Boston: Seven local students named Rhodes Scholars

Jeremy Fox
The Boston Globe
Boston

When Katherine E. Warren and Elizabeth H. Byrne learned Saturday that both will be Rhodes Scholars, the friends were overjoyed.

“It was amazing when we heard the news,” Warren said by phone Sunday. “We were standing right next to each other and hugged each other for a full minute before we did anything else.”

Warren and Byrne were among six Harvard University students selected as Rhodes Scholars for 2014, the Rhodes Trust announced Sunday.

The scholarships fund two to four years’ study at the University of Oxford in England and are awarded based on rigorous criteria set by Cecil Rhodes, a philanthropist and British colonizer of Africa, in his 1902 will.

Byrne, 22 and a senior at Harvard, said she met Warren, 23, on move-in day of Byrne’s freshman year at the university, where Warren’s younger sister Sylvia has been her roommate since the beginning.

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