College Senior From Woodland Hills Is Among Rhodes Scholars

With an eye on a career in journalism and educational policy, Ganesh M. Gunasekaran never gave much thought to applying for a Rhodes Scholarship during his past few years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But friends and professors encouraged the 21-year-old political science major to try, coaxing the Woodland Hills man into a rigorous screening process that eventually required him to craft a lengthy personal statement, collect numerous letters of recommendation and submit to a series of hard-hitting interviews.

During the weekend, the effort yielded a handsome payoff. Gunasekaran was named one of this year’s 32 American Rhodes Scholars, putting him into an elite coterie of past and present winners whose members include President-elect Bill Clinton.

“I was pretty surprised,” Gunasekaran, a college senior, said by telephone from Chapel Hill Monday. “I knew that there are many more qualified applicants than scholarships, so I figured a lot of it might just come down to luck.”

Some would beg to differ.

“His letters of recommendations from faculty members of classes he had taken . . . basically said he was the best student they’d seen in 10 years,” said Thomas Sorrell, a chemistry professor who is chairman of the university’s Rhodes Scholarship Nominating Committee.

A graduate of Viewpoint School in Calabasas and Harvard School in Studio City (now Harvard-Westlake), Gunasekaran was one of only six students whom Sorrell’s committee nominated for the Rhodes on behalf of the university. Gunasekaran, already on a full scholarship at Chapel Hill, then went on to represent North Carolina in a regional competition encompassing six Southern states.

His selection as one of four Southern scholars was announced Sunday following an interview of regional finalists in Atlanta. In all, 32 winners from eight regions in the United States were selected for the scholarships, which award an annual stipend of more than $10,000 during two to three years of all-expenses-paid education at Oxford University.

For Gunasekaran--the son of an engineer and an attorney, both of whom immigrated to the U.S. from India--the scholarship spells a return to England, where he studied for a year as a junior at the London School of Economics. At Oxford, he plans to pursue an interdisciplinary degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

Gunasekaran also wants to further his interest in journalism, which already has landed him a column in the daily university newspaper and an internship at U.S. News and World Report. “I hope to do some free-lance writing while I’m there,” he said.