PHILADELPHIA — Two Yale students from Pennsylvania, one an economics major who has studied social problems in South Africa and the other a researcher on animal cognition, will be heading to England to study at Oxford as Rhodes scholars.

Senior David Carel of Penn Valley and sophomore Dakota McCoy of Wexford are recipients of the scholarships established in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes.

“I keep sort of checking my phone to see if this actually happened,” Carel said Sunday. “It’s so hard to believe, I just sort of assume I dreamed the whole thing.”

Carel, 21, an economics major, said he spent much of his undergraduate years studying global health economics, mostly public health, and plans to study comparative social policy.

McCoy, 22, nicknamed Cody, has researched ecology, primate cognition and evolutionary biology and will study zoology at Oxford.

“I’m completely surprised and excited and blown away,” McCoy said Sunday. “It still feels like a dream.”

She said she hopes to study behavioral ecology, the connection between animal cognition and ecosystem processes. Learning how animals think and behave in an environment — how they forage and choose mates, for example — can help in designing of land reserves, setting up captive breeding programs and better managing ecotourism, she said.