Today, Baylor senior Jaden Schupp leaves campus on a trip that will culminate this weekend with an interview to determine whether she will win a coveted Rhodes Scholarship.

According to the Rhodes Trust, the Rhodes Scholarships are “the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship awards in the world.” Each year, 32 young Americans join students from around the world as Rhodes Scholars. They are provided with full financial support to enable them to pursue a degree or degrees at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

The awards have been given out since 1904, and past American recipients include President Bill Clinton, ABC news anchor George Stephanopoulos, singer and actor Kris Kristofferson, economist Lester Thurow, NBA star and U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, poet Robert Penn Warren, astronomer Edwin Hubble, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and feminist author Naomi Wolf.

Baylor has had five students become Rhodes Scholars. The last was Brad Carson, who won the Rhodes in 1989 and went on to become a Congressman from Oklahoma.

Schupp is Baylor’s lone Rhodes finalist this year. She’s a senior from Evergreen, Colo., majoring in biochemistry and minoring in mathematics, religion and medical humanities. Her ultimate goal is to go to medical school and become a doctor. She’s already had interviews at two prestigious medical schools and plans to interview at two others before the academic year is over.

“As a doctor I’d love to spend time doing public health research. I do want to see patients, but in the end I would love to work in a position that’s either at an academic medical center or within a health care system, working on health care quality issues that involve improving health on a large scale,” Schupp said. “I had a summer internship with the Baylor Health Care System up in Dallas and worked in health care administration there. I found out that I really liked public health and health care administration.”

Schupp has a special interest in epidemiology — the study of the causes, distribution and control of disease within a defined population. She has been doing epidemiological research with Dr. Lea Steele in Baylor’s Institute of Biomedical Studies as part of Schupp’s Honors Thesis.

“I’m working with chronic fatigue syndrome,” Schupp said. “There’s a study that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did from 1997 to 2000 in Wichita that was a very large population survey of chronic fatigue syndrome. You can either have chronic fatigue syndrome that starts very suddenly, or that starts gradually. There are some indications that the disease looks a little bit different depending on how it started, but nobody’s really pursued that. So that’s what I’m looking at.”

Schupp took part in the Baylor in Maastricht study abroad program her sophomore year, and during the travel portion of that program she saw the University of Oxford for the first time and vowed to return there one day to study.

“I had no idea the Rhodes Scholarship existed at that point,” Schupp said. “I came back to Baylor, and when I later found out about the Rhodes and that they would fund two years of study at Oxford I thought, ‘That’s it right there.’”

This past summer, Schupp began working with Elizabeth Vardaman, associate dean for special academic projects in the College of Arts & Sciences, to complete the intense preparation needed to submit a Rhodes Scholarship application.

“You have to have eight letters of recommendation –– four have to be academic and four have to be character recommendations, talking about what kind of person you are,” Schupp said. “There’s a single essay of a thousand words you must write, and then you have to send in a résumé of everything you’ve ever done. I think I probably wrote 12 to 15 drafts of my essay, and there were a lot of very late nights just working at this and editing and trying again. I was really pleased at the final product I put together, and I felt like it represented me well.”

Schupp had been told she’d learn on Nov. 1 whether she had been selected as a Rhodes finalist. When she hadn’t been notified by 5 p.m. that day, she assumed she hadn’t been chosen. She was in the process of boarding a plane hours later to return home for her mother’s 50th birthday party when she received an email through her cellphone.

“I opened up the email, and it said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been selected for a Rhodes interview,'” Schupp said. “I’d counted that out about three hours before, so I was completely shocked. I called my parents really quick before I got on the airplane. I was floored and surprised and so thrilled.”

Academics is not the only thing that keeps Schupp busy each week. She’s also a four-year member of Baylor’s NCAA equestrian team.

“I started riding horses when I was 12, and rode every Saturday from ages 12 to 18,” Schupp said. “When I got to Baylor I wasn’t recruited, I just tried out for the team and made it. I’m on the Western division team. That was really exciting to see the program grow and develop as it has over the last few years. We’ve won championships in the Big 12, we won a national championship last year, and the program has really grown since I’ve been here.”

Schupp will take part in her finalist’s interview for the Rhodes Scholarship on Saturday, Nov. 17, and find out later that day if she is one of the 32 students offered a scholarship this year. In the event she does not receive a Rhodes, she has applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to do neonatal health research in epidemiology at Imperial College in London. She also is considering applying for a Rotary Peace Fellowship.

POSTSCRIPT FROM JADEN SCHUPP, NOV. 17: “Thank you so much to all of you for your encouragement and well wishes. I was not selected as a scholar. The two students who were selected are outstanding individuals and intellectuals who will go on to do great things! I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to spend a weekend with them!”