The Yale campus was nearly empty when Rahul Prasad arrived from India in 1982. It was June, and most students had left New Haven for the summer. Prasad, who was engaged as a research assistant for a few months before beginning his graduate studies, spent much of his free time strolling the grounds and getting to know the layout of the university.
One afternoon, a stranger approached him on the street and asked him his thoughts about Yale and New Haven. A few weeks later, Prasad crossed paths with the man again, and they struck up another conversation. Soon after the semester started, with campus abuzz, Prasad spotted him yet again on Hillhouse Avenue and stopped to chat. Later, a friend who had seen them talking asked, “How do you know Bart?” Prasad was confused. His friend explained: “Bart Giamatti. The president of Yale.”
For Prasad, those sidewalk encounters with the president are among his first memories of Yale, and his fondest. “Bart, in his way, made me feel like I belonged,” he says. “And never for a moment, in all my years of close connection to Yale, have I felt that I did not belong.”
Prasad, now a retired physicist, has been a prolific volunteer for the university over the past three and a half decades. He has served as chair of both the Graduate School Alumni Association and the Yale Alumni Association—the first graduate school alumnus to do so. Currently, he serves on the board of the Yale Alumni Fund and as president of the Yale Club of San Francisco, in addition to his own work as an investor and chair of two non-profit boards.
Prasad says his original motivation for volunteering was simple: “I believe that I am the person I am today because of my time at Yale. I grew into an adult here and learned how to think here. It was very easy for me to decide to give back to this great institution.”
As for his motivation for continuing to volunteer for so many years, Prasad cites the experience of living in Helen Hadley Hall during his first year as a student. “There was such a diverse group of people in the dorm. I was an engineer; the person next door to me was a tuba player; a couple of doors down was a singer; and down the hall lived an art historian. I wound up finding that to be incredibly enriching because I was able to get out of my own narrow silo and see the rest of the world,” he recalls. “There’s nothing better than to be exposed to new experiences and perspectives. That should be true for your entire life. Through volunteering, I have connected with people I would never otherwise have run into. Thirty-five years from graduation, the group of Yalies whom I count as my friends is even larger today than it was when I was on campus.”
Indeed, Prasad has been credited with helping to break down barriers between undergraduate and graduate and professional school alumni, fostering a deeper sense of belonging among all. “We belong to one university,” he points out. “It doesn’t matter whether we happen to be from Yale College or the graduate school or the School of the Environment. The collision with the person who has nothing to do with your orbit is so often what generates the spark that produces the next great idea or innovation.”