Rhodes Scolars

alicantekid
Sun, 05 Dec 2004 20:20:28 +0000

One of my former job functions was to help students apply for prestigious scholarships. It is unbelievably hard to win a Rhodes, especially if you aren’t from an Ivy League school. Our university has never won one, although we had a guy make it to the last round back in 2000. I thought our applicant from last year had a good chance. He had a 3.97 GPA in Neurobiology and Economics, was an oarsman on the Crew team and made all-conference, was the undergraduate Director of the Academic Senate, member of the Honors Program, involved in undergraduate research, part of the student government, worked as a resident advisor in housing, spent his summers volunteering in third world countries doing medical missionary stuff, and was a very eloquent speaker. This guy pretty much walked on water. He didn’t even make it to the second round of the application process. It’s tough if you’re from California, because you have to get a nomination from your state. You can apply from the state that you go to college in or where you graduated from high school. So California has so many good universities as well as so many people that left the state to go to college, and it’s tough to secure a CA nomination.

The guy who applied for the Rhodes ended up getting into a bunch of different medical schools, including Harvard, but ended up choosing UC San Francisco.