 McGill student Stephen Aylward will attend the University of Oxford next fall after winning a Rhodes scholarship. [Click to enlarge]
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McGill students Stephen Aylward and Vincent Larochelle were named as the university's newest Rhodes Scholars last week, joining the 128 McGill alumni who have won the prestigious and highly competitive scholarship to study at the University of Oxford.
Established by Cecil Rhodes in 1902, the scholarship is awarded based on four primary criteria: academic achievement, leadership, good health and athletic vigour, and what Rhodes termed "sympathy and protection for the weak"-generally taken to mean some sort of community involvement.
In their academic history at McGill, both Aylward and Larochelle have pursued degrees that they believe will provide good intellectual foundations. Aylward, an honours philosophy student with a minor in political science, chose to study philosophy with the intention of eventually studying law.
"Philosophy is good at least at making you thinking critically about things, at doing things like conceptual analysis," Aylward said.
He is specializing in early twentieth century German philosophy, particularly that of Martin Heidegger, which Aylward studied last year while on exchange at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Though he found his courses there, conducted entirely in German, to be challenging at first, the 21-year-old native of Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, said that the experience gave him a new perspective upon returning to McGill.
"No longer having to do all my readings and write all my papers in German is like boxers training with weights on-you take them off and it's the same sort of idea," Aylward said. "Reading seemed far less daunting, even readings that would have struck me as difficult before."
Larochelle, also 21 and originally from Quebec City, is pursuing an honours degree in mathematics with a minor in classics, with the hope that it will hone his ability to think logically.
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