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Application Process

Navigate below to understand each stage of the application process.

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.

Why Apply for the Rhodes Scholarship?

Hi everyone. I'm Lana Alabbasi and I'm doing the DPhil in Astrophysics, and I'm from Saudi Arabia.

Hi, I'm Diana. I'm studying a DPhil in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation, and I'm from Zambia.

When I started thinking about my academic statement coming into Oxford, I wanted to pursue a master's first. So I looked up the Master's in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation, and I was trying to see what trends it had with regards to my background in social work.

So that was really my thought process. What was the trajectory of my career, and how did I want that to align within the broader context of my studies here in Oxford?

When looking at both of these documents, the academic statement and the personal statement, they should be coherent and they should represent the same story.

And by looking at both, the committee should be able to tell that it was written by the same person and it reflects the same person.

The personal statement highlights your motivations and your values, and the academic statement is an opportunity to interpret that academically and highlight how Oxford is the right next step for you academically, to achieve that vision and those goals.

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't have said it any better. With a personal statement, you are trying to communicate who you are, what your journey has been before, and what drives your passion and your curiosity.

And with the academic statement, you're putting that into the perspective of what you want your future to look like in terms of your career paths and how that sort of ties back into who you are and what your vision is for yourself and your career going forward.

Yeah, I think for me, I feel like one element that really strengthened my– that made my academic statement stronger is highlighting some sort of an effort that I've put in towards my selection of courses.

Something that also helped me when I was drafting mine was indicating why I really wanted to be in that department.

I think it's very important that when you say you want to study a particular programme, you also have a vision for what that programme will mean for you and your growth, and being able to put yourself into the society landscape and seeing what the knowledge that you would have gained out of that course would mean for your community or your society.

Yeah, I love that. And I think even if I didn't end up getting this Scholarship, I wouldn't trade my application experience for anything. I just spent like six months of thinking about my journey and reflecting on it and making sense of things that really matter to me.

I think this was really beautiful, and I think it benefited me greatly overall, and understanding myself and understanding my causes.

Something that I think I wish I knew better was, I guess, not being too scared, because the fear of not being good enough sometimes can stop you from writing and expressing yourself.

And being in Oxford for close to a year, for two years now, I’ve understood that everybody is just trying to be their best. And we all have questions that sometimes you don't have answers to, and so we shouldn't be scared, or feel that we are putting up a show.

Rather, we should be curious and allow our curiosity to just guide us in the way that we view our work and the world around us.

Yeah, I absolutely relate to that. So back then, I used to think that, gosh, I have to look like a genius in my academic statement, or even make them feel like I know everything out there about astrophysics already. But that's so not true. Express your openness, in your academic statement, to learn.

And yeah, don't be scared to put yourself out there and write about a course that you're curious about, because that is the entire point of pursuing, like, a graduate degree in Oxford, and taking that course.

Learn more about the Selection Criteria here.

Check our Generative AI Guidance for Applicants here.

Hello everyone, my name is Yuhan. I'm from China, I’m doing a DPhil in Biology.

And I'm Billy. I study the MPP and I come from Tasmania, Australia.

Whenever I'm writing a personal statement, I always found the following questions very useful. The first one is, who am I? And the second one is, what do I want to do? And the third one is, why I am the person who will be able to do that.

I feel like the [selection] criteria, they are very useful. They are a really good starting point to help me to gather my experience and my past memories. So I was going through these criteria and tried to find my experiences that I found relevant to them.

And I think sometimes one of those four is going to stand out to you more. So in my context, service was a big part of what I had done in the years prior. So that one really stood out to me.

You can really find a way, I guess, of connecting what you've done in your experiences, and what you want to write in that statement, to those criteria. They serve as a guiding point, but also as something you can sort of weave in quite naturally. And so I found it gave a really good structure.

And to be honest, the personal statement was probably one of the components of the Scholarship that came the most naturally.

Yeah. Personal statement is personal, so please be authentic. Be you. Be who you are in the statement.

Yeah, definitely. And look, when it comes to this, this point of authenticity, I think one thing that's really important to remember is that when you actually get to Oxford, it is your authenticity that makes this place a very special place.

I think if you had you know, I don't know how many students are here in Oxford, but if everyone was the same, it would be an incredibly boring place.

And so the selection committee really recognizes that Rhodes Scholars have been diverse since the beginning of the Scholarship. And so they really encourage you to embrace that, to understand the values that you bring to the table.

Probably personal statement is the only piece or the place where you can show who you really are. So do take the opportunity to express yourself.

Definitely. The way you can really approach something like Rhodes is understanding that you're going to get a lot out of it through the application process, through having to write your own narrative, being presented in front of interviewers who want to understand who you are, going through sometimes challenging processes and putting yourself under that kind of pressure. They're all immensely valuable skills.

And so, I remember, early on, being presented a framework which essentially encouraged me to think not only about the course I wanted to do at Oxford, but also actually the Rhodes Scholarship itself, and why I want to be part of that type of community.

And then finally, where I personally fit into that equation with my background and my context, what's going to make me a suitable person to go through that trajectory?

My piece of advice is actually to start early because it's always the first draft that I found the hardest.

I have some advice on AI. I would say that with a really strong word of caution. Writing the personal statement is actually a hugely beneficial process in and of itself.

I think that going through that and developing your narrative, and developing your story, is an iterative process. It's one that encourages reflection.

And if AI is slotting in a few key terms in there or shaping your narrative, it does actually really clearly show. But I would say that very much infiltrates what is otherwise a really personal, and reflective, and empowering sort of process.

I completely agree with what you said, that the application process itself is very helpful. In my personal experience, writing the statement and going through the whole process make me to see myself more clearly.

And because English is not my first language, so I do use AI to check the grammar, but that's all it can help me to do. So I keep using AI as a useful tool, but it cannot replace, who am I? It cannot replace, what are the motivations behind me writing this personal statement?

Definitely. For me, what being here in Oxford’s taught me, when I think back to my personal statement, is my personal statement had a lot of conviction that, you know, that Oxford would be the right place for me and that I would be able to use the skills and values that I learned back at home and apply it to this context.

Whenever people ask me how to become a Rhodes Scholar, my advice, my simple advice is always, just apply. Because I feel like many people don't have the confidence to apply, even though they are already qualified. So just apply to it.

Maybe your university, your subject didn't previously have a Rhodes Scholar. It doesn't mean you won't be the first one.

And so always the first step is to apply.

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.

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