Politics

Hillary Clinton talks about experience at Harvard to Humans of New York

Hillary Clinton. Brian Snyder / Reuters

Hillary Clinton knows she can sometimes be perceived as “walled off.”

In a Humans of New York Facebook post shared Thursday, the Democratic Presidential candidate described how as a young woman, she had to learn to “control [her] emotions,” referencing a specific incident before taking her law school admissions test at Harvard University.

https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.102107073196735.4429.102099916530784/1362236273850469/?type=3&theater

In the post, Clinton said that a group of men began harassing her and a friend, the only two women about to take the big exam, to dissuade them from entering law.

“One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around,” Clinton said in the post. “It was intense. It got very personal.”

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Clinton said that instead of engaging with the men, she kept her head down because she didn’t want to lose her focus.

“I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional,” Clinton said. “But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena.”

“I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional,” she continued. “And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”

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Clearly Clinton wasn’t dissuaded from entering the world of law and politics: She ended up attending Yale Law in 1969, earning her degree in 1973.

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