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The Rhodes and |
Pema M. |
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Pema: "Am I the right fit for this intense process?"
Not quite knowing how to start, I’ll go with the most definite thing I’ve learned from this process: Ken is absolutely right about the importance of developing a narrative. Who you are, where you’re going, the resonances between your personal, intellectual, and ethical life, all of that stuff. It’s not just that I think I got the Rhodes because of the way my application materials and interview painted a portrait – although I think that was singularly important. It’s that the process of narrating and presenting myself, although often grueling, ended up giving me both clarity and confidence. Having my own sense of how my application materials worked together, and a handle on the story I was telling, made it so much easier to revise my personal statement and ultimately to be comfortable during the interview process. When I first walked into the room containing my fellow finalists, and had the inevitable “who am I and what am I doing among all these amazing and accomplished people who wildly outclass me,” it was steadying to be able to step back and say, actually, I know who I am and why I’m here, and I’m not required to be somebody different.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I’d like to offer some “am I the right fit for this intense process” commiseration, and encourage people to go for it anyway. I would never have considered applying to the Rhodes were it not for the sustained and calm encouragement of the Religion faculty. And I actually didn’t consider it until it was almost too late! At my graduation, Kristin Scheible told me that I should apply for the Rhodes, and I was very flattered, and thought to myself, what, that’s for people with leadership qualities and the ability to not be total nerds all the time, I’m applying for PhD programs in the fall and don’t have time. So I put it entirely out of my head, and went to China through the Critical Language Scholarship, and didn’t think about anything other than Chinese for the next two months. And then it was the beginning of August, and as I got on the plane to come home and started thinking in English again, I went, hey, I’ve always been interested in Oxford, and maybe Kristin was onto something.
I did a lot of reading for the next week: mostly the Rhodes website and what Ken’s put together here, getting a lay of the land as far as the application timeline and the requirements. I also did some browsing of Oxford’s website, and stumbled upon the Buddhist Studies masters’ program, which is the course I’m now headed for (so much for a doctorate right away). The more that I thought about doing a masters’, and a masters’ so well suited to my academic goals, and the more I read about Oxford specifically, the more excited I got. It’s certainly not necessary that Oxford be your first choice school, or that you be passionately interested in a specific program, before applying for the Rhodes. Lots of people aren’t even sure after they get the scholarship! But, personally, I was motivated through this process by the knowledge that an MPhil in Buddhist Studies at Oxford was what I wanted to do. It worked in terms of developing narrative, it worked to inspire me, and while this is purely an impression, when I told the panel that I would be applying to Oxford regardless of whether I got the Rhodes, there was a lot of approving murmurs and sage nods.
Anyway, after that initial week of opening a lot of browser tabs, I realized what I had missed: namely, that there was an internal institutional deadline, and that it was in two weeks, and that I had to send pleading and apologetic emails to all of my potential recommenders. You only need three (rather informal) letters for Reed’s internal deadline, all from faculty, but they ask for a list of all five to eight people you intend to solicit letters from if you’re nominated. I also had neither a personal statement draft nor a list of activities. So my first advice is, well, don’t do this, don’t pull an all-nighter and run into the Center for Life Beyond Reed fifteen minutes before the deadline to hand in your paperwork, it’s stressful and if you plan even slightly ahead you don’t have to do it. I bring up the process of requesting letters of recommendation mostly to say that it’s wonderful if you can give each letter writer some strategic ideas about how they can compliment the other letters: my non-academic recommenders in particular all covered very different aspects of my life and lent breadth to what was otherwise a pretty academic portrait.
The interview for the internal nomination was very short, and not scary at all. After that, I used the month of September mostly to think. The list of activities I threw together in those first two weeks was, after much editing, eventually what I submitted. The personal statement that got me the internal nomination was totally thrown out, and I mused and planned and wrote a new one that I like much better.
Ken, both in person and in these online materials, and Michelle Johnson, are such good sources of general personal statement advice that I won’t repeat them here. From personal experience, it was a substantial advantage that I’d already graduated and had some free time: I dawdled around in coffee shops in Seattle in the week leading up to the October Rhodes deadline, and didn’t feel rushed. However, if you’re still in school, it’s more than possible, and I’d also encourage you to not beat yourself up about how many drafts you’ve written or how many hours a day you’re devoting to this process. Think deeply about who you are, how you fit the Rhodes criteria, and how Oxford is a logical chapter in your life. If you’re anything like me, a good draft won’t emerge until you’ve really done that, and when a plan comes clear, the writing will be fun rather than laborious. Also, if you’re at all intimidated by the “never get anyone’s advice” rule: I was actually super excited to read that Rhodes personal statements are no longer gauntlets of prestigious editing. There can be something very freeing and potentially genuine about writing only for strangers, and considering what you’ve written privately.
