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As the youngest in a family of high achievers, Daniel Shih was unsure how he would ever measure up.

His oldest brother is a Harvard-trained theoretical physicist. The next brother, an All-American swimmer, went through high school "destroying everything in his path -- in a good way.

"I risked being the aberration," said Shih, a Stanford senior who this week was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. He will study in England next fall at Oxford University.

"I spent a good chunk of high school just trying to live up to my own expectations of what I should be, but nothing drove me; I did not have a real sense of purpose."

Ironically, Shih said, he did not find his own life's passion until he strayed from the straight-and-narrow path of seeking a high grade-point average and traditional honors.

Working in community organizing -- first with exploited restaurant and sweatshop workers in San Francisco's Chinatown and later with the Obama campaign -- led Shih to what he now believes is most important.

"The idea I really believe in is bottom-up, grassroots change -- people getting transformed from victims of injustice to advocates for justice," he said.

"It made me see that there's a way to do something about the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be."

He credits his middle brother, a Stanford graduate who is now a community organizer in Oakland, with opening his eyes to that world.

"My brother created this paradigm shift in the way I understood the world, made me realize I had a responsibility to fight for what I believe in, to fight for social justice," he said.

Shih's first taste of activism came when his brother introduced him to the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco, where he witnessed sweatshop conditions in the back alleys of Chinatown.

The experience led him to help mount a campaign to eliminate sweatshop conditions among the manufacturers of Stanford apparel, which included a 2007 sit-in in the office of Stanford President John Hennessey.

The Stanford Sweat-Free Campaign ended with Stanford signing a code of conduct and joining an independent organization that monitors the rights of workers, the Workers Rights Consortium.

Shih later took more than a year off from school to work on the Obama presidential campaign, where he ended up as regional field director in Albuquerque, N.M. One of his colleagues there was Elizabeth Kistin, freshly returned from her Rhodes Scholarship years, who urged him to apply for the competitive honor.

Shih was born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Naperville and attended a local public high school, which he describes as much like Gunn or Paly.

His first language was Mandarin, spoken by his parents, both immigrants from Taiwan who met as graduate students at Northwestern University. "That was quickly overtaken by English," Shih added.

Shih's mother, Valerie Lo, now lives on the Peninsula and works for Alain Pinel Realtors. His father lives in Illinois.

At Naperville North High School, Shih played violin with the Chicago Youth Symphony and the Metropolitan Youth Symphony and was a right defender on the varsity soccer team.

As a Stanford student he has spent time doing research (and learning Spanish) in Venezuela, and is writing an honors thesis on Sino-Venezuelan economic and political relations.

At Oxford, he plans to pursue a graduate degree in comparative politics.

Asked to name previous Rhodes Scholars he particularly admires, Shih hesitates a moment before mentioning Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, interfaith organizer Eboo Patel, broadcaster Rachel Maddow and former president Bill Clinton.

"One of the good thing about the Rhodes is it gives you a platform in some ways to fight for the issues you really care about," he said.

"It's ironic that I started building myself as someone qualified to even be considered for a Rhodes only after I got out of the cycle of chasing honors and a high GPA."