Four Students Win Rhodes

For the second year in a row, Harvard captured more Rhodes Scholarships than any other college, with four students among the 32 winners.

Jeremy L. England ’03, Sue Meng ’03, Anna K. Weiss ’03 and Lindsey O. Worth ’02 were named to the 100th class of prestigious Rhodes Scholars on Saturday after a grueling series of applications, cocktail parties and interviews.

The candidates had to prove themselves during the week of interviews by answering questions as tough as “what is consciousness?” without losing their cool.

They will study for two or three years at Oxford University in fields as varied as Victorian literature and biophysics.

Meng, a history and literature concentrator from New York City, faced an enviable choice when she was offered the Rhodes. She was also the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship for post-graduate study at Cambridge.

“I never in a million years would have thought I would be in this position,” Meng said. “I finally decided to go with Rhodes, in part because Oxford has a more fitting program in Victorian literature, but also because if I take the Rhodes, someone else will be able to take my place on the Marshall.”

The Marshall Scholarships maintain a waiting list, while the Rhodes do not.

Nonetheless, Meng said the decision was not an easy one.

“While I feel completely honored, it’s been really tough for me,” Meng said. “For a while, I was doing coin tosses.”

Meng plans to use her Rhodes to study for a masters of philosophy in English literature. She writes a column for the Crimson every other week, as well as serving on the Harvard Advocate’s fiction board.

She said she anticipates a smooth transition to graduate study in England.

“I think that Oxford will just be a chance to deepen the thing that Harvard has gotten me excited about and interested in, so I think that it will be a pretty natural extension in some ways,” Meng said.

Meng found out at the same meeting as Worth, because they both applied in the mid-Atlantic region. She said that Worth was ecstatic when the winners were announced.

“When they announced the names, she burst into tears,” Meng said. “It was really moving.”

Worth, who graduated last year with a degree in philosophy, said in an e-mail that she plans to pursue a master’s in philosophy at Oxford before continuing on to study law.

England is looking forward to studying biophysics at Oxford for the next two or three years. He said his immediate reaction to the Rhodes was stupefaction.

“They had indicated to us that there would be this long period of re-interviewing, so when they walked in and just said it, it was just disorienting,” he said. “I was just sort of in a daze for a minute afterwards.”

England, who received the “what is consciousness?” question, said he drew on his physics research at Harvard to answer as well as he could.

“Let’s just say that I definitely didn’t resolve the issue,” England said. “We were talking about whether it could be understood in terms of physics. Science is not to be seen as a higher reality. It didn’t make sense to me to privilege highly theoretical things ahead of things that we can see as real.”

England, a biochemistry concentrator from Durham, N.H., said he spent last summer researching the interaction between protein shape and how easily they could be “designed,” or constructed.

England said he was also interested in drama, and he thought the committee “liked the fact that while I had an interest in science, I didn’t seem uninterested in the rest of the world.”

England said that the winners are not quite as inhumanly accomplished as he had feared when he began the application process.

“They tweak the bios, maybe spruce them up a bit and make them sound better than they are,” England said.

England won in the New England region along with Weiss, who is originally from New Rochelle, N.Y.

Weiss, a history and literature concentrator, is the ballet mistress and former director of the Harvard Ballet Company.

Weiss said she trained for 14 years with Russian coaches and danced professionally for two years before coming to Harvard.

Once at Oxford, Weiss plans to study for a masters of philosophy in international relations, specializing in post-Soviet Russia.

“My experience in the Russian ballet world sparked my love of Russian arts and culture in general,” Weiss said in an e-mail.

The applicants first had to receive Harvard’s institutional endorsement, before going on to compete against 981 applicants from 341 colleges and universities in the national competition.

One committee in each state picks applicants to be evaluated at a dinner party and interview the next day, which took place last week.

From there, each state picks two or three candidates to go on to the regional interviews. The states are divided into eight regions, each of which can select four scholars.

British explorer and industrialist Cecil B. Rhodes endowed the Rhodes Scholarships in his will in 1902, making the Rhodes the oldest international scholarships for American students.

The four winners bring Harvard’s total number of Rhodes Scholars since 1902 to 304, the most of any university.