Obama: Wowza!
Though Obama didn’t blow anyone away during his two undergrad years at Columbia, he made history at Harvard Law School. He arrived there in 1988, at 27 years old, after working for four years as a community organizer in Chicago. He became a research assistant to Laurence Tribe, a renowned professor working on an article applying physics to the law. (Title: “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics.”) By the end of his first year, Obama had won a position on the Harvard Law Review, widely considered the most influential and prestigious law publication in the nation. In 1990, Obama earned national recognition for the first time when he was elected the Review’s first black president. Obama graduated magna cum laude and moved back to Chicago to direct Project Vote, a grass-roots voter-registration program. “I thought … his talents are such that there’s no ceiling to what he could achieve—and that included becoming president of the United States,” Tribe told New York. “He’s the only student about whom I’ve ever had that thought.”
McCain: Did Not Attend