I won the Rhodes scholarship in November 2004, during the fall of my senior year at Whitman.
I designed my own major in Political Philosophy at Whitman—an experience which became the topic of my personal statement for the Rhodes application. My thesis dealt with themes of storytelling, judgment, and political community in the work of Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler and built on some amazing classes and relationships with professors in both the Politics and Philosophy departments. I was particularly interested in feminist and democratic theory, and these interests carried over into my time at the University of Oxford, where I completed a Master’s degree in Development Studies. This was an interdisciplinary degree that integrated anthropology, politics, and economics in the study of issues of global poverty. My dissertation at Oxford focused on relationships among gender, governance, and democratization in post-conflict Rwanda, the country with the world’s highest representation of women legislators.
The Rhodes Scholarship proposal is comparatively simple since it involves only a personal statement, a list of honors and activities, and up to ten letters of recommendation. My personal statement focused on how the experience of creating an interdisciplinary major illustrated the larger process of facilitating political conversations — between political activism and philosophy, between academic passions and the practical tasks of social justice work.
I found ten people — professors and administrators at Whitman as well as a recent employer — to write me letters of recommendation, which involved lots of individual conversations with recommenders. I wrote up short letters or e-mails to those who had agreed to put together a recommendation and suggested what their letter might include, in order that I could reflect various aspects of my interests and experiences. The Rhodes Scholarship emphasizes some specific qualities in fellowship applicants such as “physical vigor,” moral character, and “global vision,” so I wanted to make sure I had letters that could speak to these somewhat unique concepts.
I think there is always some kind of low point during the process of writing a personal statement — somewhere around the time that you’ve done a first draft, realized it’s awful and doesn’t say anything original about yourself, and then find that you don’t have the energy to start all over again.
But another low point occurred for me after I had learned that I had actually gotten a state-level interview. I had about two weeks between being told about the interview and flying to Iowa to do it, and I just felt like I had no time to prepare. I remember trying to simultaneously judge a high school debate tournament that the debate team was hosting at Whitman while read huge books about international development. I was sure I had to be an expert at everything before I walked into the interview, I was nervous about the entire process, and I had a lot of people pulling me in different directions with regard to preparing.
The high point(s) during my application process were the one-on-one conversations I had with professors and advisers, whether when drafting and editing my personal statement, talking about the content of letters of recommendation, or preparing for the interview. I felt so lucky to have a tremendous amount of support.
There was one night after I had learned that I had gotten a state level interview that my housemates and I had a dinner party with a few friends and my fellowship adviser and her husband, one of my major advisers. I just remember laughing endlessly as we ate and practiced navigating awkward social situations for my pre-interview cocktail hour with the other applicants. The ability to have people to laugh with when I was so stressed out was irreplaceable, and I was tremendously blessed to have this circle of people around me who were positive, good listeners, and got angry with me when I shrugged at the idea that I could ever win.
Oxford is a place that is built for misadventure. You topple off your bike onto cobblestones, speak too loudly in the library, get drenched in puddles or rain on a daily basis, act too much like an American when you order a pint at the pub, and inevitably say the wrong thing at endless cocktail parties and formal dinners. I started off my first week of orientation and classes with a horrible cold and sat coughing and jet-lagged through lectures while a construction crew hammered away on a scaffold outside the “new” Development Studies building (it was really a very old, converted mansion).
My level of anticipation for running off to England to plunge into a new field of study, a new group of friends, and new sources of intellectual challenge was so high that I had many tough moments during my first year. Culture shock, the fact that the sun goes down at 3:00 pm on cloudy winter days, the dollar/pound exchange rate, and a huge amount of work that never seemed to get acknowledged was hard to reconcile with the sense of achievement that had characterized my senior year at Whitman.
The Department of Development Studies emphasizes that all Master’s students should travel to a developing country during the summer between their first and second year of the program. Setting up this opportunity caused me no end of anxiety because I had never done anything like this before — I was being expected to plan a graduate level research project, buy plane tickets to Africa, figure out how to take care of myself for three months while I wandered around asking people questions in a foreign language. But, after about six months of really hard work at laying the foundation for this experience, I was in Rwanda, hanging out with women parliamentarians, hailing motorcycle taxis in French to zip around Kigali, and being in absolute awe that I was where I was, doing what I was doing.
