Famous Last Words Week 11: Read, Study, Rinse and Repeat

With last week’s arrival of the surprising news regarding the Rhodes Scholarship, I have been putting my nose to the grindstone. The final interview is known for being notoriously difficult. The judges, most of who are Rhodes Scholars themselves, try to make your head spin. They will ask questions that come out of left field just to test how well you react to not knowing a topic. Therefore, most of my free time now consists of preparing for the mental hurtle.

Anytime I drive in Norman, I play NPR through an app on my phone. When I have the time, I try to wrap my head around the complex law that is the Affordable Care Act. The same thing applies to the study of linguistics and philology because I proposed to pursue a Masters in those subjects at Oxford. Overall, it’s a humbling experience. It has been a great reminder of how little I actually know. It has strengthened my desire to be a life-long learner. I feel a renewed appetite to bite into the subjects and topics that have always interested me. At the same time, I must say that I’m a little disappointed in myself that it took the possibility of a scholarship to encourage me to do something I should have been doing all along.

A screenshot of a comic I've read that does a through job of explaining the ACA. Found at boingboing.net.

When it comes to the interview, I have been lucky enough to receive some perspective. My scholarship coordinator, Melanie Wright, sent me ‘debriefings’ of people who had interviewed in the past. One in particular helped me to calm down. She mentioned that she had said “I don’t know” at least four times in her interview, and when everything was said and done, she still got the scholarship. The way I see it, the purpose of the interview is to confirm who I am based on what I submitted in my application. I do not want to go in there feeling I have to prove myself further or impress people. I think my best chance comes from focusing on communicating who I am.