We were kids, but we were put through some pretty horrific exercises. We had a teacher once in seventh grade who ripped out pages of the phone book and told us to memorize the name, address and phone numbers of one column. It was literally to teach our brains how to find mnemonics to memorize, and it ended up being a great gift.

In eighth grade, one of our teachers gave us all rubber bands. She said, “You have until tomorrow to come up with an alternative use for this.” We were all stumped. The next day, we were just going to go in and say we couldn’t figure it out. And I’m sitting at my desk, and I start rubbing the rubber band against my paper, and I realize it’s an eraser.

What was your first job?

I worked in a storeroom that had no windows of a very fancy store in Chicago. I put the tags on the clothes. I honestly loved the job. I loved looking at the clothes. I loved the idea that I could make money. I told them I was 16, but I wasn’t. I was 15. I went there with bells on every single day. I would check the merchandise in so fast that I had nothing to do for the rest of the day, so they said to me, “Well, go help the bookkeeper.”

Then they asked me to start helping close out the register, because I was the one who could get it to balance. Once I was downstairs closing out a register, and a woman came in and she didn’t have anyone to help her, and I sold her thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes. I just thought it was the most amazing thing.

It was my first real example of making myself indispensable, which was one of the things my mom told me. She was like, “Just make it so you’re so good, you can’t get fired.”

What did you study in college?

I was in the Woodrow Wilson School of international relations and public policy at Princeton. You have to apply to get in, and I did not originally get in. I lobbied really hard and called many people. I just would not take no for an answer.

I spent a lot of my years in the Woodrow Wilson School studying systems that really oppress people. I wrote my senior thesis on South Africa, and specifically on how children ultimately led to the end of apartheid because of their uprisings.