A Rhodes Scholar goes seeking influence in the service of others

Gia-Yen Luong was told what to expect when she arrived in Oxford to begin her Rhodes scholarship.

“Someone once described to me that being in Oxford is like being at an intellectual Disneyland,” the 2019 recipient of one of the world’s most famous postgraduate scholarships says.

“And to me, that rings true. You can be interested in anything at all and there will be someone there who shares that interest – a group of people, a society, a club or a ­series of speakers.”

Ms Luong, daughter of Vietnamese refugees who settled in Adelaide, was one of nine young Rhodes winners who made the pilgrimage to the English university town in 2019, accompanied by her husband.

These days the “Rhodies”, as she calls them, are not on their own: our prestigious postgraduate programs now include the John Monash Scholars and Ramsay Postgraduate Scholars. All offer significant funding to cover ­tuition and help with other costs.

The General Sir John Monash Foundation will soon announce the 18 recipients of its 2022 scholarships, for a total of 233 so far.

“We’re identifying the future leaders of Australia and the globe,” foundation chair Jillian Segal says. “This scholarship puts the recipients on a pathway to achieve that potential.”

The Ramsay scholarships are the newest, awarded for the first time in July to 20 young people Ramsay Centre chief executive Simon Haines says will be part of “a truly diverse network of scholars overseas, who will bring their expertise back to Australia”.

“The scholarships aren’t tied to any one particular university, ­offering students the scope to choose the best course and institution to match their interests,” Professor Haines said.

Ms Luong, 27, was still at Norwood Morialta High School when, encouraged by a teacher, she realised she had a chance of becoming a Rhodes scholar.

“I wanted to go overseas and study, and I knew that I needed a scholarship because there was no way that I’d be able to fund that,” she says. “I thought, ‘if you’re going to shoot for a scholarship you’ve got to go for the oldest one and the hardest to get’.” She achieved a 99.9 Australian Tertiary Admission Ranking, then took a double degree in law and science at UNSW with outstanding results.

“In my fourth year, I started to realise I didn’t want to practise in the law, or as a scientist because I always knew that I had a drive towards using my profession as a form of service to other people.”

She had also realised the tutoring she was doing on the side had become “the best part of my day”.

She opted for the not-for-profit Teach for Australia, which offers high-achieving people the opportunity to become teachers and sends them straight into the classrooms of disadvantaged schools to learn on the job, under supervision. They also remotely complete a masters in teaching, in her case, at Deakin University.

Ms Luong taught high school science and maths in Palmerston in the Northern Territory, where students commonly had what the Gonksi report called factors of educational disadvantage: being Indigenous, from a low socio-economic background, living in a regional community and having additional learning needs or speaking English as an additional language or dialect.

Her masters of science in education dissertation at Oxford addressed a possible link between attendance and achievement in the Northern Territory, finding that “no matter how much you ­attend school, if you live at the ­intersection of these factors, you are still going to have lower educational outcomes”.

She returned to Adelaide last year, had her first child and was contract teaching when Teach for Australia offered her the new position of state manager and coach.

“We need to find a way to ­attract and retain high-quality teachers in the schools that need them the most,” she says. “Of all the factors that affect a child’s attainment that we can control, the quality of the teacher in the classroom is the highest impact.”

Impact still matters most to her, within the classroom or beyond it, in policy discussions she hopes to have.

“I knew that becoming a Rhodes scholar allows you to be listened to. And so, before I even applied, I had to think deeply about how I would use this opportunity if I were to get it,” she says.