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Malia Obama’s Graduation Day To Precede A Year In Madrid

By Nancy Bailey
Published on: 09:41 PST, Jun 9, 2016

Malia Obama will graduate from high school on Friday, June 10. The event will kick off the First Daughter’s gap year before college, during which time she may be traveling to Madrid.

Malia may be doing a summer internship at the U.S. Embassy, according to The Local. President Obama is planning a trip to Spain in July, and Malia will be accompanying him.

Malia is fluent in Spanish and acted as translator for her father during the president’s recent trip to Cuba. President Obama told ABC News that his daughter’s Spanish was “much better” than his own.

U.S. ambassador to Spain James Costos was a substantial donor to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012. He has supported business connections between Spain and the U.S. since he became ambassador in 2013.

According to The Local, Costos is a former HBO exec, and “was instrumental in bringing the production of Game of Thrones to Spain, as well as several other Hollywood films.”

Malia Obama is described as a “movie buff” and has spent the last couple of summers working on film sets. One of her recent projects has included working on the HBO series Girls, written by and starring Lena Dunham.

A leggy beauty, Malia stands six feet one inches tall, and although her public appearances are rare, her fashion sense has made her “a girl to watch,” according to Vogue.

Malia has been described as “the nation’s most scrutinized and sought-after college applicant” by the New York Times. She had been advised by her parents not to seek education in a big-name school. Last fall, her father said he had counseled Malia “not to stress too much” about being accepted to a particular school.

“Just because it’s not some name-brand, famous, fancy school doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get a great education there.”

But Malia selected Harvard, possibly not only because both her parents attended law school there, but because the school also has a reputation of hosting children of celebrities.

Gil Troy, a presidential historian at McGill University and the author of The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, suggested that schools like Harvard could offer a sense of normalcy to someone who has not experienced a normal childhood.

“The challenge of being a first child is to be normal within the context of all the scrutiny, and the challenge of everybody around them is to pretend like they’re normal and nothing’s out of the ordinary, which puts an enormous amount of stress on both the kid and the school.

“The larger the institutional ego of the place, the more comfortable you can feel about the ability to cope with that and still have as close to a normal experience as possible.”

A gap year may give Malia more of an opportunity to experience a freshman year farther outside of the limelight, as her father’s presidency would have ended by then.

Mr. Troy said, “the kids can get to at least some level of irrelevance that they absolutely cannot get when they’re still in the White House.

“The degree to which every presidential child is half a millisecond away or a snapshot away or an Instagram away from scandal — it’s really kind of unfair.”

Malia will turn 18 on July 4, and will attend Harvard University in autumn 2017, as part of the class of 2021.

[Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP]

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