Evan Boudreaux's Purdue career was brief but eventful, as he spent two seasons with the Boilermakers after grad-transferring from Dartmouth.
After moving in an out of the lineup as a junior as part of a Big Ten championship team two seasons ago, Boudreaux rebounded as a senior to become one of the Boilermakers' most important players, only to see his career cut short by a pandemic.
He leaves college now with an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth, a graduate degree from Purdue and a 4.0 GPA. Today's he considering his career options, between potentially playing overseas or entering the workforce now. Recently, he signed on with the Purdue-aligned "Men of Mackey" The Basketball Tournament team expected to compete in the event in July.
Boudreaux recaps his college career here in this GoldandBlack.com Exit Interview conducted last month.
GoldandBlack.com: What motivated you academically to get as much done as you did?
Boudreaux: From an early age, my parents always harped on me that school is the most important thing. Obviously, I was lucky enough to be able to go to a place like Dartmouth for my undergrad. And then when the opportunity presented itself to transfer, I didn't want to get a meaningless degree from a school and so being able to pick a school like Purdue and get a Masters that actually carries weight in the real world was important to me, and I'm really happy that that's the path that I chose.
GoldandBlack.com: What did you take from your Purdue experience? How will Purdue stay with you kind of moving forward?
Boudreaux: They gave me some of the best basketball memories of my whole career. It was not the most linear path for me. I had a lot of ups and downs. With two different mindsets in both my years, you come in as a transfer, you want to play a lot and score a lot and then you kind of have to fight through adversity. And then going into my second year coming off injury, having to fight again and reclaim a place in the lineup and just prove to myself that you're good enough to play and produce and all that.
It really taught me how to push through that kind of adversity, which I don't think I'd really faced all that much up until that point. So for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways, knowing that if I put my head down and keep grinding every day that eventually things are going to work out and I was really happy with the way my senior season played out for me. I think that being able to just stay at it and keep going, even when times were rough and things were hard. I think that that taught me a lot of valuable lessons that the world's not going to hand you anything. Me walking out of Purdue, that's one of the biggest things I think I'm going to take away.