First, have a modeling career.

During your candidacy and after you take office, the press will thoroughly cover your physical appearance. They might compare your body to all sorts of fruits. This kind of scrutiny may distract the public from your main purpose of making political change. To get used to hearing all the negative comments about your figure, spend anywhere from three to twenty years of your life working as a professional model. Your looks will receive roughly the same amount of attention when you later run for office.

Hide your emotions.

Remember to always speak in a dull, monotone voice so as not to reveal any enthusiasm – remember, a passionate speech can be interpreted as “emotional,” which is political suicide for a woman! You want to be seen as cold, determined, and unfeeling, but also not too cold, determined, and unfeeling, because then you’ll be called a bitch. This is a tough balance to strike; everyone knows women have 77% more emotions than men. Men only experience anger, lust, angerlust, and an emotion felt when the sports team they love is doing poorly.

Write on your clothes.

Are reporters constantly asking you about your clothing? That’s probably because your outfit is making a statement. Next time, make a political statement – use a Sharpie to write exactly what you stand for on your pantsuit! You’ll finally get to answer “Who are you wearing?” with something cool like “Immigration reform!”

Introductory Disclaimer the First: Low-income students who DON’T have the grades to get into a fancy school also deserve to be treated with dignity and not to be bankrupted by their educations.

Introductory Disclaimer the Second: These schools have massive endowments and SHOULD be doing all these things, and you don’t need to give them your money. We still feel personally grateful.

After Nicole mentioned having been on full financial aid at Harvard in an interview, she got an email from a current first-gen student on aid, and it caused her to tweet passionately on the subject for several hours. Nikki, also a former student on full financial aid at Johns Hopkins, chimed in, and it resulted in So Many Feelings that they decided to have a more formal conversation about it for the site.

*

Nicole: Let’s start off by telling our stories! My parents thought I was BANANAS for applying to Harvard, because we could never afford it in a billion years. I was in Canada, my guidance counselor didn’t know squat about American colleges, so I had to figure out all this application and standardized testing stuff out on my own. And what I found out, for starters, is that Harvard would waive my application fee if I was low-income (I literally just had to ask), and the College Board would waive my SAT costs (I think I had to do more than ask.) And then I got in.

Getting in was the second most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. Getting my financial aid letter? THAT was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The drug’s dangerous, but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer’s gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory — in her body’s memory. We look down so many avenues of the past…but only feminine avenues. Yet, there’s a place where no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot — into both feminine and masculine pasts. The one who can be many places at once: the Kwisatz Haderach. Many men have tried the drug…so many, but none has succeeded.”

During a fundraiser, a congressman catches my eye and waves me over. He’s in the middle of a conversation but reaches out for a two armed hug as he says my name: “HEATHER!” He holds me by my shoulders and asks me how I am. “And how is mom?” Mom is good. Mom is away at Columbia University earning her Master’s in Journalism. “Please tell her I said hello. But wait. Have you met my friend?” He’s personable and introduces me to the candidate for whom he is fundraising. “This is Heather! She’s the federal lobbyist for Big Name Organization.” She says that she’s been looking forward to meeting me. I see the congressman again a month later after becoming unceremoniously unemployed. He stops to introduce me to Nancy Pelosi. “I want you to meet Heather,” he says to the House Minority Leader. “She’s with…” his voice trails off. “This is Heather.” I started to continue for him, “This is Heather. She is nobody.”

***

At 23 I became a lobbyist and at 30 I was not. You should know that I wasn’t born into some political family. I was born to a black man from Birmingham, Alabama who was raised in the deep south during the Civil Rights Movement. My father still expected to see a fountain labeled “COLORED.” My mother was from a coal town in West Virginia and wanted to spend her days speaking Castilian Spanish under palm trees in Barcelona. Together they wound up with a child who watched a lot of CSPAN and prayed at the altar of Ted Kennedy. I was not raised to believe politics was the be all, end all or even in my future and yet I found myself wanting for nothing than to be seated at one of the desks on the floor of the Senate.

When people asked what I did for a living I would say “lobbyist,” which was quickly followed by “but not for like, guns or anything.”