A Rhodes scholarship changed Gregory Petsko’s life—before he even set foot in England. Petsko, now a professor of biochemistry and chemistry at Brandeis University, majored in classical literature as an under-graduate at Princeton in the early 1970s. “By the time I was a senior, I had applied to law school, medical school, and graduate school—in both the humanities and science. So that’ll give you an idea of how set on my career path I was,” he says. “I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do.” But he thought that spending some time in Oxford might help him decide.
With his heart set on the study of epic poetry, Petsko arranged to work with Maurice Bowra, a preeminent classicist, and set sail for England. “Back then, all the Rhodes scholars traveled over on the Queen Elizabeth, which took 8 days,” he says. “And sometime while I was out over ...
