Lol, kind of an underachiever compared to you.....
Maddow has stated that her family is "very, very
Catholic" and she grew up in a community that her mother has described as "very conservative".
[14][15][16] Maddow was a competitive athlete and participated in high school volleyball, basketball, and swimming.
[17] Referencing
John Hughes films, she has described herself as being "a cross between the jock and the antisocial girl" in high school.
[16] A graduate of
Castro Valley High School,
[18] she attended
Stanford University. While a freshman, she was
outed by the college newspaper when an interview with her was published before she could tell her parents.
[14] Maddow earned a degree in
public policy at Stanford in 1994.
[19] At graduation, she was awarded the
John Gardner Fellowship.
[20] She was also the recipient of a
Rhodes Scholarship and began her postgraduate study in 1995 at
Lincoln College,
Oxford. This made her the first openly gay or lesbian American to win an international Rhodes Scholarship.
[21]In 2001, she earned a
Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in politics at the
University of Oxford.
[22] Her thesis is titled
HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons, and her supervisor was
Lucia Zedner.