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I think this is also something people misunderstand. I took an Intro to Geography class my freshman year at college - it wasn't a requirement, aside from fulfilling my general education requirement, and unless one was a Geography major it's unlikely they would go beyond this course. Countries/capitals wasn't a feature of the course. It was much more of a broad survey to the study/profession of geography, mapmaking, various projections, GIS, cultural/environmental geography, discussion of the different fields of geography, etc. When I was the TA for an Intro to Political Science course, we did do map tests, but they were a fairly small portion of the grade and they were countries only.
I think it is not only something many people misunderstand, it is like many people do not care. One thing I've learned is that a Geography major isn't like an accounting major, nursing, business, or even marketing. It isn't like art, theater, or english majors. Most people understand those majors. Few people understand geography majors. It is regarded in a nonchalant way. It is more than countries and capitals.
In my geography major, I took courses such as Remote Sensing, Cartography, Intro and Advanced GIS, Urban Geography, Economic Geography, Weather and Climate, Historical Geography, Geography of East Asia, Political Geography, Political Science, and my internship involved cartography and GPS. I also did other things, like watershed analysis as part of an independent study. I took more courses, but that is just part of what I did.
I did map tests in my intro geography class, and a history class I took. However, the deeper I got into my major, the more I got into other things, such as GIS, cartography, and remote sensing. Many people simply don't get it, and often don't care. And a part of this starts early, in elementary school.
A little Googling revealed that my alma mater does not offer a degree in geography. The only geo courses are offered through the Dept. of Urban Affairs in the the School of Liberal Arts. I suppose a motivated student could cobble together courses in geo and cs if they wanted a technical degree, but a serious student would probably have to look elsewhere.
when people ask i usually say, "we learn states and capitals."
but, i am in the GIS field. I work as sort of a hybrid GIS Professional / Developer. It is good work if you're technically inclined... if not, it will suck.
basically, my employer hands me a single critical task that must be accomplished. This task would normally take a group of 10 people a year to accomplish by manual means. It takes about an hour per week, and spend the other 39 hours/week looking for something to do. (hence my prolific city-data account.)
I think that is one thing with me. I am good with GPS, making maps, and interpreting things involving Remote Sensing. My Developer skills, well, I did poorly in computer programming. I created maps using GPS. I never did well with Java or Ruby.
I think that is one thing with me. I am good with GPS, making maps, and interpreting things involving Remote Sensing. My Developer skills, well, I did poorly in computer programming. I created maps using GPS. I never did well with Java or Ruby.
yeah , the GIS programming curriculum there is backwards. they have Guo teaching Java, when the overwhelming majority of GIS programming involves Python, Javascript, or maybe C# or VB.
but to be fair, the inability to adapt to new languages seems common in academics in general. they're not really good at keeping pace with private sector trends.
yeah , the GIS programming curriculum there is backwards. they have Guo teaching Java, when the overwhelming majority of GIS programming involves Python, Javascript, or maybe C# or VB.
but to be fair, the inability to adapt to new languages seems common in academics in general. they're not really good at keeping pace with private sector trends.
To be honest, I took a VB class. I basically struggled from day one. The thing with me is this. Geometry is no problem for me. GPS is no problem for me. Cartography was never any problem. Remote Sensing, doable. Computer languages got to me. It's biting me right now. One thing I learned was that if you weren't into computer programming to begin with, you would get left behind. This year, I actually tried to learn Python myself.
I wasn't in the actual GIS program. My degree did have some GIS classes in it.
Heck, I would bet that 98% of Americans couldn't name all 50 capitols in this country and I will admit I am one of those people. I can name all 50 states and many of their capitols, but I could not do all 50 capitols.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrier
Harrier can.
Quote:
Originally Posted by revrandy
Can you name the capitols or the Capitals?
The capitals.
Urbanlife is responsible for the misspelling - but you ignored that and redirected towards Harrier.
Obama went to Harvard?
Prove it.
No, don't ask me to prove he didn't, because I am not saying he didn't.
I am merely asking for links to proof that he was educated there.
