How this Bluffton grad worked his way from local restaurant shifts to Rhodes Scholar
Long before Oxford, there was Bluffton.
August Rios’ world once stretched from the town’s rec center soccer fields to Hilton Head Island’s beaches, where he worked summer restaurant shifts alongside his six siblings and volunteered at local cleanups and festivals.
Raised by two public servants and a community that knew him by name, Rios grew up close to home, rarely leaving South Carolina and having never boarded an airplane.
But after graduating from Yale University, his horizons will stretch much further, all the way to Oxford University in England. The Bluffton High School alum was named a Rhodes Scholar, one of just 32 Americans selected nationwide each year.
The scholarship is considered one of the most prestigious academic honors in the world, covering all tuition, fees and living expenses for postgraduate students.
Only about 100 scholars are chosen each year from the thousands of applications worldwide. Over the course of six months, applicants first need their university’s backing, then compete at the district level in one of 16 regions before facing a final interview panel of former Rhodes Scholars.
The purpose of the scholarship is to develop “public-spirited leaders” and to “promote international understanding and peace,” according to the scholarship’s website.
Among the graduates of the more than century-old program are former President Bill Clinton, U.S. Senator Cory Booker, former United States Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice.
At Oxford, Rios plans to pursue post graduate degrees in Comparative Social Policy and Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation.
In everyday terms, he said, it means he will study how different countries successfully take care of people’s basic needs and how those solutions could meet growing needs in the United States. He hopes to address the affordable housing crisis, he said, not as a politician, but as someone who can recommend high-level solutions to decision makers.
Rios’ resume is the kind that makes you double-check his age.
A senior majoring in Urban Sociology at Yale University, he has spent the past four years researching housing policy and structural poverty. While studying these issues in the classroom, he felt something was missing from not interacting with the communities “closest to the problem,” he said.
It brought him out into the community, first as a fair housing auditor for the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, then as a volunteer in eviction court, then as a member of New Haven’s Affordable Housing Commission, then as a founder of an association that trains college students to support with small claims, and most recently, as a licensed real estate agent working with first-time home buyers.
This is when you check again to see Rios is in fact just 22 years old.
So what’s the secret? For Rios, it comes down to his upbringing. He describes his parents first as “remarkable public servants” and second as “life-long learners.”
His mother, Kimberly Rios, works with students at River Ridge Academy who struggle with reading. She has worked in the Beaufort County School District for more than a decade and is a lifelong educator, Rios said. His father, Philip Rios, is a public defender in Beaufort County, tasked with representing those who can’t otherwise afford an attorney.
Service has never been an abstract idea in the Rios household.
“Both my parents are very empathetic, compassionate human beings, and they emphasized the importance of volunteerism, serving and helping thy neighbor and channeling empathy for not just our neighbors, but for those worse off,” Rios said.
That mix of knowledge and empathy, he said, set his course early. All five of his siblings, also plan to work in public service.
Attending Bluffton’s public schools helped shape him along the way, too, he said.
Ms. Reichert, he said, sparked his interest in public policy. Dr. Sandusky’s content mastery philosophy taught Rios to learn from failure. Then there was Ms. Phillips, Ms. Silver, Ms. Freeze, Ms. DeAngelis, who all supported him in his earliest days of learning.
There is so much excitement for what is to come an ocean away, he said. But the foundation was set here, in classrooms, on beaches, around his family’s crowded dinner table.
“Bluffton will always be my home,” he said.
