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Laura S. Wegner ’25 was announced as one of two German recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship last week, the University’s first from Germany in 10 years.
The Rhodes Trust annually awards highly competitive and fully funded scholarships to students for their postgraduate studies at Oxford University. The honor is meant to build a group of scholars with exceptional potential to become “public-spirited leaders.”
Wegner is Harvard’s second Rhodes Scholar this year, after Shahmir Aziz ’25 received the award last month. The Trust has yet to award scholarships to applicants from the U.S. and Canada.
An Economics concentrator in Currier House originally from Walsrode, Germany, Wegner said hearing the news was “a huge weight” off her shoulders after the monthslong application process, which included a personal statement, four recommendation letters, and final interviews in Berlin.
“As an international student and not-native English speaker, creative writing definitely does not come naturally to me,” Wegner said. “It was a lot of ups and downs at the start.”
To prepare, Wegner said that she held mock interviews with her thesis advisor, house committee, two economics advisors, and her friends.
“I really went with the theme of, ‘They’re probably not always going to remember what I was saying, but they’re always going to remember how I make them feel,’” she said. “So I just really focused on talking with a lot of passion.”
After interviewing in the morning, Wegner spent 10 hours with the other finalists before the judges returned to announce the winners.
“Then they said the first name, which was another girl from Germany,” Wegner said. “She had really different interests to me, so I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I just didn't fit what they wanted.’”
When she was announced as the second winner, Wegner said she “was just sitting really quietly and just tears were coming down my face.”
“I was honestly just happy that it worked out, happy that the work paid off,” she added.
At Oxford, Wegner plans to continue focusing on digital health. There, she said she was looking forward to a more “international perspective” than what she viewed as an American-focused curriculum at Harvard. Her focus on healthcare technology was sparked by a “medical error” during surgery on her knee which left her unable to continue swimming — all because the doctor lacked her full medical history.
Wegner said she plans to use the first year to expand her technical skills in machine learning and learn how to build “ethical and fair algorithms.” In her second year, she said hopes to apply these skills more specifically in the field of digital health.
“It’s such a long and introspective process that you really just have to believe in yourself. You just have to believe that what you do matters,” she said.
