Two Rhodes to Oxford
 It was about four o'clock in the afternoon
last November 22, and BC senior Paul Taylor stood waiting
in a reception area on the 38th floor of a Chicago law firm.
Not far away was the conference room where a panel of five
Rhodes Scholarship interviewers had grilled him seven hours
earlier. He'd made the semifinal cut in the state competition
in his native Wisconsin, and now Taylor lingered nervously
with 11 other contenders for the four awards to be granted
in the Midwest district. He was rapidly losing confidence.
University of Chicago law professor Dennis Hutchinson,
director of the Midwest selection committee, entered the reception area,
told the candidates how deserving they all were, then got down to business.
He called out the first winner's name. Pause. Then another name.
Not only was Taylor's not among them, but neither was a candidate's
whom he had pegged as a sure bet.
With two names to go, Taylor was ready to leave,
certain his ambition to study astrophysics at Oxford University would
remain unfulfilled. A third name was called; not his. Then it seemed
to Taylor the Rhodes agent began moving as if through water. "He
started saying that kind of 'pa' sound and everything started
to slow down," recalls Taylor, and he heard his name.
In that moment, a Boston College student won a
Rhodes Scholarship for the first time in history. But there's
more. In Houston, Arizonan Brett Huneycutt '03—who'd
taken a break from a 10-month Fulbright fellowship in El Salvador to
interview for the Rhodes—was about to learn that his responses
to questions on economics and trade had won over a panel of interviewers
in the southwest district. Out of the 32 Rhodes Scholars named in this
country, Boston College could claim not one, but two.
While Taylor and Huneycutt were putting themselves
through the social gatherings and probing interviews that make up the
final rounds of the Rhodes selection process, at least one person back
in Chestnut Hill was "literally pacing" the floor, waiting
to learn the results—political science professor Donald Hafner.
"I knew they were both very strong candidates," he says,
and for that both students offer Hafner more than a modicum of credit.
As director of the University Fellowships Committee and campus coordinator
for the Rhodes and seven other scholarships, Hafner is part of the reason
that BC, once nearly absent from the rolls of prestigious fellowships,
now tosses up winners' names with frequency.
THE TURNING point can be traced to the academic year 1995–96.
The University was then in the midst of a 31-year drought in prestigious
George C. Marshall Scholarship awards; the previous year, nine students
had applied for a J. William Fulbright grant, and one had been funded.
Though Boston College was improving academically and its undergraduates
becoming increasingly competitive, the administration and faculty were
concerned that such gains weren't being reflected in the grant-giving
arena. In 1995–96, the University Academic Planning Council (UAPC),
charged by then University President J. Donald Monan, SJ, with developing
BC's academic goals for the next 10 years, defined as a University
mission the provision of "strong support to students who compete
for prestigious fellowships."
A modest support system was already in place,
led by Michael Resler of the German department and a cadre of BC's
"good citizens"—as associate academic vice president
Patricia De Leeuw calls the faculty who volunteered their time to assist
student grant seekers. With the UAPC's plan came funding to buttress
a new University Fellowships Committee, and Hafner became head of the
committee. During his first year, BC had two unsuccessful Rhodes applicants
and one Fulbright winner among eight applicants.
Back then, fewer students knew about Fulbrights
and other fellowships. But today, says Margaret Thomas, BC's Fulbright
coordinator, students look "dumbfounded" if she asks them
how they learned of the fellowships—it's as if she asked
how they knew to apply to college. Last year, Fulbright grants went
to 14 BC undergraduates and one graduate student, a University record.
Four BC students have won Marshalls in the past six years (only 40 are
distributed each year). In all, 19 faculty and academic administrators
serve as committee coordinators for 34 competitive grant programs. "It
wasn't that we didn't have the students before," says
Hafner. "It was that we didn't have the organization."
The University Fellowships Committee plants the
idea of seeking fellowships in high achievers' minds soon after
they arrive on campus. Hafner holds an introductory luncheon in February
and aims to fill Gasson 100 with about 180 freshmen, so he invites double
that number. Invitations are based strictly on first-quarter grades;
this year, students with an A– average or above were included.
Another luncheon, in the fall, targets standout sophomores. "The
core purpose is to rouse their interest and enthusiasm and sense of
confidence that aiming for these opportunities is worth their contemplation,"
says Hafner. "Especially for freshmen, the prospect of fellowships
will seem like something off in never-never land. So we need to persuade
them otherwise—that there are things they can reach for immediately
and that it is good to get started." The University's approximately
50 Presidential Scholars (both Huneycutt and Taylor came from this group)
also receive frequent reminders of grant opportunities at their biweekly
speaker series. "From day one we were encouraged," remembers
Huneycutt. "We were told fellowships are out there."