One more personal anecdote about my suffering and doubt, in the hope that it’s encouraging: after I’d gotten the internal nomination and was feeling pretty good about myself, I made the mistake of reading the little descriptions of last year’s Rhodes scholars on the website, and immediately had a breakdown on the phone to my mother about how I was an unworthy plebian who’d never done anything in my life, who were these people, how did the youngest ever UN delegate have time to be a concert violinist, it was impossible that I would make it through this process. Well, I’m a Rhodes Scholar now, so obviously things are less straightforward than they might appear. But on a serious note: a lot of this is about class and circumstances. I grew up very poor in a rural area, I play no instruments, have no institutionally notable artistic talents, and avoided all organized sports throughout my adolescence on the grounds that I’m transgender and feared death. Reed is hardly notable for either athletics or for showering us with fancy-sounding awards. When you read the little biographies of Rhodes scholars, it can feel like unless you’ve been a senator’s intern and edited the Harvard Crimson, you’re chopped liver. This is not true! I’m not going to lie to and say it’s not nice to have lots of institutional validation of your status as an interesting and well-rounded person, but if you don’t, and particularly if you have life circumstances that mean you couldn’t reasonably have become one of these people while also studying and maintaining your mental health, this process is still very rewarding and success is still possible. Ken and Michelle will have much better and more detailed advice about this, but basically, it’s a lot about how you present what you have done, and learning to reveal courage, devotion to duty, protection of the weak, fighting the worlds fight, etc., in what may be unlikely places. Although I didn’t address my family’s socioeconomic status in my personal statement, it came up in at least one reference letter, and I think there is some utility in reminding your Rhodes committee, nonthreateningly, that the most straightforward badges of achievement and leadership are often gifts of circumstance. Again, Ken has lots of very good advice about this, and there are ways to frame things in your application materials that will get you a lot closer to sounding like one of these superhuman people than you would believe possible.
After submitting my materials on October 10th, I had several weeks of waiting, followed by the extremely exciting news around the 28th of October that I was a finalist. I did two practice interviews in the week before the real deal, and two certainly felt like the right amount: I was familiar enough with the format to be comfortable and to feel more confident, but things didn’t get repetitive. About interviews: this advice may not work for anyone but me, but I had a great time with every interview by considering that I was attending a Reed conference, which I was leading, and whose topic was my application materials. What I mean by this is that there’s a lovely mixture of precision, formality, enthusiasm, and honesty that I’ve experienced in my favorite conferences. It’s not a chat between friends (and, as Michelle Johnson can attest, I have an alarming habit of bunching up in my chair and not making eye contact that, while it works in an exhausted group of Reedies, does not work in an interview). But I think there’s a certain aura of sincerity and inquiry that hangs about Reed College’s reputation. You can make up for not being a pile of awards by thinking out loud in your most articulate conference register. Any way you can think of to be natural, and to give your interviewers a sense of how you think, is helpful. This is only one way of thinking about interviews! But it make me relaxed, and as we walked out at the end I got complimented on my interview manner by one of the panelists at my finalist interview, so I did something right.
Finally, after all of that rambling, my experience with the whole finalist weekend thing. Probably this information is available more succinctly elsewhere, and you already know, but it wasn’t totally clear to me until the very end, so: as a finalist in the Oregon-Washington-Idaho-Montana region, I went up to Seattle for the weekend prior to Thanksgiving. There was a luncheon on Friday to get things started, and then interviews went from after the luncheon until 3pm the next day, whereupon all 16 finalists were required to hang out together in a room of the law office where this was all conducted, until the panelists finished deliberating. People are sometimes called in during this time for second interviews: they’re very brief, and none actually happened in my group. We were recommended a hotel that was very near the law office: it was horrifyingly expensive and made me feel very scruffy and intimidated, but Reed very generously reimbursed me, and ultimately I thought it was nice to be well accommodated and within walking distance.
I took the train up from Portland and got there the night before the luncheon: this was really nice, as I got a good night’s sleep and then spent Friday morning in a coffee shop, trying to get myself in a relaxed and personable frame of mind. While Ken and others recommend reading the Economist or the New York Times or something, I didn’t: I think this one varies by personal taste. Actually, what I did instead was re-read the Oresteia, which always makes me incredibly excited about meaning and poetry and the nature of suffering, but my advice would be to do whatever pushes your unbearable enthusiasm buttons. Also, wallowing a little bit in an area of intellectual confidence prior to the luncheon made me feel better.
