In line with the time-honored tradition of “Ask the” threads, I’m starting my first. I spent two years at Oxford as a postgraduate student under a Rhodes Scholarship, having won one of the slots allocated to Germany. That may matter, since the national Rhodes traditions and customs do vary - for instance, the selection process is decentralised and takes place within the various eligible countries, and the Rhodes Scholarships are much less known in Germany than, for instance, in the U.S. and consequently less contested, with fewer applications per slot. Nonetheless, while you’re there as a student you’re part of the same community, so if people have “Ask the” questions, please shoot and I’ll see if I can be of any help.
How recently were you a Scholar?
Particularly if it was many years ago I’m wondering how much you remain connected, professionally or personally, with fellow Scholars you met during your time there? IOW, does the program lead to a lifelong membership in a “fraternity”, or is it more a matter of do your two years with your profs and move on?
What’s the general “feel” of Oxford, specifically the Rhodes program? Did you enjoy your time there? Do you think its reputation is warranted?
I was there from 2008 until 2010. As far as staying connected is concerned, that varies a lot, and I am unfortunately not the most active in this respect. I’m in touch via Facebook with a number of the people, but less so as far as meeting them in person is concerned. There is also an initative of establishing a social network specifically for Rhodies, with discussion boards etc, but that is nascent. When I was at Oxford, my circle of friends came mostly from my college and less from Rhodes, but in the years since I came back I dropped by at Oxford several times and tried to catch up with whoever happened to be there.
I know, however, people who were close friends with other Rhodes Scholars back then, taking holiday trips together and stuff like that, and I guess these people still try to catch up in person every now and then. You often hear former Rhodes Scholars talking about lifelong friendships that formed, but I think that takes more the form of such bilateral contacts (of which I, personally, have just a few), rather than whole classes sticking together. There are only few events aimed at bringing together entire past classes, especially an annual ball, but for obvious reasons it’s not possible for everyone to attend that. There are more events of that sort on the national level among Rhodes Scholars coming from a particular country.
I’ve also heard people who work for the Rhodes Trust state that there are some past scholars who hardly have anything to do with the community any more, so I think there are people even less active in this respect than I am. As I said, it varies greatly and depends, ultimately, on the preferences of individual people and the friendships they formed when they were there studying.
The feel of Oxford is quite peculiar. People who’ve spent some time there often speak of the “Oxford bubble” in the sense that the situation is, at times, somewhat surreal - it’s not uncommon, for instance, to see people walking in the streets in a Harry Potter-like gown on their way to a formal dinner against the backdrop of medieval gothic buidlings which are not museums but, indeed, a living university with people living, working and studying inside. Whenever I came back from term breaks, the first few days back in the city made this feel a bit strange before you readjusted to it. I guess that effect is more pronounced at Cambridge, however - in spite of all the ostentatious rivalry, the two universities look and work work along very similar lines, but Oxford actually has a sizable city attached to it with people who have nothing to do with the university, whereas Cambridge consists almost exclusively of colleges, reinforcing the bubble feeling.
Underneath that picturesque Harry Potter-like surface, however, it’s a university that runs along the lines of so many other universities in the world (Oxford is quite proud of its tutorial system, where a professor tutors only a handful of students at a time in addition to lectures, but that applies mostly to undergraduate classes whereas almost all Rhodes Scholars take a postgraduate degree). That comes with all the ups and downs of university life. The quality of the education is certainly good, but my feeling is that the university feels a lot of pressure especially from the American schools, which have much more money available. I also think that the university capitalises a great deal on the glory of the past - there are a lot of schools where the education is similarly good but whose names don’t have the same ring to them as Oxbridge. In some areas, it’s certainly lagging behind other schools - they didn’t, for instance, set up a business school until very recently, even though they’re trying to catch up in such respects now.
Do you get a discount on stuff when you visit Rhode Island? 
A free cabinet with your sandwich ad Friendy’s. And all the quahogs you can eat.
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What factors were the most important to selection?
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How did the other Rhodes scholars differ from the other students at the same university?
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How does being a Rhodes scholar differ from the experience of other students at the same university?
Can a mature adult who has been out of school for a while become a Rhodes scholar, or is this supposed to be a “youth” activity? E.g. if I haven’t set foot inside a classroom since getting a BS in 2000 and suddenly decide that I want to be a Rhodes scholar, is that a feasible goal?
Most of you are smarter than Bill Clinton?
[Woody Boyd:] Tell me this, how come the stuff they fill in the potholes with is darker than the rest of the road?
