Westley Moore, 22, is an international relations major at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. A member of the varsity football and basketball teams, he was recently named a Rhodes scholar.

The past eight years have really been about tremendous growth. I started off in school in the Bronx, and my mom decided she wanted to get me out of New York City. She wanted me to go to another school and really get back along the right path, a direction that I really wasn't heading.

So she decided she wanted me to go to a military school in Pennsylvania, and that really ended up being one of the turning points in my life -- having the opportunity to study there and really remake my own identity.

The biggest change that [I've seen while] at Hopkins is [that] more people [are becoming] involved with public service and public interest, and doing things for the community. A lot of times [you see] people interested in business and heading straight from college to Wall Street and staying there for the rest of their lives and making a whole lot of money, and not doing that much with it.

But I see a lot of people that, even if they are planning on going that route, are very interested in at least giving back -- whether it be monetarily or just their time -- back to communities, back to people. So I think that's one change that I have started to see particularly among college students -- which is refreshing.

Speaking as an African-American, I think that the past eight years have been great for us in terms of some of the biggest strides and improvements that we've seen in our nation's history. I think you're definitely seeing more minorities, more women in positions that [they] have never held before.

And not just "token" positions -- positions where your face is there but you don't really have much say -- but actually positions where people have a say in what goes on, and people have the ear of the president and make some serious contributions.

So I think in the past eight years we've started to see a trend, and hopefully that trend will continue. Because I do think that is something that didn't exist before President Clinton and his administration. While there might be still some "glass ceilings" that are still there, I think a lot were removed during the past eight years.