President Barack Obama is already thinking about his daughter Malia’s departure for college, two years early.
His nervousness came out during a commencement address at a high school in Worchester, Massachusetts in June. “I’m trying to get used to not choking up and crying and embarrassing her,” said Obama. “So this is sort of my trial run here.”
And the POTUS isn’t alone in his anxiety. First Lady Michelle Obama was also quoted at a high school commencement in Topeka, Kansas, expressing her emotions about the topic. “Days like this make me think of my own daughters, so forgive me if I get a little teary,” said the First Lady.
Malia, now 16-years-old, will be going into 11th grade this fall and like many high school juniors, she’s already toured a few colleges. At the top of that list is University of California at Berkeley and the Palo Alto, California, campus of Stanford, which is also where Chelsea Clinton attended college.
But the President made it clear that they aren’t pressuring her to follow a specific path. “We tell her, ‘Don’t assume that there are 10 schools that you have to go to, and if you didn’t go to those 10, that somehow things are going to be terrible.'”
“There are a lot of schools out there.”