There have been countless times since I won the Rhodes that I just got caught marveling at how incredibly awed and lucky I felt that I had been handed this experience. I felt it almost every day in Rwanda when I woke up in disbelief that I was getting to do exactly what it was that I might have dreamed about (had I been able to conceive of it at all) during the months before my senior year at Whitman, when I spent summer nights trying to carve out a personal statement.
Although it’s not a moment that occurred exactly during the fellowship, one of the best moments I’ve ever had in my life was the one where I stood out on a sidewalk in Minneapolis after hearing my name called, borrowed a cell phone, and burst into tears when my parents answered the phone. My friend Meghan, a Rhodes Scholar from Virginia who I met at Oxford, calls this your “Peter Pan moment” — the memory that makes you so happy that you could use it to fly. The reason it’s so special to think of that day is that I know full well all that has followed from it, and I reflected on this so frequently during my time at Oxford.
Applying for any fellowship is really difficult because it’s stressful. You feel like you don’t have enough time to put together an application at all, let alone make it a quality one. You’re being pulled in a million different directions, and you probably feel a lot of pressure. The thing you have to keep in mind is that you really owe it to yourself to apply. The people who don’t win fellowships are the people who don’t apply for them. The people who win them are people just like so many people I knew at Whitman but who had people to push them and coach them into applying and structuring their application. Whitman students also need to go for it in the sense that they have to think they deserve to win prestigious awards. Humility and a sense of self deprecation are great qualities, but they should be employed once you win a big honor and then can still act like the normal person you are — not as excuses for not applying or as reasons that you can’t look someone in the eye and tell them exactly why you are the person whose life they have been waiting to change.
You have to plan ahead, start early, have a sense of humor, and surround yourself with positive people who you involve in the application process early. But you also have to really think you deserve this — even when you know that no one does.
Sometimes it’s a little scary to think how much my life has changed as a result of a fortuitous decision to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship and some good luck at the interview. I’d do the process all over again in a second, even not knowing whether it would turn out as well a second time, mainly because it’s the kind of challenge that it makes a lot of sense to go for when you get the chance. There’s little that I would change about my time at Oxford, even though I didn’t end up choosing some of the paths that I envisioned for myself when I applied for the Rhodes.
I also feel very lucky to have gone to graduate school immediately after graduating from Whitman. I realized at Oxford just how rare it is in comparison to a lot of liberal arts colleges that most Whitman graduates don’t go immediately into the professional or academic world but end up in more nontraditional pursuits for their first few years after graduation. This is a great thing, but I don’t think it’s necessarily always a conscious choice, and I’m glad that I ended up going straight into a graduate program.
I graduate from Oxford in June 2007 and spent a month hanging out in Oxford and traveling in France and Hungary. I flew back to Iowa in August without a job, but with the sense that — very surprisingly — I wanted to look for state-level public policy work in my home state. I never, never would have predicted that I would find myself back in Iowa after leaving to come out to Walla Walla six years ago. But I realized while I was in Rwanda that, while I was deeply passionate about issues of global poverty and international development, my strengths probably lay in affecting the domestic policy making process. The coolest people I met in Rwanda were the women legislators, and my role in Rwanda was that of an observer and a resource to others. I realized that if I wanted to do policy making work, like the women parliamentarians, I should go find a place where my skills were most relevant and see what I could learn in putting them to work.
Since September 2007, I have been a research associate at the Iowa Policy Project, a small, non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization in Iowa City, Iowa. I get to research a range of state-level issues, mainly focusing on tax and budget policy, and work to influence the public policy discussion around these areas. I really love my job. In the first few months that I’ve been working here, I’ve helped research and write about the tax contributions paid by undocumented immigrants in Iowa, city strategies for economic development, what it takes different types of families to make ends meet in Iowa, state agricultural property tax policy, and how low-income Iowans will be affected by climate and energy policy. I’m taking a calculus class at the community college and planning on applying to PhD programs in public policy next fall.
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