In the fall of 1980, a Chicago high school senior named Michelle Robinson walked into her college counselor's office at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School with one goa… see more

 

                                                                                                                                                                            In the fall of 1980, a Chicago high school senior named Michelle Robinson walked into her college counselor's office at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School with one goal in mind, following her older brother, Craig, to Princeton. She arrived with credentials, since she was on track to graduate in the top 10 percent of her class, had been elected treasurer of the senior class and had joined the National Honor Society. She would finish as salutatorian. The counselor, however, doubted she was Princeton material. In her 2018 memoir Becoming, Michelle wrote that she could not recall the woman's age or race because she deliberately blotted the meeting out, and she left fuming with a bruised ego and a single thought, I'll show you. Then she settled down and got back to work. She skipped further advice from the counselor and turned to her assistant principal and neighbor, Mr. Smith, who agreed to write her a recommendation. She applied to Princeton along with a scattering of other schools, and she wrote her admissions essay about her father's multiple sclerosis diagnosis. Six or seven months after that meeting, the acceptance letter arrived, and she called Craig to share the news. Here is the twist. Michelle never went back to tell the counselor she had been wrong. She wrote that it would have done nothing for either of them, and that she had only needed to show herself. At Princeton, she later described feeling scrutiny as one of relatively few Black students at a largely white school, yet she graduated cum laude in 1985 with a degree in sociology and African American studies. She earned her law degree at Harvard in 1988, returned to Chicago to practice law and eventually moved into public service. In 2009, she became First Lady of the United States, the first Black woman in that role. The lesson of the story lies in her response, which was to sidestep one narrow opinion, find a mentor who actually knew her and keep her eyes on the goal.