A Harvard University student and a Yale University student from New York City are among 32 Americans selected as the newest Rhodes Scholars, and will be getting scholarships to study at Oxford University.
The names were announced Sunday. Jennifer Bright is a senior at Yale University majoring in ethics, politics and economics. Aidan Daly is a senior at Harvard University majoring in computer science.
“I was shocked, it’s not something that I ever expected,” Bright said when contacted by The Associated Press.
Daly said “I definitely thought it was a long shot” because when he went through past scholars, he didn’t find too many that were in the hard sciences as compared to the humanities.
Both students have company from their schools — Yale has six other Rhodes winners, while Harvard has five others.
Daly said a few of the other winners live in his dorm.
“It’s crazy that we all went in together and came out together,” he said.
The prestigious awards provide all expenses for up to four years of study at the university in England. The winners were selected from 838 applicants endorsed by 302 different colleges and universities. The scholars will enter Oxford next October.
Bright said she would be working toward a masters’ degree in public policy. She said she was particularly interested in urban health policy, and hoped also to go to law school with the ultimate goal of working at a health policy institute.
Daly said he would be studying computer science, with long-term goals of getting a Ph.D. in computational biology and becoming a professor.
Rhodes Scholarships were created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes and have a value of about $50,000 per year.
The American students will join an international group of scholars selected from around the world.