Six Harvard seniors and two graduate students were named Marshall Scholars this year, more than at any other American university.

Undergraduate winners are Crimson executive Jeffrey N. Gell '97 of Winthrop House and Farmington Hills, Mich.; Mark J. Greif '97 of Adams House and Newton, Mass.; Crimson executive Joyelle H. McSweeney '98-'97 of Lowell House and Berwyn, Penn.; Joshua D. Oppenheimer '97, of Eliot House and Santa Fe, N.M.; Debra L. Shulman '97 of Quincy House and Merion, Penn.; and Julie C. Suk '97 of Dunster House and Great Neck, N.Y.

Suk's sister, Jeannie, won the Marshall in 1994. This is the first time in the program's history that sisters have each received scholarships, Suk said.

Graduate winners are Reshma Jagsi '95, a Harvard Medical School student and Cabot House resident tutor, and Harvard Law School student Albert S. Lee of San Mateo, Calif.

Each student will receive a full tuition scholarship for two or three years of study at any British university, as well as books, travel and living expenses. Forty winners are chosen annually.

Shulman said: "We have an extremely talented pool of potential scholars, and I think it's wonderful that so many people won."

McSweeney said she was surprised to have won the scholarship, because "I think I had some things against me, like my blue hair."

The scholarships, she said, are traditionally awarded to "student council types"--a description she does not apply to herself.

McSweeney serves on the poetry board of the Advocate and hopes to study the poetry of William Butler Yeats. "I'll be knee-deep in Yeats wherever they put me."

McSweeney said her Marshall interviewers put her on the spot about the importance of poetry. "They said things like, 'Don't you think more people watch 'Beavis and Butthead' than go to poetry readings?'" she said.

She is a former editor of the Harvard Political Review and has directed the Debate Outreach Program, which teaches debating skills to Cambridge seventh- and eighth-graders.

Gell learned he had won the scholarship as he stood at a terminal in Chicago's Midway Airport. He said his interview revolved around football and a recent summer trip to Japan.

"I didn't have to sing [karaoke] for them," Gell said. "If I had to sing, I might not have gotten the scholarship."

Greif said he is looking forward to living in England and studying English literature written between 1880 and 1960.

"I was there for a week once, at Oxford for a day," Greif said. "I liked it. There was lots of green space. I had good fish and chips."

Suk, a joint English and French literature concentrator, will study economic and social history, particularly 19th-century British colonialism.