Hello from a new Rhodes Project staff member!
Hello readers! My name is Rachel Achs, and I am the latest addition to the Rhodes Project team. I will be focusing on the social media side of the Project. A couple weeks ago, I began my stint by posting this article, but I’d like to take a step back and introduce myself before continuing to write.
In May I graduated from Yale University with a degree in Philosophy, and at the beginning of August I began my job as a Legal Assistant for McAllister Olivarius. In college, I had an extra-curricular profile befitting the Rhodes Project: I was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Herald, served a semester as Public Relations Coordinator of the Yale Women’s Center (following in the quaking footsteps of our fearless Rhodes Project Manager, Alice), and was also a member of Yale’s infamous all-female sketch comedy troupe, an experience which proved for me, beyond a doubt, that women are far funnier than men. I spent my summers during college in New York, hostessing at Bubby’s Pie Company, interning at the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, interning at the Osborne Association (an amazing social work organization that serves the incarcerated and formally incarcerated community in New York), and helping some hooligans that I went to high school with produce a play in an off, off, off, off, (West-) Broadway theater. During those summers, I also got wicked tans.
So I guess you could call me a dramatic arts and media Feminist/Humanist. If my resume looks scattered, it’s because my real passion is one that is difficult to demonstrate by listing off previous jobs. My real passion, frustratingly, is philosophy. In fact, I think the unique perspective I might bring to the Rhodes Project is my penchant for the theoretical, rather than the practical. (By the way, my senior essay was called Kant’s Theory of Empirical Cognition: The Regulative Principle for Reflective Judgment as the Mediating Link between the Sensible and the Supersensible. If anyone wants to read it, email me!)
I think a fundamental implication of the Rhodes Scholarship, one that is embodied by the men and women clever enough to earn one, is that education and brilliant ideas are integral aspects of success, something that seems almost quaint in a world where accumulating wealth has become increasingly vital to attracting attention. This credo is lived every day by the Chair and Founder of the Rhodes Project, Dr. Ann Olivarius, whose business and lifeblood, McAllister Olivarius, encapsulates what I see as the symbiotic relationship between deep reflection and effective action. Even the Rhodes Project itself, a daunting confluence of research, publication, and charity, was a project undertaken in the spirit of philosophical reflection: Dr. Olivarius wanted to satisfy her curiosity about the lives that women Rhodes scholars lead, and she wanted the conclusions that she drew to be useful for the greater good.
I am excited at the opportunity to contribute to this project. As a (moderately) successful woman at the beginning of my career, I am interested learning about the paths that (more) successful women have taken in their professional lives. Perhaps this education can inform my own career. Even more than that, I am interested in thinking about the meta-questions that the Rhodes Project raises: What does it mean to be successful? What does it mean to be a woman in modern society? How can these two roles be integrated? In writing for the Rhodes Blog, I intend to propose some answers.
