With past recipients including former President Bill Clinton and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, the Rhodes Scholarship is one of the most prestigious awards in the academic world. Out of the over 32 winning students this year, two of them are from Pennsylvania and one is from right here in Pittsburgh. Essential Pittsburgh’s Paul Guggenheimer sat down with the winner, University of Pennsylvania senior Jenna Hebert, to talk about what winning the award means to her.
“It’s been absolutely surreal,” Hebert said. “I keep playing the moment in my head over and over again when they announced my name that I had won.”
The award funds one to three years of study at Oxford University. Hebert currently studies the psychology of addiction, but she plans to expand into more general psychology at Oxford.
“I think it’s a really important field to be in,” Hebert said. “The field of psychiatric research has been pretty stagnant for the past few decades and it’s a field that needs innovation and lots of novel research and they’re definitely doing that at Oxford.”
Hebert described winning the award as a “complete dream” for her, saying that she had been aspiring to win since freshman year. She credits her dad for getting her into science and serving as her personal inspiration. Her father is the director of the Robotic Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Besides academics, Hebert is also an athlete on the University of Pennsylvania’s rowing team. While not a requirement of the award, many Rhodes Scholarship recipients are student athletes.
However, Hebert funnels her passion of rowing into more than just competitions. She also helps physically and cognitively challenged rowers with the Philadelphia Adaptive Rowing club.
“People who are disabled are sometimes dependent on others for mobility or other very basic things on land, but when you’re on the water you can row by yourself, completely independently, for miles and miles, and I think that is really important for their confidence.”
Once she finishes studying at Oxford, Herbert said she plans on acquiring a PhD in neuroscience and eventually finding a career in the field of academic research.
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