BayWindows.com – Ethan Jacobs
When Harvard senior Ryan Thoreson began filling out his application for the Rhodes Scholarship this year, he was a little nervous about the items on his resum?: former co-chair of Harvard?s Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA); coordinator of the Harvard?s undergraduate LGBT student resource center; coordinator for 2006 Alternative Spring Break student trip to volunteer at an AIDS hospice in New York; intern at the International Gay and Lesbian Association in Brussels; intern at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD); member of the student transgender task force that pushed Harvard to add trans-inclusive language to its non-discrimination policy. In terms of academics, Thoreson, a Women and Gender Studies concentrator, wrote his thesis on the South African LGBT civil rights movement and spent a month last summer in Cape Town and Johannesburg studying the movement first hand. All that might be a great background to apply for a staff position at Human Rights Campaign or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, but Thoreson was nervous that it might put off the selection committee for the Rhodes Scholarships.