USNA's Whitcombe Named Rhodes Scholar
Senior hurdler receives prestigious academic honorNaval Academy Public Affairs
NavySports.com
Annapolis, MD
Navy women's track and field senior hurdler Katie Whitcombe is one of two students at the Naval Academy to be named a Rhodes Scholar for 2013.
Nearly 1,000 applicants compete for one of 32 Rhodes scholarships, which provide U.S. citizens two or three years of study at the University of Oxford in England. Among the 32 winners, 21 came from just six schools: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, the Naval Academy and West Point.
Whitcombe is a Chinese major and plans to earn a Master of Philosophy in modern Chinese studies at Oxford. She plans to use the degree to develop better policy on counter-terrorism in Southeast Asia and find correlations between terrorism and organized crime like human trafficking. Whitcombe hopes to serve as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps after graduation from the Naval Academy.