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| 12/15/01-Will Roper, a Tech graduate student, was named a Rhodes Scholar. |
Tech Graduate Student Named Rhodes Scholar
Will Roper now has a crowning achievement to add to a long list of honors. The 22-year-old Georgia Tech graduate student is a Rhodes Scholar. He learned he was one of only 32 Americans to receive the Rhodes scholarship on Dec. 6, a little more than two weeks before he married college sweetheart Marti Moore, IE 01, on Dec. 22. Roper was named a Truman Scholar last May, the same month he received his undergraduate degree in physics. Only 80 college students —one from Georgia — received the $30,000 Truman awards for graduate studies. Roper was only the eighth Tech student to win that honor. The Rhodes scholarship will pay for two years of study at Oxford University in England. Roper was selected from 925 applicants from 319 universities around the world. Of those, 95 received the prestigious invitations to Oxford. Roper plans to pursue a master's degree in mathematics at Oxford, then return to the United States to work on his doctorate. He intends to become a college professor, then perhaps work in education policy. His work in education already has captured national attention. A tutoring program, GUIDE — Guiding Underclassmen in Directions of Excellence, Roper launched while still in high school is being considered by the U.S. Department of Education for use nationwide. GRADS, a national program he helped start to help prepare inner city kids for college, is currently being funded by Coca-Cola. He is the only enrolled Tech student to receive a Rhodes scholarship. An alumnus, S. Alton Newton Jr., ChE 48, MS ChE 49, was named a Rhodes Scholar in 1951. Newton attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1949 to 1951.
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