We are very pleased to announce that a large number of our incoming students have won prestigious scholarships. Notably, three of them have been offered full Clarendon Scholarships: Gillian Bolsover (Media Studies, Fudan University, China, and LSE), Heather Ford (Information Management, Berkeley), and Elizabeth Dubois (OII). The Clarendon Fund is a major graduate scholarship scheme at the University of Oxford, offering over 100 new scholarships every year to the best students worldwide, enabling the most distinguished scholars to study at Oxford University. They are highly competitive, with less than seven percent of applicants selected for the scholarship across all subject areas. To have three Clarendon-funded students entering our (small) department next year says a lot about the extremely high calibre of the applications we receive.

Nathaniel Ware (MSc Economics, Oxford) has been awarded a Rhodes scholarship, the oldest and perhaps the most prestigious international scholarship programme in the world. The Rhodes Scholarships support exceptional all-round students from diverse countries around the world to study at the University of Oxford. We are also very pleased that one of our own MSc students, Wybo Wiersma, returning to academic study after a year with Internet start-up Academia.edu, has been offered both an ESRC studentship and a University Scatcherd Scholarship to support his DPhil studies at the OII.

Our incoming MSc students for 2012/2013 have also won a number of scholarship awards. Julia Rone (Social and Cultural Anthropology, Sofia University) has been offered a Scholarship by the Dulverton Trust, an independent charitable grant-making organisation established by the 1st Lord Dulverton and offered to students from Central/Eastern Europe. Anna Samoilenko (Applied Linguistics, Far Eastern Federal University) has been offered a scholarship by the Hill Foundation, a UK registered charity that provides scholarships for outstanding young citizens of the Russian Federation or first generation Israelis of Russian descent.

Finally, we have offered OII scholarships to Jeremy Bowles (BSc Economics, Oxford), who is the recipient of the “OII@10” MSc Scholarship, established in 2012 to mark the tenth anniversary of the OII’s founding; to Sara Watson (BA English Literature, Harvard) who has been offered the OII MSc Scholarship; and to current DPhil student Scott Hale, who has been offered the OII DPhil scholarship.

In the current difficult economic climate it is very hard for students to obtain funding to complete a graduate degree, so the support provided by scholarship funds such as these is of great importance and we are delighted that our incoming students have found such success.

We would like to warmly congratulate them all.