Faculty in the Honors Program also identify and
encourage promising students, says Hafner. And applications for Advanced
Study Grants (set aside for underclassmen, these BC grants are administered
by the fellowships committee and fund student-designed projects) yield
additional clues to budding fellowship contenders. "It's
like a very large funnel," says Hafner. "We hope to attract
a large number of students at the very beginning. Only a few will have
the kinds of ambitions that carry them along to the Rhodes or Fulbrights."
Hafner stresses that the committee makes no effort
to groom individuals—to assign mentors to young prospects, offer
them prep courses, or send them to mock cocktail parties as some schools
do, according to recent stories in the New York Times and the Chronicle
of Higher Education. Instead, he says, the committee has set up a service
that allows talented students to stay informed; "we encourage
and assist them," he says.
Elliot Gerson, American secretary of the Rhodes
Trust, says he is concerned when he hears of excesses like mock cocktail
parties ("no one is turned down for a Rhodes because of etiquette,"
he says), but he enthusiastically supports universities that, like BC,
have put formal fellowship advisory structures into place. And BC is
far from alone: The National Association of Fellowship Advisors lists
200 members on its roster, from Abilene Christian University and Alma
College to Yale and Yeshiva University (Harvard is notably absent).
"Our feeling is that the colleges that establish
fellowship advisory offices are providing a very valuable service to
encourage outstanding students," says Gerson. "No institutional
advice or support system has created a Rhodes winner who otherwise might
not have won, but it might have encouraged someone who might not have
had the confidence or even awareness."
Even if the fellowships committee wanted to anoint
scholarship candidates, it would be tricky business. "It's
very difficult to predict early on who will be successful," Hafner
says. "There are students who are late bloomers—really dazzling
later, but we wouldn't spot them early on." For example,
one member of the Class of '98 came to Hafner's attention
when he proposed a somewhat unconventional Advanced Study Grant: The
student wanted to improve his Spanish fluency by teaching reading to
street children in Mexico. "We took a gamble," says Hafner,
and the proposal was funded. Broderick Bagert went to Mexico, won a
Rotary scholarship to study philosophy in Spain, tried unsuccessfully
for a Rhodes, snagged a Marshall, and studied at the London School of
Economics. (Today he works for a Houston philanthropy.) Bagert wasn't
a Presidential Scholar, though he was in the Honors Program. "We
found him because he progressively stood out," Hafner says. "We
didn't push him. We put an array of opportunities in front of
him, and he grabbed them."
HUNEYCUTT, too, took advantage of an Advanced Study Grant, which he
used to study the case of Augusto Pinochet's extradition from Spain.
He also received a University-funded Undergraduate Research Fellowship
to assist BC political science professor Jennie Purnell; for that project
he read archives, primarily in the O'Neill Library, about U.S.–Mexican
relations during the Cristero Rebellion of the 1920s and about Protestant
evangelization to Mexican indigenous groups. Huneycutt also spent a
semester studying in Mexico, but he had first visited the country in
high school, when a teacher was working in a Mexican shantytown. Scenes
from his two-week stay in the town remain with him—the stray dogs,
the electrical wires running everywhere along the ground. Once in college,
he says, "I was able to study poverty analytically." In fact,
Huneycutt calls his economics major "the perfect fit for me. It
represents a perfect blend of my talents, which are quantitative, and
of my passion for social justice."
Now back in El Salvador and working on his Fulbright,
Huneycutt is expanding on the subject of his senior thesis at BC, examining
the effect of money sent home by Salvadorans working in the United States
on the growth of small businesses in the developing Central American
country. Some $2 billion a year enters El Salvador by this means; Huneycutt's
analysis determined that the small-scale proprietors who receive U.S.
dollars from their relatives or friends run businesses two-and-a-half
times larger, on average, than their counterparts'.
NO AMOUNT of experience, of course, can prepare an individual for the
variegated par course that is the Rhodes application process. For Huneycutt,
the trials started out low-key: At the state level, he found the social
reception uncomfortable, but the interview surprisingly relaxed. He
answered questions on economics, international trade, and his work in
El Salvador. One panelist, noticing that Huneycutt had won a chemistry
award, asked what five elements from the periodic table he'd bring
if he wanted to build a new planet. No sweat: "I said something
to the effect of, 'Well, I like our planet as it is, so I would
bring carbon, hydrogen, oxygen.' Then I paused, and someone on
the panel suggested nitrogen. 'Oh, yes,' I said, 'that's
the majority of our atmosphere. And any element that is not plutonium or
uranium.'"
The district interview in Houston, on the other
hand, was intense. "The panel was very antagonistic, almost mean,"
he recalls. "None of them smiled. It was impossible to gauge how
I did." After he exited, he called a friend on his cell phone
and discussed moving to New York City or Brazil next year.
Huneycutt and Taylor together demonstrate the
diversity of Rhodes award winners. "There are no targets of any
kind with regard to any factor—male or female; scientist, humanist,
or social scientist; or the number of institutions represented,"
says Gerson.
