Art Casciato: Penn's fight for the Rhodes

No Penn student was chosen to be a Rhodes Scholar this year. The good news is that more Penn students chose to apply for the Rhodes than ever before -- 40 of them. More than double the previous highest number of Rhodes applicants Penn has ever had. If Penn continues to have this number and quality of candidates participate, winning Rhodes scholarships, I'm sure, will take care of itself. I'm confident about this in part because of this year's Marshall Scholarship competition in which we also enjoyed a similar yield of applicants, 29 of them, again more than twice Penn's previous high. Of these, Sunjay Mishra, Alison Stein, Jon Wanderer and Adam Zimbler were chosen for the Marshall finals, another Penn record, and the excellence of all four as well as that of Penn undergraduates in general was recognized when Zimbler was named one of the 40 Marshall Scholars for 2003 -- only the fifth Penn student to be so honored since the inception of the award in 1953. Zimbler did us all proud. But win or lose, these increases in Marshall and Rhodes applicants signal a significant change -- Penn students have begun to apply for national fellowships to support graduate study in numbers that match or surpass those of our peer institutions in the Ivy League. Last year, for instance, Yale had 43 students apply for the Rhodes; Penn had only 15 (not bad when you realize that we have averaged roughly nine applicants a year over the past two decades). This year, those 40 Penn students who tried for a Rhodes put us more or less right with Yale, which had 44 applicants this year, and even ahead of Princeton, which had 27. You'll notice that I haven't reported on Harvard. This year Harvard received 82 applications for institutional endorsement for the Rhodes, as usual almost lapping the field in number of applicants. But of these, 43 students were endorsed and sent forward -- in terms of actual competitors, Penn's 40 were right in line with Yale's 44, Harvard's 43 and Princeton's 27. Right where we belong. Penn students also applied for Rhodes more widely than ever before -- in 25 states and in all eight Rhodes districts, and of the 40 who tried, 17 were asked to interview in 13 states, both records for Penn. Typically these interviews would be on the eastern seaboard. This year, besides having two interviews in New York, New Jersey and Maine, our students really lit out for the territories, with Penn represented in Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota and Alabama -- most of these for the first time. We can be especially proud that Penn students were asked to interview in some of the most competitive states: Robert Lee in Texas, Paul Bergman and Wanderer in New York and Tevis Jacobs in California. How did Penn's 17 interviews compare to Princeton and Yale? Very well indeed -- Yale had 19 students asked to Rhodes interviews and Princeton 16. Only Harvard -- no surprise -- outdistanced the rest of us with 30 of its 43 Rhodes nominees interviewed. An efficiency to be admired and aspired to and one that, if even more of Penn's best students choose to participate, I think we will attain, too. For now, even without a Rhodes Scholar this year, Penn has plenty of students of which to be proud -- our Marshall winner Zimbler, but also all of those who decided to apply for a Rhodes or a Marshall or both and who, by making this choice, made themselves vulnerable not only to the most strenuous of competitions and the most accomplished of competitors but also to the judgment of strangers and the vagaries of chance. Not one of these students had to do this. They chose to be at risk, and this choice, I believe, is no small act of will, even courage. Any of them might have been chosen for a Rhodes or a Marshall, given this achievement and that bit of luck, but it was the choice to try that always mattered most. A choice that takes character to make in the first place and that affords those who risk taking it through to the end, win or lose, a chance to make even more of themselves. I look forward to working with those courageous Penn students who will likewise make this choice in the future. Art Casciato is the director of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.

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