Rhodes to Success

You are standing in the middle of a large room in Boston with thick drapes, leather armchairs and a small clock that chimes every 30 minutes. In front of you sit 12 young men and women dressed in their Sunday best. They watch every movement as you wave an imaginary whip, pretending to be Indiana Jones. Then there is a motion in the doorway. You dash to a seat beside your fellow candidates as the committee members file in along the far wall. The chairman of the committee walks to center stage and begins to speak. In the next 30 seconds, four of the candidates in that room will become Rhodes Scholars. Your journey to those final few seconds begins more than a year before when a friend asks if you are going to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship. You answer, honestly, that you have not even considered of it. "I think you have what they are looking for," your friend insists. "I think you should apply."

During junior year, you take on enough independent research, class work, athletic engagements and miscellaneous "extracurriculars" to keep you at the brink. You also fit in a selection of personal crises. Part of you believes that living a semiconscious existence is romantic, even poetic. You make a point of building relationships with faculty. In June, your GPA is on the rise and you have nine strong recommendation writers for the Rhodes.

During the summer before senior year, you fly approximately 20,000 miles conducting thesis research and pursuing an interest in law. You research Oxford degree programs in dimly lit Chilean internet cafes. You write to recommenders from a small island off the West Coast of Canada.

While other students settle into their senior year classes, you make 19 drafts of a Rhodes personal statement. The resulting 982 words illustrate how a D. Phil at Oxford will make the vital transition between your life thus far and your mission to save the world. You then put aside these scholastic ambitions just long enough to begin applying to innumerable banks and consulting firms. Just as you are surfacing from a blitz of marathon interviews and $40 entrees in Manhattan, a letter arrives inviting you to New Jersey Rhodes interviews less than a week away.

You spend several days reviewing your Rhodes application and reading back issues of the Economist to try to prepare for whatever they might throw at you. There is a reception on a Monday night, and you mingle with state committee members and fellow candidates for two hours. You say a few things you regret, but manage to wind in a story about teaching at an inner city school when you were 14.

The state interview is intense but fair. For 15 of the 20 minutes you are grilled on the U.S. global warming policy. You also try to explain X-ray spectroscopy in 10 seconds without sounding patronizing. Your eyes water as you explain your volunteer work in Central America. You are selected as one of three New Jersey qualifiers.

Forty-five hours after the state interview ends, you are in a private social club in Boston selling yourself to the district committee members. After the reception you go for beers at an Irish Pub with your 13 fellow candidates from seven states. You share a pizza with a pole-vaulting materials scientist. Someone reads Michael Foucault for fun. Someone else sings in a punk rock band.

The next day you sit at a table surrounded by the seven district committee members. You have scarcely begun answering a two-part question on world trade when they interrupt and ask you to discuss the role of scientific uncertainty in the courts. Your head swerves from side to side as you condemn Bush's approach to greenhouse gas emissions and then support Turkey's ascension to the European Union. One committee member insists on returning multiple times to the difference between a fee and fine, apparently looking for some metaphysical distinction beyond your grasp.

Your mind keeps replaying and critiquing sections of the interview as you rejoin your fellow finalists in the large room with thick drapes. A game of charades is proposed and soon there is a gangly Rhodes candidate squirming on the floor trying to mimic a mutant ninja turtle.

You are putting on your best Harrison Ford from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when the committee members appear in the doorway and you dive for a chair. Now you are back in those final few moments. The chairman begins to speak, but you hear almost nothing: "It was difficult...you are all...we wish we could... looking for best fit." Four names roll off her lips. You feel numb. Within 10 minutes you are sitting alone in a park on Boylston Street.

If things had gone differently, you would have called your grandfather back West. His voice would have shaken with pride. You would have traded euphoric emails with a friend praying for you in England. You would have celebrated with another friend from Maine and spent Thanksgiving with high school classmates in Boston. Instead, you take the Acela Express and race back to the life you left on hold — a backlog of overdue problem sets, neglected thesis research, incomplete workouts and exploding offers.

As you speed southward, you realize that you did not want the Rhodes for yourself. You do not need more accolades to placate your ego. You know how much you have achieved. You also know that there are many ways to get to Oxford. You wanted a Rhodes to share it with the countless people who have put you where you are — the friends, the coaches, the professors, the mentors. Their belief in you has provided you with every opportunity to succeed. They deserved this scholarship. That's why it hurt when I almost won a Rhodes.