Most remarkable, given his complex identity, was how comfortable Obama seemed with himself. “Barack’s identity, his sense of self, was so settled,” recalled Cassandra Butts ’91, who met him in line at the financial aid office, in an interview with PBS’s “Frontline.” “He didn’t strike us in law school as someone who was searching for himself.” It was one of the first few days of our law school experience. We met at the financial aid office at Harvard Law School. We were going through the process of filling out a lot of paperwork that would make us significantly in debt to Harvard for years to come. We bonded over that experience.
The Barack that I knew at the time is fundamentally the Barack that you see today, the candidate. He was incredibly mature. He had spent three years as a community organizer in Chicago, so he came to law school without some of the angst I think that many of us had who were only a year, or maybe less than a year, away from college. He was very mature, and he was very directed. He knew what he wanted to do: get his law degree and learn as much as he possibly could and take that experience back to Chicago and work in the same communities that he had worked as an organizer.
He was a very calm presence and someone who had a very good sense of himself, where he fit in, and what he wanted to do with his life.
I was as close to Barack as anyone in law school. He'd never expressed an interest in being president of the Law Review. It wasn't something that he talked about. Frankly, he was drafted by his colleagues on the Law Reviewto run. They made the case why he should run and why they thought that he could lead the Law Review. And they thought that he would be able to bring together the factions that had developed as a result of the divisions, the ideological divisions on the Law Review, on the left and the right. ...
Barack, from the start, had a leadership style that was very embracing. He was clearly seen as a leader, but at the same time, he didn't put himself out as a leader. We had a lot of people who were pretty ambitious at the law school, people who had political ambition. They were not quiet in their political ambition and putting themselves out as leaders. That wasn't Barack. A student meeting was held to discuss another burning matter of the day: What was the appropriate terminology—black or African-American? “For him, it was a false choice,” Butts says. “It wasn’t that he was trying to appease one side or the other but that he was refusing to accept that it was an either-or. And, in fact, we use black and African-American interchangeably now.” Butts adds that Obama saw the whole debate as “a very elite discussion. It wasn’t something people were talking about on the South Side of Chicago.”
Bradford Berenson, ’91, Classmate, Law Review The debates and discussions of the law and of cases frequently pit conservatives in our class against liberals in our class, and the discussions often got quite heated. I would say the environment at Harvard Law School back then was political in a borderline unhealthy way. It was quite intense.
You don't become president of the Harvard Law Review, no matter how political, or how liberal the place is, byvirtue of affirmative action, or by virtue of not being at the very top of your class in terms of legal ability. Barack was at the very top of his class in terms of legal ability. He had a first-class legal mind and, in my view, was selected to be president of the Reviewentirely on his merits.
...the conservatives were eager to have somebody who would treat them fairly, who would listen to what they had to say, who would not abuse the powers of the office to favor his ideological soul mates and punish those who had different views. Somebody who would basically play it straight, I think was really what we were looking for.
... And ultimately, the conservatives on the Review supported Barack as president in the final rounds of balloting because he fit that bill far better than the other people who were running. ...
We had all worked with him over the course of a year. And we had all spent countless hours in the presence of Barack, as well as others of our colleagues who were running, in Gannett House [the Law Review offices], and so you get a pretty good sense of people over the course of a year of late nights working on the Review. You know who the rabble-rousers are. You know who the people are who are blinded by their politics. And you know who the people are who, despite their politics, can reach across and be friendly to and make friends with folks who have different views. And Barack very much fell into the latter category. ...
[After Obama is selected,] he does a very able job as president. Puts out what I think was a very good volume of the Review. Does a great job managing the difficult and complicated interpersonal dynamics on the Review. And manages somehow, in an extremely fractious group, to keep everybody almost happy.
“He tended not to enter these debates and disputes but rather bring people together and forge compromises,” says Bradford Berenson ’91, who was among the relatively small number of conservatives on the Law Review staff.
"Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn't appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare," said Bradford A. Berenson, a former Bush administration lawyer who was an editor at the review.
"The politics of the Harvard Law Review were incredibly petty and incredibly vicious," Berenson said. "The editors of the review were constantly at each other's throats. And Barack tended to treat those disputes with a certain air of detachment and amusement. The feeling was almost, come on kids, can't we just behave here?"
Honestly, we were just very polarized on the Law Review, we really were. It's like you go to a college campus, and the black students were all sitting together. It was the same thing with the Law Review; the black students were all sitting together. Barack was the one who was truly able to move between the different groups and have credibility with all of them.