My only stay on Rhodes Island was on transit when I took an Amtrak from Boston to New York, so I can’t tell 
The selection process is decentralised. The Rhodes Trust, which funds and runs the scholarships, appoints and oversights committees in the various countries that have been allocated scholarships, and the actual selection of the individual candidates is done by these committees, not by the Trust. As a consequence, even though the selection criteria are the same everywhere on paper, their interpretation and application in practice differs.
These criteria, essentially, include good grades in high school and undergraduate studies, plus leadership (something which Germany, for obvious historic reasons, is reluctant to promote as a value) as a less “hard” factor. Any committee member can read this differently; my impression was that it boils down to something that you did on top of your curriculum when you were an undergraduate, and that can be either social or caritative work or political engagement. Then there is a passage in Cecil Rhodes’ will that says something about “fondness of and success in manly outdoor sports”. Some committees, including Germany, regard this as something that exemplary that is one, but not the only, way of extracurricular involvement, and as a consequence athletic success plays less of a role than, for instance, in the U.S., where in my experience a large percentage of scholars demonstrated athletic success in college sports. In short, it’s a combination of academic factors, exemplified by the grades, plus something “on top”, which can come from a number of areas such as sports, caritative work, or political involvement. The selection process reflects this: There’s a written first round where candidates are shortlisted on the basis of their CVs, and then the shortlisted applicants are invited to an interview that’s about half about what you did academically (including a few questions akin to an oral exam) and half about your personality beyond academia.
Officially, there are no quotas (beyond the fixed number of scholarships allocated to each country, of course), but in practice they try to find a somewhat balanced distribution among genders and academic disciplines.
Not much. They take the same courses, live in the same colleges, and take the same exams. They do have the social life of the Rhodes community added on top of that, with regular events like speeches, discussion groups etc. for the active scholars, but that’s not too peculiar. At the university, it’s very common to have student societies for pretty much everything, a lot of which do similar things, and there’s a lot of other scholarship programmes offering similar events. I’m not aware of statistically significant differences in academic performance at the university between Rhodes scholars and others.
See previous question. You’re involved in the social life of the Rhodes community, but there’s a lot of other ways at Oxford to have similar social events, so I think overall the experiences do not differ hugely.
There’s a formal age limit for applicants. The precise limit varies by country (owing to different educational systems - in some countries, students with a first academic degree are, by necessity, older than in others because high school and university curricula differ), but from what I can tell the usual limit is in the 24-28 range. It’s perfectly possible to apply with a time lag between undergraduate degree and your application if you’ve worked in the meantime, but they’re not very liberal in waiving the age limit, even though I think theoretically they can (and they usually did for men from Germany who served compulsory military service, for whom they extended the age limit by the time of the service, but this is moot now since Germany now abolished conscription).
Since Clinton never finished his Oxford degree, I guess we are
(Even though it must be added that the reason why he didn’t finish his degree was not academic failure on his part - he got an alluring job offer in the U.S. in the meantime)
What did you study? Is there the equivalent to a “major”?
Regards,
Shodan
PS - If you become President, keep your hands off the staff or find a good dry cleaner
No? Then how about Rhodes Island?
What questions were you asked in your application interviews?
Did becoming a Rhodes scholar make you want to read up on Cecil Rhodes? If so, what do you think of the guy?
Not really, but that’s not a peculiarity of Rhodes, it’s part of the overall system used at Oxford University.
Firstly, most Rhodes Scholars go for a postgraduate degree (it is my understanding that the concept of “major” in the American sense applies to undergraduate studies, but please correct me if I’m wrong), since you need to have an existing undergraduate degree to apply. It’s possible at Oxford to pursue a second undergraduate degree on top of an existing one, and some people do that; it may even be reduced as far as the requirements go - undergraduate degrees at Oxford typically take three years, and I’ve met one student from Canada who used his scholarship to get a second undergraduate degree in law (law can be studied as an undergraduate degree in Britain, unlike the U.S.), which was reduced in duration from three to two years. The vast majority of scholars, however, do postgraduate studies. The scholarship is initially awarded for two years, with a discretionary (but usually granted) extension for a third year if you’re pursuing a PhD, plus a possible extension for a fourth year where the scope of the scholarship is, however, reduced (such as tuition only, without cost of living allowance). The vast majority of people use it either for master’s degrees, or a PhD, or for a master’s degree plus the start of a subsequent PhD. In my case, it was two one-year master’s, an LL.M. plus a master’s in global governance, which is a subset of international relations.
The closest to majors in the U.S. sense that you will find at Oxford is presumably the bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) which serves as the entry for pretty much all of the social sciences. People start with a curriculum that comprises all three disciplines and later specialise on two of them, dropping the third one.