When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
Part of the great thing of looking back on how I went from the cattle ranch to the White House was, I was a country music DJ. I saw Garth Brooks perform for free in 1992 at the Colorado State Fair where I met this person who knew about this graduate school program.
But I decided I wanted more education and I had to make a choice between starting law school, which was interesting to me, and going for a graduate degree in engineering.
The greatest challenge I think is adjusting to not playing baseball. The reason for that is I had to come out of baseball and come into the business world, not being a college graduate, not being educated to come into the business world the way I should have.
The thing I'm most proud of is that I've raised a lot of money for certain charities - breast cancer and the Caldecott Foundation and the NSPCC. But as far as my self-esteem is concerned, doing 'The Graduate' for 11 months was fantastic.
Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.
I studied acting in NYU's graduate program, in which we covered everything from Ibsen and Chekov to August Wilson and David Mamet.
Higher education is one of few areas where this country competes with the rest of the world and wins. The best of American higher education outstrips any in the world. Look where the rest of the world goes for higher education, for graduate degrees. They come here.
My first direct encounter with the military was when I joined ROTC as a graduate student, although my father, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, can trace the military service in our family all the way back to the Revolutionary War.
The plan was to go Juilliard, graduate, and then go across the street and play in the New York Philharmonic - that was the plan, anyway.
Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.
My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn't even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.
My background in music is classical - I did graduate school in music. At that time, I was studying composition, but I was studying classical guitar very seriously.
My mom was the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, in 1946. She had leadership roles in the law, in government and the corporate world. She was a great role model in that she felt anything was possible.
One of my first jobs was at the Boston Globe. I worked in the sports department six months a year. When I was ready to graduate, the sports editor gave me a job as a schoolboy sports writer.
So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.
You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.
I felt I ought not to be wasting time, and I hurried to graduate from high school to enroll at UCSD. I also hurried to finish college, to go on to higher studies. By the time I was in my teens, I had a strong sense of mission, wanting to discover something important or solve a major problem in biology or medicine.
Then, in 2000, John Reid, Elton John's former manager, asked me to audition for the stage version of The Graduate he was producing. So I worked on it, got the part, and after three weeks' rehearsal I was on stage!
I had a professor in graduate school who told us, 'Know what you're good at, and do that thing.' And I thought, 'Hands down, I'm an ensemble girl. I'm a fierce ensemble girl. I am dependable.' I was never seen for the ingenue or the leading lady.
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
I think I finally chose the graduate degree in engineering primarily because it only took one year and law school took three years, and I felt the pressure of being a little behind - although I was just 22.
I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.
It was nice to finish up Stanford. I think I always felt that I would be there for four years and graduate, and definitely didn't want to leave early. A degree was definitely a plus, and I was having a lot of fun in school. But after football, you know, I don't know. I really did enjoy studying architecture; it was a blast.
ACT and SAT each have their own parts of the country. The GRE has its lock on graduate admissions. And so, one could blame the companies, but really, economically, they have no incentive to change things very much because they're getting the business.
I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.
I'm visiting my high school. Every half year I do the exams, and then this year I'm going to graduate.
I'd applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it's that I'm good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.
I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.
My husband worked on Wall Street and was an Ivy League graduate as well. In our world, we were the last couple you'd imagine enmeshed in domestic violence.
So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
I was in graduate school. I had a birth control accident and went to get the morning after pill.
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many students graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers... reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.
I loved it. I just thought I wanted to stay in college forever. I came to New York all by myself; I didn't have any friends there. But it was fine. I felt comfortable. I started thinking, 'Maybe graduate school?' I was really cool with people who were smart, who knew stuff. It's very romantic and stimulating.