Ten of the 32 new Rhodes Scholars are from New England or studied in the region.
They are: Mark Jia and Nicholas DiBerardino, both of Princeton University; Laura Nelson of the University of Virginia; Zachary Frankel, Daniel Lage and Baltazar Zavala of Harvard; Alice Baumgartner and William Zeng of Yale; Gabrielle Emanuel of Dartmouth; and Jennifer Lai of MIT.
Chosen from regions across the United States, these students will be funded for two to four years of study at the University of Oxford in England, thanks to the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who created the scholarship in his will in 1902.
Though it is a national scholarship, New England has heavily populated the Rhodes Scholarship since is inception more than 100 years ago. The colleges with the highest number of scholarship-winners are, not surprisingly, Harvard and Yale. Other New England colleges have been rising in the ranks of recipients: Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Wheaton and Williams each have received three or more scholarships in the past decade.