...I don't know what he's like now with conservatives, but I don't know why at the time he was able to communicate so well with them, even spend social time with them, which was not something I would ever have done. …
Obama displayed other traits, besides eloquence, that would define his success as a presidential candidate.
“You could see many of his attributes, his approach to politics and his ability to bring people together back then,” says Michael Froman ’91, who worked with Obama on the Law Review. As a campus leader, he successfully navigated the fractious political disputes raging on campus.
Kenneth Mack ’91, Classmate and Law Review
Barack was one of the first people I met nearly 20 years ago at Harvard, when I began my first extended sojourn outside of my native central Pennsylvania. We were in the same first-year section and became good friends during that year and the next two, when we served together on the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review.
In those days, the law school was a contentious place, nicknamed "Beirut-on-the-Charles" (the Charles River flows through campus) by its detractors for the school's pitched ideological battles among professors and, later, students.
A good bit of that reputation was exaggerated, but it remained a disconcerting place for someone like myself, raised in a state whose peculiar demographics so often seemed to produce politicians who confounded party and ideological labels.
From the beginning, Barack struck me as a person who confounded labels of every sort. He was only three years older than me and many of the other students, but he easily seemed a decade older. Most of us knew that he had been a community organizer in Chicago. Many people expected him to be interested mainly in urban politics, but the first impression he made was that of a worldly wise person who could talk as easily about national security and international relations as he could about tax relief and education policy.
Not surprisingly, one of his closest friends that year was someone who was much older than most of us and who had been an economics professor before coming to law school. Among an extraordinarily bright and deep group of students, Barack was perhaps the brightest and the deepest, but he wore his knowledge lightly and gave an impression of warmth and compassion that made him one of the most well-liked people in our class.
One of my most vivid memories of the law review election process was of one student who strongly disagreed with much of Barack's politics, but still pledged his firm support behind him. Indeed, it is a measure of his ability to bring us together that things fell apart only one year after Barack's presidency ended, with political bickering reaching such heights that the law review was the subject of a well-known expose in a book on the school's troubles.
When I think back on my law school friendship with Barack Obama, in many ways I feel as though I've come full circle. Last week, I had the honor of getting to know my hometown all over again when I returned to give a lecture in front of old friends and new.
Even in his first year, students saw Obama as a peacemaker. When his class needed someone to present an end-of-the-year gift to one stuffy contracts professor, the students chose Obama, who delivered a brief, gracious tribute. "It was a moment of diffused tension and levity," said Kenneth W. Mack, a Harvard Law School professor who was in Obama's class. "He pulled it off."
... [At] a dinner at Obama's apartment, an older black student challenged Obama and other black students to compete for the [Law Review President] job. "And I do remember Barack saying that was the moment he finally decided, 'I'm going to do this,' " said Mack.
One of Obama's most difficult tasks as editor in chief is keeping the peace amid the clashing egos of writers and editors.
"He is very, very diplomatic," said Radhika Rao, 24, a third-year law student from Lexington, Ind. "He is very outgoing and has a lot of experience in handling people, which stands him in good stead."
Tina Ulrich, 24, a third-year student, wrote an article for the review that went through several editors before her final draft landed on Obama's desk.
"When he sent it back, it had lots of tiny print all over it and I was just furious," she said. "My heart just sank. But it was accompanied by specific examples of how parts could be made better. He wound up getting an enthusiastic response from a very tired writer."
"A lot of people at the time were just talking past each other, very committed to their opinions, their point of view, and not particularly interested in what other people had to say," said Crystal Nix Hines, a classmate who is now a television writer. "Barack transcended that."
In February 1990, when the time came to elect a new president of the law review, Obama was initially reluctant, said Nix Hines. The presidency seemed better suited for careerist types who were aiming for positions at top-flight law firms, Obama told her at the time. The son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, he wanted to return to his work in Chicago as a community organizer.
"I was surprised because I knew he was very popular and well-regarded and obviously had the ability to do the job," Nix Hines said.
“I’ve never in my life encountered anyone else about whom I said, ‘This person should be president,’” Molot says. So many alumni attended that 2007 fundraiser at Molot’s home that Obama quipped, “I feel like I’m at a law school reunion.”
