Michelle Obama by David Colbert Read Free Book Online

problems and prejudices, or all of Michelle's problems. As she came to the end of high school, she got a shock.
TIGER BEAT
    November 1980: Sixteen-year-old Michelle is in the office of one of the school's guidance counselors. She's holding a list of colleges. The applications are complicated, and she wants to be certain she can get all the forms she needs from Whitney M. Young by the December deadline.
    Looking at Michelle's file, the counselor asks, "What's your first choice?"
    Michelle tells her.
    "You can't go there," the counselor says. "Your test scores aren't high enough."
    Michelle took that criticism personally, but the real problem was that the advice wasn't personal at all. It was the kind of information that appeared in college guides. The right advice for Michelle would have been to aim high. Especially with Ivy League admissions, which include interviews and personal recommendations from teachers and long applications, a single weakness wasn't fatal.
    As it happened, Michelle probably understood Ivy League admissions better than the guidance counselor did. Her brother was in his sophomore year at Princeton University. She had seen colleges compete for him when he was still at Mount Carmel High School. The University of Washington had offered him a full scholarship.
    Craig probably would have ended up at Washington, just to save the family the burden of paying for school. He knew that his father had skipped college in part to allow the family to pay tuition for a younger brother. But Craig changed his mind after his father dropped the D-bomb on him: "If you pick a college based on how much I have to pay," his father said, "I'll be very disappointed."
    His mother went to work as a secretary at the Spiegel catalog company to help pay for Princeton. She was happy to do it. With her kids practically raised, it was like making time for herself.
    Michelle had been delighted for Craig. She looked through all the booklets and bulletins the university sent to incoming students. Envelopes with the school's orange-and-black crest and
P
logo arrived throughout the summer before Craig's first year. Naturally, her friendly competition with him led her to think about the Ivy League for herself. She later remembered, "I knew him, and I knew his study habits, and I was, like, 'I can do that too.'" Or, as she put it on another occasion, "I thought, I'm smarter than him!" She was going to become a Princeton Tiger too.
    What the guidance counselor told her only made her more determined. She knew Princeton would look at more than her test scores. She was right. She might not have been perfect on paper, but she was impressive. Princeton's admissions committee also knew from the example of Craig, who was doing well at school and was on his way to becoming one of the college's all-time best athletes, that the Robinson family had a way of exceeding the highest expectations.
    In September 1981, she kissed her parents goodbye and headed to college. Hard work had taken her to exactly where she wanted to go, one of the most prestigious universities in the country.
    But it wouldn't be long before she was questioning if she had wanted the right thing.

4. ORANGE CRUSH
    Stevie Wonder albums. Friends who laughed at her constant wisecracking, and who made her laugh, too. Dancing for any reason at all. Cheering for Craig's amazing performances on the basketball court. The occasional date with a student who wasn't scared off by a big brother hovering around. This was Princeton.
    So were problems like this:
    Michelle has just met one of her roommates. Their room is on the top floor of a four-story dormitory, in what was originally an attic. With three beds, three desks, and three dressers, it's packed tightly. Making it feel even more cramped, the angled roof of the building forces the ceiling in this room to slant down toward the floor. The bathroom is downstairs. This is a dormitory with a lot of tradition, which is a polite way of saying it's