PURCHASE, N.Y. (AP) _ She's a former first lady, a United States senator, and a potential 2008 presidential candidate. But to hear Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton tell it, all of that pales in comparison to her real childhood dreams.
 "I wanted desperately to be an Olympic athlete," Clinton said Monday at a Purchase College symposium on Title IX, the 1972 law outlawing sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. "I tried everything. I ran every race, and if I was really lucky I finished second to last...I couldn't jump, I couldn't run, I couldn't swim."
After determining she'd never be an athlete, she set her sights on becoming an astronaut.
"So I wrote to NASA and said, 'How do I sign up to be an astronaut?"' she said. "And they wrote back very politely and said, 'We don't take girls."'
Next went the dream of a career in medicine.
 "I volunteered at the hospital but kept getting lightheaded and woozy when I saw anyone in any kind of distress," she said.
She also abandoned hopes of becoming a scientist or mathematician because she didn't have the best grades in those subjects.
That, she said, left her current career choice -- one that was shaped at the family dinner table.
"We had the most lively, contentious dinner table conversations that probably anybody has endured," Clinton recalled of her family's mealtime public policy debates. "I thought well, I do like to study what goes on in the world around me, I adore government as a subject in school, I'm very interested in politics and history. So I went to law school."
Despite all those apparent setbacks, Clinton urged students in the audience to pursue their dreams by believing in themselves and ignoring obstacles in their path.
"My whole life has been a speed bump," she said to laughs. |
