On encouraging Rhodes Scholars

As of Aug. 1, 2005, heading into my senior year at Princeton, I had decided not to apply for the Rhodes. I did not believe that students who were neither rising shapers of politics or science nor standout athletes stood a chance. I’d only played sports my first two years of college and only as a junior varsity also-ran, and I hoped (as I still hope) to be a writer and an English professor. My GPA was high, but not astronomical; no Pyne Prizes here. Worst of all, I knew my application would be exceptionally thin, which it remained. This is not false modesty. My primary, almost sole extracurricular as an upperclassman was being the social chair of an eating club. Whereas most Rhodes applicants apply with the maximum number of letters of recommendation (nine), I applied with the minimum (seven), two of them from my high school. I can honestly say that I would never have applied later that same August had Dean Frank Ordiway not e-mailed me encouraging me to do so (along with many other incoming seniors with the minimum qualifications). Thankfully, I had enough good sense to respond to his e-mail and to explain to him why I wasn’t planning to apply. What he replied, in short, was: “Let us or the Rhodes committee reject your application: Don’t reject yourself.”

From there, Dean Ordiway and professor Joshua Katz, the two faculty members most involved with overseeing Princeton’s Rhodes applications, gave me their tireless help and, I’m sure, too much of their time. As for the so-called interview “coaching” I received from them after I was named a Rhodes finalist, they did not try to sculpt me into some mannered, ideal Rhodes interviewee. They gave me advice like, “If they ask you to recite your favorite lines of Milton, try not make it sound as rote as if you were reading someone their Miranda rights.” And they suggested that it was best to be generous and not condemnatory in one’s thoughts about the works and motivations of others, even if they represented the very things one hoped to set oneself against (which is, incidentally, excellent life-coaching as well). Ultimately, thanks to Dean Ordiway and Professor Katz — and to the above-and-beyond encouragement and support of Professors Nigel Smith, Edmund White, Chang-rae Lee, William Howarth and Deborah Nord — I ended up being the only American from Princeton to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for 2006.

In a recent article in The Daily Princetonian concerning the fact that Princeton has not produced as many Rhodes Scholars in the 2000s as have a few other inferior institutions like Harvard (“U. trails peers in Rhodes race”, 11/24/09), professor and Rhodes Scholar John Fleming GS ’63 was quoted as stressing, rightly, the importance of faculty members actively encouraging students to apply for such scholarships. My story is in many respects a testament to how pivotal such encouragement can be. It also points to the fact that the more important disparity to focus on with regard to Princeton and the Rhodes Scholarship is not the disparity in Rhodes recipients between us and certain other universities — there are, after all, only four of those other places, and none of them consistently bests Princeton in Rhodes winners year in and year out — but rather the disparity at Princeton between the number of students whose achievements make them eligible for things like the Rhodes and the number who apply for them, a gap that encouraging students to apply will always be essential to minimizing.

Nevertheless, if the question is what might be at the root of either disparity, I’m not sure that lack of faculty encouragement is the answer. I, for one, was encouraged to apply first by Professor Smith, then by Professor Katz and then by Dean Ordiway, all over the course of my junior spring. Yet by the end of the following summer I had still thought better of it. At the time, to me, the far more racking decision was whether or not to apply for a summer internship\ and, later, whether or not to apply for a job, with one of Princeton’s handful of career-fair employers (which is not meant as a euphemism for investment and consulting firms). Those decisions felt like the most momentous of my life, and I agonized constantly about what they would forever mean for my friendships and my future happiness. I barely remember deciding not to apply for the Rhodes. I just know that by the beginning of August before my senior year I had calmly reached that decision, and I wouldn’t have given it another thought nor ever even known to regret it had Dean Ordiway not e-mailed me shortly thereafter to encourage me once again. If that e-mail had never come, or if I had still not applied for the Rhodes, would the problem really have been that I wasn’t encouraged enough? Every year scores of Princeton students receive similar encouragement, and yet for all the annual upperclassmen anxiety that I vividly remember being devoted to other post-college possibilities, the Rhodes is one opportunity that qualified juniors and seniors regularly seem content to let pass them by, just as I was quite prepared to do.

The best, and really the only, advice to give potential Rhodes applicants remains what Dean Ordiway so influentially stressed to me: Don’t reject yourself. Though there is of course always room for improvement, Dean Ordiway and Professor Katz do a phenomenal job of spreading that message to any potential fellowship applicant who is willing to receive it (and to respond to their e-mails). The same advice needs to be strenuously spread to all juniors and seniors at Princeton with regard to any of those more-fanciful post-college aspirations that typically fill out the conversations of freshmen and sophomores across campus.

Jeff Miller ’06 is a Rhodes Scholar currently pursuing a DPhil in English at Magdalen College, Oxford.  He can be reached at jeffrey.miller@magd.ox.ac.uk.