In high school, Ocasio-Cortez was very invested in the sciences. She even won second place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which awarded her with the naming of an asteroid: 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.

She went on to study economics and international relations at Boston University. During her time there, she interned in the immigration office of Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), where she first started to grasp the influence money has in politics. She says her experience led her to “realize that people that had the opportunity to run for office were often beneficiaries of dynastic politics or had access to networks that were extremely affluent.” This was deeply troubling for Ocasio-Cortez, and prompted her to move away from politics and toward community organizing.

During her sophomore year of college, her father passed away. She continued her studies, but she started waitressing and bartending while doing community work, all to prevent their family home from foreclosure. She didn’t have the ability to just focus on her community organizing, but refused to let economic obstacles deter her from pursuing her true passion: helping others.

After graduating from college, she returned to the Bronx. She worked a job at a taco shop/bar while simultaneously serving as education director for the National Hispanic Institute. In 2016, she volunteered for Senator Bernie Sanders’s (D-VT) presidential campaign, an experience she found incredibly inspiring. She says that the campaign led her to see “an opportunity to not only get money out of politics, but in the process allow working class Americans to have a role in our democracy again.”

After the painful loss that came in the spring of 2016 when Sanders lost his bid for the Democratic party nomination, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t give up on advocacy. She traveled to Standing Rock in North Dakota to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline.

“At Standing Rock we experienced first hand people coming together in their communities and trying to use the levers of representative democracy to try and say, ‘We don’t want this in our community, we don’t want this in our backyard,’ and corporations using their monetary influence to completely erode that process,” she says. “It was really my experience at Standing Rock that was pretty pivotal for me because I saw how corporations were literally militarizing themselves against American citizens so that they could kind of maximize their profit margins on fossil fuels.”

Shortly after her trip to North Dakota, Brand New Congress, a political action committee founded by former Sanders supporters, reached out to her. They urged her to run in New York’s 14th District, which includes parts of Queens and the Bronx, and is made up of primarily Latinx and Asian people.

“This is a national crisis and it is not unique to any party. It has taken over both sides, and we need to be able to hold ourselves to a higher standard if working class Americans are going to have a shot in our future. And so I said yes and I eventually launched my campaign,” she says.

She immediately learned how difficult it is to run a clean campaign, free from corporate donations. “Campaigns are so much more expensive than people think they are. Just to keep the lights on is several thousand dollars a month,” Ocasio-Cortez says, noting that she still worked another job while running. “[Money is] a compromising factor in helping people run for office.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign refused donations from corporate sponsors and lobby groups altogether because they wanted to be held accountable to their constituency as opposed to the highest bidder. In the end, it’s part of what she believes made her campaign so successful.