A college counselor told Michelle Obama when she was in high school that she didn’t have what it took to get into Princeton University, even though she as a promising teen.
Obama wrote about the details of this experience in her new memoir named “Becoming”. She said that she was required to meet a college counselor at the beginning of her senior year at Whitney M. Young High School in Chicago, and she had her sights set on the New Jersey Ivy League school, mainly because it was the school her older brother Craig was attending. However, she was disappointed when the counselor told her that it didn’t seem she was good enough to get in that school. Obama writes that she recalls the woman telling her that she wasn’t sure she’s Princeton material, while giving her patronizing, perfunctory smile.
The former first lady wrote that she can’t remember any details about the woman, because she had almost instantly blotted this experience out of her memory. She, however, decided to disregard the advice and apply to Princeton University anyway, because she wasn’t going to let anyone change her mind and dislodge everything she thought she knew about herself.
So, instead of just sitting there and be disappointed, she decided to settle down and get back to work.
She got her acceptance letter in a mail six or seven months later, and and she never went to tell the college counselor that she was wrong. As it turns out, she WAS Princeton material after all, and it would have served no purpose to tell that to the counselor.
The only person she had to show anything was herself.
She learned that she was just as smart as everyone else there by her sophomore year, and she didn’t let Princeton intimidate her.
She wrote that the classrooms were often dominated by male students, but she didn’t let that to make her feel intimidated. She realized that they weren’t smarter than her, but only emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority.
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