Student-Athlete of the Week: Raaghav Agarwal

With his varsity tennis season now behind him, Niwot senior Raaghav Agarwal is turning his attention to another type of head-to-head match. This year, he is taking on a key technical role for the Up-A-Creek Robotics' Team 1619, one of the top high school robotics teams in Colorado. Though competition season is still a few months away, Agarwal is excited about the youthful squad, and looking forward to getting back into the arena.

"This year, we're going back to in-person challenges, which is going to be a lot of fun," he said of the upcoming FIRST Robotics season, which starts on Jan. 8, 2022. "It's still considered off-season, but we're meeting every week, and getting prepared."

With the encouragement of computer science teacher Teresa Ewing, Agarwal developed an interest in programming and coding while a student at Flagstaff Academy, which continued when both of them came to Niwot High. He joined Team 1619 during his freshman year, when the team took first at the Colorado regional competition. His sophomore and junior seasons were disrupted by the pandemic, though the team still managed to collect an impressive list of awards, and, at the end of the 2021 season, was ranked the number one skills competition team out of 1,516 teams.

In addition to teaching computer science, Ewing is also one of the founding members of Team 1619, and remains a close SVVSD faculty mentor. She has been working with Agarwal in and out of the classroom for several years, and called his technical skills "instrumental" on past design challenges. But the senior brings more to the team than just his coding abilities.

"As a leader, Raaghav is the best example of servant leadership," she wrote in an email interview. "He never asks anyone to do anything that he is not willing to do himself. He models responsibility and reliability."

For the coming season, Agarwal will be the lead for the App Software subteam, the group responsible for creating an iPad application that collects strategic data on competitors. During the pre-season, that means teaching Team 1619's programming language to the newcomers, and so far, the results are promising.

"We've been to one off-season tournament already, and we won that, so I think we should be fine," he said.

It is actually the second time in the past year that Agarwal has found himself instructing younger students on coding and computer languages. To fulfill his IB Creativity, Activity, and Service requirement, Agarwal recorded a series of programming videos to help Ewing's beginning students, a project that was more challenging than he expected.

"Learning how to teach other people is a hard skill to pick up," he said. "I was trying to make it instructional, and teach them how to do it, instead of telling them how to do it, so they can do it on their own."

When he's not on the court or coding apps for Niwot, Agarwal juggles a demanding academic schedule in the school's demanding IB program. He has also earned his Eagle rank in Niwot Boy Scout Troop 161, and completed a service project at Longmont's Vance Brand Airport in 2019. Over the summer, he was an intern for NIST in Boulder, and continues to work there a few hours per week.

After graduation, Agarwal plans to attend college and study electrical engineering. He is in the early stages of the application process, but is considering CU, Colorado School of Mines, Purdue, and Virginia Tech.