U.S. Rhodes scholars for 2022 include record number of women

The class of U.S. Rhodes scholars for 2022 includes the largest number of women ever selected for the scholarship in one year, the Rhodes Trust announced Sunday.

Of the 32 students chosen to study at the University of Oxford in England, 22 are women, the office of the American secretary of the trust said in a statement.

One of the women selected is Louise Franke, a 21-year-old senior studying biochemistry at South Carolina’s Clemson University. Franke said she hopes to merge her interests in science and public policy through a career in health care policy. She intends to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford.

Franke, of Spartanburg, South Carolina, is also the first Clemson student elected to a Rhodes class. She cited her mentors and various academic programs at the school as integral to her success.

“It feels amazing to be part of this historic moment, as a woman and as a woman from the South,” Franke said. “I don’t really have the words for it.”

Also among the winners is Devashish Basnet, a senior studying political science at New York City’s Hunter College. Basnet arrived in the United States as a 7-year-old asylum seeker from Nepal and spent much of his childhood in immigration courts, an experience he says helped turn his interests toward immigration policy.

Basnet, now 22, of Hicksville, New York, said he was proud to represent the communities he came from, especially as a product of New York City public schools.

“I definitely blacked out. It didn’t feel real,” Basnet said of the moment he learned he had won the prestigious honor over Zoom.

The selection process was completed virtually for the second year in a row due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In an otherwise empty classroom at Princeton University, Josh Babu began crying when he heard his name read aloud. The 21-year-old from Scottsdale, Arizona, had planned to go to medical school next year to become a doctor serving LGBTQ populations, a calling he found in college after growing up gay in what he described as a conservative environment.