How Harvard student Swati Goel went from Silicon Valley to Survivor Island

(December 10, 2023) On the tropical beaches of Mamanuca Islands in Fiji, 19-year-old Swati Goel was handed a bunch of rudimentary supplies and told to fend for herself. “There are coconuts, here’s a machete, go kill things and eat,” Goel recalled later, to The Crimson. This was the start of Season 42 of Survivor, the iconic American television TV show she had grown up watching. Goel was the youngest contestant there, and that first night in her new home was terrifying. “It’s truly like being lifted from reality and being put in this little alternate world that is completely cut off from everything else.”

In May of 2021, Goel, who had begun a degree in Computer Science at Harvard University one year prior, finally got her turn on the reality show. Around the same time, she had also enlisted in the Army National Guard, and having undergone intense physical and mental training, felt she was ready to take on the heavy duty competition for a million dollar prize.

Swati Goel | Photo: Instagram

A bright young student

Born to immigrant parents, the Global Indian grew up in the Bay Area, where her father, Ashish Goel, works as an Associate Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Her mother, Ruchi, is a Managing Director at Accenture. Swati was always technologically sound and academically ambitious.

When she was sixteen, she spent six months at Stanford University as a research intern, where she worked under Professor James Landay and Dr Elizabeth Murnane. There, she helpd build a “test app for features for affective AI and image recognition,” the Global Indian writes on LinkedIn. The prototype app, named Dragon Companions, uses a story narrative to craft augmented reality learning scenarios that draw on concepts like curiosity-driven learning , gamification and context-driven learning.

In 2019, she began a prestigious, three-month STEM program at the Research Science Institute in Cambridge, Massachussets, where she was one of 50 scholars selected from across the US. There, she worked on identifyig fake news sources using the Twitter Co-Exposure Network. As she came close to graduating for high school, she enlisted in the Army National Guard. Being born to immigrant parents and hailing from a town disconnected from the military motivated her to join the army.

Academically gifted, Swati was admitted to Harvard University in 2020 and is expected to graduate in 2025. By the time she found herself on Survivor, she was “in the best shape of her life,” she says. However, she did not let  her fellow contestants in on the fact that she was a computer science student at Harvard.

The Survivor Story

 

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Ever since middle school, Survivor, which has run a whopping 43 seasons, was her comfort show. “It’s just the thing I would watch whenever I was upset or sad,” she said in an interview. She had always wanted to audition and would hope, back then, for Survivor to stay on air. She submitted a video audition and then waited. Even so, when she finally made it to the island, Goel was stood there in disbelief. “A small part of me was like, ‘this is fake,'” she said. “They truly just left us on an island…”

Survivor, one of America’s most watched reality shows, takes a group of strangers to a remote location and leaves them to survive in the wild. They build their own shelters and are given very limited food, usually rice and beans, which they are expected to figure out how to cook. The Fiji islands, where the show has been shot since 2016, are full of marine life for those who know how to catch it, and the lush tropical forests are full of edible plants and seeds, provided one knows how to recognize them. Fresh water is limited and contestants have to find their own sources, or collect rainwater in empty coconut shells, which they use for drinking and to cook their food.

It’s not just that, though. Physically challenging though it is, the contestants are split into tribes and left to compete against each other in a series of challenges. It’s reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, where these people are left to create their own social hierarchies and structures, and to define their own roles within this. Players are also voted out one at a time, so when they’re not hacking open coconuts or killing prey, they need to strategise and form alliance with each other.

At the end of the day, everyone is in competition, for the $1 million prize. There are no allies. That’s a lesson Goel learned the hard way. Her strategy was to tell multiple people that they were her “No. 1” and confiding in a number of her competitors. Unfortunately, her contestants, despite not being Ivy Leaguers themselves, did find out she was being dishonest. She was voted off the show soon after, having perhaps spent less time on the show than she might have hoped. “I got to live out my dream,” she told The Crimson later. “I’m not gonna sit here spending my life thinking about what I could have done differently.”

The post-Survivor plan

 

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Swati Goel has now completed her military training and does domestic missions as a member of the National Guard. She also hopes to put her fame to good use through the Open Doors Project, where she hopes to hold podcasts and a video series about mental health among the youth, to start conversations around it. That apart, Swati, who is a big fan of Elon Musk, has said, “My life’s mission is to change the world for the better. Building something like Tesla, which is uber successful and also a boon to the environment, is my dream.”

Follow Swati Goel on LinkedIn.

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