Indeed, to pigeonhole Paul Taylor as a candidate
would be particularly difficult. His dual majors, physics and classics,
point to a well-roundedness he has enjoyed for years: learning to fence
the summer after eighth grade (he's now captain of BC's fencing team),
playing high school baseball and pickup basketball, even watching kung
fu movies (Hero with Jet Li is his favorite). Last summer he
interned at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; over Christmas
break his pleasure reading included Melmoth the Wanderer, the
19th-century Gothic classic by Charles Maturin. Taylor won a Goldwater
Scholarship (for students in math or science) his junior year, and he
shares a patent on a statistical process for analyzing magnetic resonance
imaging, which he picked up in high school when he had a part-time job
assisting medical researchers.
Taylor's many interests paid off during the Rhodes
process. He talked at length about kung fu movies with a panelist at
one reception, and during the state interview answered questions that
touched on physics, his work at a soup kitchen, the California gubernatorial
recall vote, and what classical text he'd recommend for George W. Bush
to read (he suggested Plato's Republic).
At Taylor's regional and final interview
in Chicago, the panel fortuitously included an official of the Great
Books Foundation and a condensed-matter theorist. Still, eyeing the
well-versed, well-oiled competition gave the normally cool Taylor the
jitters. "Everybody has such high credentials it gets almost to
the point of a crapshoot," he says. His confidence flickering
to a "let's-get-it-over-with" resignation, he sank
into a leather swivel chair at the long conference table to face his
interrogators. Suddenly, mysteriously, he says, he felt relaxed, in
control, even powerful. "I don't know how to describe the
power of the chair," he says. "It was a magical chair."
The panelists started out with questions about
physics; then they asked if he'd rather be a woman in ancient
Greece or Rome (he chose Rome—women had more freedom and power
there); and they questioned him about fencing and about the soup kitchen.
Most stunning, says physics department chair Kevin Bedell, was Taylor's
answer to one of the science questions: Explain a Fermi liquid. "That's
a question most undergrads couldn't answer, especially when asked
to apply it to nuclear astrophysics, as Paul was," says Bedell,
whom Taylor cites as a mentor. "That was the most impressive,
that he was able to answer that question."
Bedell wasn't particularly surprised when
Taylor prevailed. His student had stood apart ever since he asked—actually
insisted—that he bypass freshman physics and begin with the sophomore
course. Bedell had tried to discourage him, but then relented. "When
I write a letter of recommendation for Paul, I mention that he was smart
enough not to take my advice," he says. During the summers after
freshman and sophomore years, Taylor assisted Bedell with research.
"He always had to go ahead of where his academic program was,"
Bedell says, "and he was always up to the challenge."
THOUGH the Rhodes awards for this year were announced in the fall, the
Fulbrights are generally made public in the spring. Last year's
14 grants marked a banner year, thanks in part to coordinator Thomas's
guidance. An associate professor in the Slavic/eastern languages department,
Thomas has ascended to the status of legend among BC faculty for her
support of aspiring undergraduates; Academic Vice President Jack Neuhauser
jokes that some now call the Fulbrights the Thomases.
Thomas says she almost turned down the coordinator's
position seven years ago, out of fear that she would find it difficult
to tread the line between helping enough and helping too much. But she
now says, "It turned out to be not a problem at all." When
students are starting the application process, she typically asks them
to consider what they've already accomplished at BC. "I
always assume they will get the grant, so they're not strategizing
about getting the grant but about how they will make it more transformative
intellectually, spiritually, psychologically." Thomas might suggest
course work to beef up knowledge in an area of interest, or tell a student,
"You're going to have to know something about the history
of this issue to write a persuasive essay about it."
By all accounts, the most intense guidance from
fellowship coordinators comes with the essay portion of applications.
Thomas typically covers essays—which can undergo numerous rewrites—with
her comments, pointing out weaknesses but not solving them. Hafner often
suggests candidates write three or four different essays, "trying
to find the 'you' in there." Hafner says his help
focuses on big themes more than organization or basic writing, asking,
"How does the essay reveal a coherent life?"
The coordinators of the fellowships committee
strive to make sure applicants appreciate what they'll gain, even
if they lose—which is, of course, the statistically likely outcome
(about 1,000 applicants vie for the 32 Rhodes Scholarships each year,
for example). "Students need to be encouraged that it's
worthwhile whether they win or lose," Hafner says. "I've
had many unsuccessful applicants in my office in tears when they haven't
gotten the award, but I've also heard from every single one of
them, I think, within a matter of days if not at that very moment, 'Gee,
I really learned a lot about myself, so even if I didn't get the
fellowship this was really worthwhile.'"
Gail Friedman
Gail Friedman is a writer based in the Boston
area.
Photos (from top):
Paul Taylor (foreground) with physicist Kevin
Bedell. By Gary Wayne Gilbert
Economics major Brett Huneycutt (left) with
Donald Hafner. By Gary Wayne Gilbert
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