[citation needed] At age 5, Raguso was introduced to his first cecropia moth by Campbell Norsgaard, a film maker and naturalist, as a part of the "Broader Impacts" activities advocated by the National Science Foundation.

At Mountain Lake Biological Station in the Southern Appalachians of Virginia, Raguso developed a lifelong fascination with pollination while studying nectar variance and risk aversion by bees with Professors Beverly Rathcke (later a key figure in his graduate years) and Leslie Real.

Raguso also traveled to Laguna Encantada near Catemaco in Veracruz, Mexico, where he initiated a butterfly survey with Professors Carol C. Horvitz and Doug Schemske[2] that would eventually become his first publication.

[3] Raguso also completed a senior honors thesis on the biodiversity of interior Colias butterfly populations, which had been separated anywhere from 8 to 12,000 generations due to the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

Under Watt's guidance, Raguso broadened his understanding of evolutionary genetics and functional ecology, caring for thousands of caterpillars of Colias butterflies, taking classes, and learning research techniques such as high-performance liquid chromatography and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis.

Raguso learned to collect and analyze floral volatiles, mastering gas chromatography and molecular spectroscopy (GC-MS) as he worked midnight-to-dawn shifts in the university's chemistry labs.

In 1996, Raguso embarked on postdoctoral studies at the University of Arizona, guiding his research interests back to hawkmoths under the mentoring of Professors John Hildebrand and Lucinda McDade.

Funded through the Center for Insect Science, Raguso worked after sunset with Mark Willis in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, piecing together the multimodal feeding behavior—a combination of visual and olfactory stimuli—of hawkmoths when visiting Datura flowers.