"Rhodes back home"

Jessica Hanzlik's Rhodes Scholarship has given her a chance to study at the University of Oxford and meet like-minded scholars from around the world.

It's also given the 2008 Ohio State graduate a bully pulpit for a cause close to her heart: women in science.

In recent years, top students like Hanzlik have won prestigious national awards, scholarships and grants--including the Rhodes, Fulbright, Goldwater and Truman scholarships--that were once the domain of Ivy League schools.

Hanzlik, who graduated from Ohio State with degrees in physics and French, recently returned to campus to speak at the Midwest Undergraduate Women in Physics Conference.

"I feel really honored and like I've come full circle," says Hanzlik, who founded a Women in Physics group for like-minded students when she was an undergraduate.

It was one of several Ohio State opportunities that shaped her undergraduate career.

As an undergraduate, she was paid for her lab work. (She worked in physics education and experimental high-energy physics.) She also earned funding to study abroad, researching women scientists in France and Quebec for at project she presented at Ohio State's Denman Undergraduate Research Forum.

"I supported myself through undergraduate," she says. "It would've been much harder to balance the schoolwork and the research if that hadn't been also a source of income for me."

After she earns her master's this summer, Hanzlik plans to teach high school science and math. She says that will prepare her to influence science education policy in the United States.

And of course, she'll always have strong Buckeye ties.

"The support that I continue to receive from Ohio State is really just fantastic," she says.