President Barack Obama jokes with participants in the Roosevelt Room of the White House before making a statement on student loans in the Rose Garden, May 31, 2013. Participants, from left, are: Nathaniel Tisa, Georgetown University; Robert Fisher, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Austin Rodriguez, University of Maryland; Brent DeBeaumont, Seattle University School of Law; and Jordan Foster, George Mason University.An iconic photo shows a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands in 1963 with President John F. Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden.
Robert Fisher had his photo taken in July 2013 shaking hands with President Barack Obama in the White House’s Roosevelt Room.
There’s another similarity now: Fisher, a senior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, on Monday was named a Rhodes Scholar. He enters a select group that includes Clinton and 3,356 other Americans who have won Rhodes Scholarships over the decades.
Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for two, three or four years of study at the University of Oxford in England. The scholarships were created in 1902 by the will of Cecil Rhodes, the British mining magnate and African colonialist for whom the country of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was named.
“It’s still sinking in,” Fisher said Monday of the honor, for which he gave his parents credit.