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Application Process

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Application Overview

The Rhodes Scholarship is a life-changing postgraduate opportunity which enables talented young people from around the world to study at the University of Oxford, and actively fosters lifelong learning and fellowship.

Our application process consists of multiple stages, and this video series will guide you through each step with helpful tips and advice from Rhodes Scholars themselves.

Rhodes Scholarship Applications Playlist

So you're thinking about applying to the Rhodes Scholarship.

This is a playlist to guide you through the Rhodes application process. No one here assumed they would win the scholarship. If you think even there's a slightest chance that you could be interested in studying at Oxford, just go for it.

There are six aspects of the application process: eligibility, choice of Oxford course, personal & academic statement, reference letters, social engagement, and finally the personal interview.

You never know what's going to happen. Just apply. Nobody thinks they're going to get it. Just give it a shot!

The broad eligibility criteria of the Rhodes Scholarship; definitive eligibility criteria are listed in the relevant Information for Candidates document for your country/region. Check your eligibility here.

Hi, I'm Timur.

Hi, I'm Simone.

And we'll be talking about eligibility criteria. So if you're a citizen of a single Rhodes jurisdiction, such as Germany, in my case, then that's where you should apply.

Or the Commonwealth Caribbean in my case. But there are some variants to this.
You should be over 18 and under 24 when you apply.

You should have a bachelor's degree and you should also meet the English language requirements.

But don't worry, there are variants of each constituency, which is why you should check out the Information for Candidates on the website. It's all there.

Literary and scholastic attainment is one often mentioned. What does that mean to you?

Yeah, so academic excellence, sometimes we just think that it means all As, but really it means being able to critically engage with the material you've been learning over the past couple of years.

Another one is energy to use one's potential to the full. That does not mean that you have to be great at sports. My main physical activity is the fact that my nose runs from time to time.
For me, energy to use my potential to the full means being active in student government, being politically active, caring about my community.

I think they just mean putting efforts into actualising your talent. So there are Rhodes Scholars in our community who are artists, musicians, debaters, dancers, or athletes. And so I think that it's a lot more nuanced than just being sporty in a sense.
The criteria are your moral force of character, your instinct to lead, your devotion to truth and courage and duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak. But these are very nuanced characteristics that you should contextualise to your situation. It looks different for different people.

Yeah, it's really about making these criteria your own and also thinking critically about the spirit of the scholarship in the contemporary world and how that applies to you.

Yeah. How does the vision of the scholarship align with your vision for your life?

And lastly, we really want to encourage you to apply.

Yeah, and apply wholeheartedly and meaningfully.

The original Rhodes characteristics really looked for the instinct to lead, truth, courage, devotion to duty, kindliness, care for the weak. How did you think about those qualities as you are applying for the Rhodes Scholarship application?

The role of those qualities is not necessarily that you've mastered a single one of them and you've got weaknesses in other areas. I think it's that you're serious about the pursuit of all of them.

It's not about checking them all off the list. It's about showing that there are parts of you that strongly exemplify these characters, but at the same time, you're not a finished product, right? So you're going to work on others and the Rhodes community is going to help you with that.

The Rhodes Personal Statement has three prompts.

Which Rhodes Scholar quality do you display most strongly?
What would you like to learn from the Rhodes and wider community in Oxford?
From your place in the world, what is humanity's greatest need?

So those are really big questions and can be quite daunting questions. How would you think about each of those?

You're trying to create an image of what you look like in action. What do you bring to the table? What's yourself, what maybe talents or energy or leadership capability or devotion to others do you have? How are you able to work with others? Are you someone that's constantly engaging with the community around you in order to learn and grow alongside other people? And then what is all of that for? And that's standing up for the world. My point of view is very local. I have lived within the same three mile geographic radius in Arkansas. All I want to do is contribute to my state and hopefully rural communities in the country, but very locally focused, and I made a case around that. So it's not about tackling and solving the entire world's problem. It's about trying to make a contribution, an area that is deeply meaningful to you and you believe deeply matters.

Coleman and I received some pushback about things that we wanted to say in our personal statements, but this is what we felt strongly about. This is what I felt strongly about, and I felt like I had to put this in my personal statement. If it was going to make others uncomfortable, so be it. So I would say don't shy away from being authentic and talking about the situations that made you who you are.

