize — when others are depending on you, quitting stops being something you consider.

Arun Kumar Rayudu

Where do you imagine yourself five years from now?

In a role where the work I do shapes how communities experience public infrastructure. The MBTA has given me an incredible foundation — working on one of the largest capital programs in Massachusetts has shown me how large-scale public systems operate and how behind-the-scenes decisions directly affect hundreds of thousands of people every day. I want to grow into senior leadership in transportation or broader public administration, where high-level decisions are being made that positively affect millions of people. And I want to stay connected to mentoring — some of the most meaningful moments of my Northeastern journey came from helping other students find their path, and I don’t want to lose that.

Is there anything else you wanted to say that we didn’t cover?

Everything I did at Northeastern started with a simple question I kept asking myself: will this matter after I’m gone? Not every decision was perfect. Not every late night felt worth it in the moment. But whatever I was working on — a policy manual for Club Sports, a digital product for students, a conversation with a peer who was struggling, a project at the MBTA — I tried to make sure it would still be useful to someone after I moved on. I didn’t come to Northeastern to collect experiences. I came to leave something behind.

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