As every account has reiterated, the luncheon was much more fun than I expected. I’d worried about my clothes for weeks beforehand, but just a blazer and a collared shirt turned out to be fine, and I forgot about what I was wearing or how I might be perceived almost immediately. The finalists and panelists milled about chatting for a little bit beforehand: I don’t think it’s necessary to worry about the social dynamics, about who you’re talking to, or about what. Everyone was extremely nice, and while we had some very quiet and reserved finalists, there was never anyone who wasn’t being pulled into conversation by someone else. During lunch, there was some copious discussion of sports (everyone but me and one other finalist had some sort of athletic experience and interest). I nodded along and asked a few polite questions. There was also some discussion of water rights and environmental issues, since one of the finalists at my table was interested in environmental education. The panelists during each course made an effort to ask everyone at least one personal question, and it all actually felt very natural and balanced. One panelist also had us go around the table and talk about a totally unexpected direction we ended up going in during our first semester of college: I talked about taking Zen meditation as someone from another Buddhist tradition (possibly this was a vain attempt to bring up the genuine physical rigor of a lot of Buddhist practice, but who knows, it might have helped me out).
My two moments of Reed-conference-enthusiasm during the luncheon were, firstly, when the topic of Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes Must Fall came up. The finalists were asked our opinion: there was a lot of hemming and hawing from a couple of people about the shades of gray in his legacy, and I ended up saying that he was a white supremacist, that his colonialism was the foundation of his legacy, policy, and investment in scholarship, and that we didn’t have to deny that in the name of nuance. Make of my stridency what you will, but definitely at least read a bit about the guy, it’s horrifying/fascinating, and I think it’s worthwhile to develop some opinion on the nature and legacy of the scholarship you’re applying for. My second moment was when one of the panelists turned to me and said he was a Reed alum: we ended up having a very fun conversation about his graduating class (of 1969, when the college was falling apart and the graduation rate was 25%), and trying to explain Renn Fayre to the rest of the table.
After lunch, the interviews started right away. They’d established our order by drawing our names out of a hat, but there was actually a lot of room for flexibility. I started out with a 9am interview on Saturday morning, and ended up trading with a lovely woman who had a 1:30pm slot: she was a morning person, I wasn’t, we were both much better off for switching. There were a number of trades, and it’s really a mark of how supportive and non-competitive the environment was. Everyone seemed to genuinely want everyone else to have their best shot.
We all hung around chatting for a while after lunch, and then dispersed. I had a very relaxed evening, did my coffee shop routine again the next day, and showed up at the law office around noon. Mostly, that was because in my experience I need some warming up to be able to speak well and candidly: I absolutely didn’t want to walk into the interview not having had an interaction with a person that day. But, that’s personal preference! As other people have reported, it was a friendly and interesting group of people to be in, and as at this point I was sure I wouldn’t be selected, I found myself considering that it had been totally worth it to have this experience, and that I’d be proud of whoever won. If this sounds ridiculously humble, I have to say, it’s a humbling experience to be in a room with a bunch of Rhodes finalists. Whenever anyone came back in from an interview, we all clapped.
Then, at 1:30, my time came: I was third to last, and at that point about half of the finalists had been hanging around for some time (everyone was required to be there after interviews finished at 3). So, my interview questions:
- Why I’d chosen to study Chinese, and what was the most important thing I took away from my summer in China. I replied by talking a little bit about the importance of Chinese to both Buddhist and global literature, and then said that having to speak my second language exclusively had been an amazing experience because it made me realize my own reliance on other people, and on my articulateness: I was a child again in a lot of important ways, and it forced me to listen a lot and speak rarely, not a skill I otherwise possess.
- How I’d present the value of an experience like CLS to a group of middle-schoolers, and what would be my most important point: I said that cultural exchange is about avoiding two kinds of dehumanization: treating someone as reducible to their culture (which is ridiculous, because cultures aren’t monoliths) or treating them as removable from their culture.
- How I’d present complex cultural analysis to “someone with the vocabulary and worldview of Donald Trump” (this was said with a lot of weary chuckling). I said that, while as a future academic I obviously believe that historical expertise and ideological sophistication are valuable, the academic humanities and in particular religious studies encourage shifts in attitude that are way more important, and way more teachable, than huge chunks of knowledge. I think I quoted Edward Said on the way Orientalism makes us see non-western cultures as singular, as tools for our use, and that we have to shift towards a compassionate listening.
- If I’d ever been at a loss for words. This was an interesting question: they asked it of one other finalist, who said he didn’t know how to answer and said something very vague. I ended up telling a very personal story about suicide and mental illness: the gist was that there are moments of despair that aren’t reachable through or by language, and that physical and emotional comfort ends up superseding all the strategies we build to understand the world intellectually.