"If anybody had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor," said Thomas J. Perrelli, a classmate and former counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno. "He was leading the discussion but he wasn't trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating."
At Harvard, [Cassandra] Butts was moot court partners with Tom Perrelli, who first met Obama at the dinner party and served as his managing editor on the Harvard Law Review.... “We have all been friends together and we found a common enterprise through Barack,” Perrelli said.
Perrelli occupied seat 151 of Professor Laurence Tribe’s constitutional law class in the fall 1989 semester – just a few feet away from Obama (seat 26), and two others who would prove vital to his ambitions: Julius Genachowski (93) and Michael Froman (103).
“He wasn’t a real righty or a real lefty, so if you cared about the institution and didn’t want to spend the next year distracted by infighting, you were comfortable with him,” says his friend Julius Genachowski, who was on the law review at the time. “The other thing is that, because he was so different, it didn’t diminish anyone to support him.”
“The law review was a powder keg,” says Genachowski. “That it didn’t explode when we were there—that it ran professionally, despite all the tensions—was not a coincidence. It says something about Barack, and the kind of president he’d be.”
Obama was so evenhanded and solicitous in his interactions that fellow students would do impressions of his Socratic chin-stroking approach to everything, even seeking a consensus on popcorn preferences at the movies. "Do you want salt on your popcorn?" one classmate, Nancy L. McCullough, recalled, mimicking his sensitive bass voice. "Do you even want popcorn?"
He skipped most parties and made his friends in class, including one good buddy, Rob Fisher, a first-year student from Maryland, whom he met on the first day of classes. Obama called Fisher, who is white, "brother," and teased him about his raggedy clothes. They watched Bulls games . Both idolized Michael Jordan.
At the end of his first year, Obama joined the Law Review. He nearly missed the deadline to apply when his 1984 Toyota Tercel broke down, and begged Fisher for a ride and sweet - talk ed his way to the front of a line at the post office to have his envelope postmarked before noon.
"That's the one modest contribution I've made to his success," Fisher, now a Washington lawyer, said in a recent interview.
Christine Lee '91, Classmate and Law Review
March 1990: “He’s willing to talk to [the conservatives] and he has a grasp of where they are coming from, which is something a lot of blacks don’t have and don’t care to have,” Christine Lee, a second-year law student who is black.
In the winter of 1990, the middle of his second year, with the review preparing to hold the election for its next president, Obama threw his hat in the ring, surprising everyone. “There were people on the review, we used to call them gunners,” says Andrew Schapiro, one of Obama’s contemporaries there, “because you knew from the minute they walked in to Gannett House that they wanted to be president. But that was not the sense you ever got from Barack.”
That becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review would be a nice biographical asset in any such race would never have escaped a mind as sharp as Obama’s. Schapiro recalls his familiarity with two up-and-coming black politicians, both Rhodes scholars: Mel Reynolds, who would be elected to Congress in 1992, and Kurt Schmoke, who became mayor of Baltimore in 1987. “It struck me that me that Barack might have the same model in mind,” Schapiro says. “I got the sense he thought, I’m Barack, I can do that!”
David Dante Troutt '91, Classmate
David Dante Troutt, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law-Newark, met Obama during their first year at Harvard, where they shared the same class section and cigarette breaks. “We were both skinny and cold and full of tobacco outside the buildings during the Cambridge winters,” he said.
“When you’re an anxious first-year black student, speaking up in class in that environment was incredibly intimidating,” observes David Troutt, one of Obama’s classmates and now a professor at Rutgers. “Because your right to be there was being questioned by some of your white peers. A lot of people were content to feel they’d done well by speaking up at all, but being a race person wasn’t what they signed up for. They certainly weren’t going to raise their hand to speak about an issue that directly reflected their concerns as a black person: to show why the professor was wrong or challenge a comment by a classmate that they thought was racist. They’d simmer about it in their seat, but only a few people would say something. Barack was one of them—we could always count on Barack.”
