On Saturday, Rachel Bayefsky-Anand ’09 was awarded a Rhodes scholarship for two years of study at Oxford University, making her the second Yale student to win the scholarship this year.

Bayefsky-Anand, a Toronto native, was one of 11 Canadian students to receive the Rhodes, which is widely considered the world’s most prestigious postgraduate academic scholarship. An ethics, politics and economics major and inductee into Phi Beta Kappa during her senior year, Bayefsky-Anand will pursue a postgraduate bachelor’s degree in philosophy while at Oxford.

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The announcement comes two weeks after American Rhodes winners were reported; the Canadian Rhodes competition operates under a different set of deadlines, said Katherine Dailinger, the director for United Kingdom and Irish Fellowships at Yale.

Competition for the Rhodes in Canada is as fierce as in the United States and identical criteria are used to select winners, she added. In Ontario, the region from which Bayefsky-Anand applied, two students are given the scholarship each year. While application statistics are not available for the current year, in 2007, 45 Ontario residents applied for the Rhodes, while 60 applied in 2006.

Despite these tough criteria, Bayefsky-Anand, in the words of Sterling Professor of Political Science Ian Shapiro, is a “brilliantly impressive student” well deserving of the award.

At Yale, she has served as chairman of the Independent Party of the Yale Political Union, co-editor of the Yale Philosophy Review, co-founder of Y.U.M. literary magazine and an editorial columnist for the News.

Bayefsky-Anand has spent the past two summers on Bulldogs programs in Brussels and Hungary, working as a news intern for the Dow Jones Company and an intern at the International Center for Democratic Transition in Budapest.

While in Brussels, Bayefsky-Anand helped report on the June 2007 meeting of the European Council, which she said helped shape her views on global politics.

“It was exciting to see all these people from incredibly different countries and backgrounds coming together to define the nature of Europe,” she said.

After graduating from Oxford, Bayefsky-Anand said, she intends to pursue a career in academia.

The Rhodes Scholarship is awarded to students in more than a dozen countries worldwide, including South Africa, Jamaica and Zambia.