Somewhere between mentoring a Bantu refugee with little formal education at Schenley High School to living in a mud house in a Zambian refugee camp, 2009 University of Pittsburgh graduate Eleanor M. Ott realized that if she was going to effect real change for refugees, she was going to have to change policies from the ground up. So she set her sights on becoming the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.

On Saturday, Ms. Ott's potential and ambition were recognized when she was chosen to be a Rhodes scholar, a prestigious distinction given to only 32 Americans this year. The scholarship will pay for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford in England. Ms. Ott is the sixth Pitt graduate chosen to win the international Rhodes award since 1983.

She got the news Saturday evening after finishing a rigorous round of interviews with other candidates in Kansas City, Mo.

"I actually stood up and I started shaking," she said. "I couldn't believe it."

One of her advisers in Pitt's Honors College, Dean Alec Stewart, was less surprised. Having mentored her for four years, he watched her excel in the classroom and apply her energy and enthusiasm for helping refugees in volunteer efforts.

The daughter of Greg and Genna Hurd and the late Michael Ott, Ms. Ott grew up in Lawrence, Kan., where her mother is a research associate at the University of Kansas with the Institute for Policy & Social Research.

At Pitt, she triple majored in French, chemistry and history. She shrugged off her odd combination of study, saying that she pursued what she was interested in, which she said was encouraged by the Honors College.

She said studying chemistry enhanced her ability to break down and solve a problem, a skill that's useful in her current position as a social science research analyst in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she works on a teenage pregnancy prevention project and works with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. She studied French because she wanted to be able to communicate with non-English speakers, and also studied Swahili and two dialects of Arabic. Finally, she said she felt learning history was important to understanding and ultimately solving any problem.

Ms. Ott's interest in the plight of refugees took her to Zambia, where she served Congolese refugees fleeing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the summers of 2006 and 2008. There, she lived in a mud house without running water in a camp of about 20,000 people and helped them set up a camp newspaper and a computer lab, powered by solar panels.

Back in Pittsburgh, she mentored high school-aged refugees who needed help with homework and worked with Catholic Charities to help refugee families get clothing. She also started a mentoring program to develop job skills for refugees.

And in Zambia, she took the personal histories of people who had survived unspeakable acts of violence only to be stuck in limbo, sometimes for decades, in a refugee camp.

At Oxford, she plans to study forced migration and evidence-based social intervention.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.