Among the scholars at Hunter College, there's now a Rhodes scholar.

Senior Thamara Jean is the CUNY school's first ever recipient of the esteemed scholarship, awarded to just 32 Americans each year for up to three years of study at England's renowned University of Oxford.

"I was extremely excited,” she said. “I was a bit in shock but again it just affirmed that there are people who understand and see the value and merit in all my goals and what I'm trying to accomplish."

What she is trying to accomplish in the near term is obtain a master’s degree in political theory, building on her senior thesis at Hunter, which examined social activists, specifically within the Black Lives Matter movement.

"When we look at protest movements, especially protest movements that are happening at the moment it's easy to trivialize them often,” she said. B”But I wanted to make sure that something like Black Lives Matter is connected to a philosophical tradition."

The 21-year-old was born and raised in the Old Mill Basin neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her father, a synagogue groundskeeper, and her mother, a nurse, both immigrated from Haiti.

She attended Gil Hodges Elementary School and Edward R. Murrow High School, and is a Macaulay Honors student at Hunter.

"When we think of Rhode's scholars we think of Harvard and Yale but clearly we have some really bright young people in public institutions,” said one of Jean’s professors Carolyn Somerville. “One thing that she can show other students is just put in effort, work hard, you can achieve what I achieved."

Jean is also one of ten African-Americans to win the prestigious scholarship this year, the most ever for a Rhode's class.

"The Rhodes scholarship is doing a great job at recognizing the diverse talent that exists in the states and the fact that the African-American component of the co-hort gets larger and larger every year just speaks to that and I'm honored to be a part of that growing tradition,” said Jean.

Jean said after her two years in the U-K she hopes to come back home and become a professor herself.