Justin Cox comes from Scott City, a tiny, blue-collar, rural town in southern Missouri. The town has one high school; his graduating class had 60 people.
Cox, a first-generation college student, didn’t start looking at colleges until his senior year and only considered two: Washington University and Harvard University. He was accepted into both.
Cox, whom professors describe as “insightful, intelligent and comfortable with ambiguity,” ignored everyone who thought they knew what was best for him (go to Harvard, go to Harvard) and chose WUSTL. The choice was difficult, but became clear for the “logical and analytical” Cox.
“I wanted to go away from home, but not too far away because of my family,” he says. “Besides, I didn’t feel like I fit in at Harvard.”
When he arrived at WUSTL, Cox quickly realized that he wasn’t in Scott City any more.
“In high school, I never had a class with someone who wasn’t Christian; there was one mixed-race person in our entire school,” he says. “Then I came here, and I was fascinated by all the differences.
“Freshman year I lived between a guy from Hong Kong and a guy from South Korea. Last year, I lived in an apartment with a Muslim, a Christian and a Jewish person. We always joked that our apartment was like the beginning of a bad joke.
“I never experienced these things before, so now I have this insatiable curiosity about the world.”
| College of Arts & Sciences |
Cox at the University was like a starving man at a smorgasbord. He threw himself into the feast with abandon, double-majoring in philosophy and political science, and double-minoring in legal studies and Spanish, all in Arts & Sciences. He maintained a 3.95 grade-point average and worked several part-time jobs to make ends meet.
He was equally adventurous and hard-working outside the classroom. Last summer, he went sky diving just before traveling to Spain, Egypt and Greece.
He timed his Spain trip so he could run with the bulls in Pamplona. He ran close enough to touch the charging beasts.
“It was pretty crazy,” Cox says. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt fear like that. Not just my own … it was palpable in the crowd.”
As a senior, Cox faced a different kind of challenge. He was chosen as the University’s first fellow for the Center for the Study of the Presidency (CSP), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The nonresidential fellowship program seeks to develop a new generation of national leaders committed to public service.
Sixty-five undergraduate and graduate students from leading colleges and universities spend a year studying the U.S. presidency, the public policy-making process, and the chief executive’s relations with Congress, allies, the media and the American public.
In addition, each fellow writes a paper with the guidance of a CSP mentor. Cox is interested in international relations and the nature of terrorism, so he wrote about “public diplomacy,” the mutual understanding that comes from cultural exchanges and the willingness to be open-minded and learn about other cultures.
Where does Cox’s wanderlust and intellectual hunger come from?
He doesn’t pretend to know the whole answer, but one part of it lies in a motto of his mother’s, “live your dreams.” She gave him a gold pocket watch with that inscription at his high-school graduation.
“I really bought into that idea from a very young age,” Cox says. “It became a mantra for me, and the credit goes to my family. Neither my mom nor my father ever considered I couldn’t do anything I wanted.”
What Cox wants now is to continue traveling the world and pondering big, thorny questions. After Commencement, Cox will teach English in Chile for a year.
He plans to then attend law school at Yale University. He’ll be able to fund his degree with a highly prestigious Beinecke Scholarship, which awards $30,000 to just 20 people nationwide for graduate studies.