As juniors start to worry about what they will do after graduation, Professor of History Paul Rahe works alongside faculty to consider a number of scholarships and fellowships as options for students.
Rahe spearheads efforts to guide students through the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, Clarendon, Fulbright, and Truman scholarships.
Rahe was a Rhodes scholar himself, on the Oklahoma Rhodes committee, and involved with scholarship applications at the University of Tulsa before coming to Hillsdale.
“I came here and I noticed two things: The quality of the students was pretty high, and there was no push to get people to apply to these things,” he said. “When I was at Tulsa, we won one Rhodes, two or three Marshalls, and four or five Trumans, so we should be able to do it here.”
When Rahe started, Professor of Philosophy Jim Stephens was acting as adviser for both the Rhodes and the Marshall. Rahe took over the Rhodes program and now also advises for the Clarendon and Gates fellowships, academic programs that students applying for Oxford and Cambridge may receive, respectively.
The Rhodes scholarships finance 32 students’ graduate studies at Oxford. Rahe said the Rhodes program is looking to find students who have an idea of how they are going to change the world in some way, and leans towards students with political or journalistic interests.
Stephens still advises students applying for the Marshall Scholarship, which finances 40 students’ graduate studies in the United Kingdom. Rahe said that the Marshall candidate is less political than the Rhodes, and more purely academic.
Director of the Dow Journalism Program John Miller recently took over advising for the Truman program for Associate Professor of Politics Kevin Portteus. Students apply for the Truman Scholarship as juniors, unlike the other scholarships. It pays for the senior year of undergraduate study and for graduate school.
“They want to invest in people who are interested in public life, writ large: so, people who want to go into government, people who want to go into politics or media, that kind of thing,” Miller said.
Miller said sophomores interested in the Truman need to see him.
“You need to be thinking about it pretty seriously no later than when you set foot on campus as a junior, and probably it wouldn’t hurt to think about it the spring before,” he said.
Fred Yaniga, associate professor of German, is the Fulbright Program Adviser for Hillsdale.
The Fulbright Program is run by the United States government and finances students to teach English or conduct research in countries around the world.
“We’ve had students apply for research scholarships, but we have not had any successes,” Yaniga said. “Our successes have been with students applying for the language program. Last year we had two winners. This year we have a finalist.”
With a September application, Yaniga said he likes interested students to meet with him the spring of their junior year to discuss it and get the process started.
“We’ve had some ongoing experience here on campus and we’ve had kind of a steady stream of applications and I’d like to see that continue,” he said.
For students interested in applying to these programs, Rahe has some warnings.
“Your academic record has got to be pretty good,” he said. “You actually have to have some tolerably clear idea of what you’d like to do with your life.”
Applying, even without success, has its advantages.
“It’s a dry run for applications to law school, or grad school, or med school,” Rahe said. “Doing it, and doing it right, is money in the bank.”
