Malia Obama is headed to Harvard.
The eldest daughter of President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama has officially committed to the prestigious Cambridge, Massachusetts, university, but will postpone her freshman year until fall 2017.
“The president and Mrs. Obama announced today that their daughter Malia will attend Harvard University in the fall of 2017 as a member of the Class of 2021,” FLOTUS’ office announced on Sunday, May 1. “Malia will take a gap year before beginning school.”
The press has been watching the teen closely over the last year, as she’s toured multiple private colleges and and liberal arts schools along the East Coast, including Ivy Leagues Princeton, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania, ahead of the college application deadlines last winter. The 17-year-old is set to graduate from D.C.’s Sidwell Friends School this spring,
Only, it wasn’t an easy decision. Thankfully, Obama had her father’s wisdom to turn to while gearing up continue her education. “One piece of advice that I’ve given her is not to stress too much about having to get into one particular college,” Obama said during a town hall on college affordability in Des Moines, Iowa, last September. “There are a lot of good colleges and universities out there. … Just because it’s not some name-brand, famous, fancy school doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get a great education there.”
He also encouraged his daughter to be “open to new experiences.” Adding, “Don’t go to college just to duplicate the same experience you had in high school.”
And what will be Malia’s focus? Michelle Obama previously told PEOPLE in 2012 that her daughter has an “interest in filmmaking.”
When Malia arrives at Harvard, she’ll join a long list of presidential children who’ve attended the university, including John Quincy Adams and his son, John Adams II; Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert; the sons of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt; Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy; and George W. Bush, who went to business school there.
In the meantime, we anticipate only great things for Malia. According to her mother, “Just like her father, she is an avid reader, and she enjoys movies and the whole process.”
Could we have a future scholar, filmmaker or script writer on our hands? Only time will tell. Show Obama some congratulatory love in the comment section below.
