Education and early career
Obama attended
Whitney Young High School,
[25] Chicago's first
magnet high school, established as a selective enrollment school, where she was a classmate of
Jesse Jackson's daughter
Santita.
[20] The round-trip commute from the Robinsons' South Side home to the
Near West Side, where the school was located, took three hours.
[26]Obama recalled being fearful of how others would perceive her and while attending Whitney Young, being in an environment that was doubtful of her ability to succeed. She disregarded the negativity around her and used it "to fuel me, to keep me going."
[27][28] She was on the honor roll for four years, took
advanced placement classes, was a member of the
National Honor Society, and served as
student counciltreasurer.
[4] She graduated in 1981 as the
salutatorian of her class.
[26]
Obama was inspired to follow her brother to
Princeton University,
[5] where he graduated in 1983. Bond viewed Obama as having become determined from her brother's admission to be admitted herself, Obama understanding Craig and his study habits.
[29] Some of Obama's teachers in high school, who were aware of her applying to Princeton, tried to dissuade her, Obama recalling that she had been told she was "setting my sights too high."
[30][31] She believed that her brother's alumni status had helped her during the admission process,
[32] though there were also talks that her acceptance was due to
affirmative action. Whichever the reason was for her acceptance into the school, Obama resolved demonstrate her worthiness of admission.
[29] Beginning her freshman year, she feared that she was not as intelligent as her new peers and at first was unable to find her classes nor choose them. Obama admitted she was overwhelmed first arriving at the Ivy League, attributing this to the fact that neither of her parents had graduated from college.
[33]By her own admission, she had never spent a prolonged amount of time on a college campus, making the adjustment all the more difficult.
[34] The mother of a white roommate of Obama reportedly unsuccessfully tried to get her daughter moved due to Obama's ethnicity. Obama would recall her tenure at Princeton being the first time she was made more aware of her ethnicity and furthered that despite the willingness of her classmates and teachers to want to understand her, she still felt "like a visitor on campus."
[35]
At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational.
[36] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis titled
Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.[37][38]"I remember being shocked," she says, "by college students who drove
BMWs. I didn't even know parents who drove BMWs."
[26] Obama researched her thesis by sending a questionnaire to African-American graduates of Princeton, requesting they specify when and how comfortable they were with races prior to their enrollment at Princeton and repeated the same request for how they felt at time they were a student. Of the 400 she sent to, fewer than 90 responded and her findings did not support her hoped conclusion that the alumni would still identity with the African-American community.
[39] While at Princeton, she got involved with the Third World Center (now known as the Carl A. Fields Center), an academic and cultural group that supported minority students, running their day care center, which also included after school tutoring.
[40]Obama (then known as Robinson) majored in
sociology and minored in
African American studies; she graduated
cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.
[4][41]
She earned her
Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from
Harvard Law School in 1988.
[42] By the time she applied for Harvard Law, Bond wrote, her confidence had greatly boasted since applying for Princeton and he furthered, "This time around, there was no doubt in her mind that she had earned her place".
[39] Obama's faculty mentor at Harvard Law was Charles Ogletree. Ogletree concluded Obama had answered the question that had plagued her throughout Princeton by the time she arrived at Harvard Law, of whether she would remain the product of her parents or keep the identity she had acquired at Princeton, him viewing her as having answered that she could be "both brilliant and black."
[43] At Harvard she participated in demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who were members of minorities
[44] and worked for the
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting low-income tenants with housing cases.
[45] She is the third First Lady with a
postgraduate degree, after her two immediate predecessors,
Hillary Rodham Clinton and
Laura Bush.
[46]Obama would later say her education gave her opportunities beyond what she had ever imagined.
[47] In July 2008, Obama accepted the invitation to become an honorary member of the 100-year-old black sorority
Alpha Kappa Alpha, which had no active undergraduate chapter at Princeton when she attended.
[48]