Has Oxford changed you?

You come here with an idea of who you are, and I feel like it's like this core foundation, and then you get here and within a month that entire core just thrown in the air, and it's like you're just like, those are all pieces of me that are being challenged strongly by all these new ideas and people who have ideas that excite and inspire you. What I'm hoping to be doing is slowly reroot these ideas and then go home with even a stronger sense of self that's more informed by the world and by others.

There's an expectation that the selection committees are looking for fully baked individuals, and none of us are fully baked. We're all sort in the process of evolution and development. How did you write about your flaws?

I think that's how I ended my statement saying that I don't actually have all the skill sets I need to achieve these things I want to do. That's why I need to come to Oxford, and that's why I want to be a Rhodes Scholar.

Is there a formula to being a Rhodes Scholar? Do you fit the formula?

No, of course not. There's no formula. That's why I've questioned myself and I've been challenged so much since I came here by Rhodes Scholars. Every one of them is just completely different. And it'll open your eyes to something that you haven't thought about before.

How would you advise applicants who are thinking of applying to the scholarship and to Oxford to go about writing their academic statement?

The Rhodes application process is a very challenging process and it can be quite stressful at times, but it's also incredibly fulfilling. Thinking about who you are as a person, what impact you want to have on the world, and really channeling that into a really succinct statement of academic purpose, I think is an incredibly valuable opportunity and thing to do.

I would say my perspective of academia was not as broad as it is now. I'm doing medical anthropology, for example. There's many different anthropological disciplines and majors here and I could not have possibly known that. So talking to your own supervisor who is more accustomed to the functioning of academia, plus who knows you better than most people here, can actually provide you a guide.

Could you tell us a bit more about how you actually went about writing the academic statement?

So I went out and checked the course list and looked at the departments and then the curriculums and the professors and their research. I structured it in a way that basically explains my interest because at the end of the day, the course is an asset. You're using it for your own passion, your interest.

Was writing the academic statement a helpful process?

Oxford is competitive and right after you get Rhodes, you need to apply to courses. You need to be quick, and the academic statement gives you the opportunity to take some burden out of that and place it before your application to Rhodes, as well as some burden out of your second year applications, which I need to do actually right now. You do not need to strictly abide by your academic statement that is there just to give the admissions committee that you have some idea about what you want to do, what you want to accomplish in the future, although not necessarily through that exact trajectory of courses.

Any tips and tricks?

The A-Z course list on Oxford's website is absolutely gold and it's worth perhaps making a list of courses that interest you, seeing do you fit the requirements of it, what sort of marks do you need to get in your undergrad to be able to apply for that. There's so many opportunities at Oxford outside of academics, and it really is just about balancing your academic time, your social time.

Finding that balance. You will manage it, you will do it. I believe in you.

Hi, my name is Saman Tariq Malik, and I'm from Pakistan.

I'm Morgan Moore. I'm from Indiana in the US.

And we're going to talk to you about the reference letter.

I started my process by writing out the names of every single person I knew who I thought would serve as a potential reference. So that included basically everybody but my friends, all of my professors, all of my professional supervisors, and not your family. All my mentors, not my family, although that would've been really handy.

I went for those professors who had worked with me extensively, who were aware of my work, but also of my research interests and long-term goals with regards to where I want to be, let's say five to 10 years after I complete my studies.

I thought, okay, well here are the people that I think will make the strongest claims or who know me best out of all these people, or I also thought about how the reference letters matched up with each other, so this person will say how I was on a campaign, for instance, so I don't want to include another campaign reference. I want this professor to say something about how I'm really studious. So I came up with all of that, contacted them, emailed them early on in the summer, followed up, followed up, followed up, followed up.

It is, at the end of the day, your responsibility to make sure that the reference letter is submitted on time.

Don't be afraid to reach out and follow up with your recommenders, especially if they aren't responsive or you don't think that they remember the timeline. We get notifications via the online portal that says, this person has submitted or this person hasn't, on the Embark website.

For some people, the recommendation letter process is the hardest part of the application. Others, it's an easy part, but I think bottom line is if you give yourself enough time, come up with backups, realize that it's a lot of responsibility for you, but also for other people and just sort of staying calm throughout the process, I think it's easily manageable.

Next: Constituency Information ➜