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Several NY, NJ Students Named Rhodes Scholars; More Women Included

What to Know

  • This year's Rhodes scholars include more women, immigrants and first-generation Americans than previous years
  • Jin Park, a Harvard senior from Queens, is the first DACA recipient to receive the honor
  • Several other students from New York and New Jersey were also named

The latest crop of American Rhodes scholars has more women than any other single class.

The Rhodes Trust announced Sunday the 32 students selected to start classes next fall include 21 women, and that almost half of this year's recipients of the prestigious scholarship to Oxford University in England are either immigrants or first-generation Americans.

Among them is Harvard University senior Jin Park, who is the first recipient covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that shields young immigrants from deportation.

The 22-year-old from Queens, New York, who came from South Korea with his parents when he was 7-year-old, hopes to become an immigrant advocate, after studying molecular and cellular biology at Harvard and founding a non-profit to help undocumented students apply to college. He says it's important for him to use the opportunity for the betterment of others, not just himself.

"When you grow up as an undocumented immigrant in America, that understanding that your talents don't really belong to you in the traditional sense, that you have to share the fruits of your labor with others, that's just something you learn," Park said.

Alaleh Azhir, a 21-year old senior at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, emigrated from Iran when she was 14 years old. The New York City resident hopes to eventually become a doctor and will be studying women's and reproductive health at Oxford.

"I'm just a passionate advocate for women in general and that's mostly because of my background," she said. "I thought that the way I could advocate for women could be by advocating for their health."

And Eren Orbey, a 23-year-old senior at Yale University in Connecticut whose parents emigrated from Turkey, hopes studying at Oxford will bring greater "context and clarity" to his writing. He's a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine and is working on a book about his father, who was slain in Ankara when he was just three years old, and his father's killer.

"I'm interested in studying the ethics of revenge and forgiveness," Orbey said Sunday by email. "I think that our culture and media coverage often condescend to immigrants and survivors of trauma. In my writing, I hope to recast tragedy and strife as occasions for growth and heroism."

Two students from New Jersey, Princeton senior Nicolette D'Angelo and U.S. Naval Academy senior Margaret Dods, are among the latest group of U.S. Rhodes scholars heading to Oxford University in England next fall.

D'Angelo, of Hewitt, New Jersey, is studying classics and said in an emailed statement she hopes to help broaden the audience for the field and show "the relevance of antiquity" to today's world, eventually becoming a classics professor.

"We prize concepts like democracy, columned architecture and philosophy from the ancient past, but we also can trace back to this time some of our most unsavory societal norms today: for example, the exclusion of women and other marginalized voices from power," she said. "... I hope to inspire budding classicists and non-classicists alike to examine and interrogate the global reception of ideas from the amazing yet deeply troubling worlds of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome."

Officials said D'Angelo is also editor in chief of The Nassau Literary Review, the university's undergraduate literary magazine, and teaches Latin to elementary school students.

Officials say Dods, of Linwood, New Jersey, is majoring in English and Arabic. She serves as battalion commander, leading 750 of her peers, and has completed three marathons. Now training for a Marine Corps commission, she plans to pursue a modern Middle Eastern studies degree at Oxford.

The U.S. Rhodes Scholars join a separate, international group of scholars representing more than 60 countries.

Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for at least two years of study at Oxford. They were created in 1902 in the will of Cecil Rhodes, a British businessman and Oxford alum who was a prime minister of the Cape Colony in present-day South Africa.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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