Sitting on the couches of the Wyse 107 lounge, with the smell of Indian food filling the air, Raj Biyani ‘92 reflected on his journey from being an international student at Goshen College to becoming a managing director at Microsoft IT and even serving as a tech advisor for the movie “Avatar.”

This fall, Biyani has been back on campus for nearly a semester, reconnecting with students and faculty. During Homecoming Weekend, on Friday, Oct. 3, he was recognized at the Alumni Award convocation with the 2025 Culture for Service Award, honoring six outstanding alumni who exemplify GC core values of leadership and service.

During his 17 years at Microsoft, he helped launch early versions of what would become the Microsoft Store, led the company’s cloud adoption strategy, and oversaw the transformation of Microsoft’s information technologies center in India, a journey later studied at Harvard Business School. Along the way, he co-authored a playbook on enterprise cloud adoption, earned multiple U.S. and EU patents and even contributed 10 “Think Week” papers directly to Bill Gates.

However, his work wasn’t limited to technology. When filmmaker James Cameron set out to build the digital world of Pandora for “Avatar,” Biyani helped connect Microsoft with the film’s production team, positioning the company as a key player in the emerging era of digital filmmaking.

“Essentially, Avatar was an IT project,” Biyani said at the time, explaining how Microsoft’s cloud platform enabled massive teams across continents to store and access more than a petabyte of data. “With the cloud, studios can focus on the art while technology works quietly in the background.”

Even with such achievements, Biyani never forgot his roots. In 2003, he created the Giving Something Back Scholarship, awarded to a GC international student who makes outstanding contributions to campus life, a personal way of honoring the place that shaped his journey.  The idea for the scholarship came after his boss once encouraged him to upgrade from his old Honda and even gave him money to buy a new car. Instead of spending it on himself, Biyani decided to donate the money to GC, a story he shared with students during his visit.

When Biyani first came to GC, he was a young student from India stepping into a world he knew little about. The decision to come here wasn’t just his, his mother helped him. As acceptance letters from U.S. colleges arrived at their home, his mom carefully read through the materials.

“My mom said to me, ‘I see a lot of similarity here between this institution and how we have raised you,’” he added,  “She said, ‘This looks like it could be a good Hindu college.’ So that’s how I came to Goshen College.”

Her intuition turned out to be right, what she sensed in that brochure became part of Biyani’s everyday life at GC.  “This institution made me who I am,” he said. “It allowed me to make mistakes, to fall, and every time I fell, there was somebody to lift me up.”

Coming from a Hindu background to a predominantly Mennonite campus wasn’t always easy, but Biyani remembered it as a time of genuine exchange and mutual learning. “There were people in the religion department who encouraged me to research and write about my own faith,” he said. “They supported me in learning more about Hinduism, the faith I had grown up in.”

Those four years were filled with curiosity and change. Biyani didn’t just explore one academic path, he explored nearly all of them. “I was changing my major probably every year, if not every semester,” he said, laughing. “Because I loved my classes. Actually, more than my classes, I loved my professors.”

He took courses across disciplines, from political science to religion, history and art, often auditing classes simply because they sounded interesting.  “For me, it was delightful to be able to take classes all over campus,” he said. “By exploring subjects outside my major, I learned how to learn something new.”

This skill, “learning how to learn”, turned out to be one of his most important takeaways from his time at Goshen. Decades later, as a managing director at Microsoft and later leading the company’s operation in India, that same spirit of curiosity helped him navigate an ever-changing tech world.

“If I had been frozen in the knowledge I had in college, I would have become redundant much earlier,” he reflected. “But because Goshen taught me to explore new spaces, I always felt ready for what came next.”

Outside the classroom, Biyani found joy in the community’s small traditions and student events. One of his favorite memories was the annual International Student Coffeehouse.

“I had a lot of enthusiasm but no talent,” he said, laughing. “My friends figured out that the safe way to utilize me was to give me non-speaking and non-singing roles, so that I could be there but not do any damage to the performance.”

Those lighthearted moments, combined with the relationships he built with professors and fellow students, became the foundation of his college experience. Even now, when he returns to campus, Biyani still visits his former professors, many of whom are now retired and living at Greencroft. “It’s so much fun connecting with them outside the classroom setting,” he said. “I’m spending just as much time at Greencroft as I am on campus.”

Ron Milne ‘67, former professor of mathematics, and his wife Sally Jo, former Librarian, attended a meeting with other retired GC faculty where Biyani spoke. Although Milne and Biyani shared a connection with mathematics, Milne never had Biyani in his classroom; he said they had “a personal connection.” Milne shared how he met Biyani through his daughter who attended GC at the same time. She would do gardening at the house where Biyani and other students from India lived.

“He was in our house a number of times.” Milne said. He also recalled a story of Biyani helping them cook an Indian dish, “we had something called a papadam” he said “ It’s sort of like an unfried tortilla, except very much thinner and Raj told us that the way to fry that is over an open flame.” They had an electric stove, so they improvised with a camping stove for that evening, “we actually got a stove in the kitchen that is now gas, so we have an open flame that we can use when we make the papadams these days. But we learned that from Raj,” he said.

Milne shared how he enjoyed having international students around, “we learned so much even without going to their home countries,” he said. Milne reflected on his connection with Biyani saying his “interactions with Raj were more, intercultural than academic”

Biyani has returned to Goshen College several times since graduating, often visiting classes, speaking with students, and catching up with former professors. During his most recent visit, he spent an evening with international students, making sure to learn each person’s name and major before the conversation began. Those small gestures reflected the same attentiveness he credits Goshen for teaching him years ago.

His family has also been part of that connection. His wife has joined him on a few visits to campus, and although she couldn’t come this time, she often teases him about how happy he seems whenever he’s here. “She tells me, ‘You’re there by yourself, but you seem to be so happy. It’s almost like you’re with family,’” he said. “And I said, ‘That’s true. Goshen feels like family to me.’” Their two children are both students in India and, as he shared with a laugh, have recently been learning Sanskrit together, a journey that even inspired [his wife] to start taking lessons. “Now the three of them can switch to Sanskrit whenever they want to talk about something I’m not part of,” he said.

Even as his career has taken him from India to Microsoft headquarters and back, Biyani returns to Goshen College with the same curiosity and care that shaped his own student experience. “It is so energizing to be amongst all of you bright, smart, young students on campus; your enthusiasm and your energy rubs off on me,” he said. For Biyani, being back isn’t just a visit, it’s a chance to continue giving back to the community that shaped him.