The night before Andrew Klaber ’04 interviewed for the Marshall Scholarship, he received 40 e-mails from his lightweight crew teammates wishing him luck. The next day, Nov. 14, Klaber attended the interview and learned shortly afterward that he had won the scholarship.

It is this kind of support from friends, professors and family to which Klaber attributes his success.

“It takes a concerted effort on behalf of many people for an individual to win,” Klaber said.

Klaber will pursue Development Studies, which concerns the process of change in developing countries, at Oxford University. Klaber said he became interested in Development Studies through his work with Orphans Against AIDS, a nonprofit organization he founded in order to provide scholarships to Thai children orphaned by AIDS. He started Orphans Against AIDS after returning from Thailand, where he worked last summer as an intern in connection with a Goldman Sachs Leadership Award he received.

Recently, Klaber was appointed to the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Orphaned and Vulnerable Children.

“I’m enormously proud of Andrew and I give him my enormous congratulations,” Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead said.

The British government awards the Marshall Scholarship, which funds two years of tuition and living expenses for graduate study at a British university, to up to 40 American students each year.

A double major in ethics, politics and economics as well as international studies, Klaber started the Little Economists Program during his time at Yale. In addition to rowing for Yale’s lightweight team, he also volunteers with the Yale New Haven Community Rowing Initiative, which gives inner-city residents the chance to row, and helped found the Yale Politic.

Klaber has also participated in environmental activism. In high school, he began an effort to encourage the use of recycled paper. During his freshman year at Yale, he was one of 19 recipients of the President’s Environmental Youth Awards and met President Bush and former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman at the White House.

“He’s one of those people who manages to do everything,” said Elliott Mogul ’05, who served with Klaber on the Yale College Council for two years. Mogul said Klaber is “professional” in all that he does and “obviously wants to make a difference in the world.”

Over the course of his Yale career, Klaber has already won other awards and scholarships. USA Today selected him as one of twenty members of its 2003 All-USA College Academic Team. In 2002 and 2003 Klaber received the Morris K. Udall Scholarship in recognition of his work with the environment. Last year, he won a Truman Scholarship, intended to help him pursue graduate studies that lead to a career in public service — something he said he wants to do after his time at Oxford.

Klaber said he has always wanted to study abroad, but was unable to do so as an undergraduate because of his commitment to rowing. He said he looks forward to meeting other international students at Oxford and will use the university’s resources to continue research on children orphaned by AIDS.

He said he also hopes simply to have a good time in the English countryside.

“I have a fascination of potentially buying a motorcycle and riding through the green pastures,” he said.

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