'An incredible opportunity': UGA senior Mariah Cady named Rhodes Scholar
Mariah Cady came a long way – figuratively and literally – to earn the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship award in the world.
The University of Georgia senior, studying in the central Asian country of Kazakhstan as part of the UGA Russian Flagship Program, flew to Atlanta for her Rhodes interview on Nov. 11 and admitted she was a bit jet-lagged for the proceedings.
“I worked with the UGA Flagship Program to plan the trip back and it was over 20 hours in the plane, with a stop in Qatar,” said Cady during a phone interview while riding to the Atlanta airport for her return trip to Kazakhstan. “I had a good amount of time to recover, but there is an 11-hour time difference, so it was like living your day backwards.”
Cady, who will get started at Oxford University in October, nonetheless rallied for her interview.
“Whenever you’re about to go into a room that could change your life in a lot of ways, you get this adrenaline rush and you keep going,” she said. “We had a dinner the night before the interview and during the dinner I was definitely feeling the effects of the time difference.”
A UGA Foundation Fellow from Columbus, Georgia and a Security Leadership Program fellow from the School of Public and International Affairs, Cady will spend the next two years at Oxford, studying for master’s degrees in linguistics, philology and phonetics, and in refugee and forced migration studies.
Besides Cady, the state of Georgia had another Rhodes winner in Madison Jennings from Agnes Scott College in Decatur.
Cady is the 27th student in UGA’s history to receive the Rhodes Scholarship and the second consecutive fellowship winner. In November 2022, Natalie Navarrete earned the Rhodes and is now at Oxford, focused on Russian and East European studies and nuclear nonproliferation.
All Rhodes lead to UGA: UGA grad named Rhodes Scholar, looks forward to return trip to Oxford
“I feel honored and grateful for all the support and encouragement I’ve received from the Foundation Fellowship and the students in the Fellowship, the Morehead Honors College and the Flagship Program and from my professors,” she said. “I feel very grateful to be in this position today. I couldn’t even have imagined this a few days ago, much less years ago. It’s truly an incredible opportunity.”
As is often the case when a student learns of receiving such an award, Cady described learning she’d won as “surreal.”
“I was standing with the other finalists and we were holding hands, holding on to each other physically because it’s so emotional,” she said. “When they announced the two of us, we just looked at each other and it was a surreal moment. We’ll remember that the whole time while at Oxford because we’ll be there together from Georgia. So it was really cool.”
The daughter of Tanja and Butch Cady will graduate from UGA in May with degrees in Russian and international affairs. Conversant in eight languages − German, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Turkish, Lakota and Kazakh − Cady’s two fields of study at Oxford go hand-in-hand to shape a future career in diplomacy.
“I chose the first path because I’ve spent a lot of my time at UGA studying languages and I want to delve into the science behind languages,” she said. “In the Russian Flagship Program in Kazakhstan, we’re doing a bit of conversation about linguistics and phonetics and how that impacts our Russian, and that has been magical to me – I’ve been so interested in every conversation we’ve had about it and I’m really excited to explore that.
“And the refugee and forced migration studies is informed by my time at SPIA and my work with refugee students and teaching them English.”
Cady said she’s also looking forward to picking up where she left off with Navarrete, whom she’s known since freshman year.
“That part is also surreal because I’ve been studying with Natalie for the past four years, and for the first three years at UGA we were in all the same Russian classes,” said Cady, who was also named a Boren Scholar for 2023.
In addition to Kazakhstan, Cady has been able to embark on study-travel excursions to Morocco, Cuba, Croatia, Oxford, Germany and Hawaii during her time at UGA. But one trip she’s definitely looking forward to will come in early spring.
“My program ends at the end of May or the beginning of June, so I will be able to come back home,” she said. “I’m looking forward to spending some time with my family because I did a semester abroad in the spring in Germany, so I’ve been away from home for quite a while.”
Cady is the eighth UGA student to receive the scholarship in the last 16 years. UGA was the only SEC school to have a 2024 recipient and was one of but five public universities to have a Rhodes winner this year.
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: UGA senior Mariah Cady named Rhodes Scholar
