‘Very few Tracys out there,’ teacher says of Rhodes Scholarship winner

It was late one Friday night this decade when it first dawned on the teacher that the student was no ordinary freshman, no run-of-the-mill whiz kid.

The teacher and the student, a ninth-grade girl, were, of all places, in a school parking lot. They were sitting on a curb, talking, waiting for the student’s ride home to arrive.

Their academic team meet was over and, after a tiring evening of competition, they were relaxing there in the dark, talking music, the violin, literature, art, the student’s ambitions, her Chinese lessons.

“I remember thinking at the time, ‘Wow, can this be for real?’ ’’ the teacher, Diane Smith, recalled Monday, after hearing that the student, Tracy J. Yang, now a University of Georgia senior, had been selected as a 2011 Rhodes Scholar.

“She was so articulate for her age, so interested in so many things. ... She was filled with energy and ideas and about pursuing interesting plans in those areas that she loved.”

Yang, 21, a Westside High School graduate who was born and raised in Macon, is her home state’s lone Rhodes Scholar this year.

Monday, as she prepared to head home to Macon for the Thanksgiving break, the anthropology major who plans to become a primary-care physician with an expertise in health policy, said, “It’s been kind of crazy.”

Yang was one of 14 finalists for the Rhodes Scholarships, widely considered the most prestigious academic honor, in a district that compromises Georgia and Virginia. In a half-hour interview Saturday at Emory University in Atlanta, the Rhodes committee asked her questions about her areas of interest.

Yang, who according to a Rhodes news release, has researched “public health challenges inherent in reducing (a Latin American) parasite’s impact on public health” as well as the “health disparities among marginalized populations in Georgia, New York and Nicaragua,” felt her interview went well Saturday.

When it was done, she said, “I didn’t have any regrets.”

After that, while the panel deliberated, she waited more than three hours in a library room with the other candidates.

When she got the good news, Yang said, “I was obviously thrilled, but also extremely shocked because you don’t want to get your hopes up too much for something like this. I think I hadn’t been really allowing myself to believe that it could happen. So when I heard my name called I was so shocked and so humbled, because, I mean, I had been sitting in this room getting to know these 13 other amazing people.”

Yang, a Truman Scholar as well and the daughter of a Macon State College chemistry professor, said she hopes to study global health science when she enrolls at the University of Oxford, in England, to begin her two-year Rhodes Scholarship next October.

“It’s a great opportunity, and I’m extremely excited about my future path and the direction it’ll lead me,” she said.

Yang, who enrolled at UGA in 2007, attended Springdale Elementary School, Miller Middle School and Westside High School, where she was the county’s STAR Student. She says she would encourage younger students to “seize the opportunities that you are given and to look for opportunities where they’re not already created.”

“I think it’s important to be able to manage your own education, of course, with a lot of help along the way,” she said. “But with a vision for where you want to go.”

Diane Smith, a teacher for nearly four decades, the one who led Yang’s academic team at Westside and who taught her Advanced Placement language and composition at Westside, recalls writing a letter of recommendation for Yang when she was seeking a plum scholarship to UGA. A scholarship Yang won.

Smith had tried to capture Yang’s love of learning on paper. She closed with a note on Yang as being someone to watch, mentioning the special young woman’s “trajectory.”

“How her trajectory,” Smith said Monday, “would certainly be an amazing one to watch.”

Smith, who still keeps in touch with Yang, said her former student “just continues to be astounding.”

It is something she, an astute educator, first sensed that night on the parking lot curb. Now, nearly a decade later, the brilliant former ninth-grader will soon graduate from her state university, long having answered her old teacher’s first question about whether Yang, the rare Renaissance freshman there on the curb, was for real.

“Yes,” Smith said, “it is for real. That is simply who she is. ... I’ve taught for 36 years, and there are very few Tracys out there. Very, very few.”

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.

This story was originally published November 23, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "‘Very few Tracys out there,’ teacher says of Rhodes Scholarship winner."