Courtesy of Priya Sury

Priya Sury

The Rhodes Scholarship, named for South African businessman and politician Cecil Rhodes, is an acclaimed international postgraduate award for study at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England.

Winners of the Rhodes Scholarship are chosen on the basis of their academic achievements, personal integrity, leadership and physical vigor.

Sury, a Minnesota native, will attend Oxford beginning next year.

Sury will join approximately 80 Rhodes Scholars selected from around the world.

An anthropology and Spanish major, Sury graduated summa cum laude from the University and is currently in her first year of medical school at the University of Minnesota.

Sury plans to take time off from medical school in order to study medical anthropology at Oxford. She said that her first year of medical school made her realize that she wanted a graduate education beyond training in clinical study.

“Medical school was incredible, but I realized that I wanted a more humanistic perspective as well,” she said.

Sury hopes to become a primary care physician for underserved populations. In order to do so, she said, it is important to understand the context of the culture from which her patients come.

“Arthur Kleinman says that the doctor’s experience of the world is as important to her care-giving as evidence is to her technical decision-making,” Sury said. “This experience will inform clinical practice with the underserved.”

And, for Sury, Oxford—where only one in 20 students is American—was the perfect place to get that experience.

“Oxford has a long and robust history of medical anthropology,” she said. “Its culture is one of understanding different perspectives and experiences.”

At Wash. U., Sury joins the ranks of 26 alumni who have been selected for the Rhodes. She was the first student in Wash. U. history to be chosen for the Danforth Scholarship, the Ervin Scholarship and the Rodriguez Scholarship—all three of which are competitive, merit-based four-year scholarships.

Sury’s experiences at the University were well in keeping with the Rhodes ethic of service. While tutoring through College Connections, the Rodriguez Scholars tutoring program, Sury created a multimedia science curriculum with the support of doctors at the Mayo Clinic, where she did research one summer. In 2008, she was awarded a Social Change Grant to help prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV in the Dominican Republic.

2010 alum Tegan Bukowski was also a finalist for this year’s Rhodes.