One time, Trout recalls, the discussion turned to a matter of criminal procedure and constitutional rights. “We were talking about an exception in the law allowing police to enter a dwelling under ‘exigent circumstances,’ which could be pretty broad,” he says. “Barack began, as he often did, saying, ‘It’s my sense…’ And he calmly went on to put the issues in context in a way that affirmed the lives of even apparently fleeing black suspects, the dignity of even a modest home, and the way excessive state power can do harm to both. It was very moving, yet sensible. I’m not sure there was a response.”
Hill Harper '91, Classmate (Dr. Sheldon Hawkes on the CBS drama television series CSI: NY)
Basketball was his outlet. He played often at Hemenway, the law school gymnasium, just off Harvard Square. Hill Harper, a classmate and frequent defender, said Obama, who stands about 6 feet 1 inch tall, had a quick first step and could easily sink midrange jump shots. "If there was any knock against Barack, he pulled his socks up a little too high and his shorts were a little too small," Harper said, laughing. "We were just at the beginning of the Michael Jordan era. He more harkened back to the Julius Erving era." Actor Hill Harper is best known for his role on the CBS drama “CSI: NY,” where he plays Dr. Sheldon Hawkes, among other film and television roles. But right now, Harper has taken on another role: parlaying his celebrity status into a campaign for presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
What sets Harper apart from other high-profile Obama endorsers is a 20-year friendship with the candidate, dating back to their years at Harvard Law School. Here, TODAYshow.com talks to the actor about his public support for Obama, the effect of celebrity endorsements and the man behind the public figure. Q. You've known Barack Obama since your time at Harvard Law School. Why, besides friendship, do you support Obama?
I've known him for almost 20 years — I met him the first week of class. I looked up to him, and not just because he's taller than I am!
He went to law school knowing why he was going. I went straight from undergrad to grad school. He had a sense of gravitas and judgment. I looked up him then and I look up to him now. He gets it right. He's extremely intelligent, extremely pragmatic. That’s the kind of leadership we need now. Everything that was great about him at Harvard Law School is still great about him now. Anyone who meets him understands how wonderful a leader he is. [If he gets elected, I believe] he will go down as one of the greatest presidents in history. Q. How has Obama changed since his Harvard days? What qualities remain the same? A: He's become more intelligent, more committed to helping people on a larger and larger scale. But he's still the same person. He called me on my birthday right when he was about to speak to 65,000 people, before the Oregon primary. He's a good, genuine person, a good father and husband. What people often don't see is that he has a great sense of humor, a great smile, a great laugh. He loves sports, football, basketball, golf. He loves ESPN SportsCenter — although he doesn't get to watch it much!
CNN Video Interview
There were rallies, sit-ins, overnight occupations of the dean’s office, even a student-propagated discrimination lawsuit; the prominent professor and critical race theorist Derrick Bell resigned over the issue. But Obama was a missing person in these pitched contretemps. “His absence from the leadership was conspicuous,” Keith Boykin, one of the prime movers of the campaign, says. “We wanted him to be front and center, because he represented a lot of the points that we were making. But nobody was particularly surprised that he wasn’t more involve
I remember Barack Obama as a very strong editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review.... He motivated a large group of editors, who were talented, headstrong, and often contentious, to produce what we sincerely believed to be the United States’ best scholarly journal in law. His greatest skill lay in defusing conflicts and in encouraging colleagues of his to cooperate with one another, or at least to compromise... Was Barack considered an ‘affirmative action baby’ by white students or faculty members? It never occurred to me to think of Barack as anything besides the president of the Review, and (as I have said) a very strong one at that. Even back in those days he plainly aspired to a high-profile political career, and the rest of us respected, even admired, him for his ambitions.
Professor Ogletree taught Michelle Obama ’88 in an advocacy workshop and later also got to know Barack Obama when he was a student.
I marveled at Barack Obama's ability to multi-task even as a young man. He was not only asking probing questions in the classroom, but also eager to challenge bigger, stronger and quicker players in the gymnasium in very competitive games of basketball. It was this ability to navigate the challenges of the classroom and the chaos of the basketball court that caused him to stand alone as a mature, bright, friendly and optimistic young law student.
Martha Minow, Professor
Professor Minow taught Barack Obama in a course on law and society at Harvard Law School and served with him on a national panel examining civic engagement when he served as a state senator. She served as an advisor to his campaign on legal issues and education policy.
“He had a kind of eloquence and respect from his peers that was really quite remarkable.” When he spoke in her class on law and society, “everyone became very attentive and very quiet.”
