Escondido Student Named Rhodes Scholar

An Escondido woman is one of 32 Americans, and one of only two Californians, chosen Saturday as Rhodes scholars.

Amy D. Matthews, 21, an English major in her senior year at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, said the encouragement of her parents, Robert and Kaye Matthews, and the college’s nurturing environment helped her achieve academic success.

“Whenever there was something new I wanted to try, my parents always said, ‘Yes, you can do that. . . . There’s no reason not to try,’ ” she said in a telephone interview.

In Holyoke’s small classes, she said, she received individual attention that helped her focus her studies on the poet Robert Browning and on Victorian literature. She is the first Mt. Holyoke student to receive the two-year Rhodes scholarship since women were first named as scholars in 1976.

Matthews, a graduate of San Pasqual High School in Escondido, said she plans to obtain her master’s degree in Victorian and Renaissance literature through the scholarship, which entitles her to an annual stipend and her choice of schools within the Oxford University system.

Rhodes scholars are chosen for their academic and physical abilities as well as for their social commitment.

Matthews has been balancing 16 course credits this term while tutoring Cambodian high school students in English and helping a learning-disabled high school student organize his social studies and science projects.

She spent her junior year at Oxford University studying English and German literature. She was also captain of her crew on the rowing team there.

“I’ve learned to take advantage of time because there are a lot of things I want to do, and there is nothing I want to give up,” she said.

After she earns her master’s degree, Matthews hopes to become a professor of English. “I want to emphasize close communication with students,” she said.

Matthews flew back to school Sunday from USC, where the announcements were made, to concentrate on her thesis, which deals with Browning’s use of the grotesque in dramatic poetry.

The other Californian chosen for the scholarship Martina Vandenberg, a Pomona College student of international relations with a concentration in Russian studies. She could not be reached for comment.