I wanted to go to a good college, and my mind was set on Wellesley.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I did go to Wellesley, a women's college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.
I'd gone to Wellesley College, an amazing women's college where the students were encouraged to follow our dreams. However, after I graduated and had a historical romance published, more than a few people indicated that, in some way, my career choice was a 'waste' of so much education.
College was just so essential for my sense of self and my development.
Dartmouth represented a great opportunity. I wanted to go to the best possible school I could go to.
I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy.
Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience.
Luckily, I was blessed to go to Stanford and a school that was primarily focused on academics, so it was a blessing.
I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.
I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.