Minow, who’d come to consider Obama a friend rather than just a former student, wound up serving with the then state senator on a national panel examining civic engagement in the late 1990s.
Obama proved just as engaging among the group of 33 distinguished and diverse panelists as he was in her class, Minow recalls.
After listening to him ably summarize everyone’s views at one meeting, Minow joined a group of panelists who went up to Obama and asked when he might run for president. He laughed at the idea, prompting many in the group to start calling him “governor.” Obama’s self-confidence and self-possession were immediately apparent. “When he spoke, everyone got quiet and listened, and it was very unusual for that kind of hush to fall,” says Martha Minow, a professor of his. “He was a little bit above the conversation. He had a synthetic mind and a capacity to summarize what people said so that they would come out feeling like, Yeah, I was fairly treated.”
David Wilkins '80, Professor
Professor Wilkins taught Michele Obama and also knew Barack Obama as a student – and has supported his political career ever since. Professor Wilkins has served on various committees during the campaign and co-hosted several fundraisers, as well as speaking for the campaign in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois and Massachusetts.
But the senator was still outstanding in his own right—“brilliant, charismatic, and focused,” said Wilkins, the Kirkland and Ellis professor of law. The two forged a relationship after Obama became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
“He talked about how the timing was not exactly what he himself expected, but with a tremendous response from the nation, that this is an important moment and a great opportunity to step forward,” Wilkins said.
He said he advised Obama to become a Supreme Court clerk. Obama recognized the honor in pursuing that post, Wilkins said, but quickly added that he wasn’t interested.
“He said that he wanted to write a book about his life and his father, go back to Chicago, get back into the community, and run for office there. He knew exactly what he wanted and went about getting it done,” Wilkins said. “He was the kind of person who you knew was destined for greatness.”
Laurence Tribe, Professor and Supervisor
March 1990: "He's very unusual, in the sense that other students who might have something approximating his degree of insight are very intimidating to other students or inconsiderate and thoughtless," said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor. "He's able to build upon what other students say and see what's valuable in their comments without belittling them."
But what truly distinguishes Obama from other bright students at Harvard Law, Tribe said, is his ability to make sense of complex legal arguments and translate them into current social concerns. For example, Tribe said, Obama wrote an insightful research article showing how contrasting views in the abortion debate are a direct result of cultural and sociological differences.
October 2008: Barack came to see me during his first year at Harvard. It was 31 March 1989. I found my desk calendar and I'd written his name with an exclamation point. From the late 1960s, when I began teaching as a professor at Harvard Law School, until the present, there has been no other student whose name I've noted in that way.
He impressed me from the beginning as an extraordinary young man. He was obviously brilliant, driven and interested in pursuing ideas with a clear sense that his reasons for being in law school were not to climb some corporate ladder, nor simply to broaden his opportunities, but to go back to the community.
He had a combination of intellectual acumen, open-mindedness, resistance to stereotypical thinking and conventional presuppositions. He also had a willingness to change his mind when new evidence appeared, confidence in his own moral compass and a maturity that obviously came from some combination of his upbringing and earlier experience.
I asked him to be my research assistant, a role he filled for a year and a half. We had a much more vibrant dialogue than one typically has with a research assistant. He was witty, he had a lighthearted touch and even though we were dealing with some pretty grave and weighty subjects, it was always a breezy thing to talk to him.
He had a charismatic quality and was very engaging. Other students gravitated towards him and liked him rather than envying him or wanting to compete with him.
Typically in a place as competitive as Harvard or Yale, one student will make a comment and another student will try and one-up him by saying something cleverer or wittier. But Barack would never put anyone else down. If a student expressed a view he didn't agree with, he nevertheless saw the value in it and built on it.
He found points of communality and gave people the sense that he could see where they were coming from, and what their core beliefs were, and why they were worthy of respect. It was really a precursor to the way he engages in dialogue across ideological and partisan divisions.
In his second year, he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review [one of the leading law journals in the world]. It was a position which represented the judgment of his peers about his intellectual acumen and his leadership capacities. He emerged with the enthusiastic backing of other students. In no sense was this some kind of affirmative action; he was chosen as the best person people could find.