- How religious studies is relevant given the declining church attendance/religious identification of Americans. I pushed back at this, and tried to argue for the recent ascendance of religion in the public sphere, against modernist expectations, and one of the panelists was like “no, actually, there are more and more un-churched Americans every year, answer the question.” So, don’t freak out if they disagree with you, I suppose? I conceded her point, and said that I think religion and religious history underlies so much of human culture that even in a totally secular chunk of society, religious studies is still an immensely powerful tool for unpacking people’s assumptions, values, and conceptions of personhood.
- If I lacked my intellectual and academic gifts, would I still have anything of significant value to contribute to the world. I responded that I found my Buddhism and engagement with Buddhist ethics to be the most valuable part of myself, and that compassion doesn’t require intellectual ability.
- Why I hadn’t taken more science classes. This one took me off guard! Honestly, a much more appropriate question was why I’d only taken the minimum number of non-religion classes at Reed (this is an advertisement for the amazing religion department). However, I answered with a minimum of effrontery that Reed’s science classes are very specialized, from into science onwards, and that I thought introductory chemistry and calculus was about as far into science as Reed facilitates humanities majors to go.
- How the world was better place now versus four years ago due to me being in it. This was the hardest question: I gave some very badly articulated answer about working to resolve community disputes at Reed, and got pressed for more detail several times.
- If I had anything to add. I’d been told to expect this, and was ready: this was where I said very frankly that I knew I wasn’t a traditional Rhodes Scholar, either by athletic or accomplishment standards, but that I’d lived my life in a very deliberate way. I talked a little bit about how, growing up in a Buddhist community that my mother administrated, I was very aware of how difficult it is to create real change in people’s lives, and what skills are necessary to make any ethical vision, no matter how sophisticated, into something real. I felt that as a twenty-two year old, I genuinely didn’t have the skills necessary to found or lead organizations, but that they were skills I was working to develop. I added that I was intending to apply to Oxford regardless, and thanked them for their time. It was little tricky not to make the “I’m not an ideal fit but what person my age really is” sound critical, but I think I kept it enough in a personal realm to work.
From my experience, plus the testimony of the other finalists, they may ask you questions that are only about your personal statement, only about some element of your life, predominantly focus on current events, or really go for some personal stuff. It depends on factors about your application materials that are hard to foresee. My sense was that they wanted to find out if I was just a stuffy intellectual, or if my vision of academic work mattered outside the academy.
After things were over, startlingly fast, one of the panelists ushered me out and complimented me on my comportment (I think he said that I had “nothing to worry about” but I was so worried that I barely registered it). I spent the next five hours thinking of all the things I didn’t say or had said badly: I think that’s an inevitable reaction to the high speed of a 25 minute interview with such high stakes. All the finalists played Mafia together, and then degenerated into increasing nervous leg-wiggling and discussion of our interviews.
I did have one interesting exchange during the period of rising tension: we were all talking about what we wanted to do at Oxford, and it became pretty obvious that, apart from myself and perhaps three other people, no one was intensely attached to their Oxford course in particular, or saw Oxford as a necessary part of their future, but was considering it as one of a number of options. I don’t want to downplay either how qualified everyone was or how much they wanted the Rhodes, but I do think my intensity about my course specifically carried weight in the decision making process.
At 6:30, after three and a half hours, all the panelists came in. We’d all been jumping out of our seats every time someone walked down the hall, so it was a relief for it to be finally over. I remember thinking to myself that the two people I thought were of course going to win really deserved it, and that I was happy to have done something like this and felt as confident and comfortable as I did, and that I was looking forward to trying to get into Oxford normally. Then they said my name. I think I screamed a little bit, and I confess I only blurrily remember the next half hour: the second winner and I were whirled from one panelist to another for congratulations and paperwork. A lot of the other finalists hugged us or shook our hands, very kindly, but they all took off pretty soon after that. One of the panelists pulled me aside and said that I was the “stand-out choice,” which floored me then and still floors me now. They gave us some packets, I sorted out some difficulty with getting Reed to send in my transcript, and they bid us farewell. It was pretty abrupt actually! Then I started calling people: I have to say, the greatest pleasure of this process has been getting to tell the religion faculty that I’m a Rhodes Scholar.
One final thing: if you are selected, there might be a little bit of press attention! I wasn’t expecting this at all: if you’re from a state that doesn’t produce a lot of Rhodes Scholars, or have some other distinguishing feature, you’ll get emails and calls from reporters. I was on OPB for all of 60 seconds! Anyway, just a warning note. The euphoria of success carried me through it with a minimum of terror.
