8 Brilliant Celebrities Who Got Their Start At Harvard

With a celebratory Instagram post, Blackish star Yara Shahidi announced that she'll be attending Harvard. And so, for the past 12 hours, our fangirl minds have been dreaming of the lives Shahidi and her future BFF Malia Obama will be leading as Harvard undergrads.

We can see them casually cutting through the quad on their walk from a colonial-style dorm to a lecture hall. We see them in the library, flipping between Sartre's existentialist philosophy and Toni Morrison's novels. We see them thriving during their four years in an academic enclave.

The actress and the president's daughter will join a long line of public figures who have graduated from the prestigious Cambridge university. Some, like Natalie Portman, attended college even after achieving vast professional success. For most of these celebrities, though, their Harvard years were a time of exploration. While at Harvard, they dabbled in theater and philosophy and football. They figured their dreams out.

Here’s what we learned about these celebrities’ from their college days.