We used to take long walks on the Charles River in Boston. Our conversations were enormously wide-ranging and enjoyable, about life in general, not just about work. I had no doubt as I got to know him that he had an unlimited future. I didn't have a clear sense of what direction it would take, but I thought it would be political and I thought the sky was the limit.
He had a personal quality which was transcendent and I continued to feel that way about him each time we met. And the quality he demonstrated that I've always been left with more than any other is authenticity. There isn't a fibre of phoniness about this guy.
January 2007: Loeb University Professor Laurence H. Tribe HC ’62, who taught Obama and employed him as a research assistant, remembers him as a “brilliant, personable, and obviously unique” person. Tribe said that Obama’s theoretical perspective on applying modern physics to law was “very impressive.”
“He is obviously a serious intellectual as well as a fantastic campaigner who can reach across boundaries,” Tribe said. “He will make an extraordinarily fine president.”
Fall 2007: In the spring of his first year at law school, Obama stopped by the office of Professor Laurence Tribe HLS ’66 inquiring about becoming a research assistant. Tribe rarely hired first-year students but recalls being struck by Obama’s unusual combination of intelligence, curiosity and maturity.
He was so impressed, in fact, that he hired Obama on the spot—and wrote his name and phone number on his calendar that day—March 31, 1989—for posterity.
Obama helped research a complicated article Tribe wrote making connections between physics and constitutional law, as well as a book about abortion. The following year, Obama enrolled in Tribe’s constitutional law course.
Tribe likes to say he had taught about 4,000 students before Obama and has taught another 4,000 since, yet none has impressed him more.
OTHER PEOPLE WHO MET BARACK OBAMA IN THE HARVARD YEARS Artur Davis ’93, Student
Artur Davis ’93 still vividly recalls how much Obama inspired him with a speech he gave during orientation week on striving for excellence and mastery.
Davis, now a United States congressman from Alabama, insists he left that speech by Obama convinced he’d just heard a future Supreme Court justice—or president.
Some students got their first glimpse of Obama, the orator, in the spring of 1991, when the Black Law Students Association broke with tradition and asked him, rather than a renowned judge or professor, to deliver the keynote address at the association's annual conference. Standing before hundreds , Obama gave what classmates recall as a stirring call to action.
"It was a clarion call," recalled Randall L. Kennedy, a law school professor who attended the conference. "We've gotten this education, we've gotten this great halo, this great career-enhancing benefit. Let's not just feather our nests. Let's go forward and address the many ills that confront our society."
John K. Holmes, Landlord
Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this story, lived all three years in the same basement apartment on Broadway in Somerville, near Winter Hill. He kept the place spotless and decorated it with second hand furniture.
"He was a model tenant," said John K. Holmes of Arlington, his landlord. "I can remember when he told me he was leaving, I can remember being disappointed." Thomas Jefferson had Monticello. John F. Kennedy had Hyannis. Barack Obama, on the other hand, had the basement of 365 Broadway in Somerville, which the
future president rented for $900 a month while attending Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991.
As the Globe reported in a 2007 profile, Obama lived for all three years of law school in the building near Winter Hill, driving his 1984 Toyota Tercel to class (and picking up the occasional parking ticket).
The 1889 brick rowhouse, meanwhile, is privately owned, and Obama's former landlord, John K. Holmes, said he is also planning to put up a marker at some point.
"He was a very good tenant. He was no trouble. There were no girls or wild parties," Holmes said. "He was very industrious. He had an agenda. He wanted to be successful."
Holmes, who has owned the building since the mid-1970s, said he met Obama after the future president responded to a classified ad in the Globe. Blair Underwood, Actor
A prankster posted a cast list for a movie version of his life, starring Blair Underwood. When Mr. Underwood visited the school, he questioned Mr. Obama for material for “L.A. Law.”
“People were always asking me, do young black attorneys really exist like that?” Mr. Underwood said in a recent interview. “I would refer to Barack.”
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virtue of affirmative action, or by virtue of not being at the very top of your class in terms of legal ability. Barack was at the very top of his class in terms of legal ability. He had a first-class legal mind and, in my view, was selected to be president of the Reviewentirely on his merits.
Broadway in Somerville, near Winter Hill. He kept the place spotless and decorated it with second hand furniture. 
