"College
In 1965, Rodham enrolled in Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.<16> She served as president of the Rockefeller Republican-oriented<17> Wellesley Young Republicans organization during her freshman year<18><19> and with them supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke.<20> However, due to her evolving views regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, she stepped down from that position;<18> she characterized her own nature as that of "a mind conservative and a heart liberal."<21> Active in campus affairs, she sought to work for change within the system, rather than take then-popular radical actions against it.<22> In her junior year, Rodham was affected by the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.,<8> and became a supporter of the anti-war presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy.<23> Rodham organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students for moderate changes, such as recruiting more black students and faculty.<24> In early 1968 she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969;<22><25> she was instrumental in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled by the student disruptions common to other colleges at the time.<22> A number of her fellow students thought at the time she might someday become the first woman President of the United States.<22> She attended the "Wellesley in Washington" summer program at the urging of Professor Alan Schechter, who assigned Rodham to intern at the House Republican Conference so she could better understand her changing political views.<24> Rodham was invited by Representative Charles Goodell, a moderate New York Republican, to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination.<24> Rodham attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami, where she decided to leave the Republican Party for good; she was upset over how Richard Nixon's campaign had portrayed Rockefeller and what Rodham perceived as the "veiled" racist messages of the convention.<24>
Rodham returned to Wellesley, and wrote her senior thesis about the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky under Professor Schechter (which, years later while she was First Lady, was suppressed at the request of the White House and became the subject of speculation as to its contents).<26> In 1969, Rodham graduated with departmental honors in political science. Stemming from the demands of some students,<27> she became the first student in Wellesley College history to deliver their commencement address.<25> Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes.<22><28><29> She was featured in an article published in Life magazine, due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her at the commencement;<8> she also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally-syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers.<30> That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).<31><32>
Law school
Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where she served on the Board of Editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action.<33> During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center,<34> learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).<35><36> She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital,<35> and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free advice for the poor.<34> In the summer of 1970, she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, researching migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education;<37><38> Edelman would become a significant mentor to her.<38>
In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, who was also a law student at Yale. That summer, she interned on child custody cases<39> at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein,<40><41> which was well-known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes;<41> two of its four partners were current or former communist party members.<41><42><43> Clinton canceled his original summer plans in order to live with her in an apartment in Berkeley, California,<44> later writing, "I told her I'd have the rest of my life for my work and my ambition, but I loved her and I wanted to see if it could work out for us."<44> The romance did develop, and the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school.<42> The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.<45><46> She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973,<8> having spent an extra year there in order to be with Clinton.<47> Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined at the time.<47> She began a year of post-graduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center.<48> Her first scholarly article, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973.<49> Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals"<50> and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but rather courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis.<51> The article became frequently cited in the field.<52>"
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