After traumatic brain injury, Rider senior lands dream job before graduation

Image

There are about six weeks of Rob Relovsky’s life that he has no memory of. 

The Rider University senior, who will graduate this May with a dream job already secured, suffered a traumatic brain injury during the summer of 2017. Working for a local landscaper in wet conditions after a rainstorm, he slipped off of the company’s truck and landed on his head. After being rushed to the hospital, he endured a three-hour surgery where doctors cut open his skull. He then survived on a ventilator while in a coma. 

“I don’t remember that time because I wasn’t all there,” he says. 

Upon waking, Relovsky began his recovery. “I had to relearn how to swallow,” he says. “I had to rebuild the muscles in my legs to walk.”

By the next year, he had made enough progress that he enrolled as a student at Rider, ready to pursue an interest that had begun to bloom before his accident. 

Before transferring to Rider, Relovsky was a scholarship student at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was studying chemistry. Realizing it wasn’t the right fit, he explored other interests, volunteering for local political candidates who were running in a swing state at a time when the nation was becoming consumed with the presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. 

“In 2016, politics was becoming more of a spectacle and so I paid more attention to it,” Relovsky says. “When I got a taste of the world of politics, I started to get excited about the possibility of making a difference.” 

That's exactly his goal in his new role as an assistant to Middlesex County’s Democratic chairman, Kevin McCabe. Relovsky has been working in the position full-time since March, balancing his paid work with his school responsibilities during his final semester. 

“McCabe is one of the state's most powerful Democrats, and for someone who is about to graduate, it's the opportunity of a lifetime to be in the middle of all the action,” says Micah Rasmussen ’92, the director of Rider’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, who has become a mentor to Relovsky. “I'm enormously proud of him — for his success, for sticking it out and for accomplishing what he set out to do.”

As for so many students, the pandemic nearly curtailed that accomplishment. Because of his injury, Relovsky says he was particularly nervous about his health during the early period of the virus’ spread. When in-person classes resumed, he decided to cease his studies and begin a career with a janitorial supply company. After working his way up to an operations manager, he was laid off during a company buyout, which led him to return to school to earn his degree. 

“Today, I’m so happy,” he says. “I always wanted to finish college. It was one of the best decisions of my life.” 

Although Relovsky has made significant progress since his accident, he will graduate with one lingering aftereffect — he never recovered his sense of smell. Still, he says he is grateful for his outcome and remains “relentlessly optimistic” about the future. 

“I’m in the best position of my life,” he says. “I’m going to be in a major hub of political activity. I’m around a lot of impressive political actors. It’s amazing. It’s also so interesting to see what goes on with the inside baseball of politics. It’s not bad in the way so many presume. There are a lot of honest, good people working toward very worthwhile goals.”