The early parts of Malia Obama’s education are intriguing because they have an almost ordinary quality. She had asthma, played soccer, and attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a child in Hyde Park, Chicago, prior to the Secret Service code names and the international travels. It’s difficult not to believe that the importance of education was ingrained in the family from the beginning because both of her parents were academics and her mother was an associate dean at the university.
In 2009, everything changed. When her father was elected president, Malia was ten years old. A few weeks later, she and her sister Sasha were enrolled in Washington, D.C.’s Sidwell Friends School, which had previously trained Chelsea Clinton. The fact that the Secret Service occasionally drove her to school instead of her grandmother and that she allegedly picked up driving skills from her own security detail is a minor, almost unnoticed detail. Adolescent milestones that are typical, but seen through a different perspective.
She participated in the chorus, ran with the soccer and swim teams, and, according to most accounts, made every effort to avoid making headlines as much as a president’s daughter could. One of 127 students in her class, she graduated in June 2016. Two years prior, Time magazine had named her one of the nation’s most influential teenagers, which was an odd kind of recognition for someone whose primary objective seemed to be maintaining her groundedness.
What followed reveals something about her way of thinking. Malia took a gap year rather than enrolling in college right away, which her father later acknowledged moved him to tears during a commencement speech. She spent 83 days traveling through Bolivia and Peru while working as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. Perhaps the year off had less to do with indecision and more to do with wanting to spend some time alone, away from expectations and cameras.
In the fall of 2017, she enrolled at Harvard to study history and was awarded a Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for her exceptional undergraduate work. Her four years there are largely unknown to the public, which appears to be deliberate. Malia seems to have embraced her anonymity rather than resisted it, and Harvard students generally take good care of each other’s privacy. In 2021, when she graduated, a large portion of the nation was still recovering from pandemic isolation.
Observing her career since then, I’ve been struck by how closely her education influenced her current work. Her teenage internships, which included time spent in television studios and ultimately with a film production company, weren’t just filler for her resume. They gestured to an object. She wrote and directed a short film called The Heart, which debuted at Sundance under the name Malia Ann, completely eschewing Obama, after graduating from Harvard and working as a writer on the Amazon series Swarm.
Her decision to abandon the family name seems to be the true turning point in her educational journey. Malia wants people to know that she has earned things on her own terms, according to her mother. It’s unclear if audiences will eventually distinguish her work from her last name, but her academic record—quiet, methodical, and mostly self-directed—indicates that she was getting ready for that separation long before anyone else noticed.
