Pond Hopping
She hasn’t taken Moral Reasoning 22, “Justice,” but Rachael A. Wagner ’04 seems to instinctively understand what it’s all about. She says two things about her recently-won Rhodes Scholarship: “It’s all relative. Maybe I happen to be good at things that these Rhodes people arbitrarily chose to value,” and “Not everything we do is completely our own doing.” Rawls might agree with Wagner on both points—and such deferral to moral relativism is typical of this modest senior when reflecting on her vibrant life at Harvard.
Not one to be a jaded senior, Wagner still speaks of Harvard as if she were a star-struck freshman. Wagner says that coming from a graduating class of 60 in Virginia, people told her that the days of “being the big fish in a little pond” were over. But, she says, “the great thing about a bigger pond is that you can see all the ways in which people are wonderful.” Wagner says that the kid she sees sleeping in class, for example, could be “starting a neo-post-modernist art movement,” and “that kid you know because you hooked up with him at a party is a researcher and has published 15 articles.”
But Wagner herself has proved to be one of the big fish in the Harvard pond. Despite coming from a small high school in Virginia Beach, Va., Wagner has been on the varsity Alpine skiing team since sophomore year. “There have been instances in races when I thought, ‘I might die now,’” she says, covering her face with her hands.
When not performing potentially death-defying turns on the ski field, Wagner has run from executive meetings of the Harvard International Review and the International Relations Council to gatherings of the Seneca, the female social club she served on as real estate chair. Right now, however, Wagner finds herself “neck-deep in data,” for her thesis on how women of different socio-economic backgrounds balance the pressures of work and family. Wagner is particularly enthused about the opportunity to “study a group of people [I will] one day be a part of...I’m writing a thesis on my life.” David Ellwood, a Kennedy School of government professor who is advising Wagner on her thesis, writes in an e-mail: “It is rare indeed to find someone who is good at both one-on-one in-depth interviewing and sophisticated data analysis.”
The intensive scholarship application process of senior year has helped Wagner to look at her own life more closely. “The most interesting thing about applying to the Marshall and Rhodes is that it forces you to sit down and draw out what your beliefs and value systems are,” she says. “Here, it is really easy to rush and do a ton of things in the day and have a great time.” In sitting down and reflecting on her life, this joint economics and social anthropology concentrator realized she wanted to work to empower both women and people of lower economic status.
Until Harvard-Yale weekend, Wagner had been looking towards a job at Blackstone Private Equity Group. The shock of winning the Rhodes reminded Wagner of “this scene in Zoolander, where the main character thinks he wins the Male Model of the Year Award...I was literally 50 percent sure they called my name.”
Wagner may be the first to tell you that winning the Rhodes was like being admitted to Harvard—at least as far as the family teasing goes. When she told one of her younger brothers the news, he joked, “Could you stop doing that? Why do you always have to win everything?”
A person more inclined to give advice than to talk about herself, Wagner has learned to become more comfortable as a public speaker due to the attention she has garnered since news of the Rhodes winners broke. “The more interviews, the easier it gets to talk about myself,” she concedes. The Associated Press wanted to know what Wagner thought of the war in Iraq. “I have a little soap box now, and I can say things to effect change,” Wagner says.