Biography | Revathi Advaithi — The Only Woman in the Mechanical Engineering Class at BITS Pilani

The clock tower on the Pilani campus still marks the centre of a desert institute that trained engineers long before India had a software industry.

Revathi Advaithi arrived here in 1986 from a Tamil family that had lived in Gujarat, Bihar, and Assam before settling in Madras.

She was eighteen.

Her father, A. N. N. Swamy, a chemical engineer at Indian Oil, had died when she was fifteen.

Her mother, Visalam Swamy, who had no formal schooling, sent the youngest of five daughters across the country to read mechanical engineering.

BITS Pilani sat then, as it does now, in Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan.

The mechanical course still ran on workshops and drawing boards.

Advaithi finished the bachelor's degree in 1990.

The institute later stated that she was the only woman in that mechanical engineering class, when it announced a scholarship named in part for her mother.

A first job as a sales engineer for Xerox in India followed.

A sister already studying at the University of Oklahoma then pulled her toward the United States.

The later titles — Eaton plant supervisor, Honeywell general manager, Flex chief executive — all sit on this four-year stretch in Rajasthan.

The buildings that produced the degree are still here.

Visitors reach Vidya Vihar through public campus gates.

The clock tower in the photograph is the campus landmark, not a later addition.

A living executive's private rooms stay off the map.

This pin is the public campus where the training happened.

Photo: Vinwe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Peter Prato, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.