Toshaani Goel named 2024 Smith Scholar

Indian American student Toshaani Goel has won Davidson College’s W. Thomas Smith Scholarship honoring graduating seniors for outstanding academic achievement, leadership, character, and community service.

Goel, 24, who graduated magna cum laude in Global Literary Theory from the North Carolina based college will continue her education next year in the United Kingdom as a 2024 Smith Scholar, according to a media release. She’ll study for a master’s degree in cultural, intellectual and visual history of the Renaissance at the University of London’s Warburg Institute.

Goel, who entered Davidson College planning to become a doctor and convinced that humanities studies would make her a better one. She thinks aspiring professionals in any field — from physicians and lawyers to financiers and engineers — can benefit from a strong liberal arts education.

“I embody the liberal arts motto,” she said. “I believe in engaging all parts of your brain. You can develop skills in any career; a liberal arts education teaches you how to think and how to use what you’ve learned in vastly different classes to make your world a better place.”

With her extensive knowledge and talent across multiple disciplines, Goel’s mentors and friends at Davidson envision multiple possibilities for her future, ranging from physician to art curator and academic to global politics — even heading a country someday.

Goel grew up in Chandigarh, India. Her mother, Bharti, is a physician, her father, Sameer, is a software engineer. She has a younger sister, Presha, who is a rising sophomore at Wellesley College.

She spent her early years rooted in a strong STEM education. She attended a Catholic convent school in India, and the science, technology and mathematics focus was as dominant as the daily religious rituals of the nuns who taught her.

Goel says that even in the STEM-dominated environment, her parents stressed the importance of arts and literature as integral to understanding the world.

That motivation propelled her to a broader humanities and arts curriculum at Mahindra United World College of India for her last two years of high school. Art and literature became viable studies, not just hobbies pursued outside of class.

Goel was thrilled to receive a full James B. Duke Scholarship to attend Davidson, where she frequented science research labs and art galleries, led outdoor expeditions and packed a schedule filled with her diverse interests. She said her work with mentors during her early years at Davidson inspired and enlightened her.

By her second year, she was selected as a humanities fellow and as an intern at the college’s Van Every/Smith Galleries. Goel wrote blogs for the galleries and even created her own art. In 2022, she won a best of show award for her sculpture in the college’s annual student art contest.

As Goel became absorbed in the work of the artists, writers, historians and philosophers she studied — and in some cases met — at Davidson, questioning identity became a recurring theme. “How are they formed?” she asked. “How do they get deployed, and how do they impact the lives of people?”

In the personal statement for her Smith Scholarship application, she reflected on the wars between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas. Questions about citizenship, identity and territorial rights teem through these and other global conflicts, she said, which makes her studies especially important.