Kenyan Victoria Kipngetich selected as 2024 Rhodes Scholar
Victoria Kipngetich is among 62 students from across the world to receive the 2024 Rhodes Scholarships, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious academic awards for graduate study.
The scholarships provide all expenses for two to three years of study at the University of Oxford.
This year’s scholarship recipients have a wide range of academic focuses, including political theory, microbiology, physics, and public health and will begin graduate study in October 2024.
Kipngetich, is studying at Yale College majoring in global affairs and is passionate about agency in Africa’s diplomatic relations and the democratization of foreign policy in the Kenyan context.
According to Yale, she has interned at the Kenya Mission to the United Nations, where she negotiated resolutions in the UN General Assembly and served as a speechwriter for the Kenyan ambassador to the UN.
She most recently interned at the Council on Foreign Relations, working to enhance U.S. policymakers’ understanding of political developments in East and Central Africa.
She is fluent in Swahili and French and has studied Italian at Yale. Through the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, she has conducted research on the diplomatic strategies employed by Kenyan policymakers in response to emerging great power competition dynamics on the African continent.
She intends to pursue this research further through a policy-prescriptive lens at Oxford, reading for an M.Sc. in global governance and diplomacy.
She studied at Brookhouse School attaining an A* in the Cambridge A-level and the Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) exams for the 2020 academic year.
Kipngetich was accepted into four Ivy League universities that she had applied for. In addition to Yale, she had also been accepted into the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Cornell University and had to make the enviable decision on which one she wanted. She chose Yale.
She was a deputy head girl at Brookhouse, and describes herself as a perfectionist when it comes to what she expects from herself, so getting the acceptance letters, which all came at the same time early this year, was quite the validation.
Created in 1902 by the will of Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes scholarships are provided in partnership with the Second Century Founders, John McCall MacBain O.C., the Atlantic Philanthropies, and many other benefactors.
Applicants are chosen on the basis of the criteria set down by Rhodes. These criteria include “first and fundamentally, academic excellence.