West Lafayette native Mohit Agrawal awarded prestigious Rhodes Scholarship

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - A West Lafayette native has been awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford. Mohit Agrawal majored in mathematics at Princeton University. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in financial economics.

Agrawal, a recipient of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship in 2011, is currently enrolled in a master's program in economic policy and evaluation at the National University of Ireland in Galway. At Princeton, Agrawal was involved in a range of interdisciplinary work both in and out of the classroom in economics and politics.

"I am a mathematician, and from classwork at Princeton I've learned how mathematics drives applications in economics, physics, biology and computer science," Agrawal wrote in his Rhodes application.

Agrawal said he would "seek to combine my background in politics and mathematics to help craft economic policy. Implementing economic policy at the World Bank, the Treasury, or in Congress requires that I first pursue graduate specialization in the field."

Agrawal's studies in Ireland add to international experiences he pursued as an undergraduate. During his junior year, he studied at the National University of Singapore. In the summer of 2009, he went to Ghana after receiving one of Princeton's Martin Dale Summer Fellowships, to help secondary school students establish a youth newspaper in Ashaiman. At the same time, he also worked in the community to help build a library as a participant in the Princeton chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

He won an IEEE Gold Humanitarian Award to support the technology costs of the project. IEEE is the world's largest professional association dedicated to furthering technology and excellence for the benefit of humanity.

According to a news release from Princeton University, Tim Leonard, a research scholar in the Council of the Humanities, said Agrawal is a "natural for the study of advanced economics at Oxford and beyond, precisely because his intellectual breadth in adjoining fields, unusual for a person of his age, enables him to put technique in the interdisciplinary perspective required for effective and humane policymaking."

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Agrawal received Princeton's Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence for his freshman and sophomore years, and the University's George B. Wood Legacy Sophomore Prize.

At Princeton, he co-chaired the Butler College Council for three semesters and served as the vice president for the South Asian Students Association. In 2009, he co-organized the South Asian Dance Dimensions competition on campus.

More information about the Rhodes Scholarship is posted on the organization's website .