when sarah schulman was 7, she saw a black, cancerous lung on TV and wrote to her school nurse to see how she could help. When she was 10, she went undercover for the Texas Department of Health, testing whether convenience stores would sell her tobacco products (yes, every single time).

These days, Schulman, ’05, studies adolescent health policy and aims to be surgeon general. It does not seem out of the question. In November, she was selected as one of 32 American Rhodes scholars to study at Oxford University next year.

Schulman “had a long-standing commitment to the issues that were expressed in her applications,” says John Pearson, director of the Bechtel International Center on campus.