SCHOOL DAYZ
Now, this is a story all about how
my life got flipped-turned upside down.
—DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Theme Song)”
While living between Westchester and the Bronx gave her some real-life lessons, young Alexandria was also dedicated to learning in the classroom in Yorktown.
As a minority at a nearly all-white high school, Alexandria had often exceeded her teachers’ low expectations. She was geek chic and read The New York Times daily, even as a teen. It was the beginning of her sense that information could be a way to fight back against the hardness of a world that could never comprehend what she had witnessed in her everyday life. She wore her difference like a badge and used it as a way to stand out from the crowd.
And stand out she did. She excelled in science, and prepared early on for a career in medicine. She was interested in health and had a natural inclination to be a healer. Similar to the way her father wanted to heal the housing blight he saw at the center of the struggle of people he loved in the South Bronx, she wanted to return her people to health and vibrancy. Her high school science teacher Michael Blueglass later recounted to The New York Times, “She was interested in research to help people in all areas, including developing nations, not just for the people with money.”
As early as ninth grade, Alexandria participated in the Great Debate, a conference where 150–300 students would gather to discuss Latinx issues with the goal of designing new, innovative road maps for social change. She honed her skill in speaking truth to power at the National Institutes of Health’s College Ready Network, where she was mentored by some of the premier biological researchers in the world. She also participated in the Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session, a youth government that teaches its students how to develop their own community policies and manage large organizations. It’s hosted by the National Hispanic Institute, a nonprofit organization that fosters future Latinx community leaders. It convenes students from more than twenty-five states and four Latin American countries. Once she went to college, she served as the Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session’s secretary of state.
MEANWHILE, HER STUDIOUS, inquisitive nature led her to develop a research study with her mentors at the NIH College Ready Network and enter it into a science fair in 2007, when she was a senior in high school. The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is no rinky-dink high school gig: it’s the largest precollege exhibition of scientific research in the world. Alexandria felt that her research offered great insight on a compound that may help regenerate the cells of a simple organism, roundworms to be exact, after they had been exposed to damage caused by oxidative stress.
So, hold on here, sis, because this is some complex stuff, and it gets kind of deep. “Free radicals” is a term thrown around a lot in health-food circles that many researchers think might be one of the causes of diseases like cancer. Basically, free radicals are like rogue cells that are unstable, so they are looking for other cells to join up with. The first problem is that when they join with healthy cells they can weaken the vitality of those cells. The second problem is that they can cause a lot of damage because they like to pair up a lot, but they are always bringing bad vibes with them. It’s kinda like that guy who always wants to hang out with the baes, but instead of just chillaxing and enjoying himself, he ends up bringing the baes around him down—he’s just negative energy. Then they get stressed out and want him to leave. On a cellular level, that chain reaction is called oxidative stress, and oxygen issues are one reason people suffer from chronic illness.
So check this out. Alexandria did a test to see whether a certain chemical compound would have a positive effect on cells (baes) that were having a hard time getting rid of this dude at the party. She introduced an antioxidant for the experiment, and the results were promising enough to indicate it might work in more complex organisms than the roundworms she used. Alexandria knew she wanted to be some kind of healer, so the most obvious choice of profession for someone with her brains and her concern for other people was medicine. Little did she know, she would one day be involved in devising treatment plans all right—but not just for individual people, for an entire society.
Okay, so even if it’s totally incomprehensible to you what AOC’s experiment was, either because you empathized with the dude over the baes in the analogy or because science just isn’t your thing, you have to admit, that’s pretty impressive. Well, the judges at this world-renowned science fair thought Alexandria’s research was pretty impressive too: she won second place. A little girl from the South Bronx killed it in a science fair where she beat out all but one of the other geeks from around the world, usually guys, who are expected to be the smartest ones in the room. Not!
Still, it wasn’t a total victory. Alexandria said that when she asked around among the doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where she conducted her experiment, why there were not more scientists pursuing the promise of these kinds of results, she was told it was because pharmaceutical companies had discouraged researchers from doing it. Years, later, when AOC made it to Congress, Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of the Society for Science & the Public, and publisher of Science News, later said, “We expect that the lessons she learned during ISEF—the importance of evidence-based science, clear communication and team work—will translate well in her work on Capitol Hill.” And in fact it has.
An especially neat thing about this whole science-fair experience is that the second-place winner of the competition gets a star—not a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but an actual star in the sky—named after them. Her star, well, actually an asteroid, was named by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory: it’s called 23238 Ocasio-Cortez. How many people in high school can say they have a star in the universe named after them? Our queen was killing it already at the age of seventeen.
AFTER CONDUCTING THIS rewarding research at a top-notch medical hospital like Mount Sinai, Alexandria was well on her way to a career in medicine. However, equal to her passion for science, in high school, was her urgency to challenge the ideas of people around her. This drive manifested in her Great Debate experience, and it would continue to be a major focus in her life. After high school graduation she’d go on to become the educational director at the National Hispanic Institute. In 2017 she was awarded the NHI Person of the Year.
NHI founder and president Ernesto Nieto stated, “Alex symbolizes the new emerging Latina—bold and courageous, well-educated and forward-thinking, contemporary with her ideas and views, and unafraid of challenges . . . It’s her character, her determination to succeed, and her community vision that makes the difference. It was there when she first joined us at sixteen years of age and continues today. Alex is among the rising difference makers who are destined to impact our future as a country.”
IT WAS NO surprise that our highly praised, award-winning queen would go to a great college; though money was still tight at home, scholarships, including a John F. Lopez Internship from the National Hispanic Institute, and student loans helped. She enrolled at Boston University in a premed program.
As a freshman, she participated in a study-abroad program in Niger, West Africa, a country stricken with poverty that involved food and water shortages, where one in five children dies of starvation. She volunteered at a maternity clinic on the outskirts of its capital city, Niamey, on the banks of the Niger River, helping midwives deliver babies. In a 2019 interview with Bon Appétit, Alexandria spoke of the extreme poverty she witnessed, including poor medical facilities for the women she served. The babies were being born on steel tables, and there were a tragic number of stillbirths. “The reason the child has passed was very preventable . . . This child’s life was literally decided because of where it was born,” she wrote in one instance.
Alexandria had personally known the impact of inequality from her life in the Bronx, but to see it through an international lens . . . it affected her. The Bronx is New York’s poorest borough, with a poverty rate of 30 percent and more than half of the residents earning under $40,000 a year. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? But juxtapose that against the average $2,000 rent for a one-bedroom apartment and the economics look bleak. She had walked these delicate lines her entire life, but nothing compared to what she saw in Niger. Nevertheless, it was somehow familiar.
When Alexandria returned to Boston University, she changed her major to economics and international relations. She realized how much health and economics went hand in hand. She herself had contracted malaria in Niger. “In the developing world, malaria is an economic disease. It’s a disease that impacts so many people as to be actually impacting national GDP, so I started thinking about these health issues as more macroeconomic public-policy issues.” The more she connected with her experience in the Sahara, the closer she came to a new calling.
She was activated, graduated with honors in May 2011, and the AOC prescription for social change was birthed. Delivering babies for the love of humanity was a great profession, but if those babies couldn’t be assured of equal access to healthcare, or even survival, then there was a much larger problem that needed to be fixed.
There comes a time in every queen’s life where she must step out of the background and into the light. A time when she must make a choice to mount her throne.