Greer’s Rachel Marie Woodlee has been selected for a 2013 Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University.
Woodlee, a senior majoring in business economics and Chinese language, she’s fluent in Mandarin, and culture, was announced Saturday as one of 32 American students selected as 2013 Rhodes Scholars. The award pays all expenses, valued at $50,000 a year, for up to four years of study at the university in England.
Woodlee has traveled in China, lived with a family in Tibet and studied in Peru and India. She will study M. Phil. in modern Chinese studies at Oxford.
She is captain of the volleyball team, a Phi Beta Kappa member and a graduate of Mauldin High School. She is the daughter of Timothy and Joan Woodlee of Greer.
Wofford reported Woodlee’s reaction. “I’ve never been so excited about anything in my entire life,” Woodlee said Saturday by telephone after her selection. “This is such a life-changing experience. I looked around that room (at the other finalists) and I knew everyone there was deserving; everyone there will be hugely successful. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Wofford President Benjamin B. Dunlap said of Woodlee and her selection: “’Fighting the world’s fight’ is what the founder of the Rhodes Scholarship said he wanted its recipients to undertake. As a star athlete in volleyball – and before that, in basketball – Rachel knows all about fighting. As someone who has lived and studied in China and other distant lands, she knows a great deal about the world. And, as a Wofford student leader with a perfect academic record, as someone with wit and energy and verve, as a person intensely committed to the well-being of others, she is perfectly equipped to make this world a better place. All of us should rejoice, for I promise you, she will.” Dunlap was a Rhodes Scholar in 1959.
Woodlee is Wofford’s sixth Rhodes Scholar.