3 Stanford Students Awarded Rhodes Scholarships

STANFORD, CA — Three Stanford students have been awarded Rhodes Scholarships, the university said in a news release.

The scholarships cover all expenses for up to four years of study at the University of Oxford.

Stanford graduate students Abdallah Abu Hashem and Ziyi Wang and senior Nicolas Fishman hope to begin studying at Oxford in October.

Abu Hashem is from the Palestinian Territories and graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in education in June 2019.

He is pursuing a master’s degree in computer science and expects to graduate in June 2021. He plans to pursue a MSc/DPhil in education.

“I’m really humbled and joyous that it happened,” he said. “More than anything though, I’m excited and scared. This kind of fear always precedes the best experiences of my life. It is the same kind of fear I had when I left my home, Gaza, Palestine, to come here to Stanford.”

Fishman, who is from Washington, D.C., is a senior completing majors in computer science and sociology, with honors.

He is still working out the details of his study at Oxford, but hopes to pursue two one-year master’s degrees, one in the history of science and one in statistics.

“I really did not expect to win this award. My fellow finalists are so accomplished,” he said. “I got lucky – only considering the finalists I actually met in my district. That leaves me a certain responsibility to make sure I use the opportunities presented by this scholarship to do as much good as I can.”

Wang graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in history in June 2020 and is pursuing a master’s in international policy and will graduate in June. She plans to pursue DPhil in politics at Oxford.

The Beijing native is the school’s first athlete to earn a Rhodes scholarship in seven years, The Mercury News reports.

Wang served as a research assistant on a Stanford COVID-19 team, led by former national security advisor H.R. McMaster.

She wrote in a September article for a Stanford Athletics that her experience in Beijing amid the 2004 SARS-C0V-1 pandemic led her to her career in golf.

“My golf story started when the lockdown for SARS-CoV-1 in 2004, in Beijing, China, introduced the sport into my life," she wrote. "The pandemic that disrupted an entire society exempted golf as a permissible activity, thereby irrevocably reshaping the temporality and